Many politicians have written memoirs of their time in Westminster. Often they are self-serving and revisionist, or just plain boring.
There was Theresa May’s plodding treatise, The Abuse of Power (“I wish Theresa May hadn’t written this book,” said one reviewer), Boris Johnson’s Unleashed (“irritating”, “overhyped”) and Liz Truss’s much derided Ten Years to Save the West (“one of the most shamelessly unrepentant, petulant, politically and economically jejune and cliche-ridden books I’ve read”).
Much more lip-smacking to be done, then, when someone in the passenger seat gives their account of the action. Nearly five years on from Sasha Swire’s delightfully indiscreet Diary of an MP’s Wife, Daily Mail columnist and former “Westminster WAG” Sarah Vine is taking up the mantle.
How Not to Be a Political Wife chronicles all the shenanigans that went on from SW1A to Ibiza through her 20 year marriage to Michael Gove. It’s out on 19 June but some choice extracts have been serialised in the Daily Mail.
Here are the biggest revelations so far, from run-ins with Jeremy Clarkson to Boris Johnson’s dinner party antics.
Keeping up with the Camerons proved challenging
The Goves and the Camerons used to be the best of pals. Vine and Michael Gove spent many “cosy, twinkly evenings” chez Cameron in Notting Hill in the Nineties. Samantha Cameron was “the absolute opposite of a snob” who “loved a drink and a fag”.
Their families holidayed in Ibiza together where they “caroused and danced and drank.” And after David Cameron became Prime Minister, all of their kids would lark around in the pool at Chequers with guest stars like Malia and Sasha Obama. “It was all a little like being at an incredibly luxurious and fun boarding school,” writes Vine.
Yet at a certain point, Vine says “Michael and I were living wildly beyond our means”. Gove often footed the bill for dinners out at chichi bistros in Notting Hill, “because he loved the idea of either repaying the hospitality of our political friends or impressing our media friends”.
They all fell out over Brexit, when Gove came out in favour of Leave. The last words Cameron ever said to Vine were in a lift on the way to a mutual friend’s party in 2016: “You have to get your husband off the airwaves, you have to get him under control. For f***’s sake, Sarah, I’m fighting for my political life here.”
Jeremy Clarkson mistook Vine for a server
Towards the end of their friendship, Vine grew paranoid that the Camerons saw the Goves as inferior, and possibly even like “staff”. This fear was exacerbated when Vine had a run-in with a certain Jeremy Clarkson at a “very Chipping Norton set party” hosted at the Camerons’ country house in Oxfordshire. Vine was running around “making sure glasses were topped up” when she spotted Clarkson chatting to Rebekah Brooks:
“I drifted up to say hello, but Clarkson took one look at the bottle of white in my hand and, without looking at me directly, waved his hand and said: 'Actually, can you get me a glass of red?' At the time I'd thought it was hilarious but maybe a server was essentially how they all thought of me.”
Boris Johnson is not, in fact, a good person to sit next to at dinner
Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames once said that Boris Johnson was “a chancer … but that doesn’t alter the fact he’s extremely agreeable to have dinner with.” Yet Vine claims the opposite: in fact, the former PM is “known for being socially awkward.” She details a dinner party in Highgate “where Boris, failing to make conversation with the two women on either side, threw up his hands and announced to the table: 'Look, this isn't going too well – shall I just give a speech instead?'”.
After the Brexit referendum was called, Johnson hosted a dinner with his then wife Marina. Yet Vine says he spent half the time sitting at the table on loudspeaker to various cabinet ministers and lawyers, trying to decide whether he should join the Vote Leave campaign. “As we tucked into the roast lamb, Marina and I spent the next 20 minutes attempting to make dinner-party conversation with the other guests in stage whispers, Boris shushing us whenever we got too loud.”
Vine sent a confidential email meant for her husband to a PR person
In the leadership contest following Brexit, Vine was very involved in helping her husband decide whether to back Boris or run for leader himself. She took to summarising her thoughts in emails, one of which was leaked to the press. “You MUST have SPECIFIC assurances from Boris, OTHERWISE you cannot guarantee your support,” she wrote in the email. “Do not concede any ground,” she wrote.
Vine had meant to send the email to Gove and his two special advisers, Henry and Beth. But she accidentally copied in “some random PR I had in my contacts,” also called Henry, instead of SpAd Henry.
“In this case, PR Henry was still recovering from caning it at Glastonbury so it took him a day to open it,” writes Vine. “At which point he momentarily stopped writing about lipsticks, shimmied out of his budgie-smugglers and decided to leak the email to the papers. I do hope he was paid enough to upgrade from a tent to a Glasto campervan the following year.”
Vine and Gove’s daughter was bullied at school
School can’t have been an easy ride for the Gove children, who went to Holland Park, a comprehensive in Notting Hill. Vine says that her daughter Bea had a “tough time”.
“When she was in Year 9, in 2017, she tells me now, there was a bust-up between her and some other kids during Pride Week, during which Michael's name came up as 'not just an effing Tory but effing gay'.”
The family received death threats in the post
In the summer of 2017 the Goves moved to a five-bedroom house in Kensington. Vine says she wanted to leave their home in Notting Hill because the area was “rife with gang pressures, prostitution and drug deals” and “everyone knew exactly where we lived.”
Yet soon after they moved house, security services informed them that their new address had been painted on a wall in Derry, Northern Ireland. Not long after, their daughter Bea received an 18th birthday card, postmarked Northern Ireland.
“Excitedly, she opened it. Inside was a card that read '18 today! Yay!' with a badge attached saying '18, Woo!' And inside that, in letters cut out from a magazine or newspaper, the following message: 'Tell your dad that if he doesn't [and here I won't specify what he had to do, for security reasons] he won't live to see you turn 19. Do not make this public.'”
“That will always be my abiding memory of her 18th,” says Vine.
