Going to bed with Sasha Swire

Sasha Swire is keeping me up at night. She is making me laugh out loud so much that my ribs crackle, and my husband has sworn he will decamp next door unless I hurry up and finish reading her sensational diaries.

Don’t be deceived by the reviews which, in the main reflect Fleet Street’s finest at their snootiest, knocking Swire as a wealthy socialite who has dissed her mates. Her Diary of an MP’s wife: Inside and Outside Power is so much more than that. It is a must-read if you want a glimpse into what really went on behind the scenes in Westminster over the last decade.

Here is one of my favourite scorchers from early on in the book, and a fine taste of what’s to come. Sasha is the wife of Sir Hugo Swire, MP for East Devon, who has just been appointed minister for state for Northern Ireland in David Cameron’s Coalition government in 2010. The couple are due to have dinner with Owen Paterson (secretary of state for Northern Ireland) and his late wife, Rose, at Hillsborough Castle (the official residence), with Prince Edward and Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, who are visiting.

Hugo – or H as Sasha calls him – can’t make it back in time for the dinner because bad weather is delaying flights from London to Belfast, so Sasha has to be the double-act.

At dinner, Sasha is sat next to Sophie and opposite Prince Edward, the Queen’s younger son, whom she takes to well. Edward, she writes, is “friendly, over-excitable like a puppy and, like his wife, highly opinionated about political matters.” She is not so sure about Sophie, whom she describes as being a bit uptight and wonders how she can loosen her up.

After the dinner, sitting on the sofa in the drawing room, Sophie tells Sasha over coffee that she is fed up with being frozen out – her husband is a bit more famous than her – and how only that day a woman had refused to acknowledge her, fawning over her husband instead.

Sasha replies that it happens all the time to her as an MP’s wife, and that “as a result I carry revenge in my heart until my dying day…but that is because I have Slav blood and wanting to kill people all the times comes naturally to me.” Sasha goes on to describe a smile finally emerging from Sophie’s “pale, milky face,” who then says she thinks, “she must have Slav blood in her as well.” That is some loosening.

Much has been written about how Swire’s explosive diaries stitch up her friends, especially the Cameron’s and the Cameroons; the Osbornes, the Gove/Vines, as well as everybody else she meets from royals to aristos, wannabe aristos as well as foreign dignitaries. And she does just that, hook, line and sinker. She describes how the Cameron clique spend hours drinking Negronis, how Dave threatened to “give her one” in the bushes because of the bewitching perfume she was wearing, watching bad TV and Keira Knightley’s nipples, surfing in Polzeath, generally bitching and plotting (that’s mainly about the Iago-like Osborne) and living a life lacking seriousness, out of touch with the country.

There has also been a fixation on Swire’s obsession with getting her husband, an old mucker of Cameron’s, fellow Etonian and the non-rich member of the grand Swire family, a top Cabinet post. She also muses, rather sadly, that her father, Sir John Nott, should have been elevated to the Lords.

But ignore the salty, sexy versions which have coloured the headlines. What the reviews don’t tell you – or failed to see – is that her diaries are not only brilliantly written but will be read by historians for years to come for a peep into the extraordinary decade of shenanigans leading to Brexit and beyond.

With a pen dipped in molten lead, she takes-down her own set, her cliquey tribe. She is merciless, shocking and vicious about them. Whether it’s Samantha’s lefty de facto “Communist” leanings, to Boy George’s (Osborne’s) vengeful plotting and unadulterated ambition to rule the world, she takes them apart. Tory gammon-like Hogarthians – with their thick necks and pasty faces running around the shires – also get it in the neck.

No one escapes her eye, or her remorseless opinions: there is the “Fagin-like Francis Maude, all villainous-looking with his tight little weasel eyes.” At Michael Spencer’s flashy birthday party in Marrakesh, she sits next to Fat Mike Sherwood, who is “a bit of a pill” and “works/runs/sells his soul to that residence of Satan, Goldman Sachs.”

At another dinner she sits on one side of Sir Evelyn Rothschild, while Princess Michael of Kent (who flirts and fawns all over him) sits on the other. Sir Evelyn burbles on about Israel and she interjects to ask about the Palestinians, prompting him to ask incredulously whether she really supports a two-state solution?  Sasha – who admits to a touch of admiration for Corbyn’s support of the Palestinians- is furious and tells him so.

After she and H give Sir Evelyn a lift home, he hands her his card, but she turns it down joking: “You don’t have anything I want.” (H takes the card, one of many he collects from Sir Evelyn, so desperate is he to find a proper post-politics job.)

H is, in some ways, the hero of the book; the natural raconteur and former Sotheby’s auctioneer who regales her with his mad days in the Chamber and overseas trips, which she writes down with a reporter’s eye for the tiniest detail.

She is also honest about H’s shortcomings and why, as a white, privileged male, he doesn’t fit into Cameron’s more diverse Cabinet – although Dave not giving him a seat at the top table still rankles with her. Yet she rather likes the new Cameroon intake, young men and women (Suella Braverman/Ester McVey) whom she describes as gutsy and more talented than the old lot.

Her political analysis is riveting, and particularly her sketches of their leadership jostling and 2018 Brexit shambles of Johnson and “bonkers” Gove. Reporting on Johnson’s success in getting Jean-Claude Juncker to agree terms, she writes: “Beside him stood Bozza, looking like he had been dragged backwards by a cuckolded husband. Clearly picking the honeymoon suite with Varadkar in the Wirral worked wonders when the officials left the room.”

Her addiction to political life has deep roots: her father, Sir John, was a former defence secretary to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war, ex- chairman of Lazard Brothers, and an MP for nearly twenty years. Stir into the mix Miloska, her smart Slav mother – from whom she inherited those killer genes (as she admits to Sophie) – and you get the drift.

And she has a good eye for the bigger geo-political picture too. She claims she saw Boy George’s dangerous addiction to China – and Chinese money pouring into the UK – way before most of the Westminster and Fleet Street crowd. She dubbed the Chinese ambassador to London “Swivel Hips” for his ability to turn between two opposing systems. This, in 2015, is what she wrote: “I am a hawk when it comes to these matters: Beijing’s industrial strategy, its approach to technology and its foreign dealings has always made me shit scared. It’s times like these I wish we had a more effective opposition.”

What we don’t know is how much of Sasha’s spiky foresight has been added into her diaries after she originally wrote them, or there has been some benefit from hindsight. Possibly. But I’m not sure it matters, as she was clearly on the right track. Keir Starmer was someone she plucked out, she claims, as one to watch.

What is compelling is her own searing honesty, even telling Dave off for not believing that Gove and Johnson were real Leavers, rather than turncoats. Originally a reluctant Remainer, she finds herself secretly excited by Brexit, and criticises the Maybot or “Old Ma May” (Theresa May) for strangling the process with her obstinacy. Dave, egged on by Sam she says, also wanted a second referendum.

The idea of Bozza Johnson as Prime Minister horrified her. She preferred the leaner Dominic Raab “C Brexit” who turns her weak at the knees. She meets Boris soon after his victory, listens to his early speeches and eventually accepts he’s got what it takes.

No wonder Dave calls her dangerous to her face. He also suggested to her, jokingly, that she should have stood as an MP or worked at No 10, as her political antennae are bang on the money. How right he was.

If only H were still a minister in Boris Johnson’s government. Imagine the diaries she would be writing now. Why Sasha has not been snapped up by one of the national newspapers to sketch today’s parliamentary shenanigans is a mystery. Maybe she is too dangerous for them too. Perhaps she should come and write for us instead? Sasha – contact editors@reaction.life.

Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power by Sasha Swire is published by Little Brown.