Adam Boulton Diary – Swire, Amiel and a very embarrassing week for Westminster
Of the thousands of books published this autumn, two have already made big splashes: Sasha Swire’s diaries and Lady (Conrad) Black’s memoirs. I say books but actually all that most of us have had to go on are the newspaper serialisations. Juicy extracts from Lady Swire’s The Secret Diary of an MP’s Wife appeared in The Times. Under her professional name, Barbara Amiel’s Friends and Enemies graced the pages of The Daily Mail.
Both were picked over by commentators across “Fleet St”. “Jaw dropping”, “rubbing my eyes” were among the kinder comments. The top revelation from Sir Hugo Swire’s wife being that Prime Minister David Cameron asked her to walk behind him while they were out for a weekend walk with the words: “The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one.”
Conrad Black’s wife is racier still. Before she met him, Barbara Amiel was lady friend to the elderly publisher Lord Weidenfeld. Judging that being with him was like “clutching death” she found a way round: “the only way I could deal with it was to avoid actual body-to-body contact and pleasure him orally.” She also confesses that on several occasions she accepted the gift of a one hundred-thousand-pound gambling chip after accompanying the Australian billionaire Kerry Packer to a casino.
Readers, including me, who are all agog, still can’t help wondering why the women in question would want to share such revelations about their private lives and their close friends.
Self-evidently, attention and boasting are reasons. Neither woman is bashful about how attractive they believe they are to men. In successive generations each was at the heart of a milieu which threw up a British Prime Minister. The Swires were longstanding members of the exclusive social set that made up Cameron’s chumocracy. Conrad Black employed Boris Johnson at the Daily Telegraph and Spectator. He even threw a party in Johnson’s honour after Johnson broke his promise to him not to become an MP while editing the magazine.
Money must be another explanation for indiscretion. No-one makes much out of a political memoir these days unless it is serialised in the national press. Editors seldom part with hard cash without the guarantee of some headline grabbing and exclusive titbits.
Barbara Amiel says she and her husband Conrad Black were down to their last $20,000 plus her earnings as a journalist at the time of his disgrace. The former proprietor of the Daily Telegraph was convicted on three fraud charges and one of obstructing justice in Chicago in 2007 and sentenced to seven years in prison. The courts subsequently overturned some of these convictions. In 2012, he was deported to his native Canada in spite of having given up his citizenship to qualify for a UK peerage. In 2019, Donald Trump granted him a full pardon.
Hugo Swire is a member of the family behind Swires, the huge Hong Kong and London based trading conglomerate. But he says he comes from a branch without the money. His wife is resentful that he was never made a Cabinet minister even though his friend Cameron gave him a knighthood in his resignation honours list in 2016. Swire retired as MP for East Devon in 2019. Like Cameron, Sir Hugo can be witty and charming. Like him he was educated at Eton College.
With these publications, the two titled-by-marriage ladies each seem prepared to risk damage to their reputations and, most probably, social ostracism and losing friends. But that’s where their similarities end.
At the age of 79, Barbara Amiel is brimming with self-knowledge and has been cast out of society already. She doesn’t care provided she can get revenge on her former friends – now enemies – who she suggests she’d like to guillotine, inject with Ebola or strangle at birth.
57-year-old Sasha Swire still wants to be “in”. She is also the daughter of a Thatcher era cabinet minister, but she seems to not quite understand the import of what she is revealing by pulling back the curtain on the complacent, entitled, off-duty behaviour of the “Cameron set”.
She portrays the Prime Minister boasting “I have just won a war” in Libya before moving swiftly on to the next entertainment. At one point in her diary she even asks what’s wrong with giving jobs to your cronies? Not a lot it would appear in her view if you are one of the cronies.
The Swire extracts have provoked sniping across the class barricade between the middle-class and the truly posh. Mrs Michael Gove, who also mines her personal acquaintance with the Tory elite in her Sarah Vine columns, loyally led the Cameroon counterattack in the Daily Mail. Cameron says “it’s kind of embarrassing” without explicitly denying the stories. Friends say Lady Swire did at least agree to drop one of Cameron’s most salacious remarks, which she had planned to put on the cover of her book.
Next month my fellow Reaction columnist Iain Dale is bringing out The Prime Ministers, a book he’s edited covering every occupant of the role. I have written the Cameron chapter. Sasha’s stories have not forced me into an emergency revision of my assessment.
Barbara Amiel has had a long and successful career as a journalist. She knows what she is writing. She depicts herself as a near-penniless Canadian divorcee who pitched up in London in her fifties and just happened to get caught up with the rich and powerful. Subsequently as Conrad’s wife she ended up the hostess of opulent homes in London, Toronto, New York and Palm Beach, containing, she says, a total of 69 bathrooms. At the time she boasted “my opulence knows no bounds.” The trouble was, it wasn’t actually her husband’s money which she now says she was spending so freely in an attempt to keep up with “The Group” of socialite billionaire wives and heiresses, which her husband expected her to join. They never quite let her in and cut her dead as soon as the FBI moved in on the Blacks.
On my rounds as a journalist I have met all these people. They have done me no harm even if Conrad Black did call me a “jackass” when I interviewed him about his memoirs. Whatever their motivations and revelations these two new books are important documents of social history. We should look to ourselves. Future generations will look to Swire and Amiel for an explanation of how we got into the state we are in.