Hermione Eyre has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Private Eye asked last week:
Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes?
Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’:
Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t.
There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD. Readers with expectations of schadenfreude will not be disappointed.
Sarah Vine shoots thunderbolts. She writes like she’s just sat down at your kitchen table, poured herself a big glass of vino and let fly. It takes huge skill to blow off copy like this, accurately channelling the voice of Middle England, and since 2012 she has been a prize-winning columnist on the Daily Mail. But the Cameron elite could not understand her popular touch or value what she did, and when they took different sides over Brexit they fell out forever. We find her here looking back over the wreckage: ‘This is my story, written with no fear, no favour – and, frankly, no fucks left to give.’
The mood is quite Thelma & Louise. Scorched tyre tracks are left across David Cameron for his shock resignation the morning after the referendum (‘what a massive man-baby’), as well as for offering the Goves an Admiralty flat that they could not accept (‘another dick-move, Dave’). Theresa May is branded ‘utterly graceless’; the journalist Emily Sheffield is told that ‘not everyone has a baronet for a daddy’; and even Vine’s own father is thanked for ‘fucking me up so brilliantly’. But she never turns on Michael, ‘the best ex-husband a girl could ever ask for’.
She does tease him throughout, though. He is her ‘goofy, incorrigible genius’, unable to ski when they met on a group skiing holiday; legendarily clever, although not always gifted with foresight – she rags him for having written Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right. One gets the sense she was fun to be with, while also fiercely loyal.
She eye-rolls, yet there’s more than a hint of pride when she recounts how, while she was in labour with their first child for 23 hours, her husband spent the entire time reading Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, only once complaining about the discomfort of his given seat, a bean bag. But when the Daily Telegraph drip-fed leaked MPs’ expenses claims, aiming to damage Gove, she saw red. She would never work with the editor Will Lewis again, branding him ‘the man who tried to ruin us’, and noted the hypocrisy of Andy Coulson, too, later imprisoned for 18 months for phone hacking, yet hanging Gove out for claiming allowable expenses. Vine felt, during her husband’s anguish, her ‘tiger wife’ awakening. ‘From this point on, I became obsessed with convincing people to see Michael as the kind, serious, intellectual, public-spirited campaigner that I knew him to be.’
She describes her father, a Welsh Del Boy-type, as Roger the Dodger, Mr Boom ’n’ Bust – yet she has surely inherited a touch of his risky charisma. She rolls like a fighter, carelessly swaggering et tu, Pontius Pilate at David Cameron and gaily mixing metaphors: ‘…the potassium-on-water conflagration that happened when politics and media collided – would ultimately be the grim reaper of all that had come before’.
When Vine started work at the Daily Mail in 2012, Samantha Cameron felt betrayed.
The truth was that at the paper I was her and her family’s staunchest advocate. I was forever putting my neck on the line to defend the Camerons, both politically and personally… What annoyed me even more was the notion – unspoken but very much implied – that I should somehow act as an unpaid spokesperson for the Cameron government, that I should be a sycophant and courtesan.
Some of Vine’s anecdotes are so vivid, we feel we are there. During dinner at the Johnsons’ house in Islington, Boris and Michael discussed whether or not to join the Leave campaign, thrashing out the implications over slow-cooked shoulder of lamb:
Timescales, economic consequences, trade options, regulations, Northern Ireland: these were all in the mix. Boris sought the counsel of various third parties – a cabinet minister, a lawyer – barking loudly into his mobile (on speakerphone) in between mouthfuls, Michael listening in and occasionally contributing.
Meanwhile, Vine, Marina Wheeler and Evgeny Lebedev were left making conversation ‘in stage whispers’.
Vine writes candidly about money worries and feelings of social inadequacy – difficult topics, bravely broached. She puts herself down wittily throughout. The stock image of a collapsed woman on the cover has a jokey deadpan feel, but there is a genuine undertow of sadness.
At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline political service. The angry dinner lady, sending their young son to the back of the line because he was a Gove. The jolly-looking 18th birthday card with a badge that their daughter Bea excitedly opened, only to find it contained a death threat for her father. And the knowledge, gleaned by security services from phone locations, that the murderer of David Amess MP trailed the Goves around, spending days lingering on the street where they lived.
Politics gets the blame for a lot of the fall-out:
Ultimately, I don’t think many couples would have survived what we went through… George and Frances did not; Boris and Marina did not; Kate Fall and her husband did not; Matt Hancock’s marriage did not. The mechanisms by which these marriages fell apart may all be different. But there is one common denominator: politics.
Vine says that the Turkish Delight the White Witch offers Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe represents the intoxicating taste of political power:
Power is the ultimate drug. Those who are hooked on it will, like any addict, go to almost any length to get their fix, prioritising it above all else – friends, family, colleagues.
She might have added that the power of the press, her own personal creative outlet and addiction, can be just as damagingly sweet.
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