Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power: 'riotously candid' Sunday Times

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We read of parties in Cornwall, dinner parties with the Prince of Wales, shooting parties, Russian oligarch parties, parties with Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Murdoch's former wife, Wendy Deng. One can only imagine Buckingham Palace’s reaction meanwhile to her observation, following a private dinner with Prince Edward in 2010, that he “seems overwhelmed with relief that the Conservatives have got in”. But in Swire’s vignettes of Cameron’s chillaxed post-Downing Street life – telling his daughter he has a meeting, only to sit watching back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones – and her perceptions of a very different, less privileged generation rising through the party lies another small piece of the jigsaw. I was pleased to have all my prejudices about Sir John Nott confirmed (a cursed name in many Naval households). Her assessments of people were heavily coloured, I concluded, as to how they behaved towards Milady Swire.

She revels in being a “difficult” spouse, bunking off a ministerial garden party rather than make boring small talk, and heading straight for the conversational jugular with her husband’s colleagues. Viele Tagebuchschreiber betätigen sich als Chronisten, reflektieren ihr Leben und bereichern die Geschichtsschreibung um eine Menge Klatsch und Tratsch. I giggled when there was some mention of someone who had fallen foul of him and was a “name forever loathed in the Nott household” – ah, I thought, just like Nott in ours.As her old friends argue fruitlessly over the best way to thwart a hard Brexit and plot unsuccessfully to manoeuvre Rudd into Downing Street, she backs the arch Brexiter Dominic Raab’s leadership bid before warming to the “slobbering golden retriever” Boris Johnson. Sasha Swire was raised and educated in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency. Whilst not actually “checking her privilege” as I believe the term is, she was certainly aware of it. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. The court of King David, to which Sasha and her Etonian MP husband, Sir Hugo, belonged during Cameron’s Downing Street years, was nothing if not homogeneous.

For more than 20 years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. He claimed to be busy with meetings, but daughter Florence, clearly knowing her father too well, quickly branded him a liar after spotting him watching back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones.For this was the period of austerity, instituted by George Osborne (Boy George to the diarist) where council budgets were cut, bedroom tax introduced, the police force lost 20,000 jobs, disability benefits were slashed, and education, health and social security budgets were cut to the bone. Diary of an MP's Wife is an irresistible, informal history and a rare tell-all about what it's really like to live behind the headlines of British political life. Overall, I revelled in this expose of privilege and politics (who knew quite so many shooting weekends still took place? There’s a scene in Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife, an insider’s account of the Tory clique that has ruled Britain for the past decade, which somehow sums it all up. Everything seems to be about competitively grasping for status symbols – a grander office, a more prestigious official car, a knighthood, getting one’s husband into the Cabinet.

New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Despite the bitchy, rather sniping tone which gives the book its flavour (and frankly, is the main reason most people will read it) she is a pretty astute judge of character and nails (or skewers) a lot of people with disarming accuracy. For more than twenty years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. She moved in circles whose values may not be to everyone’s taste (anti-green, anti-poor, anti-common) but she certainly tells it as she sees it and I don’t think she was as bad as the others.Those who took the details of their job seriously, such as the cerebral Europe minister David Lidington, were also not within the PLU pack but, rather, targets of derision. The diary covers not only the rise and fall of the Cameroons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end of last year when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left parliament. For instance the author enthuses about all the prestigious White Tie dinners she’s invited to but it sounds like they’re all status symbol and not enjoyment. At first it proved ideal shallow bedtime reading – entertaining gossipy disclosures about the world of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Raab etc. Painfully revealing and often hilariously funny, here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries.