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

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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. She was a feisty hater (the Slav thing, through her mother) and I was amused at her annoyance at her father not being in the House of Lords. It’s very much a view of politics from inside “the gang” and to read it is to understand the grating rage of those outside, realising that power lies not around the cabinet table but in jolly kitchen suppers with an impenetrable clique of old friends. 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.

I am happy to give this book five stars and recommend everybody read it at least once in their lives. 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. A professional partner and loyal spouse, Swire has strong political opinions herself – sometimes more ‘No, Minister’ than ‘Yes’.

Nothing about 14 million children in poverty, hospital waiting lists rising, education suffering (except for hose who went to Eton or Cheltenham like the diarist and her chums), or the emergence of a underclass in low paid, vulnerable jobs. In 500-odd pages of deftly edited diary entries covering her observations and conversations during the tumultuous years of 2010 to 2019, she lifts the veil on the doings of a political class that is difficult to like, admire or respect. Yet somehow she ended up showing the diary to a literary agent – as one does, when absolutely determined not to betray anyone – and bang, here she is, author of one of the most thrillingly indiscreet political memoirs I have ever read. 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.

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. Diary of an MP’s Wife is a searingly honest, wildly indiscreet and often uproarious account of what life is like in the thick of it. Swire has literary ability, a quality that manifests itself in the colour with which she describes the show and the freaks within it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It’s enough to repulse the ordinary man (sic), already angered by the continuing hold of the British class system.

Nothing is quite good enough, though, not least the fact that as the mere wife of a junior minister, she is not provided with an official car and driver when attending “excruciatingly dull” public functions in long dresses and painful heels. See our Remarkables Archive for some that are no longer in print, but which we are happy to try to track down. Swire notes that they all ate, drank, partied – and holidayed in Cornwall – together, attended the same schools and university, sent their children to play together and texted one another’s private, rather than official, numbers to bypass civil servants (who are evidently not PLU - People Like Us). 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.

Her secret diary covers not only the rise and the fall of her friends the Camerons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left Parliament. Its weaknesses were, as many have said, a lack of footnotes about who people referred to were, particularly in the early part of the journal. 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.

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. 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. It is 30 years since Hazel Holt's biography; many more since David Cecil and Philip Larkin championed her novels.