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

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She insists she never originally intended to publish the resulting inside story of a turbulent Tory decade, for fear it would be seen as a betrayal. Whilst not actually “checking her privilege” as I believe the term is, she was certainly aware of it. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. On another Swire visit, “Dave” is glued to the movie Atonement, apparently with the sole aim of ogling Keira Knightley’s nipples.

These are the things which the author doesn’t realise she’s revealing: how utterly self-seeking, venal and empty-hearted are herself and her MP husband and, it could seem, the whole Cameron, Osborne, Johnson clique. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. 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.From Samantha Cameron’s appalled reaction to the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, to what can only be described as too much information about David Cameron’s colonoscopy, she spills the guts of four governments in a book most of Westminster will doubtless be reading this autumn. Even better, they are written from the point of view of an insider; Sacha Swire is the daughter of another Tory Minister and devotee of Margaret Thatcher, John Nott, and has the ethics and ethos of the Tory Party imbued in her like letters in a stick of Blackpool Rock. But then if only half her recollections of the Notting Hill set are true, she has done the rest of us a favour by removing all possible doubt about the unfitness of most of them to govern.

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. Lady Swire has a keen eye for detail and a waspish turn of phrase, which makes this a real page-turner. At first it proved ideal shallow bedtime reading – entertaining gossipy disclosures about the world of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Raab etc. 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.On a visit to stay with the then chancellor George Osborne, at his “moderately large” grace-and-favour mansion, the 21-room Dorneywood, her Notting Hill sensibilities are even offended by the outré pink tiles in her suite. There is much sniggering public schoolboy sex chat – jokes about the size of fellow MPs’ honourable members, referring to the current health secretary as Matt Hands on Cock – and a startling moment on a Cornish coastal walk with the Camerons, where the then prime minister asks Sasha not to walk in front of him because her perfume makes him want to “push you into the bushes and give you one”. This helped me understand why Cameron lobbied for Greensill, why Hancock turned covid-19 pandemic NHS procurement into a profiteering operation, and why Johnson and his wife sought their ridiculously over-budget redecoration of Downing Street. Just once in a while a book comes long which allows the hot-polloi to peep behind the curtain and see the machinery of the theatre of British political life. Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell's diaries for the Spectator , I concluded as follows: "Who will be the chroniclers of the Cameron government?

By 2015 she is fretting that Ed Miliband is clearly “on to something” in pledging to abolish non-dom status and that the Tories have become too harsh towards the poor, “unforgiving of personal circumstances, relentless in telling people to stop whingeing and make a go of it”. After all, this is the same Dave who on another now-infamous occasion blamed pheromones for wanting to drag her into nearby bushes to “give her one”. Ensconced for the summer of 2019 in his beloved new holiday home in Cornwall, David Cameron was conceding, at least in private, that he had “completely fucked up over Brexit”.But what these diaries do reveal in all it's vainglory is the great lie at the heart of Cameron's austerity: "We are all in this together. As the daughter of former defence secretary Sir John Nott, the author knows her own way round Whitehall, and her instincts are razor sharp; she is scathing from the off about “seven-year-old Gavin Williamson”, at the time just an eager young prime ministerial bag-carrier, and has Keir Starmer pegged as a potential Labour leader almost from the moment he enters parliament. Somewhere, unknown to his or her colleagues, a secret scribbler will already be at work, documenting the rise and, in due course, no doubt, the fall of this administration" Well, here it is. 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. 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.

They were close enough to “Dave and Sam” to spend the day after the Brexit referendum getting sloshed with the defeated prime minister, while he raged about those he felt had wronged him. Insecure but fiercely precocious, the young Sontag devours everything that culture offers up to her. 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 book’s strengths were its humour, her really quite prescient assessments of people (she absolutely nailed Meghan Markle and Prince Harry) and a certain amount of self-awareness. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers.Viele Tagebuchschreiber betätigen sich als Chronisten, reflektieren ihr Leben und bereichern die Geschichtsschreibung um eine Menge Klatsch und Tratsch.