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Diary of an MP's Wife by Sasha Swire review – candid account of a Tory clique

<span>Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock</span>
Photograph: Alan Davidson/Rex/Shutterstock

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. 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 while the country was reeling from the calamity he had inflicted upon it by calling the EU referendum and then losing it, the least worst of our last three prime ministers was intent on chillaxing. 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. (On another Swire visit, “Dave” is glued to the movie Atonement, apparently with the sole aim of ogling Keira Knightley’s nipples.)

If you needed proof that Britain has been misruled by the unserious, entitled, snobbish, incestuous and curiously childish then the acerbic Lady Swire, unwittingly or not, has provided it. 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.

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. 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).

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 “mateocracy”, meanwhile, stayed in one another’s grace-and-favour homes, while furiously falling out over who had the best pad, the nicest curtains, the poshest official car or the biggest security detail. And there was endless talk about sex.

She is not averse to referring to the 'little people' – or 'toilet seats' as she on one occasion calls party members

“This is a very particular, narrow tribe of Britain and their hangers-on,” Swire writes with candour. “It’s enough to repulse the ordinary man (sic), already angered by the continuing hold of the British class system.” You said it, Sasha.

But then she herself is not averse to referring to the “little people” – or “toilet seats” as she on one occasion calls rank-and-file Conservative party members. 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.

Immediately assuming they were installed by “the fragrant” Pauline Prescott (the working-class wife of John, the former Labour deputy prime minister and a previous Dorneywood occupant), she condemns them with the words: “think Barbara Cartland, then think bathroom”. 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.

Related: Sasha Swire: ‘British politics is totally amateur. That's why it’s so sexy and toxic’

Her ladyship is less judgmental of her own tribe’s concept of good taste. When she discovers Dave “laughing uproariously” in conversation with her husband about the supposedly unusual characteristics of historian Andrew Roberts’s “male member” and comparing notes on which female politicians were “beddable”, she is positively indulgent. 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”. What happened to dignity in Downing Street? I despair.

True to form again, Sasha is brutal about “Old Ma May”, as she calls grammar school girl Theresa, and reserves what sympathy she can muster for our current PM who, though leading the country into disaster, is of course cut from the right cloth. “I can’t really sleep at night,” Boris Johnson tells our diarist. “It’s all so worrying.” Well, I’m with him there. It makes it no easier to hear that she believes him to be “desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside”.

Unsurprisingly, Lady Swire’s candour has prompted a certain backlash and cries of betrayal. 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. The bonus is that she does so with a rare verve and wit.

Sonia Purnell is the author of A Woman of No Importance (Virago), and Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition (Aurum Press)

• Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power by Sasha Swire is published by Little, Brown (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbokshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15