Dave texts. ‘WTF!!!’ I call him back. ‘She’s never forgiven you’
I’ve skim-read Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife this weekend.
The last thing I want to do is to kill sales, but I should warn you: it’s all about me. Dogs and jars of honey feature quite a lot too. I was all ready to feel betrayed by my friends. Instead I’m a little nonplussed. What’s the fuss about? I’ve been keeping a diary myself of the last few days (also only loosely based on real events).
September 12 Greg and George text me late. “Have I seen S’s diary?” No I haven’t. Extracts have appeared on a news website. “It’s going to be ugly. Dave won’t like it,” they say. “Too much about his lovely family.” Oh god, how embarrassing.
September 13 Need to find out what S says about my 40th birthday party at Dorneywood. Her account confirms my worst fears. Apparently all my friends had a good time, including H.
September 14 Dave texts. “WTF!!!” I call back. “She’s never forgiven you for not putting Hugo in the Cabinet. After all, he was an Etonian and hung out on Polzeath beach with you.” Huge error of judgment.
Flick through Lady Swire’s account and two things should strike you. The first is friendship. Yes there was banter and stupid jokes. Find me a workplace in Britain with none of those things. Of course, normally the people you work with aren’t sneaking off home to write it all down.
But there was something else much more important that shines through — we liked each other. It wasn’t some school or university dining club that brought us together; we met each other in our twenties through a shared belief that the Tory party had to change. From then on we had each other’s back. Most of us still do. It made for a more rational, collegiate and engaged government than anything we’ve seen since.
A second lesson from the book is this. Friendship didn’t tip into cronyism. The author believes that ministers are promoted over her husband because they are “Muslim” or a “Woman”. There is another explanation. Perhaps we just thought the likes of Sajid Javid and Justine Greening could do an even better job than Hugo could. Surely the best argument against the charge of chumocracy is that so many chums felt left out?
Politicians aren't they cringy, they use their powers like they're school playground bullies and more interested in one upmanship with their fellow party members and these eejits are running our country I hope she really stirs a massive hornets nestwith her quotes they deserve bringing down a peg or two Power eh it makes people for the worse
More will hit the fan when the book is published next week.
good i hope they're all crawling up their own ar$es
Politicians aren't they cringy, they use their powers like they're school playground bullies and more interested in one upmanship with their fellow party members and these eejits are running our country I hope she really stirs a massive hornets nestwith her quotes they deserve bringing down a peg or two Power eh it makes people for the worse
Now there is a surprise?
David Cameron says her does not 'recall' telling Sasha Swire that he wants to 'give her one'
David tells us that even when he switched sides, Boris was telling him via texts that Brexit ‘would be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow’ and that he (David) would survive.”
Mr Cameron’s rage at Mr Gove over his Brexit betrayal was also clear in his own memoir, in which the former PM called his tormentor a “foam-flecked Faragist”. He continued: “One quality shone through: disloyalty. Disloyalty to me and, later, disloyalty to Boris.”
The latest tranche of diary entries includes 27 June 2016, days after the EU referendum. According to the book, Sir Hugo and Lady Swire arrived at the Cameron home, laden down with alcohol and top-end Cohiba cigars, to discover Samantha Cameron “devastated” by the result.
Lady Swire writes: "When Dave arrives, he makes a lethal negroni before we progress to endless bottles of wine, whisky and brandy.
"Over dinner, he is incandescent with anger, which is almost wholly directed against Michael [Gove].
"As for Boris [Johnson], he says that this whole episode was to do with his leadership ambitions and that he despised his lack of ideology, which is a tad ironic.
She has a nickname for everybody Former Prime Minister Teresa May is 'Old Ma May', George Osborne is 'Boy George' while Dominic Raab is 'Raab C Brexit'.
Samantha Cameron once asked Sarah Gove to prepare food at her dinner party 'Poor old Sarah Gove, who bends over backwards to please the Camerons, was lumbered with cooking all the food while Samantha was upstairs learning to cut patterns (she wants to set up a fashion business). She then had her hair done! Turning up at her own party feeling perfectly relaxed while Sarah is laden down with dishes of fish pie she has herself cooked.'
David Cameron has a competitive streak Swire's book reveals he 'ruined' every weekend away with pointless physical competitions, to prove he was the fittest.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has a two-way mirror 'I sit next to Dave at dinner,' she writes. 'He gives us wonderful vignettes of the Sarkozys' fake marital displays and of being given a tour around Rome's equivalent of No 10 by [Silvio] Berlusconi. When they come to his bedroom he points at a Renaissance two-way mirror above the bed and with his characteristic grin says, "Well, they didn't have **** channels in those days, did they?"'
She dubs Prince Andrew 'excruciating' After meeting the royal at a dinner in 2011 at Hillsborough Castle, she said: 'I have to say, Prince Andrew chairing the round the table discussion is excruciatingly painful to watch. I sat there trying to listen to how brilliant he was when all I am seeing is him in swimming shorts, attending topless pool parties at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, while on his own personal trade mission to get money for his ex-wife.' She also claimed there was a fall out between him and elder brother Prince Charles, in her opinion, writing: 'It is clear there is a power struggle taking place between him and Prince Charles.'
She was no Boris Johnson fan at first 'It scares the **** out of me that people don’t see [Johnson] as the calculating machine he really is,' she writes, when he was made Foreign Secretary. Later, after a dinner at No. 10 when he was Prime Minister, she has changed her mind, saying: 'He didn’t want us to go. David [Cameron] was always one for pushing you out the door, in quite a brusque way. For all his hinterland and hot young vixen [Carrie Symonds] Boris just came across as someone who is desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside.'
George Osborne was afraid of playing croquet at Dorneywood House Writing about when John Prescott, Tony Blair's deputy, moved into the stately home, she reveals: 'There was the outcry over photographs of [Prescott] playing croquet here when Tony Blair was out of the country and the deputy PM was supposed to be in charge. George [Osborne] says he doesn't dare take out the croquet set, which now sits rather famously in the loggia.'
The PM is no wine snob She also recalls a dinner at 10 Downing Street in August 2019, when Sir Hugo Swire informed the Prime Minister of his plans to retire as an MP. During the evening, she reports watching Boris Johnson as he ‘stuffs in more mouthfuls and knocks back the cheapo plonk at an alarming rate’.
In an interview with Times Radio, due to be broadcast today, the former PM stated: ‘Of course it’s kind of embarrassing when you have things you say and do in private splashed all over the place and of course you’d rather that didn’t happen.’ He added, however, ‘the truth is if you want respect for your privacy and people not questioning your character and private life... then politics probably isn’t the career for you’.
Conversation at political dinner parties can err on the racier side Lady Swire claims that David Cameron liked her because she was ‘cheeky, occasionally lewd and sometimes a little too challenging’, adding that conversation at a dinner hosted for ministers and their spouses at Chequers encompassed ‘STDs at Oxford, and my menopausal symptoms and libido’.
She adds: 'Boris just came across as someone who is desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside.'
In her tell-all book, Mrs Swire narrates the tale of her husband bunking off parliament to go shooting and addresses his joke about people on benefits during a Tory fundraising event in 2015.
During the event at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair, London, covert filming showed Mr Swire - a former director of Sotheby's - trying to persuade a guest, who is sitting on the same table as Iain Duncan Smith, to increase his bid. '£60,000?', he says. 'Ian, persuade him. He's not on benefits is he? Well if he is then he can afford it.'
In her book, Mrs Swire goes on to question the condemnation former Prime Minister David Cameron received for his resignation honours list, asking why the politician was called out for listing his cronies if he wanted to.
Her comments come years after Mr Cameron came under fire from senior Conservatives for his resignation honours list of gongs for his friends and allies in 2016.
The list of of 48 recommendations included a gong for Isabel Spearman, a personal aide to Samantha Cameron.
My friend Sasha Swire feels bloodied by the backlash to her diaries... and Boris disappoints
My old friend Boris Johnson appears to have been kidnapped and replaced with some dour, repressive doppelgänger. I no longer recognise the former libertarian, whose car used to be littered with unpaid parking fines. This is not even a Conservative Government, and Tory voters are rightly infuriated by the new assaults on their liberty. A former Cabinet minister says: “We are reaching the point where the Party will no longer tolerate it.” Myself, I feel this is a bad new way of doing politics; blaming the people of Britain for Government incompetence and then beating up on them. It is not sensible to be on a permanent war footing against the electorate.
Kit “Fatty” Malthouse exhorts us to inform on neighbours if they are breaking the absurd “rule of six”, which even scientists deride. Malthouse, the only man I have ever met who can strut sitting down, is in no danger of suffering from this himself. He doesn’t even have six friends.
Comments
Dave texts. ‘WTF!!!’ I call him back. ‘She’s never forgiven you’
I’ve skim-read Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife this weekend.
The last thing I want to do is to kill sales, but I should warn you: it’s all about me. Dogs and jars of honey feature quite a lot too. I was all ready to feel betrayed by my friends. Instead I’m a little nonplussed. What’s the fuss about? I’ve been keeping a diary myself of the last few days (also only loosely based on real events).
September 12
Greg and George text me late. “Have I seen S’s diary?” No I haven’t. Extracts have appeared on a news website. “It’s going to be ugly. Dave won’t like it,” they say. “Too much about his lovely family.” Oh god, how embarrassing.
September 13
Need to find out what S says about my 40th birthday party at Dorneywood. Her account confirms my worst fears. Apparently all my friends had a good time, including H.
September 14
Dave texts. “WTF!!!” I call back. “She’s never forgiven you for not putting Hugo in the Cabinet. After all, he was an Etonian and hung out on Polzeath beach with you.” Huge error of judgment.
Flick through Lady Swire’s account and two things should strike you. The first is friendship. Yes there was banter and stupid jokes. Find me a workplace in Britain with none of those things. Of course, normally the people you work with aren’t sneaking off
home to write it all down.
But there was something else much more important that shines through — we liked each other. It wasn’t some school or university dining club that brought us together; we met each other in our twenties through a shared belief that the Tory party had to change. From then on we had each other’s back. Most of us still do. It made for a more rational, collegiate and engaged government than anything we’ve seen since.
A second lesson from the book is this. Friendship didn’t tip into cronyism. The author believes that ministers are promoted over her husband because they are “Muslim” or a “Woman”. There is another explanation. Perhaps we just thought the likes of Sajid Javid and Justine Greening could do an even better job than Hugo could. Surely the best argument against the charge of chumocracy is that so many chums felt left out?
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/dave-texts-wtf-call-him-092000952.html
Now there is a surprise?
David Cameron says her does not 'recall' telling Sasha Swire that he wants to 'give her one'
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12691673/david-cameron-tory-mp-wife-diary/
David tells us that even when he switched sides, Boris was telling him via texts that Brexit ‘would be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow’ and that he (David) would survive.”
Mr Cameron’s rage at Mr Gove over his Brexit betrayal was also clear in his own memoir, in which the former PM called his tormentor a “foam-flecked Faragist”. He continued: “One quality shone through: disloyalty. Disloyalty to me and, later, disloyalty to Boris.”
The latest tranche of diary entries includes 27 June 2016, days after the EU referendum. According to the book, Sir Hugo and Lady Swire arrived at the Cameron home, laden down with alcohol and top-end Cohiba cigars, to discover Samantha Cameron “devastated” by the result.
Lady Swire writes: "When Dave arrives, he makes a lethal negroni before we progress to endless bottles of wine, whisky and brandy.
"Over dinner, he is incandescent with anger, which is almost wholly directed against Michael [Gove].
"As for Boris [Johnson], he says that this whole episode was to do with his leadership ambitions and that he despised his lack of ideology, which is a tad ironic.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-brexit-sasha-swire-book-secret-diary-mp-wife-hugo-b446128.html
Former Prime Minister Teresa May is 'Old Ma May', George Osborne is 'Boy George' while Dominic Raab is 'Raab C Brexit'.
Samantha Cameron once asked Sarah Gove to prepare food at her dinner party
'Poor old Sarah Gove, who bends over backwards to please the Camerons, was lumbered with cooking all the food while Samantha was upstairs learning to cut patterns (she wants to set up a fashion business). She then had her hair done! Turning up at her own party feeling perfectly relaxed while Sarah is laden down with dishes of fish pie she has herself cooked.'
David Cameron has a competitive streak
Swire's book reveals he 'ruined' every weekend away with pointless physical competitions, to prove he was the fittest.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has a two-way mirror
'I sit next to Dave at dinner,' she writes. 'He gives us wonderful vignettes of the Sarkozys' fake marital displays and of being given a tour around Rome's equivalent of No 10 by [Silvio] Berlusconi. When they come to his bedroom he points at a Renaissance two-way mirror above the bed and with his characteristic grin says, "Well, they didn't have **** channels in those days, did they?"'
She dubs Prince Andrew 'excruciating'
After meeting the royal at a dinner in 2011 at Hillsborough Castle, she said: 'I have to say, Prince Andrew chairing the round the table discussion is excruciatingly painful to watch. I sat there trying to listen to how brilliant he was when all I am seeing is him in swimming shorts, attending topless pool parties at Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion, while on his own personal trade mission to get money for his ex-wife.' She also claimed there was a fall out between him and elder brother Prince Charles, in her opinion, writing: 'It is clear there is a power struggle taking place between him and Prince Charles.'
She was no Boris Johnson fan at first
'It scares the **** out of me that people don’t see [Johnson] as the calculating machine he really is,' she writes, when he was made Foreign Secretary. Later, after a dinner at No. 10 when he was Prime Minister, she has changed her mind, saying: 'He didn’t want us to go. David [Cameron] was always one for pushing you out the door, in quite a brusque way. For all his hinterland and hot young vixen [Carrie Symonds] Boris just came across as someone who is desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside.'
George Osborne was afraid of playing croquet at Dorneywood House
Writing about when John Prescott, Tony Blair's deputy, moved into the stately home, she reveals: 'There was the outcry over photographs of [Prescott] playing croquet here when Tony Blair was out of the country and the deputy PM was supposed to be in charge. George [Osborne] says he doesn't dare take out the croquet set, which now sits rather famously in the loggia.'
The PM is no wine snob
She also recalls a dinner at 10 Downing Street in August 2019, when Sir Hugo Swire informed the Prime Minister of his plans to retire as an MP. During the evening, she reports watching Boris Johnson as he ‘stuffs in more mouthfuls and knocks back the cheapo plonk at an alarming rate’.
In an interview with Times Radio, due to be broadcast today, the former PM stated: ‘Of course it’s kind of embarrassing when you have things you say and do in private splashed all over the place and of course you’d rather that didn’t happen.’ He added, however, ‘the truth is if you want respect for your privacy and people not questioning your character and private life... then politics probably isn’t the career for you’.
Conversation at political dinner parties can err on the racier side
Lady Swire claims that David Cameron liked her because she was ‘cheeky, occasionally lewd and sometimes a little too challenging’, adding that conversation at a dinner hosted for ministers and their spouses at Chequers encompassed ‘STDs at Oxford, and my menopausal symptoms and libido’.
https://www.tatler.com/article/sarah-swire-westminster-diary
In her tell-all book, Mrs Swire narrates the tale of her husband bunking off parliament to go shooting and addresses his joke about people on benefits during a Tory fundraising event in 2015.
During the event at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Mayfair, London, covert filming showed Mr Swire - a former director of Sotheby's - trying to persuade a guest, who is sitting on the same table as Iain Duncan Smith, to increase his bid.
'£60,000?', he says. 'Ian, persuade him. He's not on benefits is he? Well if he is then he can afford it.'
In her book, Mrs Swire goes on to question the condemnation former Prime Minister David Cameron received for his resignation honours list, asking why the politician was called out for listing his cronies if he wanted to.
Her comments come years after Mr Cameron came under fire from senior Conservatives for his resignation honours list of gongs for his friends and allies in 2016.
The list of of 48 recommendations included a gong for Isabel Spearman, a personal aide to Samantha Cameron.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8727909/MPs-wife-Sasha-Swire-says-Boris-Johnson-calculating-machine.html
Friends of Miss Dorries said the former Tory MP and minister asked her to 'slip her hand inside his coat' on their way to a formal dinner in Mayfair.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
My old friend Boris Johnson appears to have been kidnapped and replaced with some dour, repressive doppelgänger. I no longer recognise the former libertarian, whose car used to be littered with unpaid parking fines. This is not even a Conservative Government, and Tory voters are rightly infuriated by the new assaults on their liberty. A former Cabinet minister says: “We are reaching the point where the Party will no longer tolerate it.” Myself, I feel this is a bad new way of doing politics; blaming the people of Britain for Government incompetence and then beating up on them. It is not sensible to be on a permanent war footing against the electorate.
Kit “Fatty” Malthouse exhorts us to inform on neighbours if they are breaking the absurd “rule of six”, which even scientists deride. Malthouse, the only man I have ever met who can strut sitting down, is in no danger of suffering from this himself. He doesn’t even have six friends.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/friend-sasha-swire-feels-bloodied-094624125.html