Politics runs through Sasha Swire’s veins. Her father is Sir John Nott, Minister of Defence during the Falklands war, and her husband is Sir Hugo Swire, Conservative MP and Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as it then was.
She tried to get selected as Conservative candidate for Teignbridge in 2005 but Stanley Johnson beat her. I think if she had persevered she would have made an excellent MP. David Cameron agrees – he tried to persuade her to apply for a seat in 2009. Instead she recorded her and Hugo’s life in a delightfully indiscreet diary. The only people who come out well are husband Hugo and Amber Rudd, the latter a friend since schooldays. Her diaries cover the decade from 2010: David Cameron’s election, the coalition, Brexit, then Theresa and Boris. No shortage of material there.
It is a good read, a page turner, and it is for the reader to decide if it’s delightfully indiscreet or the rantings of a bitchy wife, sour because her husband never got into the Cabinet and had to make do with a knighthood. As the blurb says, “Swire showed up, stored up and rarely shut up”. David Cameron gets more than his fair share of stick until she tries to make it up to him in July 2016:
”Above all, David is an honest, charming, fundamentally decent person, which is only too rare in politics. He is an uncomplicated family man and his achievements far outweigh his disappointments. On the whole, he played the cards he was dealt with integrity and intelligence and I believe history will judge him kindly.”
So she didn’t burn all her boats and may still be welcome in Notting Hill and Chipping Norton.