The Spectator presents: Living with a Politician
Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake's Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP's Wife) as they discuss the losses and laughter involved in being married to politics.
This event will be live from 7.00pm on Monday 30 June.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
2 days ago
- Times
Michael Gove kicks off over Breakfast and hosts' ‘inner Paxmans'
Things are not happy at Breakfast. Not only is the BBC morning show engulfed in controversy, but it has now been described as 'the worst news outlet in the country' by one of its former guests. 'You can tell the presenters are unhappy that they're not presenting the Today programme,' said the former minister Michael Gove at a Spectator event, 'so they summon up their inner Paxman.' Gove added that he was 'exasperated with the stupidity of the questions' and that 'the worst thing is people who think that they're good and want to have big personalities and possess neither'. The programme might be happy to have got under a politician's skin, but the words are still harsh. Then again, if the complaints of bullying at the show are accurate, they might be used to such things. It was a rare moment of rage from Gove on a night when he was on stage with his ex-wife Sarah Vine to promote her book. Those expecting dirty laundry to be aired were disappointed as the two were wonderfully kind to each other — perhaps with good reason. Fellow panellist Lord Swire said the whole evening was an attempt to sell copies of Vine's book and thereby 'reduce Michael's alimony'. The formerly-weds were on such good terms that someone in the audience said their divorce was the most amicable since 'the Duke and Duchess of York' — an especially unflattering comparison for Gove, which Vine immediately rubbished. 'Michael sweats,' she said. • Michael Gove on divorce, gay rumours, dating and the Camerons The government has quite literally gone dotty. There has been a seemingly needless rebrand of the website and someone has decided to make a big thing of the 'dot' in that address. It is thought that the dot is now a symbol of the government, but it is difficult to confirm this as the guidance on the rebrand doesn't appear to be written in English. The guidance, which is longer than the Strategic Defence Review, says: 'Our dot is the bridge between government and the UK' and is a 'guiding hand for life'. This enterprise cost £500,000, or 2,667 weeks of personal independence payments. MPs have little time to be aspiring statesmen as they are overwhelmed with local casework, but this can lead to a moment of note. For instance, Peter Swallow (Lab, Bracknell), raised his constituents' concerns after some wildlife had been run over in the area. It was charming to see a Swallow stand up for geese. You expect some journalists to have used hallucinogenic drugs, but not Matthew Parris, still of this parish. However, in characteristically polite style, he was only doing it to fit in with the locals. He tells Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? that it happened in the Amazon, where he partook of a 'poisoned tree frog'. 'You just go crazy,' he said. 'First I couldn't stand up, then I couldn't sit down.' His hosts sat under trees and saw the mysteries of the universe, while Parris dreamt that Denis Thatcher was telling him to get into the boot of Mrs Thatcher's car. Only an ex-Tory MP could go to the Amazon and see a Jaguar which wasn't a cat.
Spectator
3 days ago
- Spectator
The Spectator presents: Living with a Politician
Exclusive to subscribers, watch our latest event Living with a Politician live. Join Sarah Vine, (author of How Not to Be a Political Wife), with Michael Gove, Rachel Johnson (author of Rake's Progress, her own odyssey as a political candidate) and Hugo Swire (whose wife Sasha wrote the bestselling Diary of an MP's Wife) as they discuss the losses and laughter involved in being married to politics. This event will be live from 7.00pm on Monday 30 June.
New Statesman
4 days ago
- New Statesman
What's wrong with Sarah Vine?
What's the matter with Sarah Vine? Almost everything if How Not To Be A Political Wife, her puzzling account of 20 years 'inside the rooms of government, a sanctioned eavesdropper on the rise – and fall – of the Cameroon style of Conservatism' is to be believed. Coming to the end of Vine's self-gouging rampage-memoir, a straightforwardly insane mash-up of Cinderella, old footage of a rejected X Factor contestant weeping about their family and the nasty Freudian bits from the Patrick Melrose novels, the reader finds themselves hoping that those 'rooms of government' have been stripped, hosed, and given a thorough wipe down since she left. Vine, formerly Michael Gove's wife and currently one of those columnists on the Daily Mail who writes at least 6,000 words a week about Princess Eugenie's Instagram account, lists the ailments herself. Like demons in hell, they are legion. To begin with Vine was born overdue, two weeks late, with 'remarkably large feet'. She was 'catastrophically' short-sighted. She had 'thick' fingers. Later, she has 'ADHD' helpfully diagnosed – why not? – by 'one of my closest friends, who is an expert on these things'. She developed alopecia, hated herself, felt anxious, exhausted, overwhelmed. Something about Vine is always off, always wrong: 'slow metabolism', 'joint pain', 'underactive thyroid', 'muscle aches', 'mood swings', 'suppressed trauma', 'acute appendicitis'. She has a cranial scan for a Daily Mail health feature. The specialist asks her 'if I had ever sustained a serious brain injury'. Vine claims throughout the book that she has a 'bad memory'. But that's not accurate. She remembers every single thing that's ever been wrong with her – and everyone else she's ever known. Vine grew up a half-Welsh transplant in hot Italy, with a hotter mum and a drunken, homophobic, nightmare Boomer dad who 'despised fat women' in between puffs on his oedipal stogies. The Vines, who fled high-tax Britain in the Seventies, were – are – evidently and tastelessly wealthy. They paid for their Vine to become a Gove by flying one hundred guests to the South of France for their 'Riviera Razzmatazz' nuptials; they own sweet property in central London, as well as a patriotically located 'place in Monte Carlo'. They sent their daughter to a 'strange' boarding school, where an 'Anti-Sarah Vine Association' swiftly formed, eerily prefiguring the future. It is not Vine's fault that her parents, in her own high exposure telling, are dreadful. But the sheer soap operatic horror of the Vines – constantly and boozily breaking down, shagging random Italians they're not married to, slagging off their daughter for being crap at tennis – does help to explain who Vine is, in ways she is not quite cognisant of. About a third of the way through How Not To Be A Political Wife this personality becomes clearer: a self-loathing, self-dramatising, self-confessed 'outsider', who is in fact a casting call posho with a cruel, nouveau riche father and a distant mother. That is also the double helix running through a certain kind of journalist – a 'sanctioned eavesdropper' in Vine's words. It's not a role she invented. In 1919, Max Weber argued all journalists were 'pariah' figures 'with no fixed social position' who took psychological risks in consorting with the 'most powerful people on earth in their drawing rooms, on a seemingly equal basis' while those same powerful people secretly despised reporters. He warned such journalists risk falling into 'total superficiality' and 'self-exposure, with all its inexorable consequences'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Only the very strongest characters, Weber believed, could do the job responsibly: 'It is not for everyone – least of all for people of weak character, especially those who need a secure social position for their inner equilibrium.' And a 'secure social position' to restore a whacked out 'inner equilibrium' is what Vine needed more than anything. She's not a special 'outsider', nor is she the 'imposter syndrome' scullery maid victim of the class system she imagines herself to be in How Not To Be A Political Wife. Her early career in journalism, as it is described here, is little more than a prolonged and painful attempt to build social caché and so redeem her unpopularity at school. 'I had quite a little black book of my own,' she boasts, after a 1990s spell at Tatler and somehow barging her way into the editorship of the Times' arts pages. Vine quotes from a prophetic letter her then editor Peter Stothard received a few days into her new job from Garsington Opera, denouncing her elevation as a 'catastrophic drop in standards'. This sounds tough on Vine, but a few pages later she describes a bathroom miniature as 'exciting' and the reader begins to think Garsington Opera might have had a point. Suddenly, How Not To Be A Political Wife's pages begin to proudly swarm with comedy arrivistes and sub-ducal nobodies. 'Topaz Amoore', 'Jayne Dowle', 'Randal Dunluce', 'Tania Kindersley', 'Imogen Edwards-Jones' and someone literally called 'Venetia Butterfield'. Ludicrously, Vine calls them 'the best and the brightest', seemingly unaware that the phrase was borrowed by David Halberstram from Percy Shelley to describe the misfiring brains in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who expanded and lost the Vietnam War. Vine's mates don't wreck South East Asia, but so many of them end up in the Cameron governments that you could fairly accuse them of wrecking Britain. Weber also speculated about what would happen if journalists tried to become politicians. What type of journalist would win power, the 'weak' charlatans or the 'worthy and genuine' who made a success of an impossible profession? We immediately think of Michael Gove, whose ascent began on the Daily Telegraph's 'Peterborough' column. Vine first envelops him on a ski slope in the early Noughties as Kyle Minogue's Can't Get You Out Of My Head blasts out from chalet speakers. Gove was then a sparkly, effete and bookish presence, and a thunderous voice on the Times comment desk, where he had begun to zoom away from his origins as an adopted boy from Scotland. And Vine's account of their marriage underlines the fact that Gove too was an ambitious social mountaineer, not the hapless intellectual depicted. Gove may have presented as a drunken and waspishly entertaining court dwarf to powerful toffs such as Ben Elliot, Tom Parker-Bowles and David Cameron, but only so he could eventually extract eminence and position. At this point, the only sign that Gove had his gimlet sights set beyond clowning at country house suppers and bloviating on Radio 4's Moral Maze was his choice of aftershave: Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet, a favourite scent of Winston Churchill's. Vine thinks this made Gove smell 'fragrant', others thought it meant he was 'gay obviously'. But what it really meant was that he dreamed of becoming a great prime minister. Gove's scent was a charm, a spell, a hopeful but furtive prediction. In The Red and The Black, Stendhal's 19th-century novel of a rural outsider attempting to conquer a glittering metropole, his hero Julien Sorel obsessively reads a hidden copy of Napoleon's letters for spiritual ballast, dreaming of one day matching the achievements of his idol. If David Cameron had simply sniffed Gove he might have neutralised the political threat he posed much, much earlier. After Vine repeatedly explains why her ex-husband is not gay, How Not To Be A Political Wife moves from misery memoir to political score-settling. In the early 2000s, the Goves, along with Francis Maude, George Osborne, David Cameron, Theresa May, Dougie Smith, Rachel Whetstone, Steve Hilton, sundry others and the Policy Exchange think tank were 'Tory Modernisers'. An inner core of this group were 'rambunctious friends' stretching back to their days at Oxford University, friends who would eventually form a court around Cameron when he became prime minister. They wanted the Conservative Party to make peace with modern, liberal, Blairite Britain: to stop calling homosexuals 'tank-topped bum boys' as Boris Johnson did and to remove the fusty Iain Duncan Smith from the Tory leadership. The Conservatives, once Cameron secured power, would become associated with nice things like climate change, academy schools and gay people. Had the Conservative Party changed? They were still mostly rich posh people like Sarah Vine, or even richer posher people like the Camerons and Osbornes. Vine swoons over their 'innate confidence', 'effortless self-assurance', 'expansive kitchen suppers', 'enviable grace' and 'flamboyantly furnished' homes. The Goves spend one soggy weekend away at Samantha Cameron's mother Annabel and step-father William Astor's 19,000-acre estate on Jura, a world, Vine writes ecstatically, of 'faithful, elderly retainers and wise old ghillies, of deer stalking and fishing, early morning swims in the freezing sea'. To be invited into this world was to achieve the 'secure social position' she desired: she always had money, now she had class. Caught up in her clichéd reverie, she forgets to mention that the estate is not technically owned by the Astors but by a company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. The one small glimpse of actually existing Britain in How Not To Be A Political Wife comes when Vine has to move from West London to Surrey Heath, where Gove has his safe seat. Ordinary life in Britain horrifies her: 'a somewhat soulless tangle of grey roundabouts, shopping centres and cul-de-sacs'. Vine had 'never even heard of Surrey Heath, much less been there'. The people she meets – Tory voters who don't register companies in tax havens – are 'for the most part' nice. Then she compares them to Hyacinth Bucket and calls their towns 'strangely nondescript'. Some of the towns, admittedly, are 'nice' but 'boy did they [all those Hyacinth Buckets] know it'. She forces Gove back to London, a move she compares to 'surfacing from a deep nightmare'. When the expenses scandal breaks and Gove comes under pressure after the Daily Telegraph reveals he bought a pair of 'elephant lamps' worth £134.50 from Oka, an upmarket interior design firm set up by Annabel Astor, Vine writes pathetically: 'It couldn't have come at a worse time for me.' Quite why public money was needed to buy 'elephant lamps' from her mate's mother-in-law becomes secondary to yet another hospital checklist of Vine illnesses brought on by the scandal: 'I caught swine flu, then tonsillitis, double pneumonia and even a quinsy.' Miraculously, she lives. By 2014, Vine was firmly established at the Daily Mail and in her own opinion 'one of the top political wives in the country'. She was happily familiar with grace and favour weekends at Chequers and Dorneywood, chauffeur-driven cars and meeting Royalty: 'a sanctioned eavesdropper'. Gove had become a hate figure for the political left after a controversial series of education reforms that would eventually improve test scores while making it increasingly difficult for schools to attract and retain teaching staff. The Goves had by now developed a reputation for scheming and leaking that Vine blames here on Dominic Cummings, then Gove's special advisor, who she also claims smelled so bad that his colleagues lit scented candles around him. Gove, the entertaining clown who ate his breakfast in cabinet meetings and was so hungover at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2010 that he nearly vomited, was becoming an object of suspicion among the other Cameroons as the EU referendum loomed into view. Vine claims that she and her husband didn't really talk about politics – a suggestion contradicted by page after page of How Not To Be A Political Wife. Cameron's chief of staff Kate Fall wrote in her 2020 memoir The Gatekeeper that Gove took orders from his wife, who 'is used to proactively managing her brilliant but not very down-to-earth husband'. In that book Fall compared the 'clever, funny, powerful' Vine to a 'python'. That sinuous picture that makes more sense than Vine's limp self-portrait. Vine says she was not Lady Macbeth, but then again, that's exactly what Lady Macbeth would say. After the referendum, Gove twice tried and failed to become Prime Minister. All the puffs of Blenheim Bouquet were for naught. Vine's personal life, which was simultaneously a ware she flogged on Fleet Street for a salary, began to come apart. Vine blames amorphous forces such as 'politics' and 'Brexit' for ruining her marriage to Gove, which ended in July 2021 and was confirmed by Vine with an 'in-depth' Tatler interview the following January. In the book Vine laments an 'abyss of class' for separating the Goves from the Camerons, a cross-family friendship that ended after Brexit. They may simply have been annoyed by Vine's constant titillations in the Daily Mail and the small matter of Gove blowing up Cameron's government. Invoking the language of class to explain why a government minister and his newspaper columnist wife fell out with the prime minister and his wife, the step-daughter of a Viscount, is probably not what Marx and Engels invented such terminology for. Over the weekend, Samantha Cameron appeared in the Mail on Sunday, pictured at Glastonbury wearing a '£340 green v-neck dress from her label Cefinn' a few pages away from Vine's column, which included fulminations against Lime Bikes and a new sandwich launched by M&S. 'My favourite sandwich is Marmite,' added Vine bathetically. If you adopt the zero-sum lens through which Vine looks at the world, it is not difficult to see who won the battle between the families. How Not To Be A Political Wife terminates with a generalised call for kindness and an odd diversion in which Vine suspects that the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown may have given her 'mild radon poisoning'. Readers will have to make their own minds up about kindness. They will have to walk around their streets and their towns and wonder what they would be like if people as shallow as Vine had never had any influence over our country. They will have to wonder if they ought to feel sorry for people who feel very sorry for themselves already. In one of the only political insights that illuminate this book's dense fog of self-pity and thwarted ambition, George Osborne warns Michael Gove in early 2016: 'If you go for Leave you will confer respectability on the mob.' It's taken a while for this warning's snobbery to fade and its prescience to become clear but we are presently hurtling towards a near future where Lee Anderson is the Home Secretary. The mob is coming, and in her own small way, Sarah Vine helped lead it to the gates of power. In the end, it's not just self-exposure that has inexorable consequences. [See also: Has Caitlin Moran ever met a man?] Related
