Sarah Vine's barbed texts stir the Westminster grapevine

Times

17-06-2025

Sales of Sarah Vine's How Not to Be a Political Wife have hardly been hindered after fellow political wife Sasha Swire gave a catty critique, but the review still stung. 'At least I wrote my own book instead of getting my husband to write it for me,' Vine typed with equally sharp claws. This was on her WhatsApp thread for famous chums such as her ex-husband Michael Gove, ex-ministers Ed Vaizey and Amber Rudd, and the broadcaster Piers Morgan, who assured Vine, that 'the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about'. The thread can receive hundreds of daily messages, so at least they'll always be talking about each other.
Vine's book talks about the ex-chancellor George Osborne, but he is yet to read it. This is not a first — he tells the Political Currency podcast that he would not buy Boris Johnson's memoirs as he 'didn't want a single penny finding its way into the Johnson bank account'. However, he still wanted to know what had been written about him. So, if Daunt Books spotted a man thumbing through the index and taking photos of various pages, you know who sent him.
Signal failure
It's no wonder that the government is pumping billions into our rickety infrastructure — it nearly cost them dear. When the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was cosying up to his American opposite number, Howard Lutnick, before crunch trade negotiations, he sent him a WhatsApp which had been carefully drafted by many Whitehall departments. Moments later, Lutnick called back saying: 'Johnny, I got your message. I don't know what it means.' Lutnick started thrashing out a deal but there was a problem as Reynolds was being driven back to his constituency in Stalybridge. 'Every fifth or sixth word was genuinely cutting out of signal,' Reynolds said at a lobby lunch. 'I was literally slightly worried I was going to sell the f***ing NHS.' Look out for more money being spent on mobile phone masts in Lancashire.
War and pizza
The pizza parlours of Arlington County, Virginia, knew something was up last Thursday night. As Israel readied to attack Iran, the area around the Pentagon experienced a surge of pizza orders. Such activity is reported by the X account Pentagon Pizza Report, who monitor this vital indicator of the geopolitical weather. Surges are caused by Pentagon staffers cancelling their dinner reservations in anticipation of an all-nighter, but there is one other business which can indicate a crisis. The account also said a local gay bar had 'abnormally low traffic for a Thursday night'.
Due to popular demand, our exam howlers series has been sent for a resit. Edward Asprey tells me of a prep school test where he was asked to define 'sangfroid' and a classmate wrote 'bloody cold'. The husband of Sue Roberts taught in Ghana and once set an exam about the 15th-century pretender Perkin Warbeck; he was amused to read one answer which began 'When Perkin Warbeck landed at London Airport'. Finally, Bernard Kingston once got wind of a history paper where the candidate wrote of Ferdinand Magellan being 'the first man to circumcise the world with a 40-foot clipper'.