Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power: 'riotously candid' Sunday Times

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We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell's diaries for the Spectator , I concluded as follows: "Who will be the chroniclers of the Cameron government? Everything seems to be about competitively grasping for status symbols – a grander office, a more prestigious official car, a knighthood, getting one’s husband into the Cabinet. Diary of an MP's Wife is a searingly honest, wildly indiscreet and often uproarious account of what life is like in the thick of it.

The struggles of ordinary people are ignored in a life of champagne, weekends at Chequers, long holidays in Cornwall and Devon, and afternoons gossiping over high tea and cake. Because of the author’s position as a confidante of the main players, this book will be a primary source for future political and social historians. But in Swire’s vignettes of Cameron’s chillaxed post-Downing Street life – telling his daughter he has a meeting, only to sit watching back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones – and her perceptions of a very different, less privileged generation rising through the party lies another small piece of the jigsaw.

In all the 538 pages, I found just one hint, one smidgeon of self-knowledge sneaking through a golden cloak of privilege. The small clique of people at the top are also exposed with waspish irreverence by Sasha Swire in Diary of an MP's Wife . As her old friends argue fruitlessly over the best way to thwart a hard Brexit and plot unsuccessfully to manoeuvre Rudd into Downing Street, she backs the arch Brexiter Dominic Raab’s leadership bid before warming to the “slobbering golden retriever” Boris Johnson. For those struggling to place Hugo Swire, an Old Etonian former army officer, he was never really a household name.

She was born and brought up in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency.Somewhere, unknown to his or her colleagues, a secret scribbler will already be at work, documenting the rise and, in due course, no doubt, the fall of this administration" Well, here it is. 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).

New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. This book won’t make happy reading in the May household, with its detailed accounts of how the Cameroons sniped about “the Maybot” behind her back. The pesky MP's wife may have a better sense of public taste than all the players strutting on the political stage. A former journalist who gave up her career to look after her family, she had kept a diary since childhood, and carried on jotting down daily insights gleaned throughout her husband Hugo’s time as a minister under their good friend David Cameron (and subsequently as a backbencher under Theresa May). Insecure but fiercely precocious, the young Sontag devours everything that culture offers up to her.I giggled when there was some mention of someone who had fallen foul of him and was a “name forever loathed in the Nott household” – ah, I thought, just like Nott in ours. By 2015 she is fretting that Ed Miliband is clearly “on to something” in pledging to abolish non-dom status and that the Tories have become too harsh towards the poor, “unforgiving of personal circumstances, relentless in telling people to stop whingeing and make a go of it”. Unsurprisingly, she was scathing about Michael Gove (it’s a national sport, really) and surprisingly unpleasant about Sarah Vine, for reasons, I concluded, of jealousy. Die Autorin macht keinen besonders sympathischen Eindruck, privilegiert und prätentiös aber egozentrisch und ein bißchen nutzlos. I bought this book cheap, intending to skim read interesting bits, but ended up reading it cover-to-cover.