The SW1nderland gang

It was the title that nearly put me off. There are far too many “How To” pocketbooks penned by political types anxious to make an extra couple of quid by pouring what pass as their questionable talents out on paper. “How To Win An Election” by those that promptly lose them or “How To Be A Whip” by those who cannot keep secrets are typical of this dismal genre. I say “nearly” as when I read it again, I saw that Sarah Vine’s memoir of her life as the other half of Michael Gove is how NOT to be a political wife. Intriguing, I thought, so I opened it.

If you are hoping to find something salacious about Vine’s former husband and father of her two children, your appetite is likely to remain unwetted. True, you will discover that he favours pastel lavender dressing gowns from Hackett (his Spectator income now may stretch to one from Daniel Hanson), that he nearly vomited over Pope Benedict, and that he read an entire Caro volume on Lyndon Johnson whilst waiting for his wife to give birth (something of a labour of love by both parents). But this is no “wronged wife puts the boot in” hiss and tell, though there is plenty of that about just about everybody else: Her father, her work colleagues and most of her ex-husband’s ex-friends, face her mercilessly accurate firing squad. Of her former husband, though, Vine offers little other than admiration and affection suffused with regret. Essentially, she tells a wretched and all too frequently told tale of two people whose common bonds unravel as their work and responsibilities impel them to live separate lives, in this case magnified a million times by the public pressure cooker of politics. The title of her final chapter is “Toxic Fallout”, yet toxicity is the quality threading throughout this memoir. Whether it concerns Vine’s relationship with her father (or his with his own father), her Cameroon friends, the media’s reporting of politicians and its effects on their families, or her conception of herself, the noxious atmosphere is pervasive. One senses that Vine has only discovered her own health and wellbeing  by leaving her first fifty years behind. In that sense her story is as much medication as it is memoir. And it is very readable.

For Sarah Vine, despite her protestations to be a kind of accidental journalist, writes with clarity, sincerity and with humour about her youth, her family and friendships, her first meeting with Michael, and her joining the Conservative political elite which corroded her marriage. She writes as an outsider looking in, which is essentially how she feels about herself. A lonely child, her relationship with her father was unusual to say the least. Most daughters idolise their fathers.  Sarah Vine analyses hers. Her assessment of a driven, drunken, bullying and deeply damaged man, capable of love but also of the most searing cruelty is raw to the bone. Most fathers, after all, do not tell their daughters that they should have been aborted. Her health battles (a latterly diagnosed thyroid problem), weight problems, basement level self esteem and general surprise that she might actually be good at something are all detailed with disarming honesty. Her approach is reminiscent of Jack Hargreaves a generation ago and his record of the changing traditions of the countryside, delivered devoid of sentiment or judgement.  

Hargreaves presented “Out of Town”. Sarah Vine’s memoir of life with Michael Gove is very much “In Town” as members of that gifted, entitled, magic circle of friends from chichi Kensington & Chelsea who surrounded David Cameron in his rise to power. The names, whose intertwined lives Vine chronicles, read like a Most Wanted list issued by the ERG: Ed Vaizey, Nick Boles, Rachel Whetstone and Steve Hilton feature regularly as do, naturally, George Osborne, his wife Frances and the Camerons themselves. They worked together and they played together allowing Vine to paint detailed and vivid portraits of fairytale weekends at Chequers with “Dave and Sam” and of life at Dorneywood with the Osbornes in the glory days before the Brexit referendum sank both those friendships and the Cameron premiership. About the loss of those friends Vine is both sad and acid, giving us a very personal perspective on what the collapse of the Cameron project meant for its personnel. She regrets her parting from Samantha Cameron, with whom she clearly had a temperamental affinity, but gives short shrift to most of the others: Cameron himself is dismissed as a “man-baby” and a toff who flounced off when the country rejected his EU proposals rather than oversee an orderly change of guard. George Osborne is treated more coolly as someone who dispassionately separated politics from personality but who reminded her children of a creepy “Mr Burns” from The Simpsons. Vine concludes that these friendships were essentially only political and although they shared the W10 postcode, the Goves were not really of the Notting Hill Set.  That Set, Vine contends, allowed her and her husband into their exclusive world only so long as the couple might prove useful as “staff” or as “just a fixer”. She believes Cameron’s coldly calculated demotion of her husband in 2014 — she describes it as a public humiliation — was the moment when “the shard of ice entered Michael’s heart”, emboldening him to part ways with Cameron over Brexit. The truth of this cannot be certain given Cameron’s own memoir tells a different story and Michael Gove, by his wife’s own admission, is a man possessed of great ability to compartmentalise “everything in neat stackable (and occasionally lockable) boxes”. What does appear certain is that the only significant Cameroon friendship to survive both the divorce from Europe and that from her husband is Sarah Vine’s fondness for Nick Boles. That friendship is clearly old and cherished and continues to this day, although, given some of her revelations about him on the dance floor, if I were Boles I might be inclined to ask for my sofa back.

The memoir concludes with an epilogue, bringing us up to date with the election in 2024 by which time both Vine and Gove had gone their separate, amicable ways, and both had left the political swamp for the journalists’ jungle. Vine muses on whether there might have been a sliding doors moment in their lives which might have saved their marriage. If there was, she decides, it was in 2003, barely two years after their wedding and almost two decades before their divorce, when Gove decided to stand for Parliament. If correct, that is a sobering portent for any couple considering a run at politics. The mills of God turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.

This is Sarah Vine’s personal memoir, not a detailed history of events and so it is not surprising if one or two inaccuracies have crept in. In the 2015 General Election, the Conservatives won a majority of 12 not 10. And in 2024 her ex-husband did not announce his “intention to stand down earlier in the year” but on 24th May — the day after Rishi Sunak announced the date of the general election and a bare six weeks before polling day. There will, too, be several supporters of Boris Johnson who have very different recollections of the chronology of events in June 2016 when Michael Gove revealed that he was ratting on Johnson. However, as a memoir of her own experience, Vine tells it as she saw it openly and candidly and without wasting a single word.

Perhaps one of the most intimate aspects of this book is the voice Sarah Vine gives to her two children, to whom the memoir is dedicated. Their story and experiences, with their permission, is retold by their mother in a way that is not for the squeamish. It is both a sobering and sorrowful reminder that, in the poisonous battles between politicians and the media, it is the innocent family of public figures who suffer most unfairly. Vine’s elegantly written “Acknowledgements”, including one to Michael Gove, are at the end of the memoir. I would advise anyone to read them first. They set out the scene, and contextualise understanding, better than any prologue.