When it comes to insight,\ufeff sometimes only a woman can do the job properly. \ufeffLots of books \u2013 too many! \u2013 have been written about Brexit, each \ufeffmore indigestible than the last\ufeff. To read the smallest excerpt of David Cameron\u2019s self-serving 2019 memoir, For \ufeffthe Record, required a hearty dose of Pepto\ufeff-Bismol, and even then one felt bilious. But these chunky hardbacks were, almost without exception, written by men \ufeff\u2013 and men, especially those who care more than they should about power, tend not to notice the small things (that, or they refuse to deal in what they consider\ufeff trivial). Their eyes on the bigger, grander picture, the telling detail inevitably eludes them.<\/p>\n
It would be easy to take the piss out of Sarah Vine\u2019s How Not \ufeffto Be \ufeffa Political Wife \ufeff\u2013 and I\u2019m about to indulge on this score myself. With its star appearances by Joan Collins and its author\u2019s seeming belief that the only place to buy a dining table is Oka\ufeff (the over\ufeffpriced greige emporium founded by Annabel Astor,\ufeff AKA Samantha Cameron\u2019s mum), it comes with its own brand of ridiculousness. Vine\u2019s insistently disdainful talk of how the \u201cgrubbier\u201d newspapers \ufeffinvaded her life \ufeffwhen she was married to \ufeff\ufeffcabinet minister\ufeff Michael Gove\ufeff is frankly deranged given\ufeff she\u2019s a columnist at the Daily Mail \ufeff\u2013 by some distance the vilest \ufeffpaper\ufeff of them all.<\/p>\n
Still, I read it with rapt fascination, every page delivering some mini-revelation. I\u2019m still reeling from the news that, according to Vine, in 2006, Dominic Cummings, the sinister mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, had his heart broken by Kirstie \ufeff\u201cLocation, Location, Location\u201d\ufeff \ufeffAllsopp. The mind boggles. Maybe Brexit might have been avoided if Dom had been \ufeffbusy knocking down some wall in \ufeffpursuit of another en suite bathroom. (\u201c\ufeffOur builder says it will \ufeffcost \u00a3110,000, which is a lot less than the UK sends the EU every week, darling.\u201d)<\/p>\n
From her perch on the squashy sofas of Chequers and Dorneywood \ufeff\u2013 probably not Oka \ufeff\u2013 Vine observes the gang of old Oxford friends that \ufeff\ufeffhad somehow managed to end up running the country in all their breathtaking carelessness.<\/p>\n
Did they want to do the right thing? Sometimes, possibly. But, hey, let there be karaoke first! (One Christmas, Vine and Cameron end up together in a Slough retail park, where the prime minister buys an X Factor \ufeff\u201cofficial merchandise\ufeff\u201d karaoke machine for Chequers, the better that refreshed \ufeffcabinet ministers might air guitar to Stairway to Heaven). In this book, no one\u2019s reading Edward Gibbon, or even Edward Heath \ufeff\u2013 with the possible exception of Vine\u2019s husband. The Goves\u2019 small house in a less-than-salubrious part of west London \ufeff\u2013 bought for its closeness to the Cameron residence \ufeff\u2013 is so heaving with fat histories, you begin to fear he\u2019ll be killed by a toppling bookcase, like Leonard Bast in E\ufeffM Forster\u2019s novel\ufeff Howard\ufeffs End.<\/p>\n
Ah, yes. Michael. He and Sarah are highly civilised ex\ufeff-partners \ufeff\u2013 they divorced in 2022 \ufeff\u2013 and thanks in part (though not entirely) to this, he emerges surprisingly well from the pages of How Not \ufeffto Be \ufeffa Political Wife. Impossible not to warm to a man who takes bath time as seriously as he does, a vision in a lavender dressing gown, the air about him scented with Clarins\ufeff.<\/p>\n
I read it with rapt\u00a0fascination, every page delivering some mini-revelation<\/p>\n
Like Vine, who grew up in Italy with her raffish, neglectful and sometimes (on the part of her father) verbally abusive parents, he\u2019s not born to the world of Cameron, George Osborne et al. The adopted son of the owner of a family fish processing plant in Aberdeen and a scholarship boy to his bones, he has neither their cash \ufeff\u2013 \u201cCan\u2019t you just ask your dad for some money?\u201d asks Osborne, when Vine confesses their money worries \ufeff\u2013 nor their temerity.<\/p>\n
Though an instinctive leaver himself, from the outset he advises Cameron not to hold his risky referendum. Turning up at Boris Johnson\u2019s Oxfordshire house after the Brexit vote, he is appalled to find Johnson blithely barbecuing sausages; Gove\u2019s people are humping laptops and \ufeffstudying\ufeff spreadsheets, desperate to plot the tricky (impossible) path ahead.<\/p>\n
We know how this ended. Theresa May became PM, to be succeeded by Johnson\ufeff, then Truss. Gove, having stood down as an MP, is now \ufeffeditor of \ufeffthe Spectator\ufeff; his wife continues to howl at Meghan Sussex from the broomstick she rides as the Mail\u2019s self-dubbed \ufeff\u201cWednesday Witch\ufeff\u201d.<\/p>\n
Is Vine right to suggest that by resigning immediately after\ufeff the Brexit vote \u2013 a snap decision that caused chaos \u2013 Cameron ensured that it would be a disaster, like some stroppy child scattering another boy\u2019s Lego? Tempting as the idea is, I\u2019m not sure he was looking that far ahead. Again, the carelessness.<\/p>\n
For Vine, the consequences were more personal. I can\u2019t accept her conviction that politics destroyed her marriage, her friendships, her lovely life. People did these things\ufeff. However, I understand \u2013 it makes me gasp \u2013 her sharp sense of betrayal. This story has more than seems probable in the 21st century to do with social class. When the outsiders Vine and Gove make their move \u2013 \ufeffshe from \ufeffthe Times to the Mail, \ufeffhe from backing Cameron, and therefore, quietly, \ufeffremain, to supporting \ufeffleave \u2013 their so-called friends quickly set the dial to Arctic.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s yelling in lifts and sushi restaurants. \u201cWe made Michael Gove!\u201d huffs Osborne. Paradise \u2013 Chequers, and the Astors\u2019 place on Jura, and giggles at the \ufeffstate \ufeffopening of \ufeffparliament \u2013 is lost. Sarah will dance with her BFF, Sam, in Ibiza no more. I would say \ufeffit was good while it lasted. But that would be to lie. As even she must know now, it was a ghastly chimera, for which the entire country is still paying the price.<\/p>\n