The Daily Mail must have paid handsomely to run extracts from How Not to Be a Political Wife, the new book by Sarah Vine, Michael Gove’s ex-wife. Yet they missed the one big story: in the book, Vine in effect outs herself as a closet Remainer.
The Mail got a lot of the froth, but somehow missed the substance. The extracts in the paper made clear her obsession with money and status, and her delight at the glamour of knowing the Notting Hill set – the Camerons, the Osbornes and so on. It also captured her growing resentment that the others had more money and bigger homes than she did.
All this eventually brought her to the conviction that they secretly despised her, and that her relationship with Samantha Cameron – beautiful, sophisticated, aristocratic, rich – was not really one of equals.
It seems to have made her miserable that she and her husband had nothing but his ministerial wage and her estimated £200,000 Daily Mail salary
to live on. Worse, they had nothing to fall back on – except for her extremely rich father.
But the real question is: what sort of person can support a policy publicly when she knows it’s a disaster? The answer is: the kind of person who wrote this book. It is – I am choosing my words carefully – the nastiest, ugliest, most vindictive, most hypocritical, most self-righteous book I know. You feel soiled by it. I have read it so you don’t have to.
On almost every page, you hear the satisfying clunk of a score being settled. I am glad I have never met Vine, for I might have slighted her somehow and found my way into this book. Vine’s vengeance even extends to a schoolgirl who apparently behaved badly at her daughter’s birthday party, and the girl’s mother who telephoned afterwards and was rude to her. Though she does not name the girl or her mother, I imagine all their contemporaries at school know who they are.
A few pages on, we find her furious about something that someone said about her daughter: “In my book it’s below the belt to tell tales on other people’s children in an attempt to get at the parents.”
There are several folk who will apparently never be forgiven for writing or speaking unkindly of the Goves, which is odd because Vine has made her reputation with cutting, often hurtful copy. Among the demonology she includes Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo, who in 2015 skewered her on This Week for what she calls a “mischievous” piece she wrote about Justine Miliband, when Justine’s husband, Ed, was Labour leader.
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I looked up the piece. It’s not “mischievous”. It’s spiteful, snobbish, sneering, and nasty. Headlined “Why their kitchen tells you all you need to know about the mirthless Milibands”, it says: “It’s the kitchen of a woman who considers domestic matters well below her pay grade. No home-making for Justine: she’s far too busy sticking to her feminist principles as an environment lawyer. And that doesn’t include nice crockery or other homely touches. Or even, it would appear, a half-decent set of curtains.”
It goes on at length about what Vine considers the inferior equipment and decor in the Milibands’ kitchen. She accused them of trying “to make their £2m town house in London’s trendy Kentish Town look less fabulous” in order “to bolster Ed’s man-o’-the-people image”. Justine, she wrote, lacks “any sign of warmth, empathy or fallibility”.
Staggeringly, in her book, Vine appeals for sympathy from feminists for being bullied over this piece on This Week by two men, Portillo and Neil. I don’t suppose Justine Miliband, for one, would feel like standing shoulder to shoulder with her. With principles like these, perhaps it’s not surprising to find that her real views about Brexit are the opposite of what you might imagine. She keeps coming back to the dilemma, apparently trying to salvage some sort of integrity for herself.
“As someone who has grown up in Europe… I had always been of the opinion that we Brits needed to lean in with Brussels,” she tells us. Cameron’s decision to go for a referendum was dreadfully harmful: “If I had to choose one man to take the rap for the mess this country found itself in for the next 20+ years, I would put David Cameron into pole position.”
She was lobbied by her father in Italy and brother in Spain, who both owned businesses that were going to be severely damaged by Brexit. She knew it was a disaster.
But her husband was a Brexiter, and so was the editor of the Mail, Paul Dacre. It wasn’t a matter of conviction – for Vine, it was, as it was for Boris Johnson, a career choice.
And that really is the lesson of this extremely grubby book. That Brexit
may have been made by fanatics, racists and chancers like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. But the biggest political disaster of our time was actually enabled by cynical careerists like Vine.
How Not to Be a Political Wife, by Sarah Vine, is published by HarperCollins
Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian
