the times | Tuesday September 15 2020 1GM 25
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Tory wife’s diary reveals all about the party
Never mind the gossip in Sasha Swire’s memoirs: what stands out is her portrayal of the smug, aimless Cameron clique
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aren’t. In a world where everybody is
blithe, their crime seems to be not
being. Almost explicitly, in fact, Boris
Johnson is forgiven for backing
Brexit because he didn’t really
believe in it, whereas Michael Gove
isn’t, because he did. As Sarah Vine,
otherwise known as Mrs Gove, wrote
yesterday: “Hugo toyed with the idea
of coming out for Brexit, but in the
end decided to support Dave
instead.” Brexit or Dave: the real
referendum choice.
As I said, a clique theory of politics
will always be simplistic. Speaking as
somebody who was also at a public
school, and who is also from a
Conservative family and who is,indeed, even also called Hugo, I
might also seem to be dancing on a
pinhead in separating one bunch of
Tories from another.
Still, the more one reads of the
world of Mrs Swire, the more
inevitable the subsequent collapse of
British politics starts to seem. How
were they supposed to end, those
years of government by about eight
smug, aloof, and slightly aimless
people who were only bothering
because they didn’t have anything
better to do? What else could
possibly have happened, if not the
storming of their expensively tasteful
barricades, by all of those colleagues
that they relied upon, and looked
down upon, and never invited in?really seemed to matter.
Facetiousness can be a pose for the
upper classes because earnestness is
gauche but the characters we see
through Swire don’t even seem to
notice that they’re doing it. “What
more do I want?” chuckles Cameron,
after the fall of Tripoli in 2011. “A
great day on the beach... and I’ve
just won a war.” Contrast this with
Blair on Iraq, with the handwringing,
and the angst, and the talking to
God. Despite all that “heir to Blair”
stuff, the two PMs don’t seem to
have much in common, either in
earnestness or in charisma. This is
seen most abruptly when the PM
tells Mrs Swire, I suppose in what heimagines to be a charming way, that
her perfume makes him want to
“push you into the bushes and give
you one”.
The clique has codes. A few months
after hosting the Camerons in
Cornwall, the Swires mention to the
Osbornes that they still haven’t been
invited to Chequers. Twenty-four
hours later an invitation materialises,
because while joking about forcibly
humping your friend’s wife in the
bushes is basically fine, forgetting to
return an invitation definitely isn’t.
Also, there is the strange, awkward,
status of the Goves. Alone among the
clique, they are precarious, with lives
that would be very different if they
weren’t in it. Thus, eventually, theyepiphany, in yesterday’s extract, at
the Cameron’s Notting Hill
Christmas party. “Poor old Sarah
Gove” is there, apparently doing the
catering, and our author has a flash
of being “in the court of King David”.
It is, she writes, “a very particular,
narrow tribe of Britain and their
hangers-on” and “enough to repulse
the ordinary man”. I’m not sure
which ordinary man. Maybe her
gardener.
Fifteen years after it began andfour years after it so abruptly ended,
there remains something enigmatic
about the Cameron project. One
looks back, still, and one is not quite
sure what it was for. Asked why he
wanted to be PM, Cameron famously
replied “because I think I’d be good
at it”. It always reminded me of that
Billy Connolly routine, where he
meets a well-spoken Englishman
who tells him he’s a tobogganist. “A
tobacconist?” says Connolly,
confused. From the right sort of
background, you can have a decent
crack at doing almost anything. So
why not, thought Dave, do that?
Perhaps that’s why it all neverI
t’s obviously simplistic to conflate
political projects with cliques, but
it can be helpful, too. Particularly
when you’re trying to figure out
why people hate each other so
much.
In many respects, for example, the
Blair government was bestunderstood as a club of Islington
lawyers who had had enough of left-
wing politics being dominated by
whiffy old men with bundles of
pamphlets in plastic bags. And then,
later on, the Corbyn movement
was dominated by those same whiffy
old men, often also from Islington,
and often also with the same
pamphlets, who were still very cross
about it.
Similarly, over on the other side,
the Cameron government was a
bunch of chummy, middlebrow
chaps from glamorous public schools,
and the Brexiters who usurped them
were a bunch of resentful
middlebrow chaps from slightly less
glamorous public schools, who thefirst lot had never once had over for
a weekend in the Cotswolds.
Caricature? Of course. But not, I
think, untrue.
The memoirs of Sasha Swire,
serialised in The Times this week,
offer the sort of perspective into the
Cameron tribe we could only
otherwise have got with a periscope
punching up through an
unspeakably expensive kitchen
island. She is the wife of the former
Tory Foreign Office minister Sir
Hugo Swire, and the daughter of a
former Tory defence secretary, and
she is tall and blonde and rich and
glamorous, and seems to convey the
very essence of being a veryparticular sort of Tory. As in, you
know the sort of Tory that Ruth
Davidson is? That Theresa May is,
and John Major is? Well, not that
sort. No.
Like all the best memoirists, Swire
seems to understand her own life
with the perfect mix of insight and a
complete lack of it. For the latter, I
offer you the bit in Decca
Aitkenhead’s interview in The Sunday
Times, where Swire mused that her
husband should have been foreign
secretary, or at least international
development secretary, because he
had Etonian charm and “knows all
the countries”. What, all of them?
Get you, Mr Google.
For the former, though, ponder herOne looks back on the
project and is not quite
sure what it was for
@hugorifkind
Hugo
Rifkind