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

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Lady Swire has a keen eye for detail and a waspish turn of phrase, which makes this a real page-turner. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. See our Remarkables Archive list for what is no longer in print, but which we are happy to track down.

If you needed proof that Britain has been misruled by the unserious, entitled, snobbish, incestuous and curiously childish then the acerbic Lady Swire, unwittingly or not, has provided it. At first it proved ideal shallow bedtime reading – entertaining gossipy disclosures about the world of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Raab etc. 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.

For more than 20 years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. When she discovers Dave “laughing uproariously” in conversation with her husband about the supposedly unusual characteristics of historian Andrew Roberts’s “male member” and comparing notes on which female politicians were “beddable”, she is positively indulgent. 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”. We read of parties in Cornwall, dinner parties with the Prince of Wales, shooting parties, Russian oligarch parties, parties with Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, and Murdoch's former wife, Wendy Deng. New Paperbacks NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks. Her assessments of people were heavily coloured, I concluded, as to how they behaved towards Milady Swire. It makes it no easier to hear that she believes him to be “desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside”.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. Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell's diaries for the Spectator , I concluded as follows: "Who will be the chroniclers of the Cameron government? The court of King David, to which Sasha and her Etonian MP husband, Sir Hugo, belonged during Cameron’s Downing Street years, was nothing if not homogeneous. These felt distinctly effortful and inserted, and I was frankly bored when she launched into spates of her political philosophy. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.