Sasha Swire: ‘98 per cent of men I’ve sat next to only talk about themselves. Now, they talk about me’
She told all in her scandalous Diary of an MP’s Wife, including memorable vignettes about Cameron when he was PM. Backlash aside, Sasha Swire says it changed her life for the better – and now she has a new tale to tell.
‘This,’ says Sasha Swire, flinging open the door of the greenhouse she’s just had built in the grounds of her rambling Devonshire home, Chaffcombe Manor, ‘is my pride and joy – and entirely paid for by the book.’
For a moment we’re both silent with admiration. Then: ‘Totally worth losing a load of friends for, don’t you think?’
She’s joking. Sort of. Because the fallout from her 2020 no-holds-barred Diary of an MP’s Wife – a scabrous account of the Tory chumocracy that ruled Britain while her husband, Hugo Swire, was Minister of State for Northern Ireland and at the Foreign Office, and MP for East Devon – was quite something.
Indeed, three years on, the 60-year-old author still struggles to find the right words to describe the backlash, before finally going with: ‘Gruelling – it was just really gruelling.’
‘I’m actually quite a private person,’ Swire assures me. ‘I don’t like exposure of any sort. So all these articles that were written saying that I wanted to be the centre of attention were so wrong.’
Even her father, Sir John Nott, who was Defence Secretary at the time of the Falklands War, protested, ‘This just isn’t you!’ she says. Wide-eyed behind her tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, Swire adds, ‘I still think the whole thing was quite harmless. To this day, I don’t know why anyone got upset about it.’
It’s hard not to spit out a spoonful of chilled cress and Roquefort soup at this – the first dish of a delicious, homemade three-course lunch we enjoy sitting in Swire’s Proven?al-style garden, surrounded by the manor’s many outbuildings.
After all, few members of the Tory clique in and around power during the period the diary covered – from 2010 to 2019 – escaped without a casual barb.
David Cameron, you may recall, was portrayed as a bit of a chump who joked that Swire’s perfume made him want to push her ‘into the bushes and give you one’, and stayed up late with her husband during a weekend at Chequers ‘to admire Keira Knightley’s nipples when she comes out of the fountain in Atonement’.
Boris Johnson was ‘desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside’. Michael Gove was ‘ever so slightly bonkers’. Dominic Cummings was ‘stark raving mad’ and newspaper proprietor Evgeny Lebedev ‘a charisma-free zone’.
Almost everyone was complimentary about Swire’s writing. Having been a journalist before she married Hugo, 63, and had her two girls – Saffron, 26, who is arts and culture editor of Time Out in Melbourne and a cartoonist, and Siena, 22, who has just finished reading English at Trinity College Dublin – there’s no doubt she has a beady eye, a natural instinct for headline-making and a witty turn of phrase.
But did the book really turn out to be, as predicted by a member of the inner circle before I first interviewed Swire in 2021, ‘an act of social suicide’? Does she regret it?
‘Oh, my God.’ She puts down her spoon. ‘No! No, no – not for a minute. It completely changed my life.’ Really? In more ways than the greenhouse? ‘Well, the greenhouse was the most important thing.’ She grins
‘But no, before the diary, I was nobody. I was completely ignored as an MP’s wife, talked over and patronised. If I gave a political opinion, I was shut down, even though I’ve always been a very political person – in some ways more so even than Hugo, because of my father.’
It’s true that as a schoolgirl growing up in Cornwall, London-born Swire spent many years supporting her father on the campaign trail. She also worked as her husband’s political researcher, and back in the mid-2000s thought of entering the fray herself, seeking selection for the Teignbridge parliamentary candidacy, which went to Stanley Johnson.
‘So, the diary was also an incredibly helpful vehicle for me to offload political opinion,’ she goes on. ‘To sort of test those opinions and stretch them. Now, I also write for The New Statesman, which I find quite kinky, quite funny. And I can’t tell you how many other things I constantly get asked to do.
Swire pauses, shakes her head. ‘No, with the diaries I literally just held my nose and dived in. I didn’t look around the corner because I never would have published it if I had. And it wasn’t for money; it was so that I could write proper books like the new one.’
The new one is Edgeland: A Slow Walk West, a beautifully written travel book sitting on the antique wrought-iron garden table between us, among the French glazed pottery dishes filled with tomato and feta salad and air-fried chicken thighs – and it couldn’t be more different to her last.
In the contemplative, Paul Theroux-like exploration of our most stunning coastline, Swire escapes the stifling Lilliputian world of Westminster to follow the path from Minehead in Somerset to Land’s End in Cornwall.
It would be neat to cast this as Swire’s therapeutic ‘post-diary’ journey, but the truth is that she embarked on the first part of the walk back in 2010, around the September equinox, ‘and walked it in sections’, she writes, over a decade, ‘returning each year like a migratory bird’.
But yes, it did help ‘tame my wild, rampaging thoughts and kept me straying off the path’, she concludes. Certainly, with its dense but lively mix of history, botany, philosophy, poetry and personal family memories, writing what became the new book will have provided something she needed to get her through her years as a political spouse: perspective.
‘Many of the entries [in Edgeland] were part of the diaries,’ explains Swire, though not published in the first book. She has kept daily accounts of her life since the age of nine and always knew she wanted to be a writer. ‘For me that’s been a part of my day for ever. Like brushing my teeth.’
Back when the Swires were living in London – where they still have a Chelsea home that she visits every couple of weeks, and in which her husband spends more time – she would write her diary first thing in the morning.
‘Hugo would come in and tell me what happened the night before in the Commons, so a lot of the diary [published in 2020] was his story, but of course he had no idea how much I was writing down.’ She gives a small smile. ‘I was quite sneaky about a lot of it, but I didn’t think about it in that way because it hadn’t occurred to me to publish it.’
Then, one day, while up in her Chaffcombe study, Swire looked at the vast quantity of material she’d amassed and thought: ‘What am I going to do with all this stuff?’ Without telling her husband, she sent top literary agent Caroline Dawnay a short email.
What did it say? ‘I’m not seeking representation. I’d just like an opinion. You’ve never heard of me, and you probably won’t have heard of my husband either. I was just a woman, sitting in the corner of the room.’
Just a Woman, Sitting in the Corner of the Room would have made a great title. Particularly given how many of the people mentioned in Diary of an MP’s Wife reacted, she says, with cries of: ‘But I never even met her!’
‘And that was the whole point! As a diarist you’re almost a spy. You’re a Trojan horse. Because you’re going in there and just watching, while they behave in a completely relaxed way.’
Of course, legally, the book ‘was such a nightmare that I nearly gave up. I’d been so honest about everyone! Which is of course what makes a good diary. But it would have been much more difficult for someone like my husband to write a diary, because these were his colleagues.’
On that note, the one thing we all want to know is: how did this affect their marriage? In fact, Google informs me that as well as ‘Who is Sasha Swire?’ people tend to ask: ‘Is Sasha Swire still married?’
She chuckles when I tell her this. ‘When I decided to publish, some female friends said, “Oh – get ready for the divorce courts!”’ But her husband was ‘so supportive’, even if he ‘did definitely find it difficult, because it was quite a scandal, so he was quite conflicted’. She weighs it up. ‘Basically, I think 80 per cent of him was proud and 20 per cent of him was: “Why the hell have you done this?”’
There were a few rows. ‘The night before the book was published we had one and I threw my wedding ring on the floor in a tantrum. But then in the morning we were fine, and just decided: “Right, we’re going to get on with this.”
And honestly, I’d worked for him for 20 years and been an incredibly loyal, supportive spouse. I’d written all his newspaper columns. We did politics together, really. So he knew it was my time.’
Obviously, husband and wife had sat down and gone through the book together, both with and without the lawyers, and he didn’t take a lot out, she insists, ‘although of course he was very protective about David’.
The former PM might have thought his friend and former colleague hadn’t been protective enough. While the two men are still friends, ‘David’s not talking to me,’ Swire confesses. ‘Neither is Samantha.’
Not a word has passed between them since the book’s publication, and a few others the author won’t discuss on the record have had a similar reaction.
When I ask whether the immediate general reaction from the men was a predictable, ‘Can’t you keep your wife in line?’, she yelps: ‘Yes! There was so much of that. David actually blamed Hugo for a lot of it, and I was quite cross about that because Hugo can’t stop me doing what I want to do.
He was saying, “Why did you tell her these things?” when of course Hugo did, I was his wife. David would have told Samantha things too. So it was very much a case of, “Put your little woman in order,” you know?’
Fifteen years ago, I remember one MP’s wife telling me that to call the culture ‘misogynistic’ would be wrong: ‘Because it would imply a strength of thought that simply wasn’t there where the wives were concerned. In many men’s minds, we were just ghosts.’
‘There was so much sexism involved,’ Swire stresses. ‘Not just from the men either. Because the women also thought I should have stayed in my box.’ When you meet Swire, it compounds the impression you get in Diary of an MP’s Wife of a strong-willed and politically savvy woman sidelined for so long that she was bound to erupt, Vesuvius-like, at some point.
When she wrote about bringing up ‘STDs at Oxford, and my menopausal symptoms and libido’ at a dinner hosted for ministers at Chequers, it reminded me of Emily Lloyd’s character in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here, and perhaps publishing her diary was the ultimate shout of: ‘Up yer bum!’
Because how many wives in their 40s, 50s and upwards, from every walk of life, must have felt that impulse? I know I have. ‘It’s exactly like that,’ she agrees. ‘I would say that 98 per cent of the men I have sat next to in my life have only talked about themselves – and you know what the difference is now? They talk about me.’
Does she feel the political arena is gradually improving in that regard, though? ‘I do think Westminster is still quite anti-women. It’s obviously changing but, I mean…’ She searches for a strong enough expression. ‘Acid comes up into my throat if I ever have to walk through Portcullis House. I can’t bear it.’
Last year, her husband was made a lord. ‘But I think I’ve only been into the Lords once,’ she tells me, as we finish the excellent flourless chocolate cake Swire frets is ‘a little burnt’ and stretch our legs.
‘When you leave politics it’s almost like you’re trying to land, and the first bit feels slightly like a bereavement, because you were surrounded by very interesting people and then suddenly, there’s this silence.’ Her face brightens. ‘But then you emerge and you think: that is the most awful, ghastly f—king life! I’m so glad not to be a part of it any more.’
As we stroll around the gardens, past the chickens and the vegetable patch she and Hugo planted during Covid, I can quite see how this life might be preferable – if a little solitary. Then again, Edgeland is very much an ode to the joy of a solitary walk. ‘I love walking with Hugo too, but we don’t talk.’
In the new book, Swire writes about the ‘decidedly different and artificial rhythm’ of Westminster, and how part of the beauty of walking in nature is precisely the slower pace. How ‘change in the natural world is altogether different’, and ‘comes from the clocks within’.
Perhaps most telling is when she writes that as she walks along the edges of the country,
‘I am walking out all the bossiness, all the debating, all the rivalries and the ambition… and being presented with the knowledge of how unimportant these things really are in the order of things.’
She is, however, so clearly a political creature; still watching things unravel from afar, still visibly energised by talk of players past and present. ‘I’ll tell you what’s really interesting: that world is a court, and basically when the power goes,’ she says, ‘the court disassembles itself.
‘Only the core members whose legacy is dependent upon those ties remain. With the Cameron court there’s only three or four of them left who still stick together and go on TV saying, “What we did was marvellous.”’
When she saw Cameron and George Osborne at the Covid inquiry, Swire says she ‘was actually quite appalled, because they’re so determined to prove that what they were doing was right. But the truth of it is that they were master PR people…’ who were ‘always very embarrassed to be seen as public-schoolboys doing politics.’
On Boris she is less brutal: ‘I never thought Boris should be Prime Minister and we never supported him, but we’re very fond of him and we owe him – I mean, Boris put Hugo in the Lords. No, Boris’s problem, funnily enough, was his loyalty. That’s what got him into trouble with Owen Paterson and with Chris Pincher.’
She continues, ‘He kept doing the decent public-schoolboy thing of supporting them, even though they were going to bring him crashing down.’
We move briskly from Keir Starmer and his U-turns – ‘He does do a lot of them’ – to the Labour Party’s ‘loss of identity’ in general; from Rishi Sunak, who Swire believes is ‘a good leader’, to his wife, Akshata Murthy, whom Swire has attended dinners alongside. ‘She’s playing it traditionally,’ Swire points out, ‘which Carrie [Johnson] didn’t. I think Samantha played it very traditionally too and that’s the best way to do it. Because you cannot be the story.’
She has the self-awareness to laugh and add a ‘Prime Minister’s wife’ caveat.
‘Starmer’s not going to win this election,’ she adds later with a sigh, ‘but we’re going to lose it. And I’d really like to see Rishi stay on as head of the opposition, but the truth is, if you’ve been Prime Minister, why would you want to do that s—t job?’
Swire breaks off, suddenly dismayed, to check: ‘The piece isn’t going to be all about politics, is it?’ And it hits me that she is a mass of contradictions. She can write rollicking bestselling reads like Diary of an MP’s Wife alongside meandering, literary offerings like Edgeland.
She’s oddly shy and, in her words, ‘antisocial’, but then garrulous and great company. She’s scandalously indiscreet in the way the best lunch dates and diarists are, but then shocked by any blowback.
Before driving me to the station, Swire tells me about an MP who was in the middle of an anecdote the other day, when he broke off and said: ‘You’re not going to write that, are you?’ Which was surely to be expected? Perhaps she should have a T-shirt printed saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not writing another volume.’
‘Oh, but I am!’ she flings back. ‘I’m really desperate to give up, but it’s just so compulsive. And I’ve got reams and reams of stuff – more diaries.’ Alongside all the material the lawyers removed from the first volume, of course.
‘I tell you, the full unexpurgated version will be a very interesting historical document,’ she says ominously, prompting me to ask if she’s seriously thinking of finding a way to publish it.
Swire considers this. ‘If Hugo was run over by a bus tomorrow, I would hide here, and I’d publish the whole lot. Because I don’t move in his circles.’ But all things considered, ‘I think I’d like to give the full diaries to my children. Because for some of the stuff I’ve written to get published, the people involved would have to be dead. You can’t libel the dead, can you?’
Edgeland: A Slow Walk West, by Sasha Swire, is published by Little, Brown on Thursday at ￡22. Pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk