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

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Despite the bitchy, rather sniping tone which gives the book its flavour (and frankly, is the main reason most people will read it) she is a pretty astute judge of character and nails (or skewers) a lot of people with disarming accuracy. Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell's diaries for the Spectator , I concluded as follows: "Who will be the chroniclers of the Cameron government?

But in Swire’s vignettes of Cameron’s chillaxed post-Downing Street life – telling his daughter he has a meeting, only to sit watching back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones – and her perceptions of a very different, less privileged generation rising through the party lies another small piece of the jigsaw. Its weaknesses were, as many have said, a lack of footnotes about who people referred to were, particularly in the early part of the journal.

From Samantha Cameron’s appalled reaction to the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, to what can only be described as too much information about David Cameron’s colonoscopy, she spills the guts of four governments in a book most of Westminster will doubtless be reading this autumn. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice.

She was a feisty hater (the Slav thing, through her mother) and I was amused at her annoyance at her father not being in the House of Lords. She (Sarah Vine, Mrs Gove) being a highly successful and well paid journalist, the profession Sasha was in before giving it up to be an MP’s wife. Die Autorin macht keinen besonders sympathischen Eindruck, privilegiert und prätentiös aber egozentrisch und ein bißchen nutzlos. Everything seems to be about competitively grasping for status symbols – a grander office, a more prestigious official car, a knighthood, getting one’s husband into the Cabinet.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. Westminster diaries are judged on three levels: the details they leak, the political era they re-create and the central character of the author.

But if the first half of the book is a giddy romp through life under the “chumocracy”, the second is more bittersweet, chronicling the fracturing of old friendships post-Brexit in what has become a court exiled from power. The author clearly was part of David Cameron’s inner circle and completely in the confidence of her husband throughout his years as an MP and junior minister. 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”. 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.

I was pleased to have all my prejudices about Sir John Nott confirmed (a cursed name in many Naval households).

The small clique of people at the top are also exposed with waspish irreverence by Sasha Swire in Diary of an MP's Wife.After all, this is the same Dave who on another now-infamous occasion blamed pheromones for wanting to drag her into nearby bushes to “give her one”. I bought this book cheap, intending to skim read interesting bits, but ended up reading it cover-to-cover. Diary of an MP's Wife is an irresistible, informal history and a rare tell-all about what it's really like to live behind the headlines of British political life. Despite all the trumpeting in the press about how no one (especially their friends the Camerons) would ever speak to her again, her overall assessment of David Cameron was complimentary. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers.