Sasha Swire's revelations about David Cameron and Tories make politics sound like a game of Twister – Aidan Smith

The Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire is a rollicking tale of ‘orf-colour’ jokes, flirting, Raab C Brexit, ‘disgusting RAF catering cheese toasties’ and politics reduced to a bucket-list achievement, writes Aidan Smith.

David Cameron's remark to Sasha Swire has returned to haunt him in her new book, The Diary of an MP’s Wife (Picture: PA)

Smirking at the juiciest revelations in the publishing sensation of the year, I’ve been transported back to 2012 and Rachel Johnson’s garden when the wee sister of the future Prime Minister sidled up the bench, rubbed my arm and, with mild panic in her voice, said: “Will you help me?”

This was in Notting Hill, the setting for Notting Hell and other Johnson bestsellers peopled by thinly disguised caricatures of real-life media power-couples, minimalist architects, supermodels, the super-rich and, yes, Tories on the rise, with David Cameron, George Osborne and Michael Gove among her tribe.

Why would she need my assistance? Well, the Cameroons and their sort were what she knew best, her writerly orbit. “Normally I just do the zeitgeist,” she said, but the novel just written was her first attempt at historical and she claimed it had been discombobulating. I didn’t buy her pleading, though. It was flirting, maximum-grade. Was I flattered? Yes, but I stopped well short of looking around for shrubbery - and this being a garden, there was some - to bundle her into.

I remember thinking that the book Johnson really needed to publish was a diary of these political times, though she’s just been beaten to it by another flirty blonde, Sasha Swire. Johnson, if she ever does spill the (edamame) beans on a thousand Waitrose-supplied fork suppers, will have tales to tell for sure. But Swire has set the bar high with this from Cameron:

“The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one.”

Poor Dave, he rises all the way to PM, deals with Very Big Important Stuff, and in the week that he hopes to be promoting the paperback edition of memoirs looking back on his time in No 10, he is answering questions about the perfume, the coastal path and the desire, even though one is a good chum and fellow Old Etonian’s wife, to hansel one with, er, one. Is this how we’re going to remember Cameron? I think it might be.

And poor Boris who achieved his life’s ambition only to see the position which in short trousers he called “world king” virtually crumble into dust and must now be thinking: “Cripes, is this what’s coming to me? At every drinks party and weekend in the country is there a fanciable but fiendish filly who’s being a girly swot about writing it all down down - my orf-colour jokes and bounderish nonsense dressed up with quotes from the Classics?”

Actually no, not poor them - poor us for having this bunch as our leaders.

I get that government can be a stressful job (though not as stressful as not actually having a job), that it’s more high-profile now, that there’s less respect for politicians than before (though they’ve brought this on themselves) and that even left-backs in mid-table Championship football teams will be better-paid.

I also get that to alleviate the stress those in power might want to laugh and drink and pat each other on the bum and drink some more and tell jokes, especially knob jokes and compare Gove’s knob to a Slinky.

Right now, considering the state we’re in, the disclosures in Swire’s The Diary of an MP’s Wife don’t read particularly well - but, really, whenever would they? Even if you think it’s too much to expect every single politico to have followed a calling and be born to serve, the flippancy and frivolousness of the Cameroons is still shocking.

Cameron himself comes across as someone who viewed PM as a bucket-list entry, but only in the sense that in his entitled life he had nothing better to do. Something in finance, perhaps? A chairmanship somewhere? I know, I’ll be Prime Minister! This entitlement is hilariously illustrated by Swire’s irateness at her husband Hugo, the former Conservative MP for East Devon, being overlooked for Foreign Secretary, especially since he “knows all the countries”.

That is not to say, as we wonder what fresh hell awaits the country in the coming days and weeks, that this book cannot be enjoyed. If, like me, you chortled a few years back at Cameron being reprimanded by Nick Clegg’s Spanish wife for dolloping Hellmann’s mayonnaise on absolutely everything, then there’s the yarn about him at Chequers serving the Swires “disgusting RAF catering cheese toasties”.

The gimlet-eyed Gideon - the name with which Osborne was christened - tops a previous-best for cunning with the tale of how, as soon as the coalition was formed, he raced down to Dorneywood to plant his toothbrush at the grace-and-favour pile usually reserved for the deputy PM. And I like the nickname given to Dominic Raab, who went clothes-shopping as soon as he announced he was standing in the Tory leadership election - Raab C. Brexit.

Reading Swire’s account, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Cameron treated his project, if it could be so called, as a game - maybe a giant game of Twister. There are consolations to be had here - the entitled elite of politics may be poshos with inherited wealth who will never have to worry about anything, but an expensive education and a clipped accent does not make them any more sophisticated and any less stupid than you or me (you especially).

Relish these stories for they may be the last laughs we get in a while. Unless Rachel Johnson is readying some of her own. When we met I wondered if friends and acquaintances were wary of turning up in her pages. No, she said, people felt compelled to blurt. “They all love to be written about. As Mae West said, better to be looked over than overlooked.”

I’m sure she could pen a wonderful diary, without my help.

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