She was Michael Gove’s wife and Samantha Cameron’s best friend. But then Brexit happened
Politics is awful.
If you want the digested read of Sarah Vine’s memoir on life as a Westminster WAG, that’s it: politics, she writes, is a hateful business that ruined her marriage to Michael Gove, her health and happiness. (Don’t ask what the Cameron years did to anyone else: this book is absolutely not about anyone else.) But like many a passionate hatred, this one started out as love.
In the book, Vine describes the “pinch me” moment early in the first Cameron government when she realised she’d made it; that the girl who never felt she fitted in, either growing up in Italy or at her English boarding school, is finally hanging with the cool kids. “Me, Sarah, the awkward inglesina, friends with the prime minister, being waited on hand and foot by staff at Chequers.”
If that makes you want to throw something, you probably won’t enjoy this tale of yearning for political paradise lost, AKA all the boozy nights “swimming in White Ladies” (David Cameron’s favourite cocktail) and hedonistic girls’ trips to Ibiza with her new best friend Sam Cameron which ended when Brexit blew their gilded circle apart. But if you’re less interested in politics than in how a grown woman could end up building so much of her self-esteem on a glittering friendship – well, buckle up for quite a ride.
