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Her Diary of an MP’s Wife reveals the self-centred facetiousness that led to today’s divided Britain
To Devon, to interview diarist of the moment Sasha Swire. A surreal day. The concourse at Paddington is as quiet as Christmas and, on the train west, I’m alone in my carriage – an unnerving peace that comes to a dramatic end once I’m in the presence of Swire, who’s in a (possibly stage-managed) flap: burnt sourdough, an escapee chicken, a husband who quite ruins the mise en scène with his outsize bag of Twiglets. Unlike most of my interviewees, Swire is determined I tour her property, which comes with the kind of guest accommodation you simply never see on Airbnb, and an ancient cider press that she hopes, one day, to have working again. Will she and the Twiglet-eater dress up like characters out of Hardy, and perform rural re-enactments for passing tourists? She doesn’t care to answer this particular question.
It’s possible – likely, even – that you may think the hullabaloo over Swire’s diaries is a fuss about nothing: who cares what the wife of some obscure former Tory MP has to say about David Cameron’s pheromones now? But if so, I think you’re wrong. A person can wade through any number of fat books about those years – I, too, have read Tim Shipman’s All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit – and still be utterly bewildered as to how we got from Cameron’s “big society” to a Britain now so distressingly dysfunctional and divided. Swire’s toxic indiscretions take us some of the way to enlightenment. Continue reading...