Here it is, hot off the press – a peek straight into the heart of Cameroonian Britain, through the eyes of a true insider. Sarah Vine was married to Michael Gove throughout the whole débacle, and now she reveals how politics, in her view, destroyed her health, her children’s sense of safety and her marriage.
Vine, who began on the Mirror and the Times then became a top journalist on the Mail, is very good writer and an excellent companion. She has a great way with words and the book is laugh-out-loud funny on more than one occasion. Entertaining, larger than life and shrewd, she comes across in some ways a force of nature, making the most of things – and sometimes people – with her very strong sense of can-do. And yet along with that came a sometimes crippling sense of unworthiness and self-doubt possibly linked to her slightly disjointed upbringing (much of it in Italy) and her rather odd and self-centred parents, who kindly once told her she would have been aborted had it been convenient. Her dashing father also appeared to consider her fat and ugly. Vine’s own backstory is in fact one of the main draws of the book – as it should be, because it’s her book.
There are some great vignettes: Boris Johnson falling on and crushing her young son via a tackle during a football match at Chequers (with Sarah fiercely yelling ‘Get off him!’ from an open window); Gove falling face first into a mushroom fricasée, then instantly rising up saying ‘I’m absolutely fine’ before collapsing again; Cameron sitting quietly with her on the sofa chatting politics (then later snarling ‘You need to get your husband under control’ near the lifts at a conference); Vine approaching Jeremy Clarkson – whom she had met, but didn’t know well – at a Chipping Norton set party given by the Camerons at their Witney home. Clutching her bottle of white wine, she approached Clarkson to say hello, only for him to hold out his glass then ask, ‘Actually, can you get me a glass of red?’. And, as she says, like the good waitress she was, she did.
This sense of being lesser, or being seen as such, persisted with Vine’s best friend, Sam Cam, for whom Vine arranged holidays, cooked and generally dogsbodied – because, as she says, that’s what you do for friends (especially when they have a disabled child), and she liked cooking and arranging and bobbing round making sure everyone was having a good time. But increasingly, Vine began to wonder if she was considered a friend … or maybe something closer to a servant. This impression was not helped by overhearing George Osborne exclaim, ‘We made Michael Gove! Who was he before? We created his entire career! How can he not support us now?’ re the EU Referendum (a referendum Gove strongly advised Cameron not to have). Gove, whose adopted father’s fish shop business had been destroyed by the Common Fisheries Policy (along with the jobs of many fishing members of his family), simply could not countenance campaigning to stay in what he saw as such a rapacious organisation. The Camerons and Osbornes saw that as a personal betrayal. Sarah’s father, an eccentric thorough-going Europhile still living in Italy and worried about the impact on his livelihood via financial markets, felt the same, as did her brother who had married a Spaniard and gone to live in Spain. Vine was caught in the middle of the cross-fire in personal as well as political terms.
The sense of devastation which pervades the book is palpable, although Vine admits she has two lovely children, who seem to have eventually risen above the peer group bullying and death threats, etc, and she is still very good friends with her ex-husband. Talented, intelligent and witty as she is, one gets the feeling he was lucky to have her. Furthermore, which I never thought possible, she has actually made me feel slightly warmer towards him. Clearly she still admires this geeky, intellectual, bookwormish ‘genius’ (her – and others’ – description of him, not mine) – and he is on record as saying he still loves her, defending her vociferously against the Lady Macbeth image certain parts of the political machine and msm tried to tag her with. Indeed, their son has said one of the things he admires most about them is how well his parents get on since their divorce.
She is at great pains to point out, in a detached, slightly amused way, that the rumours of Gove being gay are not true. Yes – he did like to take hour-long baths in Clarins blue bath essence, reading Paradise Lost. He did like the finer products of Jermyn Street and favour Penhaligon’s upmarket English Fern cologne. Yes, he did like to wear a Hackett’s lavender dressing-gown with matching pyjamas round the house. Well yes, he did share flats with handsome gay men, and – as it later emerged – take cocaine with them. He did manage to marry the daughter of a wealthy man and then want nothing to do with the paterfamilias, he did leave the house as early as possible and return very late, he did feel so peculiar on their honeymoon he had to retire early unwell, and yes he did sit on a bean bag reading when their first child was being born, speaking up only to ask for a more comfortable chair. But he’s definitely not gay. OK, Sarah, if you say so.
She can, of course, be as deluded as the rest of them. When the Goves were caught up in the MPs’ expenses scandal, she says ‘Michael paid half of it back’. Half?! Oh, well, that’s ok, then. She follows this up with a complaint that there were objections to their claiming £35 for a baby’s cot, saying ‘What did they expect him to do? Sleep in a drawer?’ Well, I imagine – call this a wild shot in the dark – that they (ie the taxpayers) might have expected you to pay for it.
Fabulous houses, shenanigans at the highest level and characters with names like Sasha Swire and Imogen Edwards-Jones: yes, this all reads a bit as if it were a cross between William Hickey and Jilly Cooper. If Cameron thought the previous years led up to a betrayal, he won’t like this exposé one bit: Vine places the predicament we have found ourselves in during the last twenty years firmly at Cameron’s door. Quitting straight after the referendum was unforgivable, in her opinion: he should have stayed and steered the ship according to the expressed wishes of the public. And, she adds, it would probably have been better if bookish Gove had stayed in his previous profession of journalism, where she thinks his talents really lie. Vine’s own lack of basic self-confidence, however, and her bouts of illness and depression, allied to her view of herself as a square peg (as mirrored in the title), are engaging, as is her bravado in trying to combat them. She is a great anecdotalist, moving smoothly from comedy to tragedy and treating those two imposters just the same. She’d be a great girl to have a glass of wine – or two – with (the irony being that she would no doubt look down on a pleb like me in just the same way she came to feel the Tory grandees looked down on her). She says she thought long and hard about writing this book, and I for one am glad she did. Her fatal flaw seemed to be, as she herself says of her schooldays, wanting just a bit too hard to hang out with the cool kids.
© foxoles 2025
