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Kindle Notes & Highlights
I married my husband, Hugo Swire, in 1996. He was then a director of Sotheby’s. He fought Greenock and Inverclyde in the 1997 election and became MP for East Devon in 2001; I gave up my journalism career, through choice, to support him.
Of course, the novelty will keep the show on the road for a few weeks; the gullible of the centre left will call it the new politics, as if coming from different ideological positions is so ‘yesterday’, but ideas and values are what this game is all about.
To be honest, even though I am not actually a republican, which I said to wind H up, I’m no ardent monarchist, although I would not want the alternative, which would be a Boris Johnson or, God forbid, a Ken Livingstone type. Or Simon Cowell?
They are also acutely aware that to be cool is to be independent – look no further than the election of Graham Brady as chairman of the 1922 Committee. David’s whips have got their work cut out.
We have a discussion at dinner about hereditary peerages and their technicalities, and in particular primogeniture and whether his wife should have legally challenged the Kitchener title, which was due to die out. ‘We decided not to, because I would have become a laughing stock in the industry,’ he tells me. He’s probably right, mainly because of the way he presents himself.
George, in typical shit-stirring form, causes me a little grief.
and I agree it might not work out for him anyway; she thinks he may be too intrinsically linked to David, that they are more likely to go down together in the end. Maybe he could become Foreign Sec, she says. I point out he would be absolutely useless at that because he can’t handle people at all and is actually quite shy.
Having quiet dinner with K in a nice Notting Hill Italian eatery when the equivalent of a human tornado comes over to harangue her about the proposed disposal of the Public Forest Estate. It is one Rachel Johnson, she of the self-publicising clan that is the Johnsons.
We started with Osborne’s Law One, which is basically work out, ahead of anyone else, who will be the next leader, stick to them like glue and become indispensable.
Law Two involved studying your opponent’s policies but also getting inside their minds by studying their deepest moral processes.
Law Three, according to Hague, is if you have to take a risk, make it worthwhile. George is more tactical than strategic but when he makes a big move it tends to really matter. Law Four: don’t forget the first law, just because there are two others!
the end, Michael got to wind up the emergency debate in the Commons. Parliamentary orations are his speciality and this one is full of his particular brand of high moral virtue. Good lines about how ‘a culture of greed and instant gratification, rootless hedonism and amoral violence’ had taken hold.
Discuss Miliband’s conference speech and we are of the same mind that it was a suicide note.
‘Too much on,’ he replies. ‘Got to exact my revenge on BAE Systems.’ (The defence giant has just confirmed that it is cutting almost three thousand jobs, mainly in its military aircraft division, which is based in Davis’s constituency.)
The only clever thing Labour are on to is identifying working-class women as the new key electoral background. Their new strategy emerged after a leaked memo revealed deep concerns among Dave’s team that the government was losing support amongst women.
This is a very particular, narrow tribe of Britain and their hangers-on. It’s enough to repulse the ordinary man, already angered by the continuing hold of the British class system.
As in politics, the governing class is simply holding up a mirror to a nation where friendships have replaced all other mediums: church, family, schools, the idea of social networks is as strong as it has ever been and in many ways Dave’s court reflects this.
Enda, having been reminded who H is, greets him with a friendly punch on the chest, which had he been wearing a pacemaker would almost certainly have broken it. All he really wanted to know, according to H, was how Owen had got on at the Cheltenham Festival. When H said that he didn’t think Owen had picked many winners Enda looked satisfied and moved on to his audience, no doubt punching as he went.
But Dave is really pissed off with Gove at the moment because of the way his shifty spad Dominic Cummings appears to be briefing against him.
At the end of the conversation I’m left wondering as to why he is a Liberal Democrat at all, but then politics is tribal and his grandfather Archie Sinclair was the leader of the Liberal Party.
He also advocates requiring churches to conduct same-sex marriages; when I argue that this is a matter for the churches not the state, he huffs and puffs, clearly annoyed this is, in the end, the collective view.
H is trying to cope with an extremely pedantic and doctrinaire member of his team. A person probably of the belief that an Oxford education and the FCO on their CV is a suitably stiff anti-toxin to see off all manner of unpleasantness, including the commands of an upstart junior minister.
H rings up Arminka. It must be the Lib Dems if it’s Oakeshott – all her fodder comes from their side. Arminka confirms.
Later that evening a Green Chip dinner, the Commons dining club set up by Cameroons for Cameroons. Lots of laughs.
Still they taunted and teased, like unengaged classroom pupils up against a weak and incompetent teacher. A clearly ironic few words about his performance later came from Simon Hoggart of the Guardian: ‘I want to praise Mr Swire to the skies for his dazzling exposition of a topic he clearly knew almost nothing about.’
have heard numerous stories along these lines about Charles, and the trivial preparations that need to be made in advance of any visit. It’s quite extraordinary that he behaves like that in this day and age.
was then introduced to the director of sport, the former England football player Carlton Palmer. They were well matched as H had never heard of him and he certainly had never heard of H.
West Hill maintains they are one of the most active CPFs, and this year is no different. They hate, in equal measure: foreigners, Europe, defence cuts, gay marriage, Liberals, the BBC, Germans, the Japanese, the coalition and garlic.
Hugo screws up the letter, tosses it into the corner of his car and heads home for a large whisky. He is pretty certain that he has to give up politics. He has fallen out of love with these people, and they in turn have fallen out of love with him and his party. When a man has to go . . .
Like many over-excitable journalists, he mistakes headlines for achievements. Dave is now banging their heads together by ordering Michael to apologise and Theresa to sack her closest adviser, Fiona Cunningham.
When Hugo’s turn comes, he turns his badge around. In large letters it says ESCORT REQUIRED. ‘I don’t want this to be misconstrued, particularly in this meeting.’ Theresa bursts out into spontaneous laughter. There is a stunned silence. No one has ever seen the woman smile before, let alone laugh. It feels historic.
William will have neither noticed nor cared, although if it was brought to his attention he would simply shy away from personal confrontation – his default position. William is only ever interested in himself; his flunkies, I mean ministers, are mere gnat bites on his ankles, or so he makes them feel.
have met Cummings a few times; he looks like one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs, but what always struck me was his over-inflated view of his own importance. Teaming him up with the single most volatile member of the government was always an explosion waiting to happen.
Anyway, the auction goes splendidly. H, on the podium, tells the audience, ‘I have something here that none of you can buy!’ This immediately silences the assorted deep-pocketed lobbyists, hedge-fund grandees and Russian oligarchs, because for many in the room there is nothing, absolutely nothing, they can’t buy.
H spots Ed Miliband and wife sitting on their own in a corner, looking glum and disconnected, so goes over and introduces him to a couple of presidents. ‘It transpires that he has no small talk and simply cannot connect on a human social level. Quite extraordinary.’
Anyway, he needs to calm down, which I imagine he will; as I imagine the nation will. The only one who won’t is Ed Miliband, who listened to the PM’s victory-speech pivot to ‘English Votes for English Laws’ with utter dismay.
If I was tempted to vote Labour, it would be for one reason, and one reason alone. It would be because of social division, the terrible gap between rich and poor.
Hilary Benn’s speech really was the clincher. It persuaded many Labour MPs to back airstrikes.
The plan was to leave Eurosceptic old guard nutters led by Iain Duncan Smith, of fifty or so backbenchers and some disaffected spads to lead the out campaign. Now Graham Brady is predicting half the parliamentary party will be joining the leave campaign.
H says that what irks him is that when it’s all over, and assuming Dave wins, he will be told he has to re-form the cabinet to heal the party, bringing in the likes of Brady and Fox, who have done nothing but stab him in the back.
Kwasi is essentially an academic; he is enthusiastic and bombastic, and barely draws breath. H can be just as bad.
We are pumping mad. Almost everyone has been placed on Minister of State level, and still no word from Old Ma May, not even to sack Hugo.
Dom Raab has resigned (he thought he should go up, not sideways) and Anna Soubry’s gone. (She was apparently offered a post under the legally ignorant Liz Truss and told Old Ma May that, as a barrister for fifteen years, she found her offer frankly insulting.
Gove has been spotted looking ill-shaven and rotund on the streets of London. Strangers have been warned (by Private Eye) not to approach him, as he may be dangerous, that he may be your friend and then try and betray you.
I ask Nicholas who he will back in a leadership election, and he says Rory Stewart.
We talk much of the Conservative–DUP deal. H asks about the future of the UUP. Will they fold into the DUP now? Peter thinks probably not, but says they are finished.
H opens up the discussion, saying he bumped into Chris Leslie in the Burlington Arcade laden down with shopping bags. Clearly embarrassed to see H while embracing such luxurious materialism, they soon got talking about the parlous state of the Labour Party. Leslie said it was ghastly and that everything was now coming to a head, not least on account of the party’s notorious anti-Semitism.
DC and George both think the irritating Anna Soubry is a heroine, a sort of anti-Brexit Boadicea, and she’s gaining in popularity day by day. Funny this, because when they were in power they were slow to give her a job because they considered her completely barking.
G is delighted that someone had written that JRM was ‘a barmaid’s idea of a gentleman’. It’s a staggeringly good and accurate description.
Arlene Foster comes to stay at Chaffcombe with her husband Brian, a PSNI officer. We discuss whether we should show them our pub, them being DUP and anti ‘the devil’s buttermilk’, etc. As it turns out, they more than match us glass for glass,
