Michael Gove, his ambitious ex-wife and how the wealthy Camerons treated them like ‘staff'

Telegraph

03-06-2025

When it comes to political memoirs, what price truth? By her own admission, Sarah Vine, the erstwhile wife of the erstwhile Tory big hitter Michael Gove, had absolutely nothing to lose when she penned her explosive new page turner, How Not to Be a Political Wife. But throughout it, lucre looms large.
Money is famously the sinews of war. It also turns out to be the force that can drive a wedge into allegiances, friendships and politics on the home front too.
For while ideas-man Gove doubled down on policy reform in David Cameron 's government, his wife and mother of his two children found herself garrotted by the family's purse strings as the couple sought to keep up with the luxury lifestyle of Just Call Me Dave and his glamorous, successful, moneyed wife, Samantha.
Despite the fact that Gove never occupied any of Whitehall's four 'great offices of state' (No 10, No 11, the Foreign Office and the Home Office), he and Vine were warmly welcomed into the PM's inner circle.
They had intimate suppers, they holidayed together, they partied with A-listers and led a life of 'unimaginable privilege and excitement'. Vine became godmother to the Camerons' daughter Florence, and they revelled in lavish weekend invitations to Chequers and Dorneywood, the grace-and-favour country home enjoyed by favoured ministers.
'The fancier our weekends got, the grander our weeks – with me cooking for the cognoscenti crowded into our warm kitchen, or dinners out in the favoured bistros of Notting Hill, Michael often footing the bill because he loved the idea of either repaying the hospitality of our political friends or impressing our media friends,' Vine writes, in extracts serialised by the Daily Mail.
'Keeping up with 'the Cameroons' became so much part of our lives that I have to admit I stopped even wondering at the discrepancy between our incomes. What made me think we could afford the same lifestyle?'
The phrase 'it would take a heart of stone not to laugh' might well spring to mind. After all, these are the people who governed us and set our taxes. But it's hard not to empathise with Vine as the financial inequality causes fault lines to appear in their friendship.
Neither Vine nor Gove was born into wealth. She writes that she found it genuinely amusing when her husband was rising up the ranks at Westminster and donors and party grandees would come to visit them in their decidedly up-and-coming first home together.
'I always enjoyed seeing the slight look of horror on their faces as they'd alight from their Bentleys and Jaguars onto the pavement, in between the bookmakers and the No 7 bus stop.'
A delicious detail that only a spouse would notice. (In a much more sombre section of the book, she recalls how she and Gove used his MP expenses to furnish a house in west London before 'flipping' his Commons allowance to a property in his Surrey constituency, and how the exposure of this in The Telegraph in 2008 prompted him to consider 'throwing himself off the ferry from Colonsay to Oban [in Scotland]')
Vine, of course, is not the first political spouse to spill the proverbial English breakfast. Sasha Swire 's 2020 Diary of an MP's Wife was a gossipy glimpse of the jolly goings-on inside the gang as her Old Etonian husband, former Army officer Hugo, signally failed to climb the greasy pole of politics.
But by contrast, Vine's excoriatingly raw account has a personal anguish and deep, complex animus running through it like an exquisite thread of self-administered poison.
Even as she strives to keep up with the Camerons' superior spending power – superior everything, according to Vine, whose poignant schoolgirl pash on wife Sam is toe-curling in its unflinching honesty ('to be Samantha's friend was very special') – the older (fatter, less achingly cool and decidedly un-posh) woman becomes acutely aware that alongside the mismatch in income was a toxic status disequilibrium.
When she accepts a job with the Mail, her 'close' friends seem a bit sniffy, especially when it emerges that she won't, in fact, be cheerleading her husband's boss at every opportunity.
'If I helped out with stuff – organising our Ibiza holidays or taking up the slack on the school run, or performing other administrative duties – it was because I cared about them and we were mates. But now the worm of doubt began to creep in: was I a friend or just a fixer? Even worse, was I… staff?'
Down the years, Vine, who was born in Wales and raised in Italy, has been called many things; in Private Eye she was lazily labelled Sarah Vain for talking too much about herself. After claims that she was manipulating her husband behind the scenes when he stood for the leadership of the Tories, her perceived wickedness was elevated to that of Lady Macbeth.
On reading this memoir, she turns out to be much more Madame Govary: a woman of vaulting ambition but (relatively) humble funds, conspicuously living beyond her means, effortfully reshaping herself to fit into a world in which she will never truly belong. (She also tells a revealing story about Michael going on a holiday to Meribel in a Prada ski jacket, despite never having skied before.)
Vine tells another story that reminds me of Conservative blackguard Alan Clark's withering dismissal of Michael Heseltine for being the sort of 'arriviste' who looks like he bought his own furniture.
Once, at a media-heavy party held at the Camerons' Chipping Norton house, Vine was 'buzzing around' keeping an eye on the food and ensuring glasses were topped up. She describes how she strolled up to Jeremy Clarkson to say hello, but he simply glanced at the bottle of white wine in her hand and without even looking at her, waved his hand and said, 'Actually, can you get me a glass of red?'
She found it hilarious at the time but looking back, it confirmed a creeping suspicion that she wasn't regarded as a fully paid-up member of the Cotswolds set, more of a server. It left its own indelible mark.
'Her heart was just like that: contact with the rich had left it smeared with something that would never fade away.'
That was Flaubert rather than Vine but the observation stands.
Our Madame Govary may not have had the underwhelming affairs described by the French literary giant; quite the opposite. She bluntly admits that politics cost her 'my friends, my sanity and my marriage'. But money was the root of at least some evil.
When Cameron decided in 2014 to move Gove from education, where he was proving to be a lightning rod for anger, Gove initially agreed to become chief whip. He then rapidly changed his mind – whether it was because it amounted to a humiliating demotion or the fact that it came with an annual pay cut of £36,000 we don't know.
Vine, however, makes no attempt to conceal her feelings. She remains furious at this 'catastrophic' dent in her husband's earnings and refers to it more than once in the course of the book.
That wealthy, entitled Cameron – who purported to be a friend – seemed so offhand about the financial impact adds insult to injury. She recounts that when her husband told the PM he had changed his mind, Cameron 'flipped'.
'He shouted at Michael down the phone, then followed that up with a text: 'You must realise that I divide the world into team players and w-----s. You've always been a team player. Please don't become a w-----.''
The rot had set in by then. They were still invited to Chequers, but the atmosphere was less relaxed. A joint holiday was cancelled when the Camerons were invited to stay with celebrity hairdresser John Frieda, or as Vine puts it, 'hosted for free.'
The final nail was hammered into the coffin during the 2016 Brexit campaign, when Gove defected to the Vote Leave camp. Cameron confronted Vine in a lift and ordered her to 'get her husband under control'. Then an absolutely livid Samantha 'let rip' at a mutual friend's 50th birthday, accusing Vine of using her column 'in a mission to bring down Dave'.
'That exchange, I'd realise later, hadn't just been a row,' asserts Vine, in the extracts published in the Mail. 'It was the final shattering of a deep friendship that had been slowly buckling under the pressure of politics.'
Politics. But not just politics. When Madame Govary concludes that neither she nor her husband was ever quite good enough 'for the public school nabobs' who made up the true inner circle of David Cameron, she throws into sharp relief the difference between the ruling elite and the rest of us – for whom a £36,000 pay cut is more than a mere detail.