4 days ago
Sarah Vine's memoir is fascinating, embarrassing and fundamentally tragic
The 'misery memoir ' was a genre one thought peculiar to the early years of this century. However, with this strange book, Sarah Vine, formerly Mrs Michael Gove, has resurrected it. Its title, How Not to Be a Political Wife, seems flippant, and one expects, when beginning it, to experience some sort of extended stunt. What one gets is in turns interesting, embarrassing and, fundamentally, mildly tragic.
Ms Vine's contention is that she married a journalist and ended up with a politician; that politics is horrible; and it ruined her marriage and, to a great extent, her life and her children's. How far this is true must be up to each reader to judge. Because of the detail into which the author chooses to go, it seems to this reader that certain factors had shaped her life and her character long before her husband arrived.
But first, the interesting stuff. I must come clean: I have long been a friend of Michael Gove, admire his considerable political and intellectual talents, and feel he has had a deeply unfair press. The service this book does to history is to put the record about him straight. First, he was vilified by David Cameron and his cronies for supporting Brexit in the 2016 referendum. It was, as Ms Vine emphasises correctly, a battle between a man with principles and a group of careerists who hardly knew the meaning of the word.
Second, he was reviled by much of the Conservative party for his so-called 'betrayal' of Boris Johnson just after the referendum, when Johnson, running for the leadership, was showing precious little loyalty to him. All Gove had done was realise, before it was too late, that Johnson was the incompetent liar, charlatan and trickster his grotesque premiership proved him to be. I and others who knew what went on have defended Gove for years for this reason; it is good that this book puts it all on the record. I hope Theresa May, whose apparently saintly personal reputation also gets the kicking it deserves for her outrageous treatment of Gove in sacking him for 'disloyalty', reads this part of the book at least: maybe she will find a belated sense of shame, though one doubts it.
The book also, though, shows just what a cesspit our politics became in the 14 years of Conservative rule from 2010 to 2024. What fills cesspits filled a succession of administrations. Cameron, the first of a succession of unremittingly dire prime ministers, was the ultimate cronyist. He adopted this method of management because his political life was, as Ms Vine definitively shows, all about him and his survival in office; never about what he could do for the country.
As some of us wrote at the time, Cameron's addiction to his yes-men and women prevented him from calling on some of the older, and wiser, members of his party who might have given him advice superior to that of his cronies. This, too, is made plain in this book. Cameron's narcissism also made it impossible for him to see a link between his disloyalty to Gove – whom he demoted from Education Secretary despite his being the most successful holder of that office in recent memory – and Gove's decision that his principles about the EU might override any personal loyalty from him that Cameron merited.
The embarrassing aspect of this book is the detail into which Ms Vine goes about her background: her being loathed at school, her mental and physical health and the effect her ex-husband's career had on her and their children. Describing her upbringing she portrays her father as a monster. In her acknowledgements at the end of the work she begins with 'my father, for f------ me up so brilliantly'.
If we haven't realised it by this stage, what we have just read turns out to be a book by the thinking man's Meghan Markle. It has taken 'courage' (as she says in another acknowledgement: and I am sure it did) to lay all this personal upset bare, and doubtless she has found it therapeutic. Will her own children thank her, in years to come, for going into such detail about what they unquestionably suffered because of their father's prominence, and all the unhappiness it brought them? Doubtless Ms Vine thought she was being cathartic on her own account, and vicariously on theirs. Only time will tell.
And then there's the mildly tragic aspect. Ms Vine exposes a chip on her shoulder the size of Yorkshire. Wounded deeply by her dear friend Samantha Cameron – about whom, to her credit, she says no bad word – turning on her viciously at a dinner party around the time of Brexit, she harps on about the class differences between her and the Camerons and their pretty repulsive cast of chums. She should pull herself together: 'Dave's' father was a stockbroker, not the Duke of Devonshire. It's indicative of the lack of a sense of perspective in this book, and which one fears is typical of the Markle school of thought.
Most tragic of all is Ms Vine's reference to a 'friendship group' that abandoned them when her husband stood up for himself and his beliefs. I am not sure I have ever met anyone over the age of 14 who has a 'friendship group': but it's just another way of saying that the Goves were sucked in to the bunch of cronies around Cameron, though never so deeply that they could not be expelled again, in what reads like an act of social projectile vomiting. The whole thing is repellently infantile, and it's depressing that impostors such as the Cameron clique were ever allowed near power.
I suspect no man reading this book (and I must plead guilty on that front) will perceive all its nuances, because it is (again from its title) presumably aimed mostly at women. One certainly rarely senses that Ms Vine is writing with the idea that a man – other, perhaps, than her ex-husband, about whom also she says no bad word – is among her readership. Perhaps other wives who have suffered because of their husband's careers will obtain something valuable from it. It is not a particularly literary book (if you want that in this context, read Sasha Swire 's diaries about the same period) but it will prove undeniably useful to those unfortunate historians who have to write about this ghastly period in decades to come. Otherwise, Ms Vine might have been far better advised not to write it at all.
