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17 hours ago
4
I thought long and hard for three seconds about writing this memoir. I’ve not done so to settle old scores but because I want to settle old scores. A chance to relive broken friendships, dirty deals and to unconsciously act out my passive-aggressive fantasies on my ex-husband. In taking myself down I will take down most of those around me. Put simply, I am the former Westminster Wag with no fucks left to give.
It is still dark when I open my eyes. It’s the early morning of Friday, 24 June 2016. My phone rings. It’s one of the special advisers. “We’ve won,” he says. “Gosh,” I reply. I had better wake Michael up. Michael had gone to bed early the previous night having drunk two-thirds of a jeroboam of claret.
I think of Michael’s team frantically debating what to do next, as they had forgotten to make a plan for what they might do if Vote Leave won the referendum. So easily done. I think of the day before when I went to vote wearing the wrong clothes. I think of my family who will be very cross with Michael. I think of Samantha Cameron and whether she will ever ring me again. Please do call, Sam. I’m always there. I hate upsetting people. Except when I am writing something unpleasant in my Daily Mail column. Then everyone is fair game.
You think you have married a journalist, then, horrors, he becomes a politician. Let me start by writing about my early life. How my parents were cruel to me. How I was unhappy. (Please don’t. Can you just get to the bits about the Govester? Cheers, Ed.) So, after several jobs in journalism, I found myself working as the arts editor for the Times and while I was there I was invited on a skiing holiday. Imagine my surprise when I was told that Michael Gove was also going to be staying in the same chalet. Michael was renowned for being the cleverest man at the Times because he could complete the medium sudoku at least six times out of 10.
I asked my old friend Brian MacArthur for tips on Michael. “He’s a lovely chap,” he said. “Though he is gay.” Reader, I married him. And let me tell you, Michael isn’t the slightest bit gay. Not that it would matter if he was.
Meeting Michael opened my eyes to a whole new social whirl. The Camerons, Sam’s spiteful sister Emily, the Osbornes, the Lockwoods, Rachel, who went on to have an affair with Sam’s stepfather, a huge scandal at the time – I don’t know why I put that in, it has no relevance to my story but any opportunity to reopen old wounds shouldn’t be missed – Nick Boles, and Eddie Vaizey. Darling Eddie. I love him to bits even if he did unsuccessfully try to shag half of the women in London before he settled down! And my dear friend Imogen Edwards-Jones. PS. You won’t forget the jacket quote, will you Imy?
Our wedding was a wonderful affair. Apart from my dad being beastly and Michael falling face down into his dinner and then passing out for 12 hours. He’s always been a romantic. Six months later, we moved into our first house in Barlby Road in North Kensington. Our friends were horrified that we hadn’t been able to afford to Notting Hill, but the fact is that Michael and I were flat broke and only had a spare half-million. Let me tell you, Dave never felt comfortable coming to our home because there were poor people walking on the pavements outside and said we were very brave for slumming it.
Not long afterwards, our first child, Beatrice, was born. Again, I came to realise that Michael and I weren’t truly part of the same social set, as many of our friends had their babies in private hospitals and Bea was born in an NHS hospital. That’s where I saw first-hand fathers who took no interest in their children. Michael could not have done more for me when I was in labour. He sat down in a chair for 12 hours and read the whole of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson. Just occasionally he would look up to check if I had had the baby yet and to ask me if I could get him a sandwich.
“We need to have a talk,” said Dave, having invited us round to dinner with George, Eddie and Nick. “Now, we all went to Oxford so it’s obvious that we’re entitled to rule the country. We’re all MPs so it’s time that you became one too, Michael. It’s all the most tremendous fun. Just like the old days in the union. You get to completely fuck up the country for years to come with absolutely no consequences. And when we’re all done with being MPs, we get to join the House of Lords. What’s not to love?”
It just so happened that a seat became available in Surrey Heath. “It will be perfect for Michael,” said Sam as we sipped martinis. “It’s an area full of common people just like you. People who can only afford half-million-pound houses. So you will fit right in.”
“You say the sweetest, kindest things,” I replied. “Is there anything else I can do for you? Collect the kids from school?”
“No, that’s fine. Just wash the dishes and close the door on your way out.”
Being an MP’s wife took its toll. I just wasn’t any good at going to speeches given by Carol Vorderman, who was then a Conservative. I’ve never seen such a highly cantilevered bosom. Sorry, that bit just came out. You can take the girl out of the Daily Mail but you can’t take the Daily Mail out of the girl. Anyway, I hate her.
While Michael was being very busy and ignoring me, I was struggling to adjust. It seemed completely unfair to expect us to buy a second home in Surrey and actually live in the constituency. Why would anyone choose to live in a shit-hole like that? We were doing Surrey a big enough favour as it was simply by offering to represent them in parliament. Plus, Michael had taken a massive pay cut to become an MP.
Then came the expenses scandal. I was at my lowest ebb, gripped by depression. A terrible, debilitating illness. Except when it’s Prince Harry who is suffering and I’m writing about him. Then he’s just a spoilt brat who needs to pull himself together. Anyway, back to me. No one had told us we couldn’t just buy whatever we wanted and put it on expenses. Besides which, everyone was at it. So when we were named and shamed by the Telegraph I just wanted to hide. Even now I don’t think we did anything wrong even though technically we did.
The early years of the coalition were like living in Camelot. Michael was doing his dream job as education secretary and most weekends we would spend time at Chequers. Mostly getting drunk and doing a tremendous amount of good things for the country. When Dave and Sam got caught leaving Nancy in the pub, I was furious on their behalf. It could have happened to anyone. Welcome to the toxic interface between politics and the media. Something to which I’ve never contributed in my life.
Sam and I became the best of friends. She would ring to ask if I could do the shopping for her and I would drop everything to help her out. She made everyone feel so at ease and was always so well dressed. She always knew the right thing to say. I felt inadequate in her presence but she never used that against me. Though she was very cross when I moved to the Daily Mail. I tried telling her that Paul Dacre was the most compassionate man I had ever met and that he only wanted me to write nice, kind pieces. Like the one I wrote about Ed Miliband’s kitchen! My, how we laughed.
But slowly it all started to unravel. First, Dave sacked Michael as education secretary. It was OK for Dave, he was loaded. But for Michael, returning to the backbenches meant we would be struggling to get by on a combined income of more than £200,000. No one could possibly survive on that. Plus, we were still living in our shitty little house, which was now only worth about £1m. We were on the breadline.
Michael always said that it was his closeness to Dominic Cummings, one of the most trustworthy men in Westminster, that was the nail in the coffin for us. Teachers used to shout at us in the street. What did they have to moan about? Some of them were earning as much as £35,000. I also have a theory that the media tried to get the public to hate us. They did it with Fergie and they did it with Meghan. Just saying. As for me, I’ve never had a bad word to say about anyone.
Then we came to the Brexit vote. People have criticised Michael for breaking his word to Dave over his decision to back Vote Leave. But people forget that Michael is one of the most inherently trustworthy people I have ever met. It’s just that he has a habit of changing his mind and letting people down. And I, genuinely, had no idea of what he was thinking from one day to the next. Michael is the least sexist person I have ever met. He just didn’t want to trouble my pretty little mind with what he was worrying about.
These days, Michael will tell you that he was always minded to leave the EU. That he had decided it was in the best interests of the country to take a 4% hit to GDP. It would make people proud to be British if they were worse off. Sam, Dave and many others in our set were furious with Michael. And with me. They said they would never speak to us and our kids again. That they had made Michael and I and we would be nothing without them. We had betrayed them and were not grateful enough. I sobbed and left the room. Who would do Sam’s ironing now?
Boris seemed an ideal choice to lead the Vote Leave campaign with Michael. “We needed someone steady to keep us on the straight and narrow,” said Michael. “Someone with no career ambitions. Someone who would say anything that people wanted to hear. Someone who, like me, had a clear plan. A plan to have no plan.”
The fallout from the referendum was horrendous. People unreasonably expected Michael and Boris to know what would happen next. But how could they, when they were both completely hungover? Then Dave threw a tantrum by resigning and the whole world hated us. He could have at least waited a few more hours until Michael had stopped throwing up. Even the Mail on Sunday turned against me by doing a piece about how upset my brother was. If anyone was going to turn over my family, it should have been me.
Thereafter, it felt as if we were a laughing stock. Of course, Michael was right to turn on Boris in the leadership campaign. How could he have known someone like Boris would be so unsuitable? It wasn’t as if he had been at his side throughout the referendum campaign. And people mocked when Michael forgot to mention that Rupert Murdoch was in the room when he interviewed Donald Trump. That was a mistake anyone could have made.
We eventually moved from our house in the north pole to another shitty area where houses were just over £1m. We could hardly swing a cat in it. I could hear the Camerons and the Osbornes sniggering at our demise. Michael just sat and did nothing throughout the move. Refusing even to open his boxes of books while I did everything. As usual. He’s at his most helpful when he’s doing nothing. A while later he stopped talking completely, just leaving notes around the house. One of which was: “Shall we get divorced?” So we did. What did you expect? Personal insight?
Digested read digested: The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Untreatable.
