Sarah Vine married a fellow journalist, Michael Gove. Then he became a politician and she was plunged into a role which she had certainly not signed up for. She did her utmost to be a loyal political wife but tells us in her witty, self-deprecating way that she had no talent for it. The couple are now divorced. Her candour is heart warming
It goes almost without saying that the book is a beautifully written memoir. Vine is, after all, a lifelong journalist and a Daily Mail star columnist. She knows how to hold her reader. She says herself that writing is the only thing she’s ever been any good at although she also comes across as a wonderful mother, friend and time juggler.
Brought up in Italy by rackety British parents and a father who put her down ruthlessly and constantly, Vine met Gove when she was in her early thirties and they were both working at The Times. Having been adopted in babyhood by an Aberdeen fisherman and his wife, Gove does not have an “entitled” background any more than she does. She is ever conscious of this even as they become close friends with “Dave” and “Sam” Cameron who come from a very different social sphere. Gove gets a safe seat and the Conservatives are elected.
The fly in the ointment – as the brilliantly clever Gove becomes ever more tied up in his Education secretary role and then becomes Justice Secretary – is the referendum and Brexit. Gove has always been anti-European and, aligns himself prominently with the Leavers. Vine is very interesting about how, for a long time, this was almost a casual, intellectual, amicable, hypothetical difference of opinion. At dinner parties there were often people of all persuasions amiably chatting together without acrimony. Then in June 2016, to everyone’s astonishment Leave beat Remain by a substantial majority. Suddenly everything was toxic.
Vine believes that Cameron scuppered the future of Brexit by resigning although she doesn’t say much about how how deliberate she thinks this was this. What would have happened, she speculates, if he had calmly summoned Gove and Johnson and said: “You won. Didn’t see that coming. Now what’s the plan?” That, she implies, would have been the grown up, rational thing to do. Instead we got Theresa May, failing dismally to “get Brexit done” with all the fall-out that caused and is still causing.
However, this is not a political memoir. It’s a rueful, sometimes sad, very personal account of one women who was stuck in the middle of it all despite not really wanting to be there. She is still grieving for the loss of what she thought was a lifelong friendship with Samantha Cameron. She is godmother to Florence Cameron from whom she is now estranged. She was sure that the bond between the two families, whose children grew up together, was stronger than disagreements about trade deals. Alas, as she comments sadly, there is no such thing as friendship in politics.
Throughout this account, Vine discusses their memories with her children, Bea and Will who are now young adults. She also talks to Gove. I know several divorced couples who’ve established a post-divorce rapport and say that they have better conversations now than they ever did when they were married – which is what Vine says too. She also says ruefully, more than once, that Brexit destroyed her marriage – and a number of other marriages. And of course, since she grew up in Italy and has a brother in Spain, her own personal views about the EU are – she now admits – much less cut and dried than her ex-husbands were/are,
Probably the most horrifying thing is this book are revelations about the difficulties of being a family in the limelight when you’re cast as pariahs. Appalling incidents include a hateful encounter in New York when a holidaying British couple spotted the Gove family in the street and hurled abuse and foul language at them. And how dare teachers (I used to be one so I feel strongly about this) tease or pester pupils about the actions of their parents? But some of them did. At one point her son Will is bottling so much pent-up fury that he loses his temper with a computer game and has an argument with a plate glass door which leads to serious cuts, A&E and many stitches.
And throughout all this, Vine, by her own account just wants to go to work and do what she likes doing – despite health issues (thyroid) which she makes light of.
You don’t need to be aligned to any particular political party or to admire Michael Gove’s decisions and standpoints, or for that matter to like Vine’s Daily Mail columns, to be moved by this blisteringly honest, and very compelling, book.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Odour of Crysanthemums by DH Lawrence
