The small clique of people at the top are also exposed with waspish irreverence by Sasha Swire in Diary of an MP's Wife . Despite the bitchy, rather sniping tone which gives the book its flavour (and frankly, is the main reason most people will read it) she is a pretty astute judge of character and nails (or skewers) a lot of people with disarming accuracy. There’s a scene in Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife, an insider’s account of the Tory clique that has ruled Britain for the past decade, which somehow sums it all up. Imagine the Alan Clark diaries, but written by his wife Jane instead: all the high-octane political gossip, set against a backdrop of country house shooting weekends and boozy dinners at Chequers, but seen through the sceptical eyes of a woman one step removed from all the head-butting stags.

Westminster diaries are judged on three levels: the details they leak, the political era they re-create and the central character of the author. Remarkables REMARKABLES Intriguing, stunning, or otherwise remarkable books These include fine editions, foreign publications that are exceptional for their interest or production, special editions and some first-rate books from very small publishers. It was really, really funny in parts, and set off with a bang with much to-ing and fro-ing in Hillsborough Castle and royal visits. Ensconced for the summer of 2019 in his beloved new holiday home in Cornwall, David Cameron was conceding, at least in private, that he had “completely fucked up over Brexit”.

Because of the author’s position as a confidante of the main players, this book will be a primary source for future political and social historians.

Here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. As her old friends argue fruitlessly over the best way to thwart a hard Brexit and plot unsuccessfully to manoeuvre Rudd into Downing Street, she backs the arch Brexiter Dominic Raab’s leadership bid before warming to the “slobbering golden retriever” Boris Johnson. A professional partner and loyal spouse, Swire has strong political opinions herself – sometimes more ‘No, Minister’ than ‘Yes’. There was a lot of publicity, and many extracts available in the national press for this humdinger of a political tell-tale “diary”.

She was born and brought up in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency. Suffice to say that Michael Gove comes out of things badly; Swire portrays him as volatile, untrustworthy and faintly odd, while his longstanding consigliere Dominic Cummings “looks like one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs” and has an “over-inflated view of his own importance”). Sasha Swire was raised and educated in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency. We have come a long way, thankfully, since the days of political wives being expected to stand mutely by their man. She moved in circles whose values may not be to everyone’s taste (anti-green, anti-poor, anti-common) but she certainly tells it as she sees it and I don’t think she was as bad as the others.

Her assessments of people were heavily coloured, I concluded, as to how they behaved towards Milady Swire. I bought this book cheap, intending to skim read interesting bits, but ended up reading it cover-to-cover.

The pesky MP's wife may have a better sense of public taste than all the players strutting on the political stage.