Blonde with a bombshell: Sasha Swire’s revelations about the Cameroons

Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell’s diaries for The Spectator, I concluded as follows:

Who will be the chroniclers of the Cameron government? Somewhere, unknown to his or her colleagues, a secret scribbler will already be at work, documenting the rise and, in due course, no doubt, the fall of this administration.

Well, here it is. It comes from an unpredictable source deep inside that privileged little caste who governed us between 2010 and 2016: Sasha Swire, wife of Hugo, a middle-ranking minister MP for a safe seat in rural Devon and a man who, for all that he was a low-key figure, has a very sharp wit and is fabulously well-connected (he once even walked out with Jerry Hall). The diary covers not only the rise and fall of the Cameroons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end of last year when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left parliament.

No holds are barred. Sasha is candid, irreverent, occasionally outrageous and sometimes hilarious. This a world that ordinary mortals, even most Tories, can only glimpse from afar. Hugo — Eton, Sandhurst, Sotheby’s; Sasha — daughter of Mrs Thatcher’s one-time defence secretary, Sir John Knott. Together they have an entrée to all the best salons: Rothchilds, Rothermeres, Rausings, they all feature. There are dinner parties at No. 10, weekends at Chequers, Chevening and Dorney Wood; holidays with the Camerons in Cornwall. Hugo, an upmarket auctioneer by profession, is much in demand at Tory fund-raisers, peppered as they are with obscenely rich oligarchs and (as Sasha calls them) ‘hedgies’. To celebrate his 60th birthday the billionaire Michael Spencer, one-time Tory treasurer, flies a planeload of his ‘besties’ to Marrakesh for ‘an orgy of opulence and bacchanalia’.