Sarah vine

After Michael Gove’s mobile phone went off in a Cabinet meeting, everyone’s been trying to find out what the ‘jazzy’ ringtone is. As Mr S documented, even Charles Moore was thwarted in his attempts to catch the Chief Whip out by ringing his phone when they were both at dinner. Now his wife has revealed the woman behind the ‘female ballad’ ringtone in her Daily Mail column. ‘Last week, during quite an important work meeting, an urgent email popped up in his inbox,’ Sarah Vine writes. ‘Not wishing to seem rude by looking at his phone, he instead turned to his latest gadget, a Pebble Smartwatch, which I bought him for Christmas.’ The watch is

It was a battle of the Westminster couples last night as Yvette Cooper took to the airwaves on Tom Bradby’s ITV Agenda show. Snarkily commenting from the couch at home, Sarah Vine, aka Mrs Michael Gove, publicly questioned ‘How did Ed Balls ever bag Yvette?’ The darling couple of the Brown treasury married in 1998, when Balls was working for Gordon and Yvette was a new Labour MP. But Yvette’s hubby wasn’t having any of it, hitting back ‘Errr.. Hang on.. Pots? Kettles?’ Whatever could he mean? Mr S could never imagine such rumbustious highly personal politics from Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont, Gordon Bro…oh wait. Over to you chief whip.

It was a Friday morning in 1992, Britain had just had an election, and I was on an ice rink. No special reason. You’re in Edinburgh, you’re a posh teenager, it’s the Christmas or Easter holidays, weekday mornings you go to the ice rink. It was a thing. Maybe it still is. I was only quite recently posh at the time, having moved schools, and I was — in both a figurative general sense and literal ice-skating sense — still finding my feet. My new boarding-school life was pretty good, though. The way you went ice-skating in the holidays was a bit weird, granted, but you could smoke Marlboro at

Sarah Vine is famed for using her column in the Daily Mail to share embarrassing personal anecdotes about Michael Gove (often involving his underpants) and to offer deeply unhelpful advice to the Tory government. Today’s article is a case in point; it says that David Cameron’s women problem is ‘the biggest hurdle the Tories face’. The wife of the Education Secretary adds: ‘as my husband is fond of saying, “Happy wife, happy life”. And Mrs Electorate isn’t happy.’ And Vine laid it on thick for Theresa May; suggesting that the Home Secretary ‘looks more and more like the true heir to Margaret Thatcher…. whose tractor beam glare makes Anna Wintour’s seem

Congratulations to Sarah Vine. Last night the Mail columnist achieved the almost impossible feat of getting the leader of the Labour Party to defend his party’s favourite pantomime villain: Michael Gove. ‘I feel like I should rush to your husband’s defence now,’ spluttered Ed Miliband on ITV’s Agenda last night, declaring that he was sure that the Education Secretary (Vine’s husband) was a great father. The secret to Vine’s success is to have no secrets. She is making a career out of revealing the minute details of the power couple’s domestic arrangements. And last night she regaled the show with tales of paternity leave in the Gove household: ‘He hung around