The diaries of Sacha Swire, the wife of Conservative Party Minister of State, Hugo Swire, during the period from 2010 - 2019 detail the comings and goings, gossip, assorted affairs, political intrigue and banalities of a Tory party in power. It’s enough to repulse the ordinary man (sic), already angered by the continuing hold of the British class system. Its weaknesses were, as many have said, a lack of footnotes about who people referred to were, particularly in the early part of the journal. Swire has literary ability, a quality that manifests itself in the colour with which she describes the show and the freaks within it. Lady Swire has a keen eye for detail and a waspish turn of phrase, which makes this a real page-turner.

Die Autorin macht keinen besonders sympathischen Eindruck, privilegiert und prätentiös aber egozentrisch und ein bißchen nutzlos. Those who took the details of their job seriously, such as the cerebral Europe minister David Lidington, were also not within the PLU pack but, rather, targets of derision. Swire and her pals carried on enjoying their lives and their parties untouched by the inequities imposed on the rest of us. Swire’s other close confidantes include No 10 gatekeeper Kate Fall, a woman who knows where plenty of bodies are buried, and Amber Rudd, who as home secretary becomes her window into May’s cabinet once Hugo has fallen out of favour. It makes it no easier to hear that she believes him to be “desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside”.Her assessments of people were heavily coloured, I concluded, as to how they behaved towards Milady Swire. Her secret diary covers not only the rise and the fall of her friends the Camerons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left Parliament.

Diary of an MP's Wife is an irresistible, informal history and a rare tell-all about what it's really like to live behind the headlines of British political life. By 2015 she is fretting that Ed Miliband is clearly “on to something” in pledging to abolish non-dom status and that the Tories have become too harsh towards the poor, “unforgiving of personal circumstances, relentless in telling people to stop whingeing and make a go of it”. Perennials PERENNIALS constant friends A selection of novels, memoirs and more by some of our favourite authors. This helped me understand why Cameron lobbied for Greensill, why Hancock turned covid-19 pandemic NHS procurement into a profiteering operation, and why Johnson and his wife sought their ridiculously over-budget redecoration of Downing Street. At first it proved ideal shallow bedtime reading – entertaining gossipy disclosures about the world of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Raab etc.

For more than 20 years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade.

For this was the period of austerity, instituted by George Osborne (Boy George to the diarist) where council budgets were cut, bedroom tax introduced, the police force lost 20,000 jobs, disability benefits were slashed, and education, health and social security budgets were cut to the bone. 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. Westminster diaries are judged on three levels: the details they leak, the political era they re-create and the central character of the author. She was born and brought up in west Cornwall, where her father, Sir John Nott, was MP for the St Ives constituency.

As the daughter of former defence secretary Sir John Nott, the author knows her own way round Whitehall, and her instincts are razor sharp; she is scathing from the off about “seven-year-old Gavin Williamson”, at the time just an eager young prime ministerial bag-carrier, and has Keir Starmer pegged as a potential Labour leader almost from the moment he enters parliament.

Unsurprisingly, she was scathing about Michael Gove (it’s a national sport, really) and surprisingly unpleasant about Sarah Vine, for reasons, I concluded, of jealousy.But if the first half of the book is a giddy romp through life under the “chumocracy”, the second is more bittersweet, chronicling the fracturing of old friendships post-Brexit in what has become a court exiled from power. 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”).