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What I’ve learnt about the art of keeping shtum as a Tory wife

Sandra Howard, wife of former Conservative party leader Lord Michael Howard - David Rose
Sandra Howard, wife of former Conservative party leader Lord Michael Howard - David Rose

I am torn. Half of me wishes I could have produced something larky and entertaining like Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife. There is so much in there that I instantly recognise from my own life.

No-one ever sits you down to tell you what is expected of you as a Tory wife. You just pick it up as you go. There’s no written guide, and my husband [former Conservative party leader Lord Michael Howard] simply had to trust my best instincts on what to say and do.

And his Private Office as a minister was exactly that – private. I had to ring the diary secretary to ask for a 15-minute window for a quick chat with my husband. It was as though he was branded HM Government property. He always said Yes, Minister was rather understated.

Hunting in a pack

When Michael was a cabinet minister and then Leader of the Opposition, he always liked to discuss what was going on with me. He did so knowing that I wouldn’t cause him embarrassment by letting anything slip. We hunt as a pack.

Yet I remember, too, the constant feeling of panic that you might put a foot wrong when your home became government property. Sasha describes living with her children in Hillsborough Castle when her husband, Hugo, was a Northern Ireland minister. At one stage her young daughter leaves behind a diary in Pizza Express with all the details of a forthcoming royal visit to Belfast.

Michael and I lived in a police-protected government house in London when he was Home Secretary. Once, we went off to Michael’s constituency for the weekend, leaving behind our 17- and 18-year-olds. They had obviously been having quite a late party and one of their friends thought she saw a button that would bring down a blind, so she pressed it. Suddenly there were 27 police motorbikes lined outside with their lights flashing. I never told Michael because I thought he’d explode. The children were a bit more careful after that.

Sandra and Michael Howard at their home in Kent - Paul Grover
Sandra and Michael Howard at their home in Kent - Paul Grover

And I immediately recognised it, too, when Sasha writes of Michael Gove’s wife Sarah busy cooking fish pie in the kitchen while the husbands were talking about important things next door. If it is a private occasion or political meeting, it has to be private, so you don’t have someone from outside bringing in food and then hanging on to every word. The upside is that it is fascinating to be close to power. You know all the characters and what they are really like.

I once spent what felt like a whole day in the kitchen of our house in the depths of Kent when Michael’s opposite number from France decided it would be easier to come there via the Channel Tunnel rather than travel up to London. My role was to make endless cups of tea for the interpreters and the bodyguards.

Out of context

What reading the diaries brought back most strongly for me was the sense, as a politician’s wife, of what you couldn’t say or do. I was still doing a bit of photographic modelling when Michael was Home Secretary, some of it with male models. One day a journalist rang me and said: “What do you think of having this chap’s arm round you in the picture in the press?” I replied: “Well, it’s all a bit of a lark”. But even as I was putting the phone down, I released my words would be taken wildly out of context. So I called back immediately and asked if he’d be terribly kind and not use it. There was a long silence and then he said: “I haven’t sent it up yet [to his editor]. You’re all right.” It is the kindest thing any journalist has ever done for me.

It is like walking a tightrope. You never quite know who you are talking to at functions. The tension was always there. I was once chattering away at some party to somebody, and I dread to think what I’d been saying, when he suddenly said, “I think perhaps I’d better mention here that I’m actually Tony Blair’s brother.”

Such stories are amusing to recall, but there is a whole other half of me that knows I could never have written anything like Sasha’s diary.

To be honest, I have never kept a diary. The only time I made notes of things as they happened was when Silvio Berlusconi invited Michael to speak at a big event in a stadium near Milan. We were put up for the weekend in a hotel. I later used those notes in my first novel, Glass Houses. It was about a character who wasn’t called Berlusconi, but he could have been.

When private means private

That was fiction, though. This is going to sound pompous but, when it comes to publishing diaries, I believe what happens between friends in private should stay private. All the silly things people say or do when they are on a letting-your-hair-down weekend, such as the ones the Swires spent with David and Samantha Cameron, they said and did because they believed they were private.

Michael and I know the Camerons well. David was Michael’s political adviser as Home Secretary and later he and George Osborne used to help Michael prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions when he was Leader of the Opposition. What I can say is that David wasn’t lazy, as he sometimes appears in Sasha’s diary. He rolled his sleeves up and got on with it, really did the work, so I think that implication is a little bit unfair. David is very witty and amusing, but that is in a separate box.

The Swires, of course, are a different generation to us, though I know Hugo a bit as a brilliant charity auctioneer. He likes to have fun, and to make life fun. So does his wife in this diary. By her own admission, her attitude is: “I don’t care, and to hell with what people think”.

I don’t know if the Camerons and their friends will mind all that much about the publication of this diary. But if I’d been mentioned there and called “Poor Sandra Howard”, the way Sasha refers to some people, I’d mind.

So, the $64 million question is, will the people quoted and mentioned in Sasha’s book ever ask the Swires round again? And on that question, your guess is as good as mine.

Sasha and Hugo Swire - Alan Davidson/Shutterstock
Sasha and Hugo Swire - Alan Davidson/Shutterstock

Who’s a naughty Tory? Diary of an MP’s Wife at a glance

  • David Cameron engaging in ‘lewd’ banter about Michael Gove’s manhood being ‘like a slinky that comes down the stairs before the rest of the body’

  • David Cameron, on a coastal walk in Cornwall, asking Sasha to walk behind him because: ‘That scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones… makes me want to grab you and push you in the bushes and give you one’

  • Philip Hammond, as Chancellor, patronising Boris Johnson as a ‘silly boy’ when he asks for a £150 million cash injection for the NHS

  • Accuses Meghan Markle of ‘eating the red-head for breakfast’ when she meets her with Prince Harry

  • Dominic Cummings being dismissed as ‘one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs’

  • Boris Johnson texting David Cameron just before the referendum, saying Brexit will be ‘crushed like the toad beneath the harrow’

  • Sarah Vine, wife of Michael Gove, making fish pie in the Downing Street kitchen while Samantha Cameron learns to pattern cut and gets her hair done upstairs

Sandra Howard's latest novel is The Consequence of Love (Simon & Schuster, £8.99). Buy yours at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514

Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power by Sasha Swire (Little, Brown, £20) is also available from Telegraph Books