Diary of an MP's Wife: Inside and Outside Power: 'riotously candid' Sunday Times

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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”. 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.

Someone who I’ve met and whose general reputation is for total charmlessness, was surprisingly (to me) described as “charming” – presumably for being nice to her. At first it proved ideal shallow bedtime reading – entertaining gossipy disclosures about the world of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Gove, Raab etc. 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. Dip Into NEW PAPERBACKS [jsb_filter_by_tags count="15" show_more="10" sort_by="total_products"/] A selection of recent paperbacks.

Painfully revealing and often hilariously funny, here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. But then if only half her recollections of the Notting Hill set are true, she has done the rest of us a favour by removing all possible doubt about the unfitness of most of them to govern.

There is much sniggering public schoolboy sex chat – jokes about the size of fellow MPs’ honourable members, referring to the current health secretary as Matt Hands on Cock – and a startling moment on a Cornish coastal walk with the Camerons, where the then prime minister asks Sasha not to walk in front of him because her perfume makes him want to “push you into the bushes and give you one”. Yet, enraging as some will find it, this is the culture that governed Britain for most of the last decade, and there are few more gallopingly readable accounts of the strengths and weaknesses that led us to the present day. 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.To the evident lack of understanding of their mother, they became followers of Jeremy Corbyn and his hope for a better Britain. The struggles of ordinary people are ignored in a life of champagne, weekends at Chequers, long holidays in Cornwall and Devon, and afternoons gossiping over high tea and cake.