Ex-minister’s wife Sasha Swire has described Michael Gove as ‘dishonest with his ambition’ in her latest comments about her upcoming memoirs.
Lady Swire, who describes the minister for the Cabinet Office as ‘bonkers’ in her book, has said she believes he is ‘dangerous’.
In an interview with the Observer, she said: ‘I love Michael. I can forgive anything if they’ve got colour. The more dangerous, the more alcoholic, the madder they are, the better.
‘Where Michael is slightly dishonest is with his ambition. He’s always lied about that. He’s a typical hack.
‘He loves being at the scene of the crash. I think he’s quite dangerous.’
Lady Swire, pictured with husband Hugo, has described senior Tory minister Michael Gove as ‘dangerous’ and ‘dishonest with his ambition’ in an interview ahead of the release of her book
Lady Swire describes Gove, pictured, as ‘bonkers’ in her soon-to-be-published memoirs
Barely a single senior member of the governments of Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron emerges unscathed in the memoirs of ex-minister’s wife.
At one point, after a meeting of the National Security Council, Sir Hugo tells her he is ‘starting to think Gove is ever so slightly bonkers’. She adds that William Hague looked ‘exasperated every time Gove spoke’.
Cameron ‘gave Gove a b*****king’ and ‘went ballistic’ when the Scotsman publicly attacked the ‘preposterous’ number of Etonians in Cameron’s inner circle.
Gove’s aim in saying this was to wreck Boris Johnson’s chances of succeeding Cameron, declares Lady Swire, who adds: Gove is a ‘loose cannon’ and, as an ex-journalist, ‘mistakes headlines for achievements’.
She describes Gove’s close ally Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s No 10 chief of staff, as ‘one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs’. Cummings is a ‘stark raving mad Rasputin’.
Teaming him up with Gove, the ‘most volatile member of the Government, was always an explosion waiting to happen’.
Lady Swire accuses Gove of ‘lying through his teeth’ and says that when he fell out with Cameron over Brexit, Cameron was so angry he said he would never have Michael or his wife Sarah Vine — a Mail columnist — or his children in his house ever again.
She says Gove also upset former Tory leadership contender Rory Stewart, who looked set to ‘punch’ him when Gove made a joke that backfired about a jihadi kissing Stewart’s wife. It was ‘nutter Michael in a nutshell’.
David Cameron thinks it is ‘hilarious’ to joke with Lady Swire’s husband about the size of Michael Gove‘s manhood — and the former Prime Minister is drawn to Lady Swire because she is ‘lewd’.
Lady Swire told the Observer that she was ‘terrified of causing trouble’ and says she is glad to be out of politics.
She also doubles down on comments made about others in the book including ‘stark raving mad’ Dominic Cummings of whom she says: ‘It will all go tits up with him, it always does. He’ll explode.’
She also says that Theresa May ‘didn’t have an original idea in her head’.
In Lady Swire’s tell-all memoir, she reveals how David and Samantha Cameron drowned their sorrows following the Brexit vote.
She tells how, in the wake of the 2016 referendum, she visited the Camerons for a weekend at their Oxfordshire home. She claims that the then-Prime Minister asked her husband to bring ‘two fat Cohibas [Cuban cigars] and plenty of booze’ and was ‘chomping on cigars’ over ‘endless bottles of wine’.
And she adds that Mrs Cameron had to muster up some Dutch courage before joining her husband for his resignation speech, feeling unable to do so ‘without drinking a large negroni’.
She also says that Mr Cameron told her former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had a two-way mirror in his bedroom.
‘I sit next to Dave at dinner,’ she writes. ‘He gives us wonderful vignettes of the Sarkozys’ fake marital displays and of being given a tour around Rome’s equivalent of No 10 by Berlusconi.
‘When they come to his bedroom he points at a Renaissance two-way mirror above the bed and with his characteristic grin says, ‘Well, they didn’t have porn channels in those days, did they?’ ‘
Boris Johnson is described as ‘His Blondness’, adding that he used to be a ‘political calculating machine’ with ‘no political identity or proven ability to grasp difficult questions and decisions’
She describes Gove’s close ally Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s No 10 chief of staff, as ‘one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs’ and says he is ‘stark raving mad’
Of Boris Johnson, she is withering, writing: ‘It scares the s*** out of me that people don’t see [Mr Johnson] as the calculating machine he really is,’ and she describes Mr Johnson’s fiancee Carrie Symonds as his ‘hot young vixen’.
Meanwhile, Mrs May is Mrs ‘Glumbucket’, the ‘Maybot’, ‘Old Ma May’ or ‘old bat, crippled by her lack of intellectual confidence.
Nor does Lady Swire, 57, spare the blushes of the Royal Family in her book, Diary Of An MP’s Wife. She says the Queen ‘fixed her beady eyes’ on her at a dinner at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland when Sir Hugo was an Ulster Minister in the Cameron administration.
Prince Philip ‘ranted’ about how ‘appalled’ he and the Queen were that guests used laptops during Palace banquets. And Sir Hugo is distracted at a meeting with Prince Charles by his ‘thick Hanoverian hands’.
Lady Swire’s reaction to Prince Harry’s engagement to Meghan Markle in 2017 is to predict ‘trouble ahead’. The future Duchess of Sussex is ‘eating the redhead for breakfast’, she declares; he is ‘clearly not as clever as she is’.
Lady Swire claims her book is a modern version of the highly acclaimed and outrageous Alan Clark Diaries in the Thatcher era.
Like Clark, she gives a riveting insight into the political skulduggery and sexual high jinks of the Tory elite.
She also pokes affectionate fun at her husband Sir Hugo, or ‘H’, as she refers to him and candidly talks of their marriage problems.
The book — the most indiscreet political memoir in decades — claims Boris Johnson was driven by jealousy of Cameron.
He saw Cameron as a ‘fee-paying squit’ at Eton in comparison to his own status of King’s Scholar at the school.
Mr Cameron has admitted the diaries, due out next week, were ‘kind of embarrassing’.
Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire is published by Little, Brown on September 24.
