5 min read
What is life like not for politicians themselves, but for their spouses, and what does a life in the Westminster spotlight do to relationships? This week on The Rundown, host Alain Tolhurst goes to visit Sarah Vine – famously married to Michael Gove during his many years as a Conservative Cabinet minister – at her home in West London to discuss what the role of an MP’s wife is, and the often unfair way they are portrayed in the public eye.
Vine has recently published a new book called ‘How Not To Be A Political Wife’, charting her difficult upbringing to entering the so-called ‘Notting Hill set’ as David Cameron became Tory leader, through to her falling out with his wife, Samantha, as the couples fell on either side of the Brexit divide, and her surprisingly amicable divorce with the now Lord Gove.
At her kitchen table, with two playful dogs milling around her feet, she chatted about unrealistic expectations, what she’d learned from her 20 years as the @WestminsterWAG, her tongue-in-cheek Twitter handle, and what advice she’d give to any soon to be political spouses about how to get through it with marriage intact.
But first, she explained, given how much she railed against it, how she became the spouse of a politician in the first place: “Well, by mistake obviously, right?”
“When I married Michael, he was very adamant that he wasn’t going to become a politician, and then he became a politician, which is fine, because people change their mind.
“It’s completely their prerogative, but when we got married, he was a journalist, and the thing about being a journalist is that it’s fundamentally an outsider profession.
“You can’t really be too insidery otherwise you can’t really do your job, whereas being a politician is the ultimate insider profession.”
She admitted to being naive about the level of scrutiny and intrusion that comes with the territory, saying: “I didn’t really think it would involve me, because I thought it would be his job, not my job, which was really stupid of me.
“I thought ‘oh well, I’m a journalist, I’ll just carry on being a journalist, and he’ll go off and do his thing, and that’ll be lovely’, but what I didn’t realise was that it is a bit like childbirth; you read the books and you listen to your friends, and then you say, ‘oh no I’m not going to have any anaesthetic, I’m going to have a natural birth, and just maybe a little bit of gas and air’.
“And then when it comes to it, you’re like ‘give me all your gas and air and an epidural, where’s the morphine’, so it’s a similar thing. You go into it with a sort of open heart and an open mind, and then you quickly discover that you’re very much mistaken.”
Vine is critical of the way many wives of MPs are characterised, highlighting how Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie was labelled “Carrie Antoinette” during their time in Downing Street — a reference to the last queen of France, who in the run-up to her execution was loathed by the public, and accused of scheming and impropriety.
“Why shouldn’t she have an opinion about politics? There’s a sort of misogyny there, because it doesn’t really happen to the male ones,” she explained.
While husbands are often written about as being “all terribly wise and clever”, she added, “When it’s a woman, it’s sort of, ‘oh you’re meddling in the affairs of men, stop that now and go back to doing some cake or whatever’.
“And I felt terrible for Carrie when that moniker was attached to her, because it’s really insulting. It’s just also really, really sexist, it’s just nasty misogyny.”
She found herself labelled ‘Lady Macbeth’ after an email she sent to her then-husband about the Tory leadership contest following Cameron’s resignation after the EU referendum in the summer of 2016 was leaked to the press.
In it, she called on Gove to “be his stubborn best” in dealing with Boris Johnson, and after he eventually withdrew his support for Johnson’s candidacy, Vine was blamed for blowing things up, something she still receives criticism for now.
“That was me just saying, as a wife, I’m with you, I’m behind you, and it was interpreted as me trying to literally meddle in the affairs of men,” she said.
“And I’m like, ‘well, okay, a) it’s not, but also b) if it were, what’s wrong with that? They’re not the affairs of men, women are allowed to have ideas about politics as well’.
“It’s not illegal, unless you live in Iran.”
But she admitted it can be hard to deal with the pressures of being in the public eye, adding: “I think politics always takes its toll. It does. It does blow a hole in people’s relationships.”
Vine explained that “resilience is a kind of diminishing resource”, saying: “And so the first time you have a knock, it’s okay, you get up quite quickly.
“And then the more knocks you have, the longer it takes you to recover, and then eventually you just think, I’m not going to leave the house because I just can’t face this anymore.”
The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced by Nick Hilton and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot
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