Scott Fitzgerald’s 1926 short story, The Rich Boy, contains the lines: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand”.
Hemingway later openly jeered at such a view, writing, “The rich ... were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious.”
This is probably the most pretentious way I could tell you what I have been reading: Lady Sasha Swire’s account of Cameron’s inner circle, Diary of an MP’s Wife, and Barbara Amiel’s extraordinarily self-dramatising memoir, Friends and Enemies. But hey! Both books give glimpses into the world of power, inordinate wealth and indeed government. Dry they are not. If you like your obligatory blow jobs, voracious sexual appetites, blatant snobbery, utter betrayal, unerring self-belief and generally vile behaviour – and well, who doesn’t? – then here we go.
Swire, daughter of John Nott, is married to Hugo Swire, a Tory former minister. She is, as she repeatedly tells us, tall, blonde and glamorous, with legs that go on for ever. A prize Tory wife. She describes the MPs as “show ponies” and herself and Samantha Cameron as “part of the equation”.
Friendship, to her, means something different from what it means to me. Class will out, after all. They often go on holidays together. Hugo and Dave, as she calls him, like a lot of sex talk about dogging, and Michael Gove’s penis. Are they 12?
On one Cornwall walk Dave tells Sasha he should walk behind with the following justification: “The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one.” What larks! What’s a little light rape joke between friends?
Brexit turns out to be a bit of a disaster. Sarah Vine has a row with Samantha Cameron. Swire does not paint the the Goves favourably. Vine appears desperate to fit in, doing the cooking while Princess Samantha gets her hair done. Vine says this is untrue. Who knows? But it is is clear that the the Goves don’t come from inherited wealth, so therefore do not fit into this set.
The mystery remains as to why Cameron ever became prime minister – beyond the fact that he could. He and George Osborne, the architects of austerity and progenitors of Brexit, continue to be promoted beyond their abilities, instead of vilified for ruining the country.
Barbara Amiel’s Friends and Enemies is about having been the crème de la crème of society and then falling from grace when her husband, Conrad Black, went to prison for criminal fraud. He owned the Daily Telegraph; she spent £300,000 a year on couture. Her hairdresser dropped her. The manager of Manolo Blahnik in New York wouldn’t sell her shoes. “You’ve got quite enough.” Even Ghislaine Maxwell gives her short shrift. Imagine.
But Amiel is a woman who has clawed her way up. Knowing that the publisher George Weidenfeld was falling for her, and trying to hold on to “the social advantages he gave me”, the only way she could deal with it was to avoid “body-to-body contact and pleasure him orally”. There is a word for this – if you are poor. Yet Barbara has no time for her ex-friends – she hopes, at one moment, that they, the lawyers, and the journos who blanked her, get injected with Ebola.
Who were her actual friends? Where is kindness?
Within the Cameron circle, everything seems equally transactional, and largely based on Eton. Swire’s husband, Hugo, makes jokes about people on benefits while out shooting. There is endless imbecilic sex “bantz”. “Boy George” Osborne is desperate to be accepted; Cummings is described as “one of those odd amoebas you find in jars in school science labs”; Johnson is a “calculating machine”, knocking back cheap plonk and eyeing up Swire to see if she is “shaggable”. “He’d probably do that if a sheep walked in the room.”
In all this, don’t forget Cameron’s chillaxed style actually created the chaos we now live within. The absolute sense of entitlement, along with utter cluelessness, is evidenced everywhere between the hilarious nicknames. This clique were running the country.
What lessons can we draw from these books? Do not mistake deals, power-broking, and transactions for friendship. If you do you will end up sad, lonely or maybe simply isolated with your own kind, who know nothing of giving without taking.
These diaries remind us these not-particularly-bright people have broken things because they just don’t care. Fitzgerald (in the Great Gatsby) again: “They smashed up things and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together.” The rest of us live with the mess.