Vine art
Hackwatch, Issue 1651

"FORGET every other reading matter – put down your 250th anniversary copy of Pride and Prejudice," trilled Melanie McDonagh in last week's Standard, "because the required reading right now is the extracts now being published from Sarah Vine's memoir, How Not to Be a Political Wife."

Er, OK then. But can Michael Gove really compare with Mr Darcy? Well, on this evidence, he could drink the owner of Pemberley under the table.

"He loved Europe – especially its vineyards," writes Vine at one point, before retelling an anecdote where her hungover husband nearly vomits on the Pope's shoes. Amid the expenses scandal, he comes home from a fiery public meeting and puts away "three-quarters of a bottle of whisky in 20 minutes".

And while Michael might not ever have emerged dripping from a lake, Vine notices when they first meet that he enjoys "hour-long baths in the chalet, reading Paradise Lost and emerging, pink and smiling, in his pastel lavender Hackett dressing gown and matching pyjamas, smelling of Clarins Blue Bath".

Mail privilege
The Mail spent five days serialising How Not to Be a Political Wife – one more day than its other big-shot columnist, Boris Johnson, got for his memoir. But what do we learn from the chosen extracts? That David Cameron was a "man-baby" over Brexit, that Sam Cam's aristo slenderness always made Vine feel like an arriviste frump, and that the promised raw, unfiltered nature of this book extends to its prose style.

Of the education establishment, Vine observes that "the Blob would have tried the patience of Job". (The... blohbe?) Later, Gove ignores a "siren call" and begins to "emerge from his carapace" in the same sentence, making him sound like a crab that got smuggled aboard by an argonaut.

This being the Mail, we are treated to details of Vine's thyroid problems, weight struggles and verbally abusive father – oh, and the fact that her second child was conceived on a holiday in Portugal with the Camerons.

Omission possible
The real fun in reading these extracts, though, is seeing what isn't there. Vine worked at the Times before joining the Mail in 2013, and her ex has long ping-ponged between Fleet Street and political jobs. This deep embedding in the British elite requires some careful navigation and strategic omissions.

In her memoir, Vine depicts the fateful dinner at which Gove and Johnson decided to break with Cameron and back Brexit. "As we tucked into the roast lamb, Marina [Wheeler, Johnson's wife at the time] and I spent the next 20 minutes attempting to make dinner-party conversation with the other guests in stage whispers, Boris shushing us whenever we got too loud," Vine writes now.

But who were those other guests? Writing in the Speccie in 2016, she wasn't so coy: "Also there was the Russian media mogul Evgeny Lebedev, impeccably groomed and suited, a stark contrast to the two baggy-suited politicians sitting next to each other on the sofa."

Her account of writing an email to Gove, telling him to extract formal promises from Johnson before backing his leadership bid, has been similarly airbrushed. There is space to bitch about the PR called Henry to whom Vine mistakenly sent the email: Henry is depicted coming home from Glastonbury, at which point "he momentarily stopped writing about lipsticks, shimmied out of his budgie- smugglers and decided to leak the email to the papers". (This from a woman who used to write for a beauty blog, "Get the Gloss"!)

But there was sadly no room to include the email's funniest line: "Crucially, the membership will not have the necessary reassurance to back Boris, neither will Dacre/Murdoch, who instinctively dislike Boris but trust your ability enough to support a Boris Gove ticket."

Presumably, editor-in-chief of Daily Mail Group Paul Dacre has since improved his opinion of the paper's star political columnist.

Gown and out
How Not to Be a Political Wife is out later this month, and one final awkward insider decision remains. Which of Michael Gove's luckless staff at the Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor's marital woes – and will they dare to ask if he still has the lavender dressing gown?

More top stories in the latest issue:

FOLLOW THAT, KAMAL
Kamal Ahmed, who lasted barely a year as the Telegraph's "director of audio" before being shown the door last week.

PROPHET & LOSS
Kath Viner last week celebrated her 10th anniversary as Guardian editor, but the paper's annual financial losses show no sign of nearing an end.

FAMILY FORTUNES
More details from behind the scenes of that fake Telegraph piece about a high-earning family crippled by the imposition of VAT on private school fees.

SOFT SCOOPS
The low-profile UK Media Research Centre is giving stories to newspapers that focus on extremism – but seemingly only one form of extremism.

LAPTOP CASE
Daily Mail US columnist Maureen Callahan railed against the media over "the Biden health cover-up" – but she notably did not criticise one outlet.

HIGH HORSE
"Why do police accept criminal drug use?" demanded the headline of a recent Spectator article, which did not mention its own editor's powdered history.