Quite simply, I had never seen Samantha Cameron like that. So angry, so embittered, so full of vitriol. Yelling at me.
It was the anguish of a woman who, like me, had seen her life twisted out of shape by politics, a person who had no choice but to choose between her husband and her friend. Why? Because in February 2016, politics and power had made it impossible to choose both.
The price of being the superb political wife that she always was – in contrast to my own failures – was the price of our friendship. When it came to Sam and me, I just couldn’t believe that Brexit could drive our families forever far apart.
She and I were the true friends out of the four of us. Dave Cameron and my husband Michael Gove may have known each other since they were students at Oxford, but political ambition had always been the third wheel in their relationship.
Sam and I were joined by the strongest ties of shared motherhood, of grief, of wiping children’s noses, bolstering each other up against the storm of public opinion. We couldn’t possibly be over…
Even before our wedding in 2002, there were countless cosy, twinkly evenings at the Camerons’ gorgeous house in West London, which they’d bought for a relative song at the end of the 90s.
Sam was the personification of effortless chic while most of us were still struggling, metaphorically, to hold a knife and fork. She was cool, younger than Dave and in to music and fashion.
But she was also incredibly kind and welcoming – the absolute opposite of a snob, which some of my husband’s Oxford circle had a slight tendency to be (then again, she’d studied at Bristol and hung out with the likes of trip-hop legend Tricky, a far cry from the Bullingdon Club, which Dave had belonged to at Oxford).
The price of being the superb political wife that she always was – in contrast to my own failures – was the price of our friendship. When it came to Sam and me, I just couldn’t believe that Brexit could drive our families forever far apart
To be Samantha’s friend was very special. She was kind and loyal, and funny, and honest, and to the point. She loved a drink and a fag, and a laugh, and so did I, writes Sarah Vine (pictured right with Samantha)
At this stage in our friendship, Tony Blair’s Labour was riding high and the Tories were very much in the doldrums, yet it was clear from the start that Dave was in politics to win. By December 2005, at the age of 39, he was Conservative party leader.
Funnily enough, unlike Cameron’s other friends, who were all very gung-ho, Michael had urged Dave to think very carefully about running for the leadership, calling to say he was genuinely worried about the effect on Dave, on Sam and on the family, and pleading with him not to do it. Who knows where we might be now if Michael had dissuaded him?
If I had to choose one man to take the rap for the mess this country found itself in for the next 20-plus years, I’d put Dave Cameron into pole position.
Anyway, our dinner party chats suddenly became discussion points at a national political level; friendships matured into political alliances. Michael, by now a parliamentary candidate, was part of the inner circle.
As for Sam and me, we were both working mothers, both with tiny children, in this together.
For her, I could recapture that elusive feeling, so precious to me, of being useful: I could cook dinner parties, organise our holidays, pick up the slack later on our shared school runs.
The reason for this, of course, was because she had Ivan, beside whose challenges my tiny motherhood quibbles were as nothing. Ivan was Sam and Dave’s first child. He was seriously ill with Ohtahara syndrome, a condition which left him prey to constant epileptic fits and his poor parents in a permanent state of exhaustion.
He needed round-the-clock care and they had been told he would never live a conventional life. I remember visiting them at their home in Oxfordshire a few months after his diagnosis and seeing the deep sadness in their eyes as they cradled their tiny, very sick baby. It was nothing short of heartbreaking. His death in February 2009, a year before Dave became PM, was simply devastating.
David Cameron during a charity tennis match at Chequers
At Chequers, our children spent many happy hours splashing round the indoor swimming pool, once with Malia and Sasha Obama, writes Sarah Vine
The thing is, to be Samantha’s friend was very special. She was kind and loyal, and funny, and honest, and to the point. She loved a drink and a fag, and a laugh, and so did I.
On our regular holidays to Ibiza, we were on the same page: our children were there and had a great time – but so did we; we caroused and danced and drank and parcelled out the early mornings between us.
Multi-tasking was second nature, as was burning candles at every end we could find.
The Conservatives winning the election of 2010 – albeit with a hung parliament – was a turning point for Michael and me. It felt like hurtling around a sharp, rain-slicked bend on a twisty country lane and coming out onto one of those magical, sunlit high-country vistas.
Our so-called Notting Hill set –castigated as an Old Boy Network but in fact mostly a rambunctious friendship group from university days – was upgraded to the Cameron Court of Camelot.
We had suppers together, holidayed together, partied together. Most importantly of all, we argued together: this was no echo chamber, far from it, as Michael and Dave’s fabulous ding-dongs over foreign policy always demonstrated. And it was certainly no Boys’ Club – at least, not until Boris shoehorned his way in, tipping the balance of Old Etonians from tolerable to toff-heavy.
Funnily enough, Boris was never a part of this social circle of trust. He was a political loner – two years above our lot, lived in Islington, not West London, running with a more literary set and, for all his infamous wandering eye, known for being socially awkward.
I remember being told one story about a dinner party in Highgate where Boris, failing to make conversation with the two women on either side, threw up his hands and announced to the table: ‘Look, this isn’t going too well – shall I just give a speech instead?’
Our son Will has his own abiding memory of Boris. One day, there was a ‘Tory dads versus Tory kids’ football match at Chequers, where we were all staying.
‘Suddenly Boris took me out and fell really heavily on me,’ Will says now. ‘It was just the worst tackle ever. I was lying there, struggling for breath and you, Mum, were yelling from an upstairs window, shouting at him to get off me.’
It was striking just how nakedly competitive Boris was, especially in the general vicinity of Dave.
From the outside looking in, it must have seemed we were leading a life of unimaginable privilege and excitement and, in many ways, it was: weekending at Chequers and Dorneywood, hanging out at Downing Street, dipping our fingers in the font water at the christening of the prime minister’s daughter Florence, my goddaughter, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.
We were being waited on hand and foot by staff, and hanging out with A-list celebrities such as Helena Bonham Carter and her then partner Tim Burton.
I was Alice in Wonderland, still slightly over-large on the Drink Me potion, expecting any minute that the Queen of Hearts would topple through the scene, shouting: ‘Off with her head!’
At Chequers, our children spent many happy hours splashing round the indoor swimming pool, once with Malia and Sasha Obama. Then there’d be Dave’s inevitable Sunday morning constitutional, a three-line whip affair that had us reluctantly jumping out of bed at 5am to yomp up hill and down dale.
Evening drinks were by the fire in the great hall, sprawled in the deep sofas facing each other, mags on the ottoman; swimming through White Ladies, a cocktail that Dave had perfected: slugs of tart lemon juice, sweet Cointreau and an extra cosh of vodka.
After dinner, there was none of that sexist rubbish of gents staying with the port. We all hung out together in a strangely informal, feet-up sort of way, sometimes upstairs in the Long Gallery, occasionally watching reality TV and shouting at the telly.
During our first Chequers Christmas/New Year, Dave decided we should have our own X Factor competition and bought a karaoke machine.
So, most evenings after supper, you’d find a few tipsy grown-ups warbling through Jolene and air-guitaring madly through Stairway To Heaven. It was all a little like being at an incredibly luxurious and fun boarding school.
But it wasn’t all good. For one thing, Michael and I were living wildly beyond our means.
The fancier our weekends got, the grander our weeks – with me cooking for the cognoscenti crowded into our warm kitchen, or dinners out in the favoured bistros of Notting Hill, Michael often footing the bill because he loved the idea of either repaying the hospitality of our political friends or impressing our media friends.
Keeping up with ‘the Cameroons’ became so much part of our lives that I have to admit I stopped even wondering at the discrepancy between our incomes. What made me think we could afford the same lifestyle?
The first fractures in our friendship came in 2012, when I accepted a job offer from the Daily Mail. This seemed to be taken almost as an act of aggression by the Camerons – though I never wrote negatively about them – and their immediate circle.
What annoyed me even more was the notion – unspoken but very much implied – that I should somehow act as an unpaid spokesperson for the Cameron government, that I should be a sycophant rather than, as I had always been, a true friend, an equal, able to speak plainly and honestly. I began to wonder whether they saw me differently to the way I saw them.
If I helped out with stuff – organising our Ibiza holidays or taking up the slack on the school run, or performing other administrative duties – it was because I cared about them and we were mates. But now the worm of doubt began to creep in: was I a friend or just a fixer? Even worse, was I… staff?
After all, there was that time when I’d been helping out in my usual way at a very Chipping Norton Set party at Dave and Sam’s house in Witney, buzzing around keeping an eye on the food, making sure glasses were topped up, keeping a weather eye on the kids and I saw Jeremy Clarkson talking to, I think, Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News UK, owners of The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun.
I drifted up to say hello, but Clarkson took one look at the bottle of white in my hand and, without looking at me directly, waved his hand and said: ‘Actually, can you get me a glass of red?’ At the time I’d thought it was hilarious but maybe a server was essentially how they all thought of me.
Above all, there was a sense that my career – and my husband’s – didn’t matter as much as the Camerons’. That we had to compromise our beliefs and views in order to facilitate their life at No 10. For me, this was perhaps the most insulting notion of all, not least because before any of the politics and grandeur, I’d always bent over backwards to help my friends when they needed it.
But also because it smacked of entitlement, which was not something I’d ever associated with Samantha. I was deeply upset about the growing distance between us.
Meanwhile, Michael had been appointed to his dream job of Education Secretary. Very quickly he’d polarised public opinion into stark camps of fan and foe. He’d come in hard, bringing in more rigorous exams, smashing grade inflation, rebooting Ofsted inspections and going head-to-head with the flabby and complacent teaching establishment.
I was all for how radical he was being. What I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at inwardly, from time to time, was the headstrong manner in which he did it, the way he merged a desire for change with a lack of understanding of how best to achieve it.
Of course, with hindsight, I can see that there was more than a little of the dread hand of Dominic Cummings at play. Then Michael’s special adviser, he was well known for being a blunt instrument and not suffering fools even remotely gladly. Michael had whiplash from turning the other cheek to the methods Dom used to ram things through the inertia of the Blob.
Mind you, the Blob would have tried the patience of Job: Michael regularly tore his hair out, when going through his red boxes in the evening, at the sheer incompetence, the staggering inability of some of the Blobbier civil servants at Education.
I can therefore sympathise. Every day, for Michael and Dom, must have felt like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid busting out against the Bolivian army – and that’s before the public started coiling their lynching ropes. By 2014, it suddenly became not just OK, but expected, to hate Gove. That’s when Dave decided to move him to ‘a less high-profile role’ as chief whip. Michael at first agreed – but, under close re-examination, realised this was a terrible idea.
For one thing, it was a clear demotion – and, much more catastrophic, it meant an annual pay cut of more than £36,000.
So he went back on his earlier assent to the move and Dave flipped. He shouted at Michael down the phone, then followed that up with a text: ‘You must realise that I divide the world into team players and w***ers. You’ve always been a team player. Please don’t become a w***er.’
Have you ever noticed that when people start talking about team players, it’s more often than not because they want the rest of the team to agree with them?
Cameron forced through the move. Michael was demoted. Worse, in my eyes, the PM was insultingly casual, in an entitled way that I didn’t often see in him, about the devastating effect that this would have not only on Michael’s income, but his morale.
So far, so politics. Then Max Hastings, grand old man of Fleet Street, wrote a piece condemning Michael’s demotion. Taking to Twitter, I requoted Hastings saying: ‘A shabby day’s work which Cameron will live to regret.’
Dave apparently yelled with fury when he was told. Suddenly our friendship with him seemed at breaking point and maybe it was all my fault. We still got invited to stay at Chequers but there was a new wariness between me and Dave. He resented what he saw as my interference – and Michael felt let down by Dave.
As for our joint Ibiza holidays, they were shelved in favour of Sam and Dave being hosted for free in Ibiza by uber-hairdresser John Frieda. A shadow of suspicion did flit across my mind that perhaps, for the Camerons, the job had become more important than their old muckers, that Michael and I might have outlived our usefulness.
Then came the Brexit campaign, with Michael famously deciding to join Vote Leave. Things got nasty very fast. At the end of February 2016, we were invited to a 50th birthday party for Andy Feldman, then chairman of the Conservatives and a great friend of both Michael and Dave. I texted Andy’s wife Gaby and suggested it might be better if we didn’t come. She was adamant we should, that it would be fine.
Dave’s gatekeeper Kate Fall also got in touch to say that the Camerons were very much looking forward to seeing us there.
It felt like a three-line whip, so I went. This was soon after a column I’d written for the Daily Mail, in which I did my best to explain the rationale behind Michael’s decision to back Leave. I hoped it would shed some light on the complexity of emotions around it – and act as a bit of an olive branch to Dave and Samantha. I was trying to explain that none of this was personal, that we could, if the will was there, overcome this and remain friends.
But I was wrong. As I was leaving the party, I paused to say thank you to Andy, who was sitting next to Samantha. She must have been a few drinks down and she let rip.
The incident was later leaked. According to The Sun, Samantha launched into a tirade, accusing me of ‘betrayal’. I don’t think I said very much as she laid into me, although The Sun wrote that the pair of us ‘ended up raising their voices and effing and blinding’.
I do recall she felt very strongly that I shouldn’t have put her name in the paper, that the Mail (which supported Brexit) was the enemy, and I was therefore complicit in a mission to bring down Dave.
There were so many things I could have said. That the Mail was a great paper; that I was proud to work there; that she had no right to tell me what I could or couldn’t write; but also that all this was just bloody ridiculous. We were friends, grown-ups. Our children had grown up together. Surely, I could have concluded, that was worth more than a stupid political disagreement?
But I was too shocked to argue and acutely aware that everyone was watching us. I just had to stand there and take my punishment.
I knew I shouldn’t have come – but maybe that was why Kate and Gaby had been so insistent: maybe it was a deliberate ambush, to give Sam the opportunity to dress me down.
I was embarrassed and upset and fled the room, mumbling an apology, not quite in tears, but on the verge.
That exchange, I’d realise later, hadn’t just been a row. It was the final shattering of a deep friendship that had been slowly buckling under the pressure of politics.
And, actually, it broke my heart.
Adapted from How Not To Be A Political Wife by Sarah Vine (HarperCollins, £20), to be published June 19. © Sarah Vine 2025. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 14/06/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
When Joan Collins came to dinner, my dad flirted with her like he was Alan Partridge. It was just one of THREE dreadful faux pas we made that night
Ivan Massow, Joan Collins and Michael Gove
I don’t remember an awful lot about who we shared a table with at the Black And White Ball of 2012, the Tories’ annual fundraiser, but I do remember one person very clearly: Joan Collins.
It was Sam Cameron who pointed her out to me and we admired her from afar. I’d had a few glasses so, imbued with Dutch courage, I decided to introduce myself. I waffled animatedly about make-up and wigs, which La Collins loved, being a devotee of both.
Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself asking if she and her husband Percy would like to come for supper at our house. To which she responded, even more to my surprise, that she’d like that.
Fair to say the evening was not an unmitigated success. For a start, I couldn’t help but see a slight look of horror flit across their faces as they walked up our rickety garden path and took their seats in our modest sitting room. I covered up any discomfort by revving around with the homemade canapes (eat your heart out, Meghan), including some quails’ eggs that I presented to Joan.
She took one, exclaiming, ‘how delicious!’ as she held it between her crimson-tipped fingers.
She bit into it. Oh the horror, the horror, as Joan’s selected egg turned out to be rather more soft-boiled than expected. It exploded all down her spotless white silk blouse, covering her in yolk.
She was charming about it, of course, but clearly put out. Faux pas number one. It got worse.
Faux pas number two: my parents were in town that week, so I’d decided it would be fun to invite them. I think perhaps I just thought they’d love to meet her, being of Joan’s generation.
My father started off by acting like a lovestruck schoolboy. His flirtation technique was a cross between Alan Partridge and Mr Bean. I saw Percy blench slightly as Dad lunged forward to help Joan clean her shirt.
I’d assumed Mum and Joan would get on famously, cast as they were from the same mould: both beautiful, ferociously disciplined, quick and funny, no stranger to a shoulder pad or four.
But something about my father’s mooning eyes clearly got Mum’s back up, because it was like watching cats prepare to fight; all waving tails and rictus grins.
Neither was prepared to share the limelight; my mother was, after all, the Joan Collins of her social set back at her home in Italy. At one point my father must have truly offended Joan because I saw her face set into glacial lines of fury. My mother shot him a very hard stare.
I started to feel a little sick. What to do when a diva looks ready to detonate in your kitchen?
Why, call in reinforcements: I decided to let the children come down, all soft and pink in their pyjamas in the hope of defusing things. Faux pas number three. ‘Oh, I know who you are!’ says seven-year-old Will. ‘You’re the lady from the Snickers advert.’
Joan’s eyes widened in mild horror; the ad showed her playing a football coach being a bitchy diva, before being sweetened back into his male body by his favourite chocolate bar. Will, perhaps sensing he hadn’t quite struck the right note, decided a compliment was needed. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘you don’t look like you’re 80 at all!’
Miraculously, Percy and Joan had us back – without the kids, funnily enough – to their palatial flat in one of Chelsea’s grandest mansion blocks.
If you’d told me on either night that I’d actually become friends with Joan, I would have laughed in your face. She is an absolute inspiration, not just for her sharp mind and dress sense – but for her razor wit.
We were once having a conversation about Ozempic, the weight-loss jab drug. ‘Oh, I love Ozempic,’ I said gaily. ‘I’ve been on it for years!’
Joan looked me up and down. ‘Really?’ she drawled, raising one of those incomparably well-drawn eyebrows and pausing for lethal effect. ‘I’m not sure it’s working terribly well, darling…’
Michael was so hungover he feared he might throw up on the Pope’s shoes
Not long after the 2010 election, in Michael’s first months as Secretary of State for Education; Pope Benedict XVI was on an official visit, and as Secretary of State, Michael was part of a delegation due to greet him as he addressed a teacher-training college in Twickenham.
The night before, an old friend and flatmate came over for supper, bringing with him a particularly nice bottle of single malt as a present. Whisky is not really my thing, so after supper I left them to it.
They must have reminisced about old times well into the night, because when I woke up the following morning to do the school run, Michael was sound asleep in a cloud of peaty fumes and the bottle had just a wee dram left in it.
I took him a cup of tea. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be meeting the Pope this morning?’ I said breezily, albeit with a slightly panicked wifely undertone. There was a momentary pause as Michael’s whisky-sodden synapses registered this information and then he shot out of bed like a scalded cat. After a hot shower, hurried shave and several Alka-Seltzers, he clattered down the stairs and out the front door into the waiting car.
But pretty soon it occurred to him that he was apocalyptically hungover. ‘Food,’ he thought to himself, ‘what I need is food – and coffee.’ A strong cappuccino and an almond croissant were duly procured and consumed, and the car sped on towards Twickenham. By the time Michael got to the school, the combination of alcohol, milky coffee and almond paste had begun to take effect. As he stood in the receiving line, sweating through a pounding headache and swaying slightly, it dawned on him that he now felt alarmingly sick. Clutching Vince Cable’s arm for support, he focused his eyes on the floor. Visions of him throwing up on the papal moccasins swam before his eyes, together with the next day’s headlines: ‘Gove vomits on Pontiff ‘; ‘Possessed Tory in Papal assault’.
‘Are you all right, Michael?’ asked Vince. He didn’t dare open his mouth to reply.
And then it happened. After what seemed like an eternity, the red papal shoes finally came to a halt in front of him.
Benedict XVI clasped Michael’s trembling palms in his and uttered a quiet greeting. Michael looked up and, in that very moment, his hangover simply evaporated.
The instant his flesh made contact with the papery skin of the Pontiff, he was cured. Verily, it was a miracle.
