I never thought I’d say this, but I actually feel sorry for Sarah Vine

I’m sure many of you can’t wait to read How Not to be a Political Wife by Sarah Vine, ex-spouse of the Rt Hon Michael Gove, now editor of The Spectator. It is out on 19 June. So to help you through this nerve-racking time, I’m sharing some thoughts on the excerpts that have been published in the Daily Mail, where she’s been a star columnist for a long time.

These extracts are frightfully candid, infuriating and exasperating, sad and bitter, funny, self-aggrandising, unknowing. It is about upsetting separations and divorces – her own, yes, but also the bust-up between Boris Johnson and Gove, as well as the falling outs between Tory Remainer and Brexiter wives.

Vine has no filters. I like that. She shares her pain freely. Too many people don’t or can’t. She was loyal to her man. When I tweeted that Gove reminded me of Kaa, the python in The Jungle Book, she scolded me on social media.

Her description of her marriage and Boris Johnson’s chaotic government unravelling at the same time is, unintentionally, poetic. Snaky Gove was in both dramas. One of the saddest revelations in the book is about Vine moving into the box room after trying to make Michael feel loved, “but it seemed I couldn’t make him care about anything but his one true passion: politics”. She’s believed that for years.

But that’s as far as my sympathy can go for a woman who has, in her influential column, been cruel, vain and so right-wing that after I read her horrible stuff, my teeth hurt. These are neither nice nor good people.

The book displays the shambolic, narcissistic, mendacious and ethically challenged Tory MPs and ministers from David Cameron to Boris Johnson and beyond. There are wonderfully malevolent descriptions of Johnson, Andrea Leadsom, Theresa May, and Gove himself.

We get to know the strange tribe of Tory wives, their codes of loyalty, secrecy and true blue wifey values. Then came the EU referendum: “Looking back, Brexit truly marked the beginning of the end of my marriage to Michael Gove… Our close-knit group of friends … were slowly pulling apart. Godparents were at war with each other. Children, who had grown up in each other’s houses, were suddenly non-speakers as the adults took sides … So much of my life – my identity – had been built on these relationships and now the whole landscape of my existence was fracturing … Messages went unanswered, calls not returned, emails ignored … We’d been banished from the court of Cameron.”

It’s hard to muster sympathy for Vine, who we know from email leaks exerted considerable influence on her ex. He, Dominic Cummings, Johnson and other plotters took us out of the EU with fraudulent claims and promises. Couples, families, communities, neighbourhoods were fractured. The bones will not mend. The country is still broken. She doesn’t appear to give a damn about that.

When calling out the Telegraph, which called her a “latter-day Lady Macbeth”, Vine goes all feminist, denounces this as a “lazy, sexist trope”, and even sympathises with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, whom she has demonised for years.

For right-wingers like Vine, it’s all about me, me, me; us, us, us. Her book is a good reminder of why we got sick of them and voted them out.

For that I am immensely grateful.