Viele Tagebuchschreiber betätigen sich als Chronisten, reflektieren ihr Leben und bereichern die Geschichtsschreibung um eine Menge Klatsch und Tratsch. When she discovers Dave “laughing uproariously” in conversation with her husband about the supposedly unusual characteristics of historian Andrew Roberts’s “male member” and comparing notes on which female politicians were “beddable”, she is positively indulgent.

But if the first half of the book is a giddy romp through life under the “chumocracy”, the second is more bittersweet, chronicling the fracturing of old friendships post-Brexit in what has become a court exiled from power. I giggled when there was some mention of someone who had fallen foul of him and was a “name forever loathed in the Nott household” – ah, I thought, just like Nott in ours. A professional partner and loyal spouse, Swire has strong political opinions herself - sometimes more 'No, Minister' than 'Yes'. Yet, enraging as some will find it, this is the culture that governed Britain for most of the last decade, and there are few more gallopingly readable accounts of the strengths and weaknesses that led us to the present day. A leaver by temperament, in a circle of Tory remainers, by the end Sasha has come to feel something of an outsider herself.

The diary covers not only the rise and fall of the Cameroons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end of last year when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left parliament. It’s very much a view of politics from inside “the gang” and to read it is to understand the grating rage of those outside, realising that power lies not around the cabinet table but in jolly kitchen suppers with an impenetrable clique of old friends. Swire is at least vaguely aware of how insufferable it can seem; glancing around the Camerons’ Downing Street Christmas party in 2011, she realises “we all holiday together, stay in each other’s grace and favour homes, our children play together, we text each other bypassing the civil servants … this is a very particular, narrow tribe of Britain and their hangers on. Of course, there is something about the phrase 'political wife' that still evokes an image of a passive, helmet-haired, jam-making woman standing silently behind her husband, either smiling admirably as he asks for votes or frowning firmly as he admits to abusing his power or marriage.

We have come a long way, thankfully, since the days of political wives being expected to stand mutely by their man. Here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. Despite the bitchy, rather sniping tone which gives the book its flavour (and frankly, is the main reason most people will read it) she is a pretty astute judge of character and nails (or skewers) a lot of people with disarming accuracy. They were close enough to “Dave and Sam” to spend the day after the Brexit referendum getting sloshed with the defeated prime minister, while he raged about those he felt had wronged him. These are the things which the author doesn’t realise she’s revealing: how utterly self-seeking, venal and empty-hearted are herself and her MP husband and, it could seem, the whole Cameron, Osborne, Johnson clique.It makes it no easier to hear that she believes him to be “desperately lonely and unhappy on the inside”.

The struggles of ordinary people are ignored in a life of champagne, weekends at Chequers, long holidays in Cornwall and Devon, and afternoons gossiping over high tea and cake.She seemed somewhat in awe of Samantha Cameron, and also rather jealous of her various business successes.