Böcker av Sasha Swire

What is it like to be a wife of a politician in modern-day Britain? Sasha Swire finally lifts the lid. For more than twenty years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. A professional partner and loyal spouse, Swire has strong political opinions herself - sometimes more 'No, Minister' than 'Yes'. She detonates the stereotype of the dutiful wife. From shenanigans in Budleigh Salterton to state banquets at Buckingham Palace, gun-toting terrorist busters in pizza restaurants to dinners in Downing Street sitting next to Boris Johnson, Devon hedges to partying with City hedgies, she observes the great and the not-so-great at the closest of quarters. The results are painfully revealing and often hilariously funny. Here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. Swire showed up, shored up and rarely shut up. She also wrote it all down. Diary of an MP's Wife is a searingly honest, wildly indiscreet and often uproarious account of what life is like in the thick of it.

In Edgeland, the political diarist Sasha Swire escapes the confines of Westminster to walk the northern stretch of the South West Coast Path. Starting at Minehead in Somerset, she follows the well-trodden path to Land's End in Cornwall, walking it in sections over a decade-long period, returning each year like a migratory bird from the spot she had previously left off from. The result is an immersive, beguiling and literary exploration of one of the most enigmatic, beautiful and popular coastlines on earth. It is also a contemplative and very personal response to a story about our English shore from pre-Celtic times to the present day; of the upheaval of rocks; of astonishing botany; of pilgrimage and customs; of the exploitation of resources and of dangers to come. Swire identifies how important edges are to us as she walks, not only in how we see our world but in our cerebral response to them. She observes that the outside limits, the borders, the line where two surfaces of a solid meet actively encourage not only the flora and fauna but people to gather, create, generate resistance, and create new ways of living and working. She discovers that the path is not only a walk through Britain's windswept and wave-battered western fringes but a tale about how we and nature have, through extraordinary resilience and a relentless spirit, learnt to tame the various forces that are stacked up against us. That we live at the edge of the possible.

Sasha Swire's diaries open a fabulously insightful and revealing window on Westminster life - one never documented before.