SIMON WALTERS: Sasha Swire left out claims her Tory minister husband had an affair in her new book

The wife of ex-minister Hugo Swire fled to David Cameron in ‘distress’ after claiming her ‘pig’ of a husband had an affair. 

Sasha Swire, who has lifted the lid on sex and political shenanigans in the Tory party, reveals in her new book that she dashed to Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence, when her marriage was in crisis. 

Her ‘world was falling apart’ because of her husband but Mr Cameron and wife Samantha ‘slowly brought me back to life’, she writes. Mr Cameron even allegedly gave Sir Hugo a ‘ticking off’. 

Lady Swire, 57, does not state in her explosive book, Diary of an MP’s Wife, that this incident related to an alleged affair involving her husband, 60. However, the Mail has been told by multiple reliable sources that she has said Sir Hugo had an extramarital relationship when he was a minister in Mr Cameron’s government. 

Invited to respond, Lady Swire told the Mail cryptically last night: ‘Three sauces [sic]? Is that Bearnaise? Peppercorn? Or Marie Rose?’ Asked for a more detailed response, she did not reply. 

In her book, Lady Swire lavishes praise on ‘family man’ Mr Cameron for saving her marriage. She salutes his ‘integrity’, arguing he will be judged well by history, before adding pointedly, ‘But he has been a good friend to me as well.’ 

This is the preface to her moving account of the day she fled to Chequers as a result of her ‘pig’ of a husband. 

She writes: ‘When in 2013 I felt my carefully constructed world was falling apart around me – ‘H’ [her name for Sir Hugo] being a pig and always away – I remember ringing him up in a distressed state and he told me to just get in a car and come down to Chequers, where Sam and he slowly brought me back to life. I can hear him now, ringing up ‘H’ to give him a severe ticking off, with me smiling on in gratitude.’ 

Lady Swire’s book describes a series of blazing marital rows between the couple – and flirtatious behaviour by both. A year before she turned to the Camerons in despair, the couple’s marriage was ‘in a difficult place’ and she ‘barely saw’ her husband, Lady Swire writes. 

Sir Hugo told Mr Cameron he feared his wife would to divorce him. Lady Swire says her husband joked he had ‘fallen in love’ with a ‘gorgeous’ 30-year-old female South American diplomat. 

Mr Cameron yesterday admitted that Lady Swire’s diaries, recounting his political rivalries and alleged sexualised comments, were ‘kind of embarrassing’. 

The new book recounts a series of marital disputes beween Lady Swire and her husband. She says that in July 2012: ‘I barely see him any more; he’s always in Ireland or the House or working in the constituency, and when he’s home he hardly speaks to me. It is midnight when he finally comes to hide in the corner of my cage, but it’s not from calm, it’s from exhaustion. 

‘I flare up. It has an effect, because the next day he texts Kate [Baroness Kate Fall, Mr Cameron’s Number 10 ‘gatekeeper’] saying if he is not brought back from exile [a reference to his job as Northern Ireland minister] at the next reshuffle his wife is going to divorce him.’ Number 10 promised Sir Hugo he will get a new job. 

When the Camerons and Swires holidayed together in Cornwall in 2012, Mr Cameron asked Sir Hugo over dinner, ‘How do you cope? With her? Your wife I mean?’ 

Sir Hugo was duly promoted to Foreign Office minister in the same month. 

Lady Swire also recounted how in October 2012 her husband ‘looked guilty’ and declared to her: ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ 

‘Oh yes, who is it this time?’ she asked. ‘The Panamanian ambassador – she’s gorgeous, and just 30,’ he replied. ‘Thirty! Am I getting old?’ exclaimed Lady Swire, who was then aged 51. ‘Yes, Hasta la vista, baby!’ he said. 

Lady Swire says she was ‘due to meet’ the Panamanian ambassador but her husband told his wife her attendance was ‘cancelled’ on the grounds that it was ‘inappropriate’ because they would be ‘conducting bilateral talks’. 

‘Fine, I say, carry on flirting,’ she writes. 

Later, Sir Hugo was invited to Buckingham Palace by Prince Andrew, where ‘somehow conversation comes around to the Panamanian ambassador’. 

‘Have you met her?’ asked the Prince. ‘Have I!’ replied Sir Hugo. On another occasion, Lady Swire flirted at a Palace banquet during a Mexican state visit in March 2015, the diaries recount. 

She tells an unnamed ‘smoothie’ that she is ‘a very fed up MP’s wife’ because her husband is too busy to take her on holiday. 

She talks of ‘getting a lover to take me’, and they exchange banter about him taking her to Corsica. The ‘smoothie’ offers to take her there in his private plane. When she says she hates flying he says she can go in his ‘super yacht’. 

When Sir Hugo asked her what she was saying ‘to that man,’ she replied: ‘He’s taking me to Corsica.’ She jokes she doesn’t care if he ‘bangs her up in his harem,’ she is going. 

Meanwhile, at a dinner hosted by the Camerons in November 2015 Lady Swire tells shocked guests: ‘I enjoy sex much more in my 50s than in my 40s.’ 

In 2015, during the ‘Sexminster scandal’, she notes: ‘Looking back on my own younger days the only person who patted me on the bum on greeting me was one David Cameron.’ 

At the time when a number of MPs were being accused of sexual misdemeanours, Lady Swire says she was ‘assured’ by Sir Hugo ‘he has not partaken in any groping himself’. 

‘Time will tell,’ she reflects, adding lightheartedly: ‘He is that age where he needs more of it and is getting less.’ 

But despite all their sniping, Lady Swire says her husband is the hero of her book for ‘riding the political tiger’. 

Elsewhere in the book, Lady Swire claims she was propositioned by Mr Cameron in 2011 when their families were on holiday in Cornwall. ‘At one point, on the coastal path, he (Cameron) asks me not to walk ahead of him. 

‘Why?’ I ask, and he says: ‘Because that scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones. It makes me want to grab you and push you into the bushes and give you one!’ 

When the Mail went to her home in Devon last night, she declined to comment. 

When asked for a comment on the claims that Lady Swire had included a coded reference to an alleged affair involving her husband in her book, her literary agent Caroline Dawnay replied, ‘Have fun’, and put the phone down. 

Sir Hugo did not reply to requests for a response. 

More bitchy jibes from Sasha the slasher…

Cameron’s black dog:

Lady Swire describes how the ‘black dog’ of despair ‘descended upon David Cameron’ as his premiership hit trouble in 2012, when he and George Osborne were ‘at their lowest ebb’. 

The then-prime minister could ‘see it all unravelling before his eyes’ and said it was ‘like watching a version of (computer game) Angry Birds: all governments in Europe falling. He’s wondering whether his is next’. 

Mr Cameron backed a bizarre plan to use IKEA to stop marital rows over flat-pack furniture, the book claims. The idea was part of a Number 10 ‘relationship agenda’ dreamed up by his ex-aide Steve Hilton. 

The plan was to print ‘ten top tips on relationships in IKEA flat packs’ to help couples deal with the stress of putting up their wardrobes, says Lady Swire. 

Cameron was ‘genuinely excited’ by the proposal but an aide told him he was in danger of ‘looking like Prince Charles talking to plants’. 

Wives’ curtain spat 

The ex-minister’s wife risks being accused of poor taste for saying she was ‘p***ed off’ by Rose Paterson, the late wife of former cabinet member Owen Paterson, in a row over curtains. 

Mrs Paterson, 63, was found dead in woodlands near her family home in June on her husband’s birthday. Lady Swire said she was ‘fuming’ with Mrs Paterson’s ‘removal of two sets of curtains’ from the Swires’ flat at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland in 2011. 

As fellow Northern Ireland ministers, Sir Hugo and Mr Paterson had grace and favour apartments at the castle. 

‘She decided ours would be better suited to her sitting room and promptly took them without a by your leave. We now have a frothing Colefax and Fowler floral confection completely out of keeping with our interiors. I rant at ‘H’ (her term for Sir Hugo).’ 

When Sir Hugo tells her ‘calm down, dear!’ and reminds her Rose was the husband of his boss, Lady Swire spits: ‘I don’t care who she is, it’s bloody bad manners! I’m going straight to the top on this one.’ 

Incredibly, she complained to David Cameron about ‘the curtain spat’. She protests: ‘The truth is those Patersons really p*** me off.’ 

Rachel the ‘tornado’ 

Lady Swire complains that Boris Johnson’s sister, journalist Rachel, ‘the equivalent of a human tornado’, came over to ‘harangue’ her over government plans to shake up the forestry industry when she was dining at a ‘Notting Hill eaterie’ with David Cameron’s Number 10 aide Kate [now Baroness] Fall. 

When Fall played down the issue, Miss Johnson said: ‘That’s a complete lie, Kate.’ 

Miss Johnson is ‘a violent dangerous rotating column of air that’ threatens to ‘lift us off our seats’, says Lady Swire in the book. 

‘Oily’ Hunt 

She mocks ‘oily’ ex-foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt for being the first to give up his official car in ‘in his usual mad PR dash’. 

Lady Swire says sports minister Hugh Robertson said of Mr Hunt: ‘It’s alright for him, he’s rich. He can get a taxi home.’ 

Brad Pitt’s ears 

When Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt attended a 2014 Foreign Office seminar hosted by foreign secretary William Hague, Sir Hugo was distracted by Pitt’s ears. 

He claims ‘one of Pitt’s ears doesn’t match the other – and he wears high heels, so there! He’s not perfect’. 

‘Swivel hips’ envoy 

China’s ambassador in London is cruelly mocked as ‘Old Swivel Hips’ in the book. 

Lady Swire says she and her Foreign Office minister husband gave Liu Xiaoming the nickname because of ‘his ability to turn between two opposing systems’. 

She says ‘Swivel Hips’ had Downing Street officials ‘screaming at the walls’ over his threat to scrap a visit by Chinese premier Li Keqiang unless he met the Queen during his 2014 trip to the UK. 

When Mr Li arrived at Heathrow he demanded the red carpet, which Lady Swire says was more like a ‘bath mat,’ was replaced by an ‘Oscar-night carpet stretching all the way up to the plane. 

Sir Hugo told Downing Street ‘Swivel Hips needed taking down a peg or two’. 

More brandy, bishop? 

The ex-archbishop of York, John Sentamu, said David Cameron ‘lacked backbone’ as he drank brandy with Sir Hugo during a stay at Hillsborough Castle in Belfast in 2012. 

Lady Swire says: ‘As the brandy takes effect the dog-collarless Archbishop becomes increasingly robust. 

Dr Sentamu asks for another brandy to take to bed and ‘rolls down the corridor glass in hand’. 

‘Puffed-up’ Fellowes 

Lady Swire scorns ‘puffed-up’ Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes and his ‘eccentric’ wife Emma at a shooting weekend. 

Lord Fellowes was ‘eloquent and intelligent but faintly ridiculous’ and ‘obsessed with social hierarchy and nostalgia’. 

She said his ‘turban-wearing’ wife was ‘ Julian’s add-on and sticks up her hand to seek permission from him to interrupt’. 

‘Sad’ Hezza 

At a gathering of Tory grandees at Michael Heseltine’s home in 2012, the former deputy prime minister plays a prank by claiming the Queen has asked him to replace David Cameron as PM. 

He goes round the dinner table handing out ‘cabinet jobs’ to guests, including Lady Swire’s father, Sir John Nott, defence secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s administration. Her father said it was ‘all a bit sad’. 

‘Mad’ Dorries

Nadine Dorries, now minister for mental health, was branded ‘mad’ after she attacked ‘arrogant posh boys’ David Cameron and George Osborne in 2012. 

‘The old criticism is back to haunt them,’ says Lady Swire. 

‘This time it’s promoted by Mad Nad Dorries who accuses DC and GO of being ‘arrogant posh boys’ (yes, and the news is?) 

• Diary of an MP’s Wife by Sasha Swire is published by Little, Brown, on September 24.