If only the Sarah Gove email didn't tell us everything we already knew

An accidental glimpse into a politician's wife's outbox only reveals the shocking but predictable machinations of a politician's wife

Sarah Vine and Michael Gove earlier this year. The leaked email was sent from Ms Vine to her husband and his aides (PA)

The only way you can be sure it’s real life and you’ve not slipped down a wormhole into some Last Days political horror drama is that not even a British House of Cards re-re-make would cast Frank Underwood as a three-chinned Smeagol in Punch-Me glasses. However low the budget, even Channel 5 would find a better Claire than a D-list Katie Hopkins churning out I-don’t-know-if-you-know-but-my-life’s-better-than-yours snidefests for a two grand a time while quietly mapping out how to detonate the hopes of your unborn kids in a game of liars poker with a no shame buy-in.

Yes yes, I know you shouldn’t descend to the level of a woman who slags off the second kitchen of another politician’s wife despite having had both her’s redone at taxpayer expense, but if the last week has proved anything then ascend if you want but the action’s all down in the gutter.

Of course, the depth of Leave duplicity was moved beyond doubt during its two month tour round the nation in the big red bullshit bus, its artless protagonists occasionally hopping out to tell whoppers so blatant that you could almost see them emerge, little brown vapour clouds hanging in the air like breath in winter.

But even so, as we all wondered how it had taken Ms Sarah Vine/Gove six days to turn around the inside story of the Moment Michael F*cked Us All, complete with ‘cups of strong brew’, ‘therapeutic monopoly’, and ‘a coveted chicken and sweetcorn sandwich,’ pausing only to hand wring about the tribulations of life on Twitter for a politician’s spouse with the ‘Go Home Vermin’ graffiti on the Hammersmith Polish Centre not yet dry, it was almost a relief to learn she’d been otherwise occupied going the full Claire Blunderwood on the family laptop.

Probably, some modern take on Shakespeare has already been done in which Lady MacBeth emails MacBeth to tell him to ‘screw his courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail’ but then accidentally cc’s in a member of the public who leaks their plot to Sky News, but again, to my near certain knowledge this is all real life. It is actually happening.

To think that a few thousand people had bristled at the suggestion, in Ms Vine’s Wednesday morning column that “he - we - are now in charge.” By lunch time we knew for a fact she genuinely meant it.

It is certainly unfortunate timing that, not a fortnight after the murder of a young MP prompted an urgent reminder that most politicians are decent people and not venal sociopaths casually trashing lives to satiate their own demented ambition, the wife of the man who has emerged victorious while all around him crumbles is, as suspected, up to his eyeballs in ‘leverage’ and the ‘necessary reassurances from Dacre/Murdoch.’

It all brings to mind the Vince Cable tuition fees mea culpa of not so long ago. It is scarcely a year since the former Business Secretary was widely admired for the admission that, hand on heart, they’d only sworn they wouldn’t raise tuition fees because they’d never imagined anyone ever making them not do it. Or as Homer Simpson famously put it: “I swear to God Marge, I never thought you’d find out.”

Jobs will go, lives will be crushed, whole years of the nation’s precious energies and anxieties needlessly thrown away in a world that’s changing faster than ever. That we now know it’s all some megalomaniac stitchup would be depressing enough, if the more depressing fact weren’t that we all knew it already.