Hugh Grant, self-confessed grump and Fourth Estate muzzler, was at a drinks party I went to the other day in his old stomping ground of Notting Hill. It happened to be the day after he went to Makerfield to lend Andy Burnham his support. Grant was doing his occasional ‘man of the people’ act (Latymer Upper; New College, Oxford), having attached himself barnacle-like to the next PM in the apparent belief that Burnham will one day tame the wicked Murdoch/Rothermere press. How naive is that?
Anyway, I went up to him and said: ‘Oh, you turned up in my husband’s old constituency as well, and it was the absolute kiss of death.’ He looked mildly amused. ‘You lost then?’ ‘No, we won it outright. So, thank you.’ I told him the constituency – East Devon – and could see him trying to clear the fog, so I thrust out my hand. ‘Sasha Swire.’ Grant, a lover of F1 and fast cars – you know what women say about men like that – jammed his foot on the accelerator, catapulting from stationary to take-off in one violent, neck-snapping surge. One moment he was idling, the next he was all flame and thrust. I was left standing there, soot-faced, eyebrows gone. I’ve never seen anyone take off that fast. ‘I came to your fucking constituency to get rid of your absolute TWAT of a husband!’ he thundered, ‘twat’ apparently being his preferred synonym for Conservative. ‘But you don’t even know my husband. How do you know he’s a twat?’ (As it happens, my husband, Hugo, wasn’t even East Devon’s candidate at the 2019 general election – he had already retired – but I forgot to mention that.) ‘Just FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF, you vile, horrible woman.’
He then accused me of being drunk – I’d had half a glass of wine – and claimed I’d written horrible things about him in my published diary. Not true. I merely sketched him. If you’re a B-movie romcom star campaigning in a general election, you can hardly expect a legal right to privacy. Politics is not a red-carpet premiere, with awkward people kept behind a velvet rope by overconfident PR women.
He kept swearing at me, spraying me with spit, until his leggy Swedish wife stepped between us. Her brow furrowed with concern, and looking as though she’d done this before, she quietly apologised and asked me to leave the conversation. So I did. An hour later, as we were heading out of the party, Grant was standing by the exit. I couldn’t resist. ‘Bye-bye,’ I smiled. ‘And thanks for the diary entry.’ His face turned to stone.
When I got home, my ‘twat’ of a husband was on Grant’s side. ‘Why did you provoke him again as we were leaving?’ ‘Because, Hugo, he’d just verbally assaulted me.’ I added that had I been a man, Grant would never have spoken to me like that, because a man would probably have decked him there and then. And had my husband been a real man himself, he would have challenged him to pistols at dawn.
The following evening, at a rather more political drinks party in Chelsea, I ran into Thangam Debbonaire, the former MP for Bristol West, and told her about my altercation with Grant. ‘I absolutely hate that man,’ she said. ‘He did exactly the same thing to me.’ Apparently, when Debbonaire was shadow culture secretary, Grant came to lobby her on press regulation. Debbonaire told me that he launched into a furious rant, jabbing his finger in her face. She said everyone in the room was left trembling. Then, during the 2024 general election, Grant waded in again, as if on a personal vendetta against her, endorsing Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, who went on to unseat her. In Denyer’s leaflet, Grant stated: ‘It’s so refreshing to see a politician with integrity, who puts the public first.’ Denyer has recently taken a leave of absence to recover from ‘burnout’, putting herself first. Debbonaire, meanwhile, is sitting pretty in the House of Lords. Happy ending, as they say in the film business.
I come home to Devon, still slightly shaken by the drama. The viper’s bugloss is in glorious bloom along the edge of the track. Its roots were once believed to cure the bite of a viper. I think about Grant. He must be feeling rather hacked off just now: Harry has lost his case to the Mail and Liz Hurley may have to rediscover the virtues of holding her dresses together with safety pins following the reported £50 million cost of the action. Truth is, Grant has never had much difficulty dishing it out. It’s being on the receiving end that doesn’t seem to suit him. Consider this diary my herbal remedy. And my bite back.
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