English author Frances Osborne, who happens to be married to the new chancellor of the exchequer, has taken a skeleton out of her closet and turned it into a book.
Osborne’s best-selling biography of her aristocratic and famously libertine great-grandmother, “The Bolter “– which will be feted Thursday night at a Washington book party hosted by former Sen. Fred Thompson, among others — is hardly the kind of material you’d expect from a Cabinet wife in the United States.
“Is there even a phrase ‘Cabinet wife?’ ” Osborne asked. “Cabinet wife sounds like you are locked in and you’re just taken out for various occasions.”
Osborne added, “Wives do not have the role in the U.K. like they do in the U.S.”
She said she is focused on her writing career and her children, and is carving out an independent identity from her husband George’s political career, even deciding that the family will stay in their Notting Hill home in London and will not move into the official residence on 11 Downing Street.
“I don’t have any official role going forward. I’ll be there to support him and if he needs me to go to dinner with him, I’ll do that,” she said.
As for the strange flower on the family tree, Osborne is a direct descendant of notorious party girl Lady Idina Sackville, who scandalized English society in the 1920s. She’s remembered for ditching five husbands and forming the Happy Valley set in the British colony of Kenya, famous for its sexual promiscuity and drug use.
Osborne penned the biography “The Bolter” about Sackville’s scandalous heritage, and chatted with Yeas about how that piece of her DNA haunts her.
“Maybe a little bit of a desire not to be sort of bound by convention just because it’s there,” she said about her empathy for her great-grandmother. “As my husband says, ‘I hope you haven’t inherited any of her characteristics.’ ”
