The intrusion of politics into personal relationships has been an eagerly documented feature of the Trump-Brexit era, which this week found its perfect expression: a granular account of the end of the marriage between Sarah Vine and Michael Gove. You may think, as I did, you’re not interested in this, but hold up. A recent excerpt in the Daily Mail from How Not to Be a Political Wife, Vine’s forthcoming memoir, contained not only the suggestion that Brexit ruined their marriage, but that a key trigger in its collapse was Andrea Leadsom’s political manoeuvring. Has Andrea Leadsom ruined any of your relationships? It is certainly a question worth asking.

Or more broadly: do people really break up with each other because of big-P politics? In the case of Vine/Gove – which sounds like a tortured play at the National that, despite the playwright’s best hopes, never transferred to the screen – it’s a complicated picture. This wasn’t a separation brought on by opposing views about Europe, but rather, in Vine’s account, by the stress caused when her husband backed Brexit and drove a wedge between the couple and their pro-European friends and colleagues. Brexit broke their marriage but only because it put in motion a train of events that ended in David Cameron standing down, Leadsom scuppering Boris Johnson’s first run for top office, Theresa May becoming prime minister, and, ultimately, Gove losing his cabinet position.

This isn’t how most of us experience politics,........

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