Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, and journalist Sarah Vine have announced their separation after 20 years of marriage.
In a joint statement released on Friday, Gove and Vine said they remained “close friends” and would continue supporting their two children. They requested everyone to give them privacy and established that they won’t be commenting further.
Gove and Vine met in 1999 and married in 2001. “A friend of the high-profile couple told PA Media they had “drifted apart over the past couple of years” but it was an “entirely amicable” split and “there is no one else involved”,” Guardian reported.
For those who may not know, Vine is the godmother to one of David and Samantha Cameron’s children.
Last week she wrote about former health secretary Matt Hancocks’ affair with his advisor and breaking Covid protocol. She went on record to say that it “showed that Westminster life could drive a wedge between partners.”
Stating the power is an “aphrodisiac”, Vine wrote, “Westminster is a place of myriad distractions for the politician seeking refuge from his or her home life,” and that she understood “how you can go from being happily married to the kind of person who gets caught so unfortunately on CCTV”.
“The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade” and that there were some politicians who could walk away from power and others “who will compromise everything for the sake of it”, Vine added.
Gove joins names like Boris Johnson, now Matt Hancock whose marriages came to an end during their tenure with the UK government. Further to that, Vine emphasised that “Westminster changes people” and wives of senior politicians “are still more or less the same person they were when they got married” but their husbands sometimes were not.
