It is getting harder and harder to believe that the issuances emitting from Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine aren’t an elaborate sabotage by someone who hates Sarah Vine. The most recent is her “leaked” (accidentally misaddressed) email to her husband, Michael Gove, which I would like to reproduce in full. “Thoughts”, it is titled, which is one way of putting it.

“Very important that we focus now on individual obstacles and thoroughly overcome them. I really think Michael should have a Henry or a Beth with him for this morning’s crucial meetings. One simple message. You MUST have SPECIFIC assurances from Boris, OTHERWISE you cannot guarantee your support. The details can be worked out later on, but without that you have no leverage.

“Crucially, the membership will not have the necessary reassurance to back Boris, neither will [Daily Mail editor Paul] Dacre/[Rupert] Murdoch, who instinctively dislike Boris but trust your ability enough to support a Boris Gove ticket. Do not concede any ground. Be your stubborn best. GOOD LUCK.”

I’ve had a sudden attack of the Joanna Trollopes and am much more interested in what this says about their relationship than what it means for the government ahead, so let’s be brisk with the political stuff. It is plain that there is very little trust between Gove and Boris Johnson, but nobody will be nominated for Mensa when they notice that Johnson isn’t always as good as his word.

It is clear too how much store is set by the approbation of the Mail and the Sun. Dispiritingly, that barely needed saying either. It is obvious how much of the poison of the referendum and its aftermath was created by the Mail and the Sun preaching incessant hate, and equally obvious how much the high command of the leave campaign has depended on the media moguls while pretending to abhor racism.

Rounding off the list of things we already knew, it is clear that Gove had no plan: no plan for if they won; no plan for if Cameron resigned; no plan for the leadership battle, no plan for any of this. And if Gove had no plan, imagine what Johnson – with his famous eye for detail – has up his sleeve.

Possibly the most illuminating thing is how amateurish this negotiation is. The Conservative hatred of Europe has recently been partly ascribed to how often they were bested in EU talks, often sending in a recent graduate, thinking that the UK held all the cards, only to be taken apart by some Italian, gnarly with experience, who’d been making deals with his Polish counterpart since before Mr PPE was born.

This has something of that naivety: is that the best they’ve got? “Er … make sure you ask him for something … before you’ve given him the only thing you’ve got to give him … doesn’t matter what it is, just make sure you ask, and if he doesn’t say yes, keep on asking for the thing we don’t know what it is, again.”

She addresses him as if he has just woken up from a 20-year snooze and has never heard of the Houses of Parliament

Far more intoxicating is the insight it gives into Gove and Vine’s relationship, a sort of careless babying, her mind only half on him, but cooing with maternal sweetness when it is. It starts with the statement of such blinding obviousness it would only really make sense in her column, where she is paid by the word.

It is a completely baffling thing to say to one’s actual spouse. Darling. We need to IDENTIFY problems and then SOLVE them. It slips between addressing Michael Gove in the third person, as if she were instructing a nanny (I really think Michael should take a packed lunch into these crucial meetings, and not just rusks), and addressing him directly. The kindest possible reading is that she is writing the email on one screen and has Net-a-Porter open on another.

It is packed with flattery – he is vital and courageous and stubborn – but the very idea that he would need to be told such rudimentary things is profoundly insulting. The capital letters are an interesting touch, as if she is yelling to make herself heard through a veil of senility.

She addresses him as if he has just woken up from a 20-year snooze and has never heard of the Houses of Parliament – or to put it another way, is a complete idiot. There is none of the shorthand you would expect from people who actually know each other: it is bizarre that a couple who spent years on the same newspaper, have two children, work for the Conservative party and its newspaper attack-dog respectively and live under the same roof would ever need to spell out something as simple as “Dacre/Murdoch … instinctively dislike Boris”.

Thought about too deeply, it just engenders this awful sadness: for the country, for the future, for the pettiness that has brought us here, for the hollow compliments that pass for intimacy between these solipsistic people, for the whole rotten business. I prefer the sabotage theory.