Boris and Carrie: ‘She wants a clique, he’s a loner, in both cases it’s about self-preservation’
Boris Johnson told MPs on Monday: “I get it and I will fix it”, as he promised a clear-out of No 10 and a complete overhaul of the way it works. But many senior Tories are sceptical that a shake-up of the prime minister’s office will be enough. “He says he’s just got to change the people around him and it will all be great, but the only thing that can change the environment around Boris Johnson is to remove Boris Johnson,” one says.
Another insider points out that the shake-up will also not involve the prime minister’s wife. The political is always personal for a leader, but the rows over lockdown-busting parties in No 10 have highlighted just how blurred the lines are for Johnson.
Lines lead to Carrie
It is extraordinary how many of the strands of the Westminster drama that culminated on Monday in the publication of the Sue Gray report lead back to Carrie Johnson. Even in her incomplete update, the senior official confirmed that the police are investigating a “gathering” in the Downing Street flat — said to have been a “victory party” held by “friends of Carrie” on the night that Dominic Cummings quit and which Johnson denied in the House of Commons had taken place.
Carrie Johnson is, depending on your point of view, the queen bee of No 10 or the spider at the centre of the Downing Street web.
Either way, the prime minister’s wife is the most powerful leader’s spouse in living memory and one half of a relationship that, it is now clear, allowed a culture of rule-breaking to take hold at the very top of government. One former Downing Street adviser says: “From wallpaper to parties, the holiday in Mustique or the evacuation of animals from Afghanistan, everything leads back to the advice the prime minister is receiving from his spouse and the fact that he is following it.”
‘Carrie Antoinette’
The 33-year-old mother of two was also at the lockdown-busting parties in the No 10 garden, muddying the distinction between work and play. And of course when the prime minister was ambushed by a cake it was his wife who carried it into the Cabinet room. If the government’s epitaph ends up being “let them eat cake”, as seems quite likely, it will be because one was produced by “Carrie Antoinette”.
She is reported to have given several allies the access code to the Downing Street flat, where top-secret documents were left lying around. And her influence over government policy has become increasingly apparent. Boris Johnson last week claimed it was “total rhubarb” that he had intervened to help the evacuation of more than 160 stray cats and dogs from Afghanistan, after leaked emails appeared to suggest that he had.
But Dominic Dyer, the animal-welfare campaigner and friend of the prime minister’s wife, tells me he is sure that Boris was involved and that Carrie was instrumental in persuading him to support the airlift of the animals out of Kabul.
“Everything I know about her track record and interests would tell me she was influential in this process,” he says.
Then there was the lavish refurbishment of the Downing Street flat, organised by the pricey boho-chic interior designer Lulu Lytle and supposedly including $AU1600-a-metre gold wallpaper, which the prime minister said his wife was insisting on and he couldn’t afford. That led to an inquiry by the ethics adviser Lord Geidt and another controversy about whether the prime minister had been entirely honest and transparent.
‘Parallel briefing operation’
Meanwhile, at the weekend, Cummings accused Carrie of running a “parallel briefing operation from the flat” during the pandemic. Boris “hasn’t got the balls to say to her, ‘Listen, I’m prime minister and this is what I’m doing,’ ” he told New York magazine. “She thinks that she understands a whole bunch of things about politics and communications and whatnot. She doesn’t.”
Former colleagues are struck by the irony that Carrie may unwittingly have accelerated her husband’s downfall by encouraging him to brief against his one-time Svengali, thus setting the best campaigner in British politics — armed with a dossier of WhatsApp messages and a desire for revenge — against the prime minister.
‘It’s all about her whim’
It was, according to a former Downing Street aide, “the worst strategic blunder of all time”. A senior Tory who has worked with Carrie says: “I don’t think she’s calculating, she’s emotionally reactive. It’s all about her whim. It’s very queenly. What drives her is insecurity, she’s got to feel like she’s in charge, that’s why it’s so important to her to have the prime minister’s ear.”
I’ve always reacted against the criticism of Carrie Johnson because so much of it appeared to be driven by sexism or spite. Some of the briefings have been truly vicious. The prime minister’s wife has been nicknamed “Princess Nut Nut” and described as a needy, emotionally demanding Diana figure, the “Princess of whales”. One minister waspishly compared her to Elizabeth I in Blackadder II, “Queenie”, who behaves like a spoilt schoolgirl. A senior Tory MP protested to me that “a geisha” who is 24 years younger than the prime minister was running the shop.
When I was writing a profile of Carrie Symonds, as she was at the time, for The Times Magazine in December 2020, the Tory MP Tracey Crouch told me she was appalled by the “misogynistic” attacks.
“They’re playing the girl, not the ball, to undermine Boris,” she said. Another government ally pointed out:
From bimbo to Lady Macbeth
“When she was first with Boris she was dismissed as a bimbo. Now she’s Lady Macbeth — as if women can only be typecast into those two roles. It’s totally sexist.” John Whittingdale, for whom Carrie worked as a special adviser, told me she was “very bright” and a “brilliant” adviser. “She’s a very likeable person and she also had extremely shrewd political judgment. She is somebody who will have her own views.”
Carrie Johnson is the first prime ministerial spouse who has had a career in politics. While Cherie Blair worked as a barrister, Samantha Cameron was a designer and Denis Thatcher was happy to retreat to the golf course, Carrie was the Conservative Party’s director of communications and a special adviser before becoming a leader’s wife. She has her own political networks and her own opinions that predate her relationship with the prime minister, and she is not afraid to use them. That is fair enough, and her husband does not have to do what she says. He is the only one who can make prime ministerial appointments or change government policy. One senior Tory points out that: “Her interventions are symptomatic of the fact that the government doesn’t know where it’s going; she only has influence because there’s a vacuum.”
But in the court of King Boris the influence of Queen Carrie is so great that even some of her old friends think the prime minister’s wife must take her share of the blame for the culture in No 10.
Dyer, who has campaigned with her on animal welfare issues, says: “She’s got a right to talk to him about things she cares about and ultimately it’s up to him whether he listens.” But he feels something has gone wrong in the dynamic at No 10. “They were drawn together because they are very similar — in some ways shy, in other ways extrovert. Both have focused on enjoying the trappings of power but don’t realise how that’s perceived.”
Bond of entitlement
Another longstanding friend says: “I’m afraid to say Carrie’s become part of the problem. All the boundaries have gone. She happens to be a woman but she seems to have adopted Boris’s sense of entitlement that the rules don’t apply.”
One female senior Tory points to the cliquiness cultivated by the prime minister’s wife. “It’s like Mean Girls. You are either in her group or you’re not, and even if you are friends with her it’s all about your usefulness,” she says. “You can’t defend every woman’s actions just because they’re a woman. The only sexist thing is suggesting he’s trapped and doesn’t have any agency over these decisions. He’s the f***ing prime minister. He can say no to her but he chooses not to. It’s not that all roads lead to her, all roads lead to them and they both have a complete disregard for rules. You can see why there’s a bond, they think they’re above the rules. It’s the bond of entitlement.”
Like Daisy and Tom in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the Johnsons are “careless people”. One former colleague who knows them well says they are “damaged souls” who are drawn together by their dysfunctional childhoods.
As a boy the prime minister declared his desire to be “world king” to protect himself from the trauma of his mother being admitted to a psychiatric hospital. According to one friend, the young Carrie “thought her father lived in a car, because she only ever saw him drive up and drive away again”. A former colleague says: “They enable each other; they both need to feel cocooned. She wants a clique, he’s a loner, but in both cases it’s about self-preservation.”
For both of them that task has become more urgent and difficult over the past few weeks. A senior Tory says: “I think Carrie has realised that she is in real peril now because if he goes then what life has she got? He will bugger off around the world doing what he wants and she will be left holding the babies. I get the impression she’s absolutely determined he will not go,
so she’s become overly defensive.”
‘Toxic’ combination
A friend of the prime minister, who has seen the relationship close up, believes the Johnsons are a “toxic” combination. “Boris uses Carrie as a lightning rod to deflect from himself. He will blame her for all sorts of things he is doing. It’s as if he is simply observing events, not actually the man who is in charge and can make the decisions. Carrie is herself quite a manipulative force and uses the power of patronage that comes from the prime minister to do what she wants.”
This source, who knows the couple well, says: “She’s slowly cut out the people who were close to him and surrounded him by people who are Carrie-approved. The whole thing is so toxic. They both use each other to get something but it’s like in a Greek tragedy.”
The Times
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