Everybody just keep calm and Carrie on...

IWONDER if Carrie Symonds asked her boss for the day off on Wednesday. ‘The thing is,’ I can picture her saying, ‘it’s quite a big day for my boyfriend and I’d really like to be there to support him. Would that be OK? I can come in early the next day to make up for it.’

Can you imagine? I couldn’t. Not at first, anyway. Being in a relationship with a man 24 years my senior who’s about to become Prime Minister and comes with a terrible reputation for philandering, a wife and five children isn’t, happily, my area of expertise.

But the more I thought about it the more I realised that I, and indeed you, have more in common with Ms Symonds than we realise.

Not sure what our place is, or what the future holds. Whether we can trust this great, lumbering lummox of a man we suddenly find ourselves living with, or if he’s going to screw it up for both of us. The only difference is that we don’t have to argue with him over where to put the teapot, or, gulp, which side of the bed to sleep on.

Because even by modern British political standards, it has been an extraordinary week. Boris’s coronation, and the perhaps inevitable vaporising of Jeremy Hunt as he slumped off to the backbenches. Theresa May’s final, ever-so-slightly tearful PMQs, before that drive to the Palace and one last audience with the Queen.

And then, the bit which always fascinates me – that 45 minutes or so when Britain is officially ‘between prime ministers’ – meaning that Her Majesty is technically in charge and could, if she so desired, do anything she wanted. Make corgi ownership mandatory, perhaps, or give Prince Philip his driving licence back.

Then Johnson was off, momentarily waylaid by climate change protesters, to doff the cap and kiss the hand and receive permission to form a new government, which he promptly did by launching the greatest bloodbath inside Number 10 since someone told Margaret Thatcher that Michael Heseltine was on the phone.

As I say, it’s been quite the week, dude. Heavens, let’s not forget there was even a second party leadership election, won this time by a Scot, Jo Swinson, the 39-year-old from Milngavie who claims the Liberal Democrats are going to stop Brexit.

I’m not sure how. The way Johnson is going on (although let’s face it, he’s always done a good line in bluff, bluster and wiff waff) you get the sense it’d be easier to stop a fully loaded freight train at 80mph with a cocktail stick and a packet of sticky-back plastic.

And it was a sad farewell too, to David Mundell, who has run the Scotland Office with grace, dignity and the occasional bit of steel. While his flip-flopping on Brexit has done him no favours, he was nevertheless a steady hand on the tiller and I can’t help but feel Boris is making a mistake by jettisoning him.

As for his replacement, Alister Jack, a man for whom the Jeremy Paxman epithet ‘not even a household name in his own household’ could well have been dreamt up, he remains something of an unknown quantity. Holding his own against the SNP’s Westminster rabble will be his greatest challenge.

SPEAKING of which, watching the hopeless huffing and puffing of the SNP’s Ian Blackford as Johnson eviscerated him in the House of Commons was something of a guilty pleasure.

In fact, Boris Johnson appears to have ripped out page one of the Alex Salmond handbook with his refrain of ‘stop talking Britain down’.

It was all ‘the ties that bind us together’ and ‘uniting our country’ and ‘high hearts and growing confidence’. Honestly. I swear he was flirting with us.

So if Ms Symonds looked a little flustered and unsure of herself as she stood alongside No 10 staff as Johnson made his inaugural speech as PM, I don’t blame her. She’s about to take a great big leap into the unknown.

So, too, is the rest of Britain. Aren’t we all, in a way, a little bit like Carrie right now?

PS ANYONE else notice that the new Prime Minister wore the same pale blue and grey silk tie two days in a row? Either it’s his lucky one or he never made it to bed on Wednesday night…