An enraging biography of Carrie Johnson
FIRST LADY: INTRIGUE AT THE COURT OF CARRIE AND BORIS JOHNSON by Michael Ashcroft Biteback, £20; Kindle £14.24 ★★★★★
Last month, which now seems like an eternity ago, gossipy snippets from Lord Ashcroft’s incendiary new book emerged. First Lady: Inside the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson sounded like the sort of bombshell that could do for Boris Johnson and his scheming Machiavellian spouse.
But now real bombs are raining down on Ukraine. Children and women and old men are literally being blown apart. And it’s shamingly frivolous to be leafing through a hotchpotch of “anonymous sources” slagging off useless Carrie or (less often) praising really-rather-sweet Carrie, while her husband is standing shoulder to shoulder with world leaders facing down a madman hellbent on slaughtering innocents and destroying democracy.
Anyhoo here goes. When I first read excerpts way back when, I took it to be a misogynist hatchet job. I said so in print and an unhappy Lord Ashcroft immediately wrote to this paper complaining I was illinformed – because he had interviewed “a great many” women in the course of research.
Right I’ve read it cover to cover now and (spoiler alert) can vouch for the fact that not only was my view correct, but I was absolutely furious before I had even finished the introduction. Why? Because Ashcroft refers to Carrie Johnson as a “young lady”, but without the inverted commas. She was 31 at the time.
Now, if you don’t know why that’s a problem then you are either probably part of the problem or a 76-year-old billionaire and former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.
I’m no advocate of cancel culture but these two little words pretty much sum up the writer’s antediluvian mindset. There are other clues. Do any of us really care that aged 12 or 13, “After their Christmas lunch, the two girls [one of them being Carrie] disappeared to a nearby churchyard to drink bottles of an alcopop called WKD. On the way back to Florence’s house, no doubt spurred on by a small amount of liquor, ‘they played a game that involved flashing every man over fifty who was walking down the street’.”
Yuck. God no, Michael! Seriously, leave that anecdote out. You can (maybe) keep the one about student Carrie, whose idea of supermarket shopping for household “essentials” once involved her buying nothing more than “300 ice lollies and six
bottles of £80 champagne”. But it’s nobody’s business that she had her first kiss at 16.
Then there’s her ex, who cheerfully reveals that Carrie was a handful with quite the temper.“‘i remember when we went to Kenya she cried because her hair straighteners didn’t work. We were on safari and going to the beach for two weeks. And she had a big strop in Paris once because I wasn’t enjoying myself. I don’t much like the place.” Industry standard, son. I might have set fire to the bed.
The upshot is that Carrie is an uppity careerist who “wanted to be noticed” and was regarded as “flirtatious” rather than a strategic thinker; who had the temerity to attend men’s finals at Wimbledon when she should have been at home worrying about the Tory leadership contest, the witch! She also once stood too close to a male colleague. Whore! And her husband is frightened of her. Bless!
Oh and she’s the malign puppetmistress who’s been working Boris’s strings this entire time, in which case Lord A must be terribly impressed by her current statecraft in the Ukraine crisis.
That’s the thing: you can’t castigate a wife for her husband’s bad decisions and then withhold credit for his good ones. That wouldn’t be at all fair on the young lady, would it?
To buy ‘First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson’ by Michael Ashcroft (RRP £20) for £16.99, go to books. telegraph.co.uk or ring 0844 871 1514