We Need To Talk About Carrie...

Despite having cared very deeply as recently as a week ago, deploying my trusty Perspective-o-Meter means I now don’t really care about the specifics of the parties in Downing St—at least not while there’s the prospect of a War on the horizon. However, even as we wait on our collective tenterhooks for Sue Gray to pass Whitehall’s Judgement — and feeling entirely exhausted by all of it — I do think We Need to Talk About Carrie...

Carrie Johnson is 33. This makes her four years older than her husband’s eldest on-the-record child and a not-insubstantial 24 years younger than her husband—who, in turn (being born on June 19th, 1964) is precisely two months and 19 days younger than me. My partner of 13 years is three years younger than me and even this modest differential is relatively unusual. Were he 23 years younger, however, I would be Sam Taylor-Wood—an object of interest arguably less for her numerous professional achievements than for being able to pull a hard-bodied hottie in his prime, if not a Prime Minister. (The fact that Boris Johnson can pull a hard-bodied hottie in her prime is, apparently, even in 2022, neither here nor there).

Having been born in 1988, Carrie is a ‘Millennial’. For many people of mine and Boris Johnson’s generation (more likely to be their parent than their spouse, after all), Millennials are a cliché of self-absorbed entitlement — a ‘Peter Pan’ generation of ‘kidults’ apparently entirely resistant to growing-up. The US psychologist Jean Twenge summed it up in the title of her 2006 book ‘Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable Than Ever Before’ and there’s no evidence UK Millennials are any different. (I blame the parents).

However, more fool the PM, frankly — led, as ever, by his pencil, like so many lazy, emotionally-stunted adult males before him. And BJ has form in bouncing from one relationship straight into another without coming up for air—his second wife, Marina Wheeler, mother of most of his children, was pregnant with their first before the divorce was through from his starter marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen — a story which repeated itself with Carrie, pregnant with Wilf before the ink was dry on Johnson’s Decree Absolute from the previous Mrs Johnson, QC.

Do you remember the ‘argument’ between Boris and the then Carrie Symonds, back on June 21, 2019? The neighbours called the police after they heard (what the Grauniad described as) ‘a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging’. Wilfred Johnson was born on April 29, 2020. Given this was a mere 44 weeks after the headline-grabbing argument, I can’t be the only person to assume this was Carrie’s make-or-break pregnancy— a ‘glue baby’ that could potentially hasten Boris’s divorce and, ultimately, get him to ‘put a ring on it’.

This is what used to be known as ‘feminine wiles’ — and though the phrase itself may be out of fashion the deployment of ‘wiles’ remains forever on-point. On the other hand not even the fragrant former Tory Party Head of Comms could have foreseen that her pregnancy would span a landslide election victory for her partner’s party, a controversial romantic break in Mustique, the arrival of a global pan(ic)demic and her partner’s near-death as a result. How she found the time to mastermind the Lulu Lytle interior makeover is beyond me; I wasn’t good for more than watching the Big Brother live feed during night feeds. Nonetheless, on June 20th 2020, a mere 8 weeks after Wilfred’s birth, Carrie was (allegedly) sipping gin in the garden during the first ‘lockdown garden party’ of which we have details. Strong work (and clearly not breastfeeding, either)! Just over a year later Carrie not only had a ring on it but announced another pregnancy, while revealing an earlier miscarriage.

Look, nobody deserves a miscarriage—yet even though Carrie’s a... * checks notes * ... ‘Confident, Assertive, Entitled...’ Millennial... I mean really, wtaf? You have to question the emotional maturity and indeed (*Jane Austen face*) sense and ‘suitability’ of a woman in her (then very) early thirties who puts her own desire to procreate before her husband’s need to run the country.

While my primary school ‘first love’ — also an Old Etonian, in the same school year as the PM — currently runs the whole of the Army, I have never been in a relationship with anybody who wanted to run the entire country, much less become World King. Though were I in an allegedly loving and mutually-supportive (as opposed to, say, just drinking-and-shagging) adult relationship with somebody who was on the brink of realising their lifetime’s professional dream — a dream which would almost certainly be aided and abetted by my putting my dream of motherhood on the back burner while they got the hang of it — then I like to think I would stand myself down from my own shiny pedestal, albeit with caveats attached:

‘Darling, look, this isn’t easy for me but of course you need the space to do the thing you’ve literally always dreamed of doing — and well done you, by the way! — so let’s make your doing it our shared priority for a couple of years, with the proviso that I get a crack at growing a baby before I’m 35? How does that sound?’  

But this isn’t the Millennial Way, clearly. No, the Millennial Way (and isn’t there one of those in Wembley?) is probably ‘Oh gosh, Big Dog, you are amaaaaaaazing! Never mind Brexit and Covid, trust me—Net Zero is absolutely going to be your legacy, like Dave’s is gay marriage. But in the meantime let’s make babies and fight global warming while we get lovely Pen Farthing’s dogs out of Afghanistan! Yay us!’.

In truth, the things that Carrie cares deeply about — animal welfare and climate change — are unlikely to be the things that her 57 year-old husband cares about quite as much. And even if she makes him ‘care’, it’s the kind of ‘caring’ that ensures I will happily listen to a lot of my teenage sons’ Spotify playlists before, eventually, defaulting to my own.

Meanwhile, can you imagine Sam-Cam insisting on remaining creative director at the pukka stationers Smythson’s when Dave landed the Big Job? Or Sarah Brown telling Gordon that PR was as important as running the country? Even Cherie managed to have another baby, raise the kids and become a QC without making it all about her. And who the hell knows what Norma Major ever did, other than (presumably) discreetly clench her teeth every time she spotted Edwina Currie? (Indeed, Dame Norma’s own Wikipedia page says ‘She kept a low profile during her husband's premiership (1990–1997), doing charity work and writing two books, Chequers: The Prime Minister's Country House and its History (1997) and Joan Sutherland: The Authorised Biography (1994)’).

Do I think that Carrie Johnson — or any other wife — should routinely subsume her personal ambitions into her partner’s ‘bigger’ picture? No, obviously not. And clearly one day in the not too far distant future we’ll have a Millennial PM, so…. However I do think that putting those ambitions on the back-burner for a while is entirely appropriate, even in the 21st century.

Is Carrie therefore Boris’s Get Out of Jail Free card? No—he made his bed, etc. Nonetheless, I do think that ‘choosing’ Carrie — never mind capitulating to her predictably Me-Me-Me-llennial agenda — proves (as if we needed any further proof) that he is both foolish and opportunistic. It isn’t news that women in their thirties often want babies, so more fool the fiftysomething men with multiple previous children who don’t/can’t acknowledge it. I don’t know if the rumour that Carrie makes her husband change nappies and do night feeds is true, however if it is... well, then she’s a proper little Millennial, albeit one also ‘generous’ enough to ‘surprise’ her husband with a birthday cake and a quick singalong in the office while people elsewhere ‘celebrated’ their own birthdays and mourned their family member’s death days alone.

Look, I don’t much care about the detail of the parties, to be honest — I’m exhausted by Dom’s democracy-undermining drip-drip feed of revenge-fuelled vitriol, while the prospect of even less government than we’re getting for the next few months while the Tories cast around for another ‘leader’ depresses the hell out of me — but, yeah, while everybody’s still talking about the men I did think we needed to talk about Carrie—especially during the week in which we learned Boris’s family refer to her as ‘Meghan Markle’. It’s not even personal; in future she can live her well-wall-papered life in whatever way she chooses, however, right now, while she’s still living above the shop, to expect it not to be scrutinised closely — and judged — by the little people like me is, at best, naïve.

In many respects, though, the behaviour of entitled and self-aggrandising ‘Carrie Antoinette’ clearly demonstrates that the highest office in the land is still arranged as if its holders were 19th century aristos with a retinue of personal staff whose wives and children were previously neither seen nor heard (and certainly didn’t care about the décor at No10), largely because they lived elsewhere. Finally, while neither Carrie nor her husband are remotely fit for purpose, nor is the obsolete, weirdly Dickensian theatre of the absurd that is our rickety, creaky method of Governing. And that’s another rant...