The odd couple unleashed: Inside Carrie and Boris Johnson’s everyday reality
While the former PM has been busy telling his wild exaggerations and self-aggrandising stories in his new memoir, ‘Unleashed’, his wife has been quietly spinning another line on Instagram. Zoë Beaty looks at their tumultuous history, and how it is being repackaged and retold by his unlikely spouse
Recently, Carrie Johnson took to Instagram to share a few pictures from a recent holiday in Greece. The family – she, her three children, and her husband, Boris – are having a jolly old time. A sunkissed carefree Carrie poses on boats and in bikinis, while their three blonde-thatched children cosy up to their dad.
Their group of friends all wave for the camera from the sea; there are kayaks and copious sunsets. In a couple’s picture with Carrie, Boris wears a T-shirt and all the elegance of a man who’s just ordered two-for-one cocktails from a laminated menu.
Anyone who has been following Carrie Johnson on social media will be all too familiar. All year, her feed has been a square-by-square soliloquy of life in the Johnson family: selfies in the south of France, sandy beaches in Sardinia; a few days in Hollywood here, a short stay in Morocco there. In July, the pair attended the “wedding of the year”, a £250m celebration for the marriage of Anant Ambani, the son of India’s richest man, to pharmaceutical heir Radhika Merchant.
Of course, Carrie took to Instagram to record it for posterity, and for her audience of almost 100,000 followers. The glamorous 36-year-old sparkled in glittering, bejewelled two-piece gowns, and 60-year-old Boris cut a shambolic figure in an ill-fitting, creased kurta, buttons hanging on for dear life.
It’s a radical facelift for the woman whose “ruthless ambition” once won her comparisons to Lady Macbeth. Her critics aren’t short of other nicknames, either – Boris’ famous “cash for curtains” scandal, an estimated £200k refurbishment of their Downing Street flat saw her branded “Carrie Antoinette”; Dominic Cummings, made a nemesis of her, referring to her as “Cersei” (a reference to the Game of Thrones character) or “Princess Nut Nut”. During Boris’ tenure she was linked to Westminster’s “chatty rat” – allegedly a friend of Carrie’s who was leaking government documents. Ultimately it was Carrie that caused Boris to “squander his chance to be a great prime minister”, accused Lord Ashcroft and many others at the time. Boris, of course, already had that covered.
Still, their relationship has always attracted more attention than most, not least for their obvious age gap. The “screaming row”, reportedly over Boris spilling red wine on a sofa back in 2019, when police were called to their flat during Boris’ election campaign wasn’t exactly a good start. Concerned neighbours had made the 999 call after hearing a “loud altercation” between the two, involving “screaming, shouting and banging”.
According to recordings taken outside the flat by a neighbour at the time at one point Carrie could be heard telling Johnson to “get off me”, and “get out of my flat”, while Boris told his then girlfriend to “get off my laptop”. The neighbour who called the police, Tom Penn, later came forward to say that, while police confirmed that no one had been harmed during the altercation, he felt that it was “reasonable for someone who is likely to become our next prime minister to be held accountable for all of their words, actions and behaviours”.
Not so long since Carrie Johnson’s public profile amounted to a role as a media advisor and a relationship with the political editor of The Sun. Now she’s one of the most controversial first ladies to have resided at No. 10.
Coincidence? Probably not. Power and influence is in Carrie’s blood. Her father, Matthew Symonds, was “very bright” and “competitive” in his journalism heyday; a “long-haired, cuban-heeled, slightly shifty-looking” fellow, one acquaintance remembers.
In 1986 he co-founded The Independent, having already worked for the Mirror group and The Daily Telegraph, where he was the economics leader writer. Carrie’s grandparents were equally prominent in the media: John Beavan worked as the London editor of The Guardian before becoming a Labour MEP; her grandmother, Anne Symonds, worked for the BBC World Service.
Now she’s doing what all influential people do best – living her best mumfluencer life out on Instagram, a world away from Boris’ relentless promotion of his memoir, set to be released – or, more aptly, Unleashed – next week. Extracts being eked out and appropriately stirring up the press. Headlines are gathering around his various claims: that everyone from pesky “lefty journalists” to Sue Gray, when writing her Partygate report, was out to get him; that the former government considered mounting an “aquatic raid” on the Netherlands to obtain the Covid vaccine; and about his grave underestimation of the pandemic. Hardly new information there, then.
So far, Unleashed has unearthed some wild stories – Boris being stuck in open water on a kayak from Argos in the Highlands during a trip with Carrie in 2020, for one – and provoked some fittingly cutting responses. “If nothing else, and there really is very little else to be said for it,” The Independent’s Sean O’Grady wrote this week, “Boris Johnson’s memoir, Unleashed, proves that this man really was, and indeed still is, the most shameless charlatan ever to flit across the British political scene.” In The Times, Caitlin Moran proclaimed him to be a “gossipy b****” with “the physique of a Womble”.
The real revelations that were hoped for – an explanation for the absolute failure to deliver anything on Brexit, or his thoughts on the Conservative Party’s future – are not expected to materialise. If you are looking for any revelations at all about his relationship, you will be disappointed. It seems that Boris was firmly on the leash when writing in detail about his wife.
Carrie Symonds, as she then was, joined the Conservative Party aged 21 in 2009, and began campaigning for Boris in the London mayoral election a year later, being consistently promoted from thereon in. By 2018, when she was 29, she’d become head of communications for the Tory party.
The same year, Boris’s wife of 25 years, Marina Wheeler, with whom he shares four children, reportedly “kicked him out” of the marital home. Carrie left her job in politics to work for conservation company Oceana later that year, too.
It wasn’t until 2019 that rumours of the pair’s relationship began to surface – the same month as their famous red-wine-on-the-sofa row. Unsurprisingly, the incident isn’t addressed in Boris’s memoir; rather, it’s been long since forgotten – or merely lumped in with the litany of other criticisms of Boris, whose Wikipedia page claims he has “seven or more” children.
By February the following year, a month before Boris, who was by then prime minister, caught Covid, Carrie’s Instagram announced that they were engaged and expecting their first child – soon to be Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson; and in May 2020, Carrie officially became the third woman to marry Boris, in a “small ceremony” at Westminster Cathedral.
Carrie’s presence at Downing Street didn’t go unnoticed, and nor did she shy away from the limelight. In 2020, she took part in virtual fundraisers for LGBT+ Conservative candidates, even persuading Boris to make a short appearance.
Increasingly, she was deemed the real “management” of No 10. In his book First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson, released in 2022, Tory peer Michael Ashcroft insinuated that the power wielded by Carrie, both at Downing Street and over Boris, was preventing the then prime minister from governing Britain correctly. At the time, Carrie said she was the victim of a “brutal briefing campaign”.
The consensus was that Ashcroft’s claim was decidedly unlikely – and played into one of the oldest misogynistic tropes in the book, that women at the side of powerful men should be dutiful and passive. Carrie’s political career, way before she met Boris, was a threat.
While Carrie undoubtedly influenced her husband when he was in power, her influence – now as a popular, stylish mum, quietly working on his family-man image on Instagram – has a different sheen, but it’s still there. In her comments section, among the endless requests for details of her latest bikini and assertions that “Boris is well punching”, others are glad to see the former PM “resting up for his return to politics”.
Could this new Instagram profile do him some favours if the rumours that he wants a second shot at leadership are true? The image curated carefully by his wife is certainly showing him in a different light from the shambolic charlatan we remember him as when in power. She does have some influence over him cleaning up his act, reportedly getting him to stop drinking during his election campaign, and even convincing him to (briefly) try going vegan.
Under Carrie’s careful curation, Boris has undergone another image overhaul, one square at a time, as the beach-loving, kid-carrying, kayaking dad, still rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. The holiday might be over, but Boris is back, soaking up the spotlight, trying to divert our attention from the extreme damage and hurt he brought to our country.
His memoir is yet another attempt to manipulate his own narrative – to paint himself as “too good for his own good”; it’s a “shameless, sour, predictable, self-exculpatory” text, says O’Grady, full of wild exaggeration and self-aggrandising stories. Ironically fitting for self-promotion platform Instagram, then, which seems to be the only place it’s not mentioned.
While Boris promotes the memoir, Carrie has been tight-lipped about Unleashed. Still, no doubt she’ll continue holding up the family fort on social media, posting stories about Baby Boden jumpers, providing the levity to prop him up. And those of us following with morbid fascination will still be glued to her updates, to see if the most slippery man in politics can somehow, despite his despicable history, still get likes.
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