It seems a lifetime ago now that Camilla Parker Bowles was a scarlet woman, a mistress so reviled some felt she would never be accepted by the public. This week it was announced that she will become Queen consort when her husband becomes king, in what felt like the final reward for years of being a Good Wife; the kind who supportively, unselfishly and discreetly enables her husband to become the best version of himself. As an anonymous royal source told the Daily Mail approvingly, Camilla saw her job as doing whatever she was asked to do: “You don’t try to shape the role to your advantage. It’s about duty and service.” And if it’s taken three solid decades of self-effacement to transform her from hate figure to national treasure – well, nobody said being a Good Wife was easy, or indeed fun.
Carrie Johnson has certainly found it hard going, judging by a new biography from the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft in which her critics portray her as the wrong kind of wife entirely; too meddlesome, too “woke”, too insistent on her husband changing the odd nappy, and altogether too unlike her predecessor, Marina Wheeler, who made his life run so smoothly that he didn’t have to worry about anything (and was duly rewarded for her efforts by being repeatedly cheated on). Poor Boris needs “mothering”, we’re told, not someone nagging him about net zero. Setting aside the fact that portraying the prime minister as a needy manchild does him no favours, the trouble with this reductive nonsense is that as an explanation for his current misfortunes, it simply doesn’t wash.
