Is it fair that Mrs Johnson should, courtesy of her sublime nickname, Carrie Antoinette, have become the face of complacent privilege? Whatever her faults, as recently enumerated by Lord Ashcroft, they have yet to include the dispensing of fatuous lifestyle tips for the less fortunate. Her old advisory tweets on single-use plastic were aimed, after all, at everyone less environmentally enlightened than Mrs Johnson, not just at poor people.
Regardless of her taste in single-use interiors, parties and cake, Mrs Johnson has yet, publicly, to express the traditional Tory conviction that the struggling should welcome lifestyle advice from the prosperous. True, her husband has previously argued that “if having a baby out of wedlock meant sure-fire destitution on a Victorian scale, young girls might indeed think twice about having a baby”. But as the now married mother-of-two Mrs Johnson sometimes reminds us, it is sexist and retrograde to think she might be as ghastly as her partner.
