She’s Lady Macbeth, scheming, manipulative, a forward planner; but she’s also feckless, work-shy, addicted to holidays, with a brain that can’t plot the optics from one Instagram post to another. Thus is Carrie Johnson characterised in the new biography from Michael Ashcroft, the Tory peer who makes these unflattering, scattershot pen portraits his contribution to the literary canon. His biographies rarely make a huge addition to the public understanding of a person; the modus operandi appears to be to find anyone, genuinely anyone, right down to someone who met them once at university and doesn’t remember them (so the reader can infer, Ashcroft will typically suggest, that they weren’t very memorable), prepared to make a bitchy remark, and then note it down. Inevitably, the character that then emerges is a little contradictory.
To this, the author brings his own baggage: that title of the biography in full – First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson. What’s he trying to say? Is she Eleanor Roosevelt (ultimate first lady, never knowingly thwarted?), or Cherie Blair (often accused of trying out the role, assailed by pratfalls as she learned the hard way what the British political scene expects of a spouse?). Is she Anne Boleyn (controlling the court with vixen spite and the king with unexpected sexual manoeuvres she learned in France?), or Kate Middleton (bland on the surface, but underneath … well, she’s female, right? So probably underneath is something worse). In this medley of puppeteer-wife stereotypes, you can’t really pick out a tune. That’s medleys for you: they were designed for people who prefer not to follow things through.
But the endless stories in the book: Carrie, who allegedly demanded an iPad from work even though it was incompatible with the system; who never turned up; whose friendships ran hot but didn’t last; whose ex-boyfriends can recall seemingly word for word the times she lashed out unreasonably … Even if the evidence isn’t all consistent, it nevertheless builds a picture of a wrong ’un, and upon this hangs the faith of the few remaining defenders of Boris Johnson. He wasn’t destined to become this kind of prime minister. He’s just a fool for love.
On this, it’s maybe safer to remain agnostic. We could run counterfactuals for ever and we’d still be in the same situation; maybe if you were trying to write a period drama, it would help to know which character flaws were hitched to which relationship. If you’re wishing for a more effective government, it really doesn’t matter who is worse between Boris and Carrie Johnson, nor which of them wears the trousers.
However, there are those who would defend not Boris Johnson but his party and their project, and they’re going for the classic left-right switcheroo, a cheap three-cups magic trick in which the people who thought they were on the side of the angels find themselves suddenly – who could possibly have foreseen? – the true villains. First, they find a diversity angle: in Carrie’s case, that she is female. Nobody would be saying these things about her if she wasn’t. Ergo, the substance and tone of the attack are misogynistic. Anyone who denies that is failing to take misogyny seriously (and now, of all times, ladies and gentlemen! Just when worldwide misogyny has never been more serious!). Anyone who continues to attack her is, themselves, a hater of women.
The aim is to discombobulate feminists so much that we don’t know which way is up – if we can’t decide whether Carrie is good or bad, if we’re in thrall to sexist narratives that belong in a different century, then how can we possibly say what we think of her husband, what we think of the entire predicament? And there’s more: we disagree with Priti Patel because we’re racist, we fault Cressida Dick because we’re sexist and homophobic, the only person we’re allowed to criticise on this ship of fools is Michael Fabricant, and even then it is illiberal to mention his hair.
The truly irking thing is that nobody, literally nobody, buys any of this: the people crying sexism don’t really believe it’s that, and wouldn’t care if it was. The people who abhor sexism know it isn’t that. It’s not even a discursive manoeuvre, it’s more like throwing a tarantula into a Scrabble bag, so that no one wants to put their hand in, and the game simply dissolves, its players move on.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
