The Carrie conundrum: What next for the Prime Minister’s wife?

Pat Nixon called it “the hardest unpaid job in the world”; Cherie Blair “a strange thing” given “you cannot afford to express any separate views”. Sarah Brown argued that “being the wife of the PM isn’t a job,” and Barbara Bush made the point that: “The First Lady is going to be criticised no matter what she does.” 

All of which makes the position sound pretty unappealing – though not, perhaps, as unappealing as the position in which Carrie Johnson finds herself now.

Over the past two years and 11 months our outgoing First Lady has certainly garnered criticism – some unfair, some fair. And already commentators are saying that Carrie “helped blow it for Boris”. But it is surely her husband’s sociopathic behaviour over the past few days, weeks and months – and what has been described not as Boris’s downfall but his “clownfall” – that will have been most brand-damaging. So how easy will it be for Carrie to rid herself of that toxicity, and what next for the Prime Minister’s wife?

Anyone in crisis management would advise immediately stepping away from the source of the stench, but when that stench is primarily coming from your own husband and the father of your children, it’s not so easy.

“Psychologically, Boris will be very damaged at the moment,” one Tory source tells me. “So of course the number one thing she needs to do is support him.” To her credit, Carrie has done this seamlessly from the start. And again, it can’t have been easy. Because if there’s one word that you invite into your life along with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson it is “chaos”.

That same word has often been used to sum up their relationship. Before Carrie became involved with Boris, and his special brand of bedlam, the daughter of Matthew Symonds, co-founder of the The Independent, and lawyer Josephine McAfee was described as “controlled” and “confident”.

Politics may have seemed a world away from the creative fields she immersed herself in at the University of Warwick – where she studied theatre and art history – but after a stint working for Zac Goldsmith, who was MP for Richmond at the time, Carrie moved on to the Conservative party’s press office, where she quickly rose through the ranks, working on her future husband’s re-election campaign, when he ran for Mayor of London in 2012, before becoming the youngest director of communications for the party at just 29.

That a woman who forged a career in the business of public perception – and was credited with taking charge of the Prime Minister’s image (and weight) after they first got together in 2019 – could go on to make the series of missteps Carrie made at No 10 remains baffling today.

It may always have been strenuously denied that the PM’s wife played any part in the prioritising of dogs over humans for evacuation from Afghanistan, but it was without a doubt the First Lady who oversaw No 10’s controversial maximalist redesign. It was she who picked out the infamous gaudy wallpaper estimated to cost £840 a roll and, as I write, Twitter is alive with memes about the one “burning question” that remains: “Now that the Prime Minister has finally resigned what happens to Carrie’s gold wallpaper?”

Because of this, reports that the Johnsons planned to build a £150,000 treehouse for their son at Chequers (but were stopped when police raised security concerns) prompted some to interpret this as “yet more Carrie”. Which might have been unfair. But then there was Carrie’s involvement in partygate. 

The Sue Gray inquiry was told that it was she who was keen to throw a party during the first lockdown and “offered to bring cake” – so these cannot be written off as “sexist”, “misogynistic” slurs along with the rest. And while other First Wives have been busy out in Ukraine, shaking Zelensky’s hand, Carrie has been notably low profile in recent months, presumably acting on advice from spin doctors.

By any PR yardstick, the wallpaper and the parties were mistakes, but should she be held accountable for all of her husband’s mistakes into the bargain? That would be both sexist and misogynistic. And it’s telling that almost nobody in the political sphere is willing to speak ill of Carrie. Indeed, according to Craig Oliver, former director of politics and communications for David Cameron: “Leaving No 10 could be the making of Carrie. She’s an intelligent woman, interested in a lot of issues. Being the PM’s wife has an inevitable chilling effect on what you can do and say. She’ll now be free to speak her mind.” 

Lord Ashcroft, whose biography, First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson, was published in March, describes Carrie as “an impressive person – with a high-level career in politics and a record of campaigning on animal rights and the environment”. Another political writer, meanwhile, assures me that any toxicity will be shrugged off with characteristic ease both by Boris and his wife. “He will be a very successful ex-Prime Minister. His star quality is shoulders above any of the others and he will become very rich on the back of it. So very shortly, everything will settle down, and she will be glad to have left the fishbowl.”

The US isn’t as natural a progression for these two as it has been for former leaders and their wives. And although Carrie is clearly a political animal, it seems likely that she’ll choose to concentrate next on animal rights campaigning, perhaps deepening her involvement with The Aspinall Foundation, for whom she has worked as head of communications since 2021 – which in itself is in a period of transition. Every PR knows that charity work is the best “brand rehab” there is, and her passion for the cause isn’t in doubt.

Post-politics careers have worked for other former First Ladies: Samantha Cameron is now a legitimate fashion entrepreneur; Cherie Blair immersed herself back in law. Perhaps the closest comparison could be Sarah Brown, who found fulfilment with charity work. We don’t see a cookbook, a la Mrs Clegg, on the cards. And she will want to be more Michelle Obama than Melania Trump.

On a personal level, it may take some time for the smarting to stop. When the couple were booed by the crowd outside St Paul’s Cathedral as they arrived for the Queen’s service of thanksgiving last month Boris did not seem fazed, but Carrie appeared to be gritting her teeth. And however timely Ministers’ interventions were to the electorate, Carrie is bound to see those as a series of shocking betrayals from people in their inner circle – some of whom she will have considered friends. According to one MP’s wife: “The key is not to carry revenge in your heart because that just eats away at you. There are no friends in politics; it’s a brutal business and loyalty is always fluid.”

Who knows what the imprint Carrie leaves on people’s consciousness after the removal van finally pulls away from outside Number 10 will be? But one thing seems certain: when it comes to the blunders made over this extraordinary, dramatic premiership this young woman was neither Lady Macbeth nor an innocent bystander, blithely caught up in her husband’s chaos. Perhaps only afterwards will she be free to show us who the real Carrie Johnson is.