The prime minister’s wife gets a rough ride in Michael Ashcroft’s new biography. But many of her defenders couldn’t care less about fairness or decency
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.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
