The odd couple unleashed: inside the daily reality of Carrie and Boris Johnson

A.Recently, Carrie Johnson took to Instagram to share some photos from her recent vacation to Greece. The family, her three children and her husband Boris, are living a good old time. Carrie, carefree and sunny, poses on boats and in bikinis, while their three blond, thatched children cuddle up to their father.

Their group of friends all wave at the camera from the sea; there are kayaks and copious sunsets. In a couple photo with Carrie, Boris wears a T-shirt and all the elegance of a man who has just ordered two-for-one cocktails from a laminated menu.

Anyone who has followed Carrie Johnson on social media will be all too familiar with her. All year, his feed has been a square-by-square monologue of Johnson family life: selfies in the south of France, sandy beaches in Sardinia; a few days in Hollywood here, a short stay in Morocco there. In July, the couple attended the wedding of the year, a 250m celebration for the marriage of Anant Ambani, the son of India's richest man, to pharmaceutical heir Radhika Merchant.

Of course, Carrie took to Instagram to record it for posterity and for her audience of nearly 100,000 followers. The glamorous 36-year-old shone in her sparkling, bejeweled two-piece dresses, and Boris, 60, cut a chaotic figure in an ill-fitting rumpled kurta, with buttons hanging on for dear life.

It's a radical facelift for the woman whose ruthless ambition has earned her comparisons to Lady Macbeth. Her critics have no shortage of other nicknames, either Boris's famous money-for-curtains scandal or an estimated $200,000 renovation of their Downing Street apartment that saw her branded Carrie Antoinette; Dominic Cummings made an enemy of her, calling her Cersei (a reference to the Game of Thrones character) or Princess Nut Nut. During Boris's term she was linked to the Westminster gossip rat, allegedly a friend of Carries who leaked government documents. Ultimately, it was Carrie who caused Boris to waste his chance to be a great prime minister, Lord Ashcroft and many others charged at the time. Boris, of course, had already taken care of that.

Yet their relationship has always attracted more attention than most, especially because of their obvious age gap. The screaming row, apparently over Boris allegedly spilling red wine on a sofa in 2019, when the police were called to their apartment during Boris' election campaign, wasn't exactly a good start. Concerned neighbors had called 999 after hearing a loud altercation between the pair, involving shouting, screaming and punching.

According to recordings taken outside the apartment by a neighbor at the time, Carrie could be heard telling Johnson to get off me and get out of my apartment, while Boris told his then-girlfriend to leave my laptop. The neighbor who called the police, Tom Penn, later came forward to say that although police confirmed no one was injured in the altercation, he believed it was reasonable that someone who will likely become our next Prime Minister is detained. responsible for all their words, actions and behavior.

Not long ago, Carrie Johnson's public profile consisted of a role as a media advisor and a relationship with the political editor of The Sun. She is now one of the most controversial first ladies to have resided at No 10.

Coincidence? Probably not. Power and influence are in the blood. His father, Matthew Symonds, was very successful and competitive during his journalism heyday; a guy with long hair, Cuban heels and a slightly shifty look, an acquaintance recalls.

In 1986 he co-founded The Independenthaving already worked for the Mirror group and The Daily Telegraphwhere he was the leading economic writer. Carry's grandparents were equally prominent in the media: John Beavan worked as the London editor of the The Guardian before becoming a Labor MEP; his grandmother, Anne Symonds, worked for the BBC World Service.

Now she's doing what all influencers do best: living her best mumfluencer life on Instagram, a world away from Boris's incessant promotion of his soon-to-be-published memoir or, more aptly, Unchained next week. The extracts are extracted and mixed appropriately in the press. Headlines are multiplying around his various claims: that everyone from pesky left-wing journalists to Sue Gray, when she wrote her Partygate report, was there to attack him; that the former government was considering organizing a water raid in the Netherlands to obtain the Covid vaccine; and on its serious underestimation of the pandemic. So there is hardly any new information.

So far, Unchained unearthed some crazy stories of Boris getting stuck in open water on an Argos kayak in the Highlands during a trip with Carrie in 2020, for example, and provoked some downright trenchant responses. At least, and there's really not much else to say about this, The IndependentSean OGrady wrote Boris Johnson's memoir this week, Unchainedproves that this man truly was, and still is, the most shameless charlatan to ever grace British politics. In The timesCaitlin Moran proclaimed him to be a talkative asshole with the physique of a Womble.

The real revelations hoped for to explain the absolute failure of Brexit or his thoughts on the future of the Conservative Party are unlikely to materialize. If you're looking for revelations about his relationship, you'll be disappointed. It seems that Boris was on a tight leash when writing in detail about his wife.

Carrie Symonds, as she then was, joined the Conservative Party at the age of 21 in 2009 and began campaigning for Boris in the London Mayoral election a year later, being constantly promoted to from there. In 2018, when she was 29, she became party leader. communications for the conservative party.

That same year, Boris's wife of 25 years, Marina Wheeler, with whom he shares four children, allegedly kicked him out of the marital home. Carrie left her job in politics to also work for the conservation society Oceana later that year.

It wasn't until 2019 that rumors about the couple's relationship began to surface in the same month as their famous red wine argument on the couch. Unsurprisingly, the incident is not addressed in Boris's memoir; rather, it has been long forgotten or simply lumped into the litany of other criticisms of Boris, whose Wikipedia page claims has seven or more children.

In February the following year, a month before then-Prime Minister Boris caught Covid, Carries Instagram announced that they were engaged and were soon expecting their first child, Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson; and in May 2020, Carrie officially became the third woman to marry Boris, in a small ceremony at Westminster Cathedral.

Carries' presence at Downing Street did not go unnoticed, nor did she shy away from being noticed. In 2020, she took part in virtual fundraisers for conservative LGBT+ candidates, even persuading Boris to make a short appearance.

Increasingly, she was seen as the true leadership of Number 10. In her book First lady: intrigue in the court of Carrie and Boris Johnsonpublished in 2022, her Conservative peer Michael Ashcroft insinuated that the power Carrie exercised, both in Downing Street and over Boris, was preventing the then Prime Minister from properly governing Britain. At the time, Carrie said she had been the victim of a brutal information campaign.

The consensus was that Ashcroft's claim was decidedly improbable and constituted one of the book's oldest misogynistic tropes, that women alongside powerful men should be respectful and passive. His political career, long before meeting Boris, was a threat.

While Carrie undoubtedly influenced her husband when he was in power, her influence now as a popular and stylish mom, quietly working on her family man image on Instagram, has a different sheen, but it's still there. In his comments section, amid incessant demands for details about his latest bikini and claims that Boris is hitting well, others are happy to see the former prime minister resting up for his return to politics.

Could this new Instagram profile do him a favor if the rumors that he wants a second chance at leadership are true? His wife's carefully curated image certainly shows him in a different light from the chaotic charlatan we remember when he was in power. She has some influence over him in cleaning up his behavior, apparently getting him to stop drinking while on the campaign trail and even convincing him to try (briefly) going vegan.

Under Carrie's careful direction, Boris underwent another image overhaul, one square at a time, as a beach-loving, child-carrying, kayaking father, always rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. The holidays may be over, but Boris is back, in the spotlight, trying to distract our attention from the extreme damage and harm he has caused to our country.

His memoir is another attempt to manipulate his own narrative to present himself as too good for his own good; it's a shameless, sour, predictable, self-exculpatory text, says OGrady, full of wild exaggerations and self-aggrandizing stories. Ironically, this therefore suits the self-promotion platform Instagram, which seems to be the only place where it is not mentioned.

While Boris promotes the memoir, Carrie remains tight-lipped about Unchained. Yet there is no doubt that he will continue to support the family fort on social media, posting stories about Baby Boden sweaters, giving him the levity to support it. And those of us who follow her with morbid fascination will stay glued to her updates, to see if the most elusive man in politics can somehow, despite his despicable history, get likes.