the times | Thursday January 13 2022 5times2
on himself: Johnson told firefighters
that Dilyn was “endlessly up on
people’s legs” at Downing Street.
There are apocryphal stories of
Johnson on his hands and knees at
Chequers, trying to extract important
historical books from the ever-more
playful Dilyn’s jaws, until Johnson was
said to shout, not seriously, “Someone
shoot that f***ing dog.”
The almost unbearable stresses of
illness, new parenting and
bereavement grew on a new couple
who were isolated not just by Covid
but also through the difficulty of
friendships strained by their gaping
24-year age difference.
Carrie’s mother was for a while in
their household “bubble” to help with
the children, and Carrie’s best friend,
the “first friend” in the form of Nimco
Ali, the FGM activist, also for a time
formed a “childcare” bubble.
Then there was the little thing on
top of running a government in a
pandemic: no wonder there were
reports of ready-meals mounting up in
the Downing Street kitchen.
But chaotic energy can also be
exhausting and irresponsible. In all
this relentlessness there is no time for
wisdom. Theresa May, David
Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair,
Margaret Thatcher, they mostly had
average to dull personal lives.
When their political downfall came
it was usually associated with high
stakes and serious policy: the Iraq war,
Black Wednesday or a Brexit
referendum. Likewise it would be hard
to imagine May joining staffers for
drinks at a similar point in lockdown;
she does not have Johnson’s Henryread Tender Is the Night, by F Scott
Fitzgerald, a study of marriage and
thwarted ambition. Johnson described
the lead character, Dick Diver, as a
man who had superficial charm but
threw away his success. (As an aside,
in the book the hero opines: “I am
tired of knowing nothing and being
reminded of it all the time.”) This is
the same interview in which Johnson
talked of the importance of
storytelling in politics — not lies, but
rather “narrative”.
“People live by narrative,” Johnson
said. “Human beings are creatures of
the imagination.”
Although Johnson makes mess,
enjoys mess and deliberately looks
messy, ruffles his hair if it gets too
neat, his skill as a writer and journalist
is to weave storylines that make sense
of it all. One skill requires the other.
Storytelling is of course very close to a
capacity for deception. When, decades
ago, he was confronted over his later-
confirmed affair with Petronella
Wyatt, he called the allegation “an
inverted pyramid of piffle”.
If he was said to stand for something
in the Brexit debate, it was a kind of
chaotic optimism, that somehow
Britain would prevail in our amateur
can-do manner, almost by force of
character. Johnson’s faith in this vision
was alluring. It was a very personal
plea: Johnson also relies on the
momentum of chaotic optimism to
keep him lurching onwards and away
from the mess in his wake.
Chaotic energy can be entertaining,
endearing and relatable. Dilyn the dog
provides a psychoanalytic model for
Johnson to acquire some perspectiveConversative Party. She also enjoyed
growing a following on Instagram.
As a millennial in her thirties her
instincts make much more sense in
the context of Instagram. She uses
photographs strategically: her
wedding to Johnson was revealed
afterwards with a surprise photo. And,
as befits an American medium, she
does not shy away from aspiration.
It normally behoves politicians in
this country to have hairshirt holidays
and favour unambitious high street
clothing brands. By contrast Carrie
was alleged to have rejected the “John
Lewis nightmare” left behind in the
Downing Street flat by Theresa May,
when “John Lewis” is for many a kind
of secular wardrobe of all that is safe
and respected in the national psyche.
Johnson managed, for a while, to
regain the disastrous narrative of the
early response to the pandemic with
his victorious vaccine rollout, and his
weight loss, aided by a personal trainer
(he appears to have gained weight
again, and a source says he loves to eat
at Chequers, where there’s a cook). But
he is losing control again, losing his
writer’s credit, while he becomes more
like an exhausted and overproduced
subject of the reality TV that is
Downing Street.
It’s yet to be seen whether the public
are still committed to a second season.
As Johnson has been reading in
Tender Is the Night, one character tells
Dick that “so many smart men go to
pieces nowadays”.
“And when haven’t they?” Dick asks.
“Smart men play close to the line
because they have to — some of them
can’t stand it, so they quit.”VIII-style appetite for revelry or rule-
breaking (or indeed marriages).
We know that Johnson and Carrie’s
relationship intensified at her flat on
the night of her 30th birthday;
Johnson, then foreign secretary,
attended solo despite being married to
Marina Wheeler, his second wife and
mother of four of his children.
Johnson danced his heart out to
Abba in a kind of disco version of a
peacock display for his new love. The
songs included, of course, The Winner
Takes It All. We also know that just
before they moved into Downing
Street together, they had an almighty
row in Carrie’s flat, recorded by
neighbours. It was speculated that the
cause of the ferocious argument was
Johnson’s contact with Wheeler, or
Jennifer Arcuri, the American
businesswoman who claims she had a
four-year affair with Johnson when he
was London mayor, or maybe just
some spilt red wine.
The response to this debacle from
the Johnson camp may have looked
like a page from a political spin
textbook: a staged photo of Johnson
and Carrie in a meadow. But it was
also something else — an insight
into Carrie’s generation gap with
Johnson. He did not take to social
media, whereas she has been a
natural professional and personal
communicator on it from long
before she became involved with him.
It explains a lot.
Her father, Matthew Symonds, was
a co-founder of The Independent, no
surprise Carrie went into
communications, and rose to become
director of communications at theJohnson
danced his
heart out
to Abba in
a disco
version of
a peacock
display
In Carbis Bay in
Cornwall for the G7
summit in June 2021Arriving at the Conservative
Party conference in
Manchester in 2019. Top: Carrie
with US first lady Jill Biden
and Wilfred in Carbis BayCOVER: ADRIAN DENNIS/GETTY IMAGES. BELOW: ANDREW PARSONS/I-IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; SIMON DAWSON/NO 10 DOWNING STREET; ASSOCIATED PRESS