Boris, Carrie, And Whack-A-Mole

While his pals in our free and fearless press are trying to get their readers to look at all the Rotten Lefties™ who are either going on strike, or seriously considering doing so, alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is encountering one of those Little Local Difficulties involving his wife Carrie. And yet more alleged corruption. And it won’t go away.

What happened can be put directly: early editions of Saturday’s Times ran a story titled “Johnson tried to give Carrie top Foreign Office job during affair”, claiming that Bozo had attempted to have his then mistress made chief of staff at his own department. The story follows up a claim in Michael Ashcroft’s biography of Carrie Johnson, First Lady, and effectively confirms it.

That revelation was bad enough - although nothing Bozo gets up to any longer has much in the way of shock value - but then the story vanished. It also vanished from Mail Online, which had recycled the claims for a few more clicks. MSN, which had syndicated the Mail Online version, followed suit. Someone had whacked, or caused to be whacked, the mole.

But then, by the iron law of the Streisand Effect, lots more smaller moles emerged. The journalist whose name appeared on the story’s by-line, Simon Walters, is Old School. He doesn’t just make stuff up. He does the hard yards, asks the questions, gets the answers. His trophy cabinet includes former Tory MP Aidan Burley - over the Nazi-themed stag party.

Walters stood by his story. So then came the questions. Had there been some kind of injunction? Press Gazette has today quashed that one: had there been an injunction, there could have been no reporting on the story being pulled, something the Guardian and New European have now done. So who pulled the story, and who caused the story-puller to act?

Now things got much more interesting: Times editor John Witherow had been away, and Saturday’s edition was overseen by his deputy, the deeply unpleasant Tony Gallagher. “Multiple sources” told the Guardian that he made the decision to pull the story. Gallagher is a friend of Bozo. So then a direct line was drawn to Downing Street intervention. But on whose behalf?

The Oh What A Giveaway moment came when someone speaking on behalf of Carrie Johnson declared that the central claim in the Times story was untrue. However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, the claims were also made in the Ashcroft biography. And, it seems, no legal action has been taken against its publishers. Well, well.

At this point, regular readers of Private Eye magazine may recall Bozo intervening to try and have another story spiked, on the grounds that “Carrie is very upset” by it. But why might she also be upset over a story that, at its heart, merely riffs on a claim already made in a book already published and still out there? And why are the Times and Mail so coy about it all?

More questions, more moles to whack, more Streisand Effects coming, and to come. One of the answers may be found in the Ashcroft book, an excerpt from which is still live at Mail Online. This claims that before Carrie met Bozo, “she had become close to other men, one of whom was a married Conservative MP with a high public profile”. Who was not Bozo.

So there’s another question: who he? While that one sinks in, “Hearing that then Foreign Secretary Johnson was looking for a new special adviser, Carrie approached him about the role”. She didn’t get it. Then, in early 2018, “Johnson seemed keener on the plan [to appoint a chief of staff]. The person he had in mind for the plum, six-figure role? Carrie Symonds”.

What might also not please Carrie is this snippet: “'For Boris, Carrie was a fling,' says a source close to these events. 'He never expected to be with her long-term. He was shocked when Marina said she was divorcing him. He never expected it. So he settled for Carrie.’” OUCH! It gets worse.

Tony Gallagher

She is portrayed as controlling and manipulative. “She wasn't prepared to roll her sleeves up and work hard, and yet she interfered all the time … The problem was she would want to control everything, but she wouldn't work with anyone”. And, after Bozo became PM, “We learned pretty quickly there was a culture of fear around touching anything that Carrie didn't like”.

And one source made this damning claim: “I would say Boris is trapped in an emotionally disruptive relationship. I think he's definitely scared of her and I think she dominates him. In private moments he would say words to the effect of, 'Don't do anything that's going to make her torture me when I get home. You've just got to help me. My life at home's miserable. You've got to find a way to make this bearable for me.' He'd speak with exasperation in his eyes”.

That may be why the Times story got pulled. But that excerpt from the Ashcroft book is still live, and the book still available. Whoever has been playing Whack-A-Mole on behalf of Bozo and his third wife has failed miserably. And no chorus of supportive voices denouncing the claims as “unfair” or “sexist” is going to make any of it go away any time soon.

Nor will blaming the spread of this story on The Left or Bitter Remoaners have any effect. The genie is out of the bottle. And it isn’t going back in.

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