Keeping up with the Johnsons: what Boris and Carrie have been up to (and what they plan next)
As Boris takes the stand at the Covid inquiry, his biographer Sonia Purnell reveals his year of raking in the cash, fitting out his moated mansion and preparing the ground for what he hopes will be a second stab at power
The Covid inquiry has proved to be a trial of reputations for the big beasts of the 2020 government and none more so than for the then prime minister Boris Johnson who appears for the first time on Wednesday. His handling of two days of intense questioning may prove the most important 48 hours of his public life as he surely knows it will shape how his three-year premiership is judged by history.
More immediately, it will also dictate whether he can attempt a spectacular political comeback – his supporter-in-chief Andrew Gimson revealing that even now he “burns with a desire to prove the decision by his own MPs to sack him was a mistake”. Johnson’s intention is apparently to present a “strong case” for being given a second chance at power – and that he has been greatly wronged.
With Labour a massive 23 points ahead in the polls, he is said to believe that he could return (just like his hero Silvio Berlusconi did in Italy) as his party’s only possible hope of salvation – and his own. In truth, there is probably nothing Johnson fears more than a shrinking life of small children, overseas speaking engagements, the odd appearance on GB News and the boos he received from fellow diners at Moro, a Hackney restaurant where his son Theo had been working. Even rumours that he might be parachuted in to edit The Daily Telegraph have recently faded.
This year has featured – at the behest of his much younger wife Carrie – choosing soft furnishings including a £1,250 Soane lamp base for his newly acquired moated £3.8m manor in Oxfordshire. Pictures have been released of the interiors with its collection of pricey Alice Palmer lampshades and super-fashionable Italian splatterware. It appears that the couple are unrepentant in their high-end tastes despite the trials of” Wallpapergate” when they were accused of redecorating the Downing Street flat with eye-poppingly expensive gold wallpaper.
Yet not all has been rosy in the Johnsons’ extensive garden – a local government ecologist stopped them from building a swimming pool because it posed a danger to a population of great crested newts. It was an embarrassing setback for Carrie, who has positioned herself as a champion of animal welfare, and an insight into the small stage on which Johnson himself now operates. The green light for the work from South Oxfordshire District Council was given only when the couple gave an undertaking to protect the endangered species.
Money, it seems, hasn’t been a problem. In February it was reported that Boris Johnson had received earnings, hospitality and donations worth more than £5m over the last six months since leaving office. This included £2,488,387.53 as an advance fee for future speaking engagements arranged via the Harry Walker Agency in New York which has him billed as “the kind of visionary thinker who takes risks for the principles of democracy, freedom, and free markets, and stands alongside those fighting against authoritarian regimes”.
Certainly, this increase from a prime minister’s salary will be appreciated with eight children to now support (Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson was born in July; in addition to Romy, two, and Wilf, three, he also has with Carrie, he has four children with ex-wife Marina Wheeler and another child as a result of an affair with art consultant Helen Macintyre). However, word is he is already tiring of the global round of speeches to cryptocurrency gurus, insurers and investment bankers and will enjoy being back in the news.
In anticipation of what awaits, he has been ensconced with eminent lawyers Brian Altman KC and solicitor Nick Vamos – who, his team is keen to point out, most recently managed to get dozens of sub-postmasters exonerated from wrongful convictions. His wife Carrie and remaining advisers have also been working flat out on a battle plan against the excoriating evidence against them given to the inquiry in the past few weeks.
On past form, Johnson, who once admitted that he enjoyed the “sound of breaking glass” caused by his incendiary coverage of the then European Community back in the early 1990s, will be relishing being back in the limelight. He is someone who craves attention and is crushed without it. How he will fare in the face of the Covid committee, however, remains to be seen. Never before has he faced such lengthy and forensic questioning – made even more difficult without the wall of supportive clamour he commanded from the Tory benches in the House of Commons until the dying days of his premiership.
Johnson thrives with a crowd but has always disliked intense one-to-one encounters. He has even been known to offer to give a speech at dinner parties simply to avoid the agony of having to talk to his neighbour at table and, of course, once famously hid in a fridge to avoid a probing reporter. Those who know him best say he has long nursed a fear – but also expectation – of being “found out”.
The limited number of questions he had to face at Prime Minister’s Questions previously allowed him to deploy the famous “Five Ds” mantra of his favourite film Dodgeball – dodge, duck, dip, dive and, er, dodge. On the rare occasion when he was unable to double dodge, however, his temper often got the better of him. His face would redden, his eyes narrow and he would angrily jab his finger at his challenger. Will he be able to keep his temper under control for the entire two sessions with Mr Keith and other questioners, including a lawyer representing bereaved families?
One subject that might rattle him is the role played by his wife. In one WhatsApp released to the inquiry, Simon Case referred to Carrie Johnson as the “real person in charge” during the pandemic and that “whatever Carrie wants she gets, I guess”. The allegations follow the damaging £50 Metropolitan police fine for a rule-breaking birthday party which she apparently instigated.
She too has notably been busy with burnishing her image. More than 88,000 followers of her Instagram account have been treated to images of Dilyn the dog, ducklings, newborn babies, daisies, baby bumps and – perhaps rather provocatively during a traumatic cost of living crisis – idyllic tropical holidays.
A rare interruption to the earth mother theme – and her emergence as something of a style influencer – has been to campaign to keep Joanna Simpson’s husband Robert Brown, who bludgeoned her to death with a hammer, behind bars. That follows on from her successful fight to reverse a Parole Board decision to release the black cab rapist John Warboys – who targeted her when she was a 19-year-old student. Carrie is said to want to position herself as the leading champion of victims of male violence.
Her plans have been somewhat overshadowed, though, by Johnson’s ex-wife. An expert in employment law, The Independent revealed how the distinguished KC had been appointed as the “whistleblowing tsar” to safeguard women from abusive colleagues – by Labour. In that battle at least, the meticulous and cerebral Marina is emerging as the winner. And one thing Carrie and Boris hate is losing.
Few who worked closely with him during Covid have had a good word to say for Johnson, who has emerged in testimony after testimony as a leader in a time of great national peril who failed to lead, a man who once wanted to be “world king” but when put to the test did not have the “right skill set” to govern. Ultimately, he has emerged as a man who could not apply himself to the serious attention to detail and self-discipline that a pandemic requires. Lockdowns went entirely against his libertarian instincts. And having won a large majority in the 2019 election, he was a prime minister who just wanted to have fun, not become the bearer of bad news.
Johnson’s former chief of staff Dominic Cummings has been particularly damning – repeatedly likening him to a “trolley” veering from one opinion to another and going on holiday for 10 days to work on his Shakespeare book The Riddle of Genius, just as the pandemic was taking hold.
Cabinet secretary Simon Case described him in a WhatsApp as “feral”. Others have painted his No 10 as a toxic and dysfunctional hotbed of misogyny, dithering, infighting and fear. Government scientists found him “bamboozled” by graphs or statistics and insist they were not consulted before the controversial – and now discredited – Eat Out to Help Out policy despite the all too obvious risks of increasing contagion.
Senior civil servant Helen McNamara recalls that there was not a “single day” on Johnson’s watch when the Covid rules were followed and another former chief of staff, Eddie Lister, confirmed Johnson said “let the bodies pile high” rather than introduce a second lockdown to avoid another even more deadly peak.
So Johnson has a very big hill to climb. But no effort has been spared in a vigorous advance campaign to rehabilitate him as a statesman whose only apparent fault was perhaps an excess of optimism but who got the “big calls right” to save hundreds of thousands of lives. It’s said he also hopes to offer “considered reflections” on how Britain should deal with the next pandemic.
Campaigning, of course, has always been his genius – and rule-breaking and personal attacks on opponents his modus operandi. Witnesses are expected to remain silent on their evidence until they appear in person at the inquiry when their statements are put to the sword by lead counsel Hugo Keith KC. But for the past few days, sympathetic newspapers have been running helpful comments on his evidence from unnamed Johnson “allies”, “friends” and “sources”. Johnson’s critics, meanwhile, have been targeted with allegations of “malice” or running a “vendetta”.
It is a similar tactic to the one he has deployed on many occasions when under fire, notably when the cross-party privileges committee found that there was “no precedent” for the scale of his lying to parliament about Partygate. Rather than showing genuine contrition, Johnson dismissed the findings as the “vindictive” verdict of a “kangaroo court”. Now friendly commentators have upped their attacks on the Covid inquiry – one friendly columnist branded it as “ludicrous, turgid, gloating”.
On Saturday, “Johnson: My Covid decisions saved lives” was the front-page headline in The Times. Although the paper suggested he would offer an apology for his early overconfidence, the bulk of three pages of reporting presented Johnson’s “likely” defence of his overall handling of the pandemic. Allegations of infighting were merely “useful” tensions between departments, the paper claimed he would tell the inquiry, while the persistent U-turns in policy were just “flexible reactions to changing circumstances”.
The coarse and aggressive WhatsApp messages between ministers and senior officials should be seen, the piece continued, just as “dark humour” under pressure. And, the story claims, government scientists Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were consulted on Eat Out to Help Out and deemed it an “acceptable risk”. Finally, the allegation (from several quarters) that he ignored Covid – and received no Cobra briefings or emails on the subject – for an incredible 10 days during the February half-term to write his book is a “red herring” from “malevolent critics”. He had his red boxes with him at all times.
We will soon find out whether Johnson will include these claims in his evidence under oath to the inquiry or whether they were simply useful fliers in a media management campaign that could be distanced from him if necessary. But he has certainly got his arguments in first and unchallenged. In the past, Johnson’s favourite tactics of bluster, attack and dissembling have served him well. Whether they will be as effective for him under the pitiless strip lighting of this week’s Covid inquiry hearings remains to be seen.
Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition - A Biography of Boris Johnson by Sonia Purnell
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