Carrie Johnson and the curious case of the
vanishing Times story
Report had claimed Boris Johnson tried to hire his now
wife as chief of staff when foreign secretary, but then it was deleted
Rowena
Mason and Jim Waterson
Sun 19 Jun
2022 18.38 BST
At first
glance, the story appeared to be the political scoop of the weekend.
On
Saturday, the Times reported claims that Boris Johnson had tried to hire his
now wife as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary.
But almost
as soon as the article hit the printers, it was withdrawn, without explanation
or clarification.
The piece,
written by the veteran lobby journalist Simon Walters, formerly of the Daily
Mail and Mail on Sunday, appeared on page five of some early print copies of
Saturday’s Times newspaper but was dropped for later editions.
It does not
appear that the article was ever published on the Times’ website.
The story
expanded on claims in a biography of Carrie Johnson by the Tory donor and peer
Lord Ashcroft that Johnson had tried to appoint her to a £100,000-a-year
government job when he was foreign secretary in 2018.
It said the
idea had fallen apart when his closest advisers learned of the idea to hire the
Tory press chief, then known as Carrie Symonds, whom he later married. Johnson
was then still married to Marina Wheeler, a barrister.
A source
with knowledge of the situation told the Guardian this account was correct.
However, a
spokesperson for Carrie Johnson was categoric. “These claims are totally
untrue,” she said.
Downing
Street declined to give an on-the-record response to the story but a No 10
source also said the story was untrue – and suggested it was sexist.
“This is a
grubby, discredited story turned down by most reputable media outlets because
it isn’t true. The facts speak for themselves.”
Walters
told the Guardian: “I stand by the story. I went to all the relevant people
over two days. Nobody offered me an on-the-record denial and Downing St didn’t
deny it off the record either.”
Journalists
at the Times were baffled by the decision to withdraw Saturday’s story, with
multiple sources suggesting there had been a high-level intervention to remove
it.
The paper’s
editor, John Witherow, is reported to be off work. His deputy Tony Gallagher
edited the newspaper on Friday, with multiple sources saying he made the call
to drop the story from later editions.
A
spokesperson for News UK declined to comment on why an article that appeared
prominently in potentially hundreds of thousands of print newspapers had been
removed from later editions, without any explanation.
Walters
recently left his senior position at the Daily Mail, where he first revealed
the scandal over Carrie Johnson’s renovations of the Downing Street flat.
MailOnline
rewrote the Times’ story about the proposed government job for Carrie Johnson
in the early hours of Saturday morning but has since also deleted its article
without explanation or an editor’s note. News aggregation sites have also
deleted their copies of the MailOnline article.
Removing
the article may be an example of the Streisand effect – where attempts to
delete information from the internet make the public much more interested in
it.
Alastair
Campbell, the former No 10 director of communications under Tony Blair, tweeted
on Sunday that the disappearance of the story appeared to be “further evidence
that much of our media is essentially an extension of the press office of a
liar and a crook”. He also said that the Times owner, Rupert Murdoch, had “done
so much damage to journalism”.
CARRIE ON REGARDLESS
SIMON SAYS:
No. 10’s official spokesman will be braced for a flurry of questions today over
the disappearance of a Times story claiming that Boris Johnson tried to make
his now-wife Carrie his £100,000-a-year chief of staff while he was foreign sec
in 2018. The report was taken down hours after being printed on Saturday,
causing lots of head-scratching over the weekend. It should make for a fun
lobby briefing for Westminster hacks today.
Mystery of
the disappearing story: Veteran political journalist Simon Walters told both
the New European and the Guardian that he stands by his report, which appeared
in the first edition of the Times on Saturday but was wiped from the second and
never put up online. “I stand by the story 100 per cent,” Walters told the New
European. “I was in lengthy and detailed communication with No. 10 at a high
level, Ben Gascoigne and Mrs Johnson’s spokeswoman for up to 48 hours before
the paper went to press. At no point did any of them offer an on-the-record
denial of any element of the story.”
Adding fuel
to the fire: Dominic Cummings tweeted last night that the story “is true” and
that the PM also wanted to give Carrie a government job during the third
quarter of 2020.
FWIW: No.
10 denied both the Walters report and Cummings allegation to Playbook. A No. 10
spokeswoman said last night: “Both these claims are untrue.”
The weird
thing is: The story was already out there in Michael Ashcroft’s biography of
Carrie, published earlier this year, and the Mail’s serialization of it. The Guardian’s
Rowena Mason and Jim Waterson have a mischievous write-up suggesting that this
has turned into an example of the Streisand effect — when an attempt to wipe
something from the internet massively increases interest in it.
And not for
the first time: A 2020 story by Times news reporter Ben Ellery claiming that
the Johnsons were considering giving away their rescue dog Dilyn was removed
from the website after furious reaction from Carrie, who called it “total crap”
on Twitter. On that occasion she was said to have phoned lobby hacks personally
to tell them the report was untrue. But its claims that Dilyn was not properly
housetrained and was causing damage have since made its way into lots of
reports about the PM’s jokey frustration with him. Last year Simon Walters
wrote in the Mail that when the Times refused to print an apology for the
story, Carrie drafted a letter to the paper alleging it had breached IPSO rules
but that the PM refused to sign it because it was “nonsense.”
The former government aide alleged that Boris Johnson
also offered Carrie Symonds a government job during his time as prime minister.
Jack Peat
by Jack Peat 2022-06-20 08:28in Media, News
Allegations
that Boris Johnson offered Carrie Symonds a lucrative job in the Foreign Office
are accurate, according to the PM’s former aide, who said the truth is “worse”.
This
weekend the Sunday Times spiked an article by Simon Walters concerning a
high-paid position offered to the prime minister’s wife during his time as
foreign secretary.
The story
appeared in first editions of the newspaper but was replaced by a story about
European Court of Human Rights judges when second editions were sent out.
Alastair
Campbell branded the cover-up as ‘the death of journalism’ in the UK, taking a
swipe at the right-wing papers who ‘make excuses’ for Johnson’s crimes.
Walters has
also spoken out, saying he stands by the story “100 per cent”.
Talking to
the New European, he said: “I was in lengthy and detailed communication with No
10 at a high level, Ben Gascoigne and Mrs Johnson’s spokeswoman for up to 48
hours before the paper went to press.
“At no
point did any of them offer an on-the-record denial of any element of the
story.”
Dominic
Cummings took to Twitter to give his view on the matter.
He said the
missing story “is true” and that the Times is “pathetic” to have pulled it.
The PM’s
former aide also said Johnson tried to appoint Symonds to a government job in
the third quarter of 2020, when he was the prime minister of the United
Kingdom.
First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris
Johnson – thinly veiled and thinly drawn
Michael Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography can’t seem
to decide whether the prime minister’s wife is a shallow non-entity or a
sinister power behind the throne
Gaby
Hinsliff
Sun 20 Mar
2022 11.00 GMT
Carrie
Johnson is a fascinating woman. An undoubtedly complex character, inspiring
fierce loyalty from some and equally fierce loathing in others, she wields an
influence unlike any previous British prime minister’s wife and arguably
represents a new archetype of female power. But if Michael Ashcroft’s
thoroughly unauthorised biography of her is to be believed, she only really got
interesting when she met her husband.
Her old
headteacher reports that “she didn’t stand out” and there is little memorable
to say about her student years. Politically, an early boyfriend describes a
“fairly blank canvas”, who fell into working for the Tory MP Zac Goldsmith (her
springboard to a press officer job at party headquarters and subsequent special
adviser gig) largely because of a shared passion for animal welfare. The one
character who really comes alive in the early chapters is her father, Matthew
Symonds, co-founder of the Independent newspaper, accused of brandishing
packets of condoms in morning conference – a way, one ex-colleague suggests, of
letting everyone know that despite being married he was still having lots of
sex – and trying to wangle his mistress Josephine McAffee a job on the paper.
When Carrie was born as a result of this affair, he financially supported and
spent time with his daughter, but didn’t leave his wife. Something here sounds
uncannily familiar, but if there are intriguing parallels between the absent
father and the married ex-journalist two decades her senior who Carrie
eventually fell for, Ashcroft isn’t the writer to explore them. His real
interest isn’t in making sense of her character but in how he thinks she shaped
a Conservative government.
There is an extraordinary bitterness to the extensive
verbatim quotes, from heavily disguised anonymous sources
Here the
book appears to rely heavily on the accounts of her enemies, although in
fairness, that may not be for want of trying to interview her friends (access
to her inner circle is strictly controlled). Most readers are now familiar with
the story of the power struggle inside Downing Street between a young, liberal
clique loyal to Carrie and the former Vote Leave advisers Dominic Cummings and Lee
Cain, which ended in victory for her. But Ashcroft helpfully traces these
tensions back to their original roots, well before she entered No 10. In his
telling, she first clashed with Cain when he was working for Johnson at the
Foreign Office; she earned the now notorious nickname “Princess Nut Nut” for
supposedly meddling in her lover’s run for the Tory leadership, and froze out
his election guru Lynton Crosby during the 2019 election campaign. All these
grievances were carried into power, with predictable consequences under
pressure.
There is an
extraordinary bitterness to the extensive verbatim quotes, from heavily
disguised anonymous sources, that follow. Carrie is portrayed as something of a
spoiled princess, insecure and vengeful and lacking in “intellectual depth”.
Worse, she has entrapped Boris in such an “emotionally disruptive relationship”
that he seems actively scared of her. Similar claims have been aired before,
not least by Cummings, but the charge here that there’s “something not right”
about Carrie is a serious one. Yet it goes virtually unquestioned. Whoever his
source is, Ashcroft apparently considers them beyond reproach.
Carrie,
we’re told, just isn’t up to the standards of the last wife; while Marina
Wheeler organised his home life to perfection, Carrie is “demanding rather than
supplying. I think it’s the biggest explanation of the dysfunctionality inside
Number 10... Marina was his wife but she was also in some respects a mother
figure to him.” This third marriage, our anonymous friend adds, is a “Greek
tragedy” in which the great potential of a man we have just been told can’t
manage his own laundry has been squandered “‘because of her”.
The sexism rankles, obviously. But so does the way some big questions are left hanging. Is a man this chaotic actually capable of running a country? Was it really his wife’s job to organise him, or a chief of staff’s? Might the Downing Street operation take some responsibility itself for the chaos of the Downing Street operation? Yet the author largely contents himself with transcribing his mysterious but strangely familiar-sounding Deep Throat at length, before concluding gravely that while “I know that the buck stops with [Johnson], the evidence I have gathered suggests his wife’s behaviour is preventing him from leading Britain as effectively as the voters deserve”.
Feminist
qualms aside, the most puzzling thing about all this is the leap from the first
half of the book to the second. Carrie Johnson is depicted as a kind of
glittering she-devil, with a mystical hold over her husband and the skills to
outwit veteran political campaigners. How Carrie Symonds, the unmemorable
schoolgirl turned very middle-ranking special adviser, morphed suddenly into
this creature of semi-mythical powers remains unclear. Should the book not seek
to explain this, if only to avoid cynical readers concluding that it’s mostly
another vehicle for the Vote Leave lot to work through their feelings about
being dumped by Boris Johnson? Diana, Princess of Wales famously said that her
marriage involved three people and so felt a bit crowded. With the Johnsons, it
seems more like half an office-full. Maybe the real Carrie simply got lost in
the crowd.
No comments:
Post a Comment