Carrie and the secret (or not so secret) life of a Prime Ministerial Consort

Boris and Carrie did it their way. Their marriage last weekend was the triumph of negative media management you might expect from the Conservative party’s former Head of Communications and a former editor and journalist. 

Never mind that there was a little deception involved with save-the-date invitations sent out for a celebration in July next year. The happy couple got to have their day privately at Westminster Cathedral and 10 Downing Street away from the prying eyes of the press, politicians and photographers. What news there was only stuttered out long after the deed was done.

Boris Johnson was the first Prime Minister to marry while in office for over a century, and only the third divorcee to hold the office. The low-key nature of his and Carrie’s nuptials sent a “so what?” message to the public. None of your business. Co-habiting unmarried couples are now the fastest-growing family type, according to the Office for National Statistics. The Prime Minister and his partner had already moved into their official residences, with the birth of baby Wilfred following shortly afterwards.

If not much has changed for Johnson, beyond the legal bond of matrimony, a lot has changed for the new Mrs Johnson, as she wishes to be known. Bureaucratic stiffness about her status has been dispelled. She is now the Prime Minister’s official consort and will step into that role for the first time later this week by entertaining “the spouses” of visiting G7 leaders. 

The Prime Minister’s wife is not the equivalent of FLOTUS, the First Lady of the United States, who now has a federal budget for her own staff. No Prime Minister’s wife has yet managed to match Michelle Obama’s record of being voted America’s most admired woman for the third year running. 

Unofficially, though, the wife, or husband, is paired up and compared with FLOTUS and other spouses. The expectations placed on her, or him, are not really very different, except for typical British cheeseparing which means any assistance which she receives must be chiselled out of her husband’s funding. 

The Prime Minister’s consort has a public profile and is expected to use it unless they opt to remain strictly in obscurity – a fate which Carrie has already foresworn. 

The novelty of being a male sidekick forced Denis Thatcher into the public eye. He became the first of the high-profile Number Ten consorts of the media age. He camouflaged himself by playing up to the gin-swilling golf club buffoon caricatured in Private Eye’s “Dear Bill” letters. In-person, he was different: nobody’s fool, a successful businessman with startlingly right-wing views on issues such as South Africa, views which he was happy to share with his wife.

Philip May, the UK’s second “First Gentleman”, performed a similarly important role as a confidante and private political advisor to his wife, Prime Minister Theresa May. It is a convenient myth to pretend that spouses are merely apolitical appendages. Unsurprisingly, most of them have similar political sympathies to their partners and have been involved in party politics. Theresa and Philip, for example, met through the Oxford University Conservative association. 

In recent times, only Norma Major has almost pulled off a disappearing act. Thanks to Edwina Currie’s confessions we know that the Major’s marriage was not entirely happy. Even so, Norma Major only retreated to Huntingdonshire after she expressed much more trenchant views on crime and punishment than her husband in an interview with The Independent newspaper. John and Norma also managed to keep their two teenage children, Elizabeth and James, out of the limelight during his premiership. Yet Norma still managed to publish two books during that time. One on Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country retreat, the other on the soprano, Joan Sutherland. Norma complained that her husband fell asleep as soon as the lights dimmed whenever he accompanied her to the Opera. She was subsequently made a dame for her charity work, especially with Mencap.

Cherie Blair became the first, controversial, in-your-face, working, Prime Minister’s wife. She was not content to find herself looking out from The Goldfish Bowl, which was the title of the book she wrote about Prime Minister’s wives with the late Cate Haste. She offered an irresistible counterpoint to her husband for commentators. Unlike Tony Blair, Cherie was born into the Labour party and the Catholic church, two creeds he later chose to adopt. After failing to be elected as a Labour MP she pursued the legal career which he abandoned. And she had a colourful family, including that TV actor Tony Booth. 

Above all, the Blairs were different to what the public was used to. They had three young children and became the first Prime Ministerial couple for a hundred years to add another while still living in Downing Street. Little Leo turned out to be an early indicator of a shift in Prime Ministerial demography. The Camerons and Johnsons would follow with newborns, and the Browns, with two small boys. 

It is erroneous to dismiss Sarah Brown for having “little interest in politics”, as the historian Andrew Roberts did in The Sun a few days ago. If that was true, it is unlikely Sarah Macaulay would have ended up marrying the viscerally political Gordon Brown. Two years running, in 2008 and 2009, she broke the precedent to give American-style speeches in support of her husband, the then Prime Minister, at the Labour Party Conference. She attended prominent North London state schools, and the PR company she formed with Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of the Marxist historian Eric, included work for The New Statesman, the Labour Party, and trade unions. Today, both Gordon and Sarah Brown campaign on health and education issues.

Samantha Cameron kept out of party politics, her contributions to her husband were her dignity and style. She managed to make him seem almost cool with her patrician bohemianism. The hospitality events she organised at Downing Street had never before been so graceful.

Now it is Carrie’s turn. Aged 33, she is by far the youngest of the spouses since Denis Thatcher, with the biggest age gap, 24 years, with her partner. She shares the political activism of her predecessors with Sam Cam’s interest in presentation, though perhaps not with Mrs Cameron’s flair. 

Before moving to Tory Party HQ, Carrie worked for three Conservative MPs – Zac Goldsmith, Sajid Javid and John Whittingdale. Her closest friends appear to be people currently actively involved in politics, either as advisors to the Johnson government or as sympathetic journalists. 

She has already made her presence felt. She made an enemy of Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief advisor, now dismissed. The government seems to have a clearer focus on animal rights and environmentalism, both subjects close to her heart, than in many other policy areas. She was in charge of the expensive, privately funded, redecoration of the Prime Minister’s flat “above the shop”. 

In the milieu of the ruling Tory party, where genealogy and personal alliances matter so much, the cynical words of Zac’s father Jimmy Goldsmith did not die with him. “When a man marries his mistress he creates an immediate vacancy”. This is this Prime Minister’s third marriage, another record. 

It is plain to see that Boris Johnson is besotted with his new bride. The nation is agog, noses pressed up against the goldfish bowl, and wishes the new couple well.