The writer Tanya Gold has a top quality piece over at Unherd where she talks about Carrie Johnson, the Prime Minister’s wife aka ‘Princess Nut Nut’. It’s pretty scathing about not just the unelected and unaccountable political and administrative power that Carrie Johnson has acquired, but also about the Prime Minister himself. On the subject of Mrs Johnson Ms Gold said that she has been using feminism as a ‘defensive earthwork’, a shield to deflect criticism that may come her way but her husband does not escape criticism. Of Boris Johnson Ms Gold says:

According to those who have left Downing Street in despair, Johnson mirrors his wife. He mirrors everyone and tells them what they want to hear, because then they will love him. A weathervane will shift to the wind because it is easy. If Carrie Johnson has too much power, it is because he took it from those who should have it and gave it to her instead. I think his premiership will be destroyed by it and, considering what he has done to the women he has known, it is a mad kind of justice.

Ms Gold claims that Boris Johnson’s personality and the root of his desire to be loved and also his less than admirable treatment of his former intimate partners lies in his childhood and that is something that I can agree with Ms Gold about. We are all the products of our pasts but it may well be the case that Boris Johnson is at least in part a prisoner of his own past and that has led him to be the person he is today. It was an interesting description of Boris as someone who ‘mirrors’ others and this I’m afraid is what makes him weak.

Ms Gold is correct, Carrie Johnson has too much power and her friends have too much influence not because they’ve earned that power but because Boris Johnson has meekly handed it over. Ms Gold’s prediction that the act of Boris Johnson handing over so much influence and authority to his wife and her friends may be what ultimately destroys his political career. This will especially be the case if or rather when, Carrie Johnson’s preferred energy policies cause Britons to starve, freeze or be put in significant penury.

When that time comes people will of course blame Carrie Johnson and her wealthy environmentalist friends for their predicament but they will also blame her husband for failing to tell his wife that the health and wealth of the nation must be the absolute and binding priority over and above everything else. That Boris Johnson found that he could not say these words to his wife and instead hand her such destructive political power might end up being not only what destroys his political life, but will end up being his mocking epitaph. He will be the Prime Minister who could not put Britain’s interests first and rather than being remembered as a simile of Churchill or Thatcher, he will instead be remembered as a combination of a weak leader like Heath and a womanising scoundrel like Lloyd-George.