Carrie Johnson’s strength isn’t the issue – it’s Boris’s weakness

A SUSPECT dubbed “The Eunuch Maker” has been arrested in London after allegedly carrying out dozens of castrations in their flat.

It may surprise you to learn that the alleged perpetrator of what’s known as “genital nullification” is not, in fact, the Prime Minister’s wife Carrie Johnson, but a 44-year-old man from Finsbury Park who apparently kept the removed appendages in his freezer.

Perhaps Carrie has also kept the removed appendages of Boris, Dominic Cummings, Uncle Tom Cobley and all in the same fridge-freezer she stored all those bottles of wine for the secret parties she “ambushed” her poor, unsuspecting husband with?

The Eunuch Maker is very real and acting as part of “Nullo” — a movement popular with those who don’t identify as male or female that hails the work of Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama.

He removed, cooked and served his genitalia to paying guests at a banquet in 2012. As you do. No, I’m not making this up. But much of the opprobrium being heaped on Carrie’s head in recent weeks is trumped-up nonsense by grown men who really should know better.

Is she a strong woman? Undoubtedly.

As the privately educated daughter of a journalist father and lawyer mother, she would rightly have been taught that her opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, so why the hell shouldn’t she express it to her husband and father of her two children?

The problem, one suspects, lies not so much with Carrie being a strong woman but her husband being a chaotic, some might say weak, man.

Grow the hell up

In short, the guns of blame for Boris’s failings should be targeted solely at him and not his wife.

Did Denis Thatcher, Norma Major, Cherie Blair, Sarah Brown, Samantha Cameron and Philip May have political conversations behind closed doors with their spouses? Of course they did.

Everyone — be it butcher, baker or candlestick maker — uses their other half as a sounding board on work grievances, but what’s crucial is how they assimilate the content of the chat and use it to make their own decisions which they then take full responsibility for.

That’s what a true leader does.

But Boris’s indecision is legendary. So too a yearning to be liked, which often translates to agreeing with the last person he spoke to then irritating them by changing his mind later on.

To Dominic Cummings et al, this trait has been interpreted as the PM being hen-pecked in to U-turns by his forthright wife. But in truth, his chaotic thought process could just have easily been swayed by the input of a Downing Street cleaner he encountered on the way back to the flat.

His reported comments such as, “You don’t understand what it’s like upstairs”, and that Carrie would “Go crackers” if he didn’t appoint Allegra Stratton as his press chief suggest that he too has added to the narrative of his wife being his puppet-master. Pathetic really.

Can you imagine Margaret Thatcher telling her aides she was making an important appointment to appease Denis? Quite.

I rewatched the Sky Arts documentary Painting The Johnsons yesterday, which focuses on the compelling art work of Boris’s mother Charlotte, who has since died.

In the film, she’s admirably honest about the clinical anxiety and depression that blighted her life.

“I loved babies, but I didn’t realise they’d get to be too much for me. I lost it completely,” she says in the film.

When Boris, the oldest of her four children, was nine, she was admitted to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital after developing severe OCD which compelled her to wash her hands until they bled.

Boris’s younger brother Leo, now 53, refers to their visits there as “the elephant in the room” that they consciously chose not to discuss.

He adds: “We were all sent off to schools with norms and structures and that British competitive instinct where we all thrived totally. And we just buried it, totally. We denied, denied, denied and we all just pushed and shoved on.”

Their father Stanley says of that difficult time: “I have always regarded life as a game of rugby. You smash on through.”

Isn’t that Boris to an absolute tee? All his life he has smashed on through every blunder by using his undoubted charm to survive another day. Deny, bury, repeat.

But the office of Prime Minister is no place for a busker. It requires someone with clarity of thought who thinks beyond electoral cycles, makes unpopular decisions for the good of the country and takes responsibility for those choices rather than seeking to blame others.

Boris is ferociously bright with the populist touch, but now he needs to take a long look in the mirror, tackle any childhood demons that might still affect his behaviour today and grow the hell up.

Then he might just become the Prime Minister we all hoped he would be. And it would give his relentlessly vilified wife a well-deserved break too.

Locks killed cocks

YE Olde Fighting Cocks is the “oldest pub in Britain”, but current landlord Christo Tofalli has filed for bankruptcy after he “tried everything” to keep it going through the pandemic.

The hostelry in St Albans, Herts, first opened its doors in 793 and, over the next 1229 years, it survived the Great Famine, the Black Death, the Great Plague, the cholera and flu pandemics and both world wars.

But it couldn’t survive the scourge of Covid-19.

Or, might one humbly suggest, was it the Government’s obsession with the last two, wholly unnecessary, lockdowns that proved its financial undoing?

Killer doubts

DID Levi Bellfield kill Lin Russell and her daughter Megan back in 1996?

And will his confession exonerate Michael Stone, who was jailed for the crime in 1998 but has always protested his innocence?

Time will tell. But meanwhile, it’s food for thought for those who still think we should impose a death sentence on murderers.

Days gun by

THEY always say that when police officers start looking young, you know you’re getting old.

But for me, that moment happened this week when I read that Axl Rose, the snake-hipped frontman of Guns N’ Roses whose stage name is an anagram of oral sex, is now 60.

Surely not? Perhaps, given the slew of age-related medical conditions that will now inevitably descend on him during the final third of his life, Lax Sore might now be a more appropriate moniker?