Carrie, please don’t launch a lifestyle brand

When Carrie Symonds first emerged as the paramour of Prime Minister Johnson, I liked what I saw. I admired her bravery in waiving her anonymity to reveal that, as a teenager, she had been targeted by the serial rapist John Worboys to campaign against his release from prison. And I appreciated her love of our dumb friends; she was widely believed to have been behind her boyfriend’s promise to promote animal welfare in his first speech as prime minister, quite a turnaround for a man who had said that he ‘loved’ hunting in part because of the ‘semi-sexual relation with the horse’.

But reading in the Evening Standard gossip column this week that Carrie Johnson is planning to launch ‘a lifestyle brand in the style of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop’ and ‘considering a line of sustainable and organic products for young fashion-conscious women and children’, I was torn between wild amusement and existential dread.