It’s all a bit of a soap opera over at No. 10. Tears, screams, tantrums, mess everywhere — and that’s just Boris’s children Wilf and Romy. The papers are full of talk of ‘the good king with bad advisers’ as various sources speculate that one or more of the whips’ office, special adviser team and the ministerial ranks could all be overhauled. Bertolt Brecht suggested dissolving the people and electing another – it appears Boris wants to do the same to the team he hand-picked.
But while Johnson’s government has been accused of having a ‘women problem,’ it’s not just the men getting involved in the briefing wars. For tensions within the Downing Street sisterhood spilled over on Wednesday when Carrie Johnson’s close friend Nimco Ali publicly reprimanded one Tory rising star on Twitter:
The tweet was sparked by allegations that Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland, instigated the ‘pork pie plot’
‘I honestly can’t believe the audacity of Dehenna Davison. Girl get a grip.’
The tweet was sparked by allegations that Dehenna Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland, instigated the ‘pork pie plot’ against Mrs Johnson’s husband. Naturally, neither Carrie nor Ali, a taxpayer-funded Home Office adviser who knows Downing Street well, would take too kindly to efforts to kick them out of the recently decorated No. 11 flat.
Davison, for her part, describes the claims as ‘bullshit’ but Ali’s intervention signalled the advent of a torrent of negative briefing against the 28-year-old backbencher. The Daily Mail splashed details of the ‘TikTok TV star with a thirst for attention’ across two pages, replete with an image of her in a thigh split dress. Andrew Pierce regaled his readers by referencing Davison’s puppy ‘playdate’ with Dilyn in No. 10 and how ‘back then the newly minted MP’ was ‘one of Boris Johnson’s golden girls’ and ‘besties’ with Carrie. As Pierce noted, Johnson’s then fiancé ‘even joined the campaign trail to help get Davison elected in 2019. The MP later posted cosy pictures of the two of them on Twitter with the hashtag #ToryGirlSquad.’
Never such innocence again. To Mr S, it all smacks a little too much of the 2004 classic Mean Girls with its parties, teenage social cliques and adolescents telling one another ‘you can’t sit with us!’ If all the plastics start delving into their Burn Books, where will it all end? As Gretchen Wieners said, ‘you may think you like someone, but you could be wrong.’ That’s just, like, the rules of feminism.
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