Dilyn the dog

Thursday

Dilyn the dog

Dilyn the dog’s Downing Street diary (as told to Rod Liddle)

I heard them rowing again this morning, look you. I had just completed my first dump of the day in Allegra Stratton’s handbag when I heard their voices spiralling upwards, the Man and the Woman. They’re not in a good place right now, which is fine by me. A plague on both their houses. Mimsy, woke Carrie, who purchased me under the mistaken impression I was a Peke who would lie gently across her bloody lap all day. And that shambling albino wreck, kind of half-dog half-man, who apparently runs the country, when his wife lets him. Money seemed to be at the heart of their disagreement — it often

Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Carrie Symonds and the First Girlfriend problem

One of the least attractive aspects of American politics is epitomised in the ‘Office of the First Lady’. The office in the East Wing of the White House has grown under consecutive presidents and, depending on the incumbent’s ambitions, can include policy and legislative initiatives. All emanate from a person solely in place because some years earlier they were lucky enough — or otherwise — to marry a person who became president. It all makes America less like a democracy, more like a court, with the inevitable overspill of ‘First Children’ and more. By convention this country has been spared that problem. Prime-ministerial spouses can be strong figures in their

Thursday

Elisa Segrave

A quick fix: how Boris and Carrie can bring Dilyn the dog to heel

A lot of nonsense is being written about Dilyn, the adorable Jack Russell owned by Boris and Carrie, a lookalike for my dog, Perry, now nearly 16. Is Dilyn the currently subdued Boris’s alter ego, one journalist wondered. We read that Dilyn allegedly humped Dominic Cummings’s leg, and at Chequers ‘mounted’ a stool made from the hide of an elephant shot by Teddy Roosevelt. He also peed on an aide’s handbag after she arrived at Downing Street for a meeting. Of course it is not the first time Boris has had a poorly trained dog in his life. When he was editor of The Spectator, a dandie dinmont called Laszlo

Wednesday

Steerpike

Carrie goes to war over Dilyn the dog

It seems fresh infighting has broken out in Whitehall on what is supposed to be the most important Budget day of a generation. Yes, a briefing war has spilt out into the open, with the PM’s fiancée Carrie Symonds taking to Twitter to defend… Dilyn the dog.  Some fed-up official appears to have been whispering that the prime ministerial pooch is ‘sickly’ and could be on the way out.  According to reports, the inhabitants of No. 10 are sick to the back teeth with, to borrow Ms Symond’s phrase, ‘a load of total crap’. The Times‘s Ben Ellery reports the words of one insider, who told the paper: ‘For a while there was dog shit everywhere in