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What Carrie Did NextChapter One
The secret memoirs of the First Lady of the United Kingdom (FLOTUK). As told to Otto English…
That night I dreamed I went to Chevening again.
Beyond the gate, the drive to the great house was littered with discarded microwave meal boxes. A hollow-faced man in a beanie hat and ill-fitting trousers appeared and beckoned me but, just then, Dilyn my faithful puppy, appeared at my feet and started yapping.
“What do you want boy? What is it?” I asked.
“Woof!” he barked and then “woof – woof”.
The man in the beanie hat had somehow got hold of a giant fork and was lumbering towards me screaming: “Prick it! Prick it!”
Now I was in the walled garden, next to the organic vegetable patch. I looked down at the ruby slippers on my feet, clicked them together and awoke with a start.
I was no longer at Chevening, but safe in our bed in Downing Street. Al, known to millions as ‘Boris’, was playing a naked game of tug of war with Dilyn. It had all been a nightmare and I was back with the two beings I care about most in the world!
“This f*cking animal is tearing my pants.” Boris was shouting adorably, as Dilyn tugged excitedly at his favourite bus motif boxers.
It seems improbable that a simple girl like me, from one of the best-connected families in the country, born just a few short months before Boris was first sacked for lying, should end up in a relationship with the most widely loved Prime Ministers since David Cameron – but somehow I managed it.
In these pages, I intend to put down for posterity what happened next. Boris’s mission is a big one. He may have told those Northern people that he will make Sunderland great again, but he has insisted to me that his real long-term priority, his secret agenda if you like, is to save all of the whales, baby dolphins and orphaned kittens that suffer at the hands of beastly people. And everyone knows what a Boris promise means!
I first met the man who was to become the greatest love of my early 30s during his re-election campaign to be London Mayor. Boris is famed for his way with words and I will always treasure the first thing he said to me. I was standing outside the campaign bus and he came up to me and bellowed: “Who are you and what’s your number?” Adding: “I’m in a hurry.”
Some months later, my phone rang and it was him. My heart skipped a beat as he yelled: “Arcuri? It’s kicking in, can I come over?” Clearly, he had misdialled accidentally on purpose, so I shot back that he’d got the wrong number, but how lovely it was to hear his voice. Before I could say any more he hung up.
The path of true love never did run smooth! But, eventually, we did get to meet again and I came to understand the real ‘Boris’ – Al is the Boris the public don’t get to see. A man as comfortable with minor public schoolboys as those from Eton; Boris the cultural connoisseur who loves popular movies like Anchorman 2 every bit as much as cinematic classics such as Saving Private Ryan or Mrs Doubtfire.
When we first started seeing each other, he was at his very lowest ebb. Boris had a unique problem in his marriage. His second wife Marina didn’t understand him and specifically his habit of hanging out with younger women and fathering babies by other people who weren’t her.
I was a shoulder to cry on at first before, incredibly, our relationship turned into something else. Boris told me that nothing like this had ever happened to him that year with someone called Carrie – as far as he could remember.
By now, he was serving as Foreign Secretary but, as he confided to me, everyone was determined that he would fail simply on account of his not reading anything or listening to boring briefings. He believes that history will come to recognise him as the greatest Foreign Secretary this country had in the period between July 2016 and the summer of 2018 when he stepped down.
A year later, the tide of political history had turned and he was Prime Minister. It was a job he had never wanted but as he told me tenderly one night: “Jen… I mean Carrie… I have to save my country first, if we are ever going to save the dolphins and puppies. And that means that I must do this, even if it means giving up the salary from the Telegraph for a bit.”
Now here we were in our cosy flat, with our future stretching out blissfully in front of us. Or so I then thought. For already dark clouds were gathering.
In the kitchen, Dom was sitting at the table reading a magazine about graveyards, while Dilyn humped his leg.
“Where is he?”
“In the shower.”
“Tell him the boss is here and I ain’t happy.”
Back in the bedroom, Boris was cowering behind the bed.
“What does he want?” he whispered. “Can’t you tell him I’m not here.”
The temperature in the room seemed to plummet. I turned and saw Dominic towering over us.
“Get dressed. There’s work to be done.”
Boris pulled on his trousers and tucked in his shirt.
“Romeo has taken out my man Sabisky.”
“Romeo?”
“Sworn enemy of the PJ Masks – watch television and learn something. Look, we haven’t left the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels only to have people tell me who I can and can’t hire. I want my misfits and weirdos and I want them now. Capeesh?”
They were both gone and I was alone with Dilyn and my thoughts.
What had my dream meant? Was it someone in another dimension trying to warn me of something or was it that ill-advised dodgy éclair I had eaten the night before? Either way, I didn’t like Dom acting that way and treating my poor beloved like the EU had treated Britain. I was also beginning to wonder if a man who read magazines about graveyards at breakfast was really that concerned about the fate of baby porpoises.
“What’s to be done?” I thought – and then in a flash I knew.