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. There’s something sad about it, when you consider what an idealistic young woman she was, so passionate about everything from veal crates to FGM. At a time when her husband is being turned to as the unlikely saviour of a soul-sick nation, a fashion brand is not a good look no matter how many sustainable ribbons you tie around it. The idea that people will be paying through the nose for sustainable and organic goods at a time when a pat of Lurpak costs almost a tenner is laughable, so the Standard’s suggestion that Carrie ‘could draw on the expertise of her friend Lady Bamford, owner of the upmarket supermarket and deli Daylesford’ must surely be a jest.

This is the world in which Carrie wishes to become a ‘player’, that murky junction where luxury beliefs and luxury goods meet. Yes, the public won’t be paying for the indulgences of their rulers, but the general suspicion that the richer you are the more you get given – that rich people never have to pay, in both senses of the word – is a dangerous one for our democracy right now. It’s true that since Gwyneth Paltrow started Goop in 2008, it’s been estimated to have a value of $250 million. But that was before when we in the West believed that things could only get better. Now it’s dawning on us that things will surely get worse. I wonder how many jade eggs Goop will shift next year, when the price of the actual thing that comes out of a chicken will cost almost as much?

For the past two decades, the organic snake oil-fuelled wellness industry has attracted every last nervous Nellie with money to burn, making self-soothing and self-care the new self-abuse, with ceaseless pampering to assist us little ladies through the horror of having to work for a living. Fainting couches were replaced by those things with holes for your face to hang through; smelling salts were replaced by essential oils as women born strong sought to render themselves wet, shuffling around day spas in robes and slippers. It seemed such a comforting way to spend one’s disposable income – all those books about how-to-be-hygge, all that lounge-wear, brands like Toast, Loaf and the White Company, all those three-figure scented candles, when one could literally watch money burn and enjoy the smell. It’s funny how the idea of hunkering down seemed like a leisure option just a few years ago; now even Bed Bath & Beyond is about to go bankrupt.

Because when people are sitting around open ovens or huddling under heated blankets for warmth, the idea of cosines seems like a bad joke, a let-them-eat-cake for our times. As for sustainability, when sheer sustenance becomes an issue to the point that people are working out how they can eat every other day, and with the prospect of an imminent dystopia that may see us scrapping in the street over who gets the last lick of a Dairylea wrapper, one could not imagine a worse time for a politician’s wife ­to start a business selling dreary luxuries to people with more money than sense.

But who knows, maybe it won’t be boring. Maybe, like Goop, it will sell sizeable sex toys (‘The Gove’?). Or candles that smell like the tears of Remainers. Or Afghan pet insurance. Nothing would surprise me now. And if there’s a chance of Carrie’s husband returning to the rigours of his Prime Minister’s salary as opposed to the ease of pocketing $150,000 for a 90-minute fireside chat with our American friends, he’s going to need a working wife bringing in the filthy lucre, for all those rolls of fool’s gold wallpaper yet to come.