Carrie Johnson and the curious case of the
vanishing Times story
Report had claimed Boris Johnson tried to hire his now
wife as chief of staff when foreign secretary, but then it was deleted
Rowena
Mason and Jim Waterson
Sun 19 Jun
2022 18.38 BST
At first
glance, the story appeared to be the political scoop of the weekend.
On
Saturday, the Times reported claims that Boris Johnson had tried to hire his
now wife as his chief of staff when he was foreign secretary.
But almost
as soon as the article hit the printers, it was withdrawn, without explanation
or clarification.
The piece,
written by the veteran lobby journalist Simon Walters, formerly of the Daily
Mail and Mail on Sunday, appeared on page five of some early print copies of
Saturday’s Times newspaper but was dropped for later editions.
It does not
appear that the article was ever published on the Times’ website.
The story
expanded on claims in a biography of Carrie Johnson by the Tory donor and peer
Lord Ashcroft that Johnson had tried to appoint her to a £100,000-a-year
government job when he was foreign secretary in 2018.
It said the
idea had fallen apart when his closest advisers learned of the idea to hire the
Tory press chief, then known as Carrie Symonds, whom he later married. Johnson
was then still married to Marina Wheeler, a barrister.
A source
with knowledge of the situation told the Guardian this account was correct.
However, a
spokesperson for Carrie Johnson was categoric. “These claims are totally
untrue,” she said.
Downing
Street declined to give an on-the-record response to the story but a No 10
source also said the story was untrue – and suggested it was sexist.
“This is a
grubby, discredited story turned down by most reputable media outlets because
it isn’t true. The facts speak for themselves.”
Walters
told the Guardian: “I stand by the story. I went to all the relevant people
over two days. Nobody offered me an on-the-record denial and Downing St didn’t
deny it off the record either.”
Journalists
at the Times were baffled by the decision to withdraw Saturday’s story, with
multiple sources suggesting there had been a high-level intervention to remove
it.
The paper’s
editor, John Witherow, is reported to be off work. His deputy Tony Gallagher
edited the newspaper on Friday, with multiple sources saying he made the call
to drop the story from later editions.
A
spokesperson for News UK declined to comment on why an article that appeared
prominently in potentially hundreds of thousands of print newspapers had been
removed from later editions, without any explanation.
Walters
recently left his senior position at the Daily Mail, where he first revealed
the scandal over Carrie Johnson’s renovations of the Downing Street flat.
MailOnline
rewrote the Times’ story about the proposed government job for Carrie Johnson
in the early hours of Saturday morning but has since also deleted its article
without explanation or an editor’s note. News aggregation sites have also
deleted their copies of the MailOnline article.
Removing
the article may be an example of the Streisand effect – where attempts to
delete information from the internet make the public much more interested in
it.
Alastair
Campbell, the former No 10 director of communications under Tony Blair, tweeted
on Sunday that the disappearance of the story appeared to be “further evidence
that much of our media is essentially an extension of the press office of a
liar and a crook”. He also said that the Times owner, Rupert Murdoch, had “done
so much damage to journalism”.
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