Carrie Johnson is not to blame for her husband Boris Johnson's failures - Jayne Dowle

I’ve watched with sadness as her marriage crumbled under the strain; she, a clever woman who speaks three or four languages fluently, accused of meddling in his political affairs, earning her the sobriquet of ‘Lady Macbeth’. For what? Being astute? Ambitious? Isn’t that what politics is all about?

She did not deserve that, and neither does Carrie Johnson deserve to carry the can for everything her husband has done and failed to do.

Yet what else might we expect? This highly-personal criticism of a leader’s spouse follows a pattern set with Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton, both highly-accredited and respected lawyers and professionals in their own right, earning more than their husbands at the time.

I remember the rabid muck-raking over Cherie Blair’s racy family background, her father being the late actor Tony Booth, and the judgments placed on Mrs Clinton for her own transgressions, inevitable in a 40-odd year career at the heart of US politics. When she stood for president against Donald Trump in 2016, his supporters even used the hashtag #killary on social media.

And this is the elephant in the room. This dislike of qualified and credentialled women married to political leaders is as much to do with the weakness of the men who populate the inner circle as it is to do with their own strength as outstanding female achievers.

Some of the recent opprobrium levelled at Carrie has surely been mendacious. Her enemies accuse her of at worst, interfering in the business of government, at best of leading her husband astray on interior design. By the time she was 30, the University of Warwick graduate had worked as a special adviser in Westminster and run the Conservative Party press office, as well as gaining a track record as a climate activist.

I am sure she is not perfect, no-one is. Thrown into the bear-pit of Downing Street perhaps too soon after meeting Johnson, pressurised by the demands of living through a pandemic in the public eye and giving birth to two children in two years, she will struggle at times to make the right call.

However, Mrs Johnson is clearly not a guileful seductress who entrapped a helpless man – she’s Johnson’s third wife, after all – nor an evil witch, the ‘Carrie Antoinette’ of tabloid-ese.

Hats off then to Sajid Javid, who must have many other things to think about, for sticking up for her. His intervention came following the publication of extracts of a critical new biography First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson, to be published in full at the end of March.

One of author Lord Ashcroft’s sources likened the Johnson couple’s “toxic” relationship to a Greek tragedy, saying: “He could have been a great Prime Minister but his lack of discipline, which led him to get involved with Carrie, has cost him. His potential to transform the country has been squandered and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s because of her.”

This “source” seems totally oblivious to his (I’m assuming it’s a man) own contradictions. “Lack of discipline” does not make a great Prime Minister, with the possible exception of David Lloyd George, who did manage to combine a love of wine, women and song with pushing through some of the most significant social reforms of the early 20th century.

Johnson, however, is no Lloyd George. He has no compass, political, moral or otherwise. An opportunist and a charlatan, whose many lies in power have been proven, who gravely insults the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition and refuses to back down, has made it known that despite his many failings and his party on the brink of mutiny, that it “will take an army of tanks” to drag him out of Downing Street Is that really all his wife’s fault? I think not.