Here’s the real ‘enigma’ about Charlotte Owen: why we still take sexist gossip so seriously

Hello there. Today I would like to talk about Charlotte Owen. If you’ve heard of Charlotte Owen, it’s probably because you’ve read someone – unquestionably one of the “good guys” of the discourse – saying some creepy, innuendo-laden thing about the “riddle”, “mystery” or “enigma” of her relationship with Boris Johnson. Before we go on, a word on vocab: all those words are journalese for “I can’t stand up this cobblers but I just want to publish it anyway”.

If you haven’t heard of Charlotte Owen, then (a) you may be the last pure human, and (b) you will need a primer. So here goes: she worked for Johnson’s No 10 operation, and was unexpectedly given a peerage in his resignation honours list. Alongside her House of Lords work, she has recently taken a position in a business Johnson has got with a uranium entrepreneur. Any more background? I should also say I have never met Owen, who is now 31, or had the remotest dealings with her. However, I have watched the absolute deluge of sexism disguised as gossip that has beset her since Johnson chucked her the poisoned chalice. Though entirely fact free, most of it has been frothingly circulated by the sort of person who imagines themselves to be on the side of the angels. So allow me to offer a counterpoint: they’re not.

Listen, I’m sure it’s not great to give a peerage to a 29-year-old. But let’s get real: even if she were totally useless, Owen could still only be about the 200th worst person in the House of Lords. She wouldn’t even make the same postcode as the cut of the true monsters, about whom we don’t get any articles because they’re not youngish and blond. Do imagine if all the good guys casting twice-weekly aspersions at Owen were chucking even half those at fellow Johnson peer Evgeny Lebedev – a serious piece of work, who has somehow garnered fewer bad headlines this past year than Charlotte has this past fortnight. Records and colleague accounts suggest Owen is a diligent peer, turning up very frequently and offering contributions some would estimate put her in the top 10% of speakers. (Lebedev has never even bothered voting and has asked only four written questions in four years.)

As for being unqualified for her latest job – countless 31-year-olds in this country have jobs that I’m sure their elders and betters think they’re not good enough for, and they were often hired for them by people they met through previous jobs. You’re going to need more than that. Yet not one person has produced a single nano-particle of evidence for their theories, while indications that they’re nonsense pile up. Consider the pictures of Owen at Carrie Johnson’s soirees. Seriously, Carrie’s the final boss of this game. She saw off master strategist Dominic Cummings (Carl von Clownewitz). Pretty sure she’d make light work of Charlotte if there were anything to worry about.

Some people will say it was ever thus. Funnily enough, I think I was Owen’s age when I started reading stories about my own affair with the former editor of this newspaper. Not true stories, as it goes, and I’m just trying to think back to it all. Private Eye ran some of them, so I contacted the magazine to tell it they were completely untrue and asked it to correct. Alas, corrections were not a Private Eye thing, I was told – but I was offered the option of writing a letter to its letters page, under my name, to counter the story. I remember sitting and wondering what such a bizarre and inherently unedifying missive would even look like. I pictured a letter reading “Dear Sir, Sorry to trouble you but this is just to say I’m not actually having an affair with my boss. Yours ever so gratefully, Marina Hyde.”

I concluded that would be rather adding insult to injury, so declined to send it, and instead had to come up with a sort of renegade campaign of ways to get the record corrected, which now seem excruciatingly ridiculous in retrospect. I can’t remember all the stupid stuff I did, but I do remember, for example, agreeing to a hideously dreary media panel, purely because the then editor of Popbitch was also doing it, then sitting through it and waiting for an opportunity to confront her in public about what I think I called “my non affair”. This was no one’s finest hour, but I couldn’t think of a better way. In the end, you realise you just have to ignore people and work hard, and maybe that work will displace people’s current view of you in, like, a couple of decades?

Now I am a much older lady, I wouldn’t say I can say exactly what I like – but I can certainly say a lot more of what I like. And I say all this now not because I want to spare Charlotte Owen the ball-ache of having to do some dire panel on climate lies at the next Cop conference, purely to tee herself up for introducing a leaden non-sequitur beginning with the words, “Hey – you know what else is a lie … ?” No, I am doing this because I honestly can’t believe that almost 20 years later, fact-free faux journalism like this has got worse.

Much of it is down to social media being a place where people very much like to look as though they’re insiders (again: they’re not). The other corrosive practice, popular on social media but also with some very online journalists, is that thing of putting two pictures or stories together and saying with some kind of flourish, “You join the dots!” To which the only acceptable response is: no. Would YOU mind joining the dots? You are, after all, supposed to be the professional here. The fact that you can’t confirms you’re not “doing journalism” – you’re doing sexism, you’re doing conspiracism and you’re doing indolence. Still: lovely clicks.

Allow me to end by offering a competition prize. The next person to publish any fact-free innuendo about Charlotte Owen shall be crowned the biggest trouser-rubbing weirdo in Fleet Street – and that’s a tough field. Guys, that actually means something! If anyone has any evidence of the thing at which they have hinted so remorselessly, then let them produce it. Otherwise, maybe they have had their fun, and it’s finally time to shut up and leave her alone. Instead: please tell us more about the uranium entrepreneur. You see, this is the other thing about getting older: you start wanting to know more about the uranium entrepreneurs. But we always look the wrong way in this country – so don’t hold your breath.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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