COULD you contemplate a time when you go to the dentist to have your teeth filled – and have it done by the dentist’s husband? Or call a car insurance company rep to agree a new policy only to be told, “Hang on a minute. Let me pass you over to my missus.”

So why can we all readily accept that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is prepared to allow his partner Carrie Symonds to make key decisions in the running of his government?

Ms Symonds is claimed to have pushed for the removal of press strategist Lee Cain and special advisor Dominic Cummings. This has resulted in forces within the Conservative government, describing the PM’s fiancé as ‘Princess Nut Nuts’ and ‘Lady Macbeth.’ In Western liberal democracies we vote for a political party, with a leader chosen by that party, and you fully expect the leader to make the decisions involving hiring and firing.

Yet, should the steadfast principals of democracy allow for flexibility, particularly when the politician being refocused is a rambling, shambling mess of a man useful only for producing mixed metaphors and offspring too numerous for his biographer to be able to add up?

Carrie Symonds – a former director of communications for the Conservative Party – certainly isn’t wrong to want to protect her partner, a man whose jacket is currently on a peg so shoogly it would take at least one giant tube of Gorilla glue to hold it on.

This is particularly pertinent at the moment given the PM’s proclamation that devolution is little more than a dog’s breakfast.

She certainly isn’t wrong to keep her partner away from the likes of Dominic Cummings, even though Cummings helped deliver an 80-seat majority and wreck Corbynism. It’s not just the Opposition parties who reckon Mr Johnson’s allies to be indeed “mad mullahs” (Ms Symond’s alleged terminology) who had isolated the Prime Minister from his own MPs.

Carrie Symonds isn’t wrong either to hate the “bully boy” culture of Cummings and Co, a group who it’s claimed use language such as having people “whacked”. (Now this Covid PR disaster of a man has been on the end of a “whacking” himself.) And Ms Symonds will also be aware that her partner has major character flaws, a man of appears to have no fixed moral abode who will do whatever it takes to be successful. “He’s a people-pleasing guy,” said Dr Gwilym Favid Blunt from City, University of London,” describing Mr Johnson’s behaviour rather positively.

But that’s only part of it. The PM, as we know, is as fickle as the morning sky over Fickletown facing a rainstorm. And he needs to be centred.

But what of the future role of Carrie Symonds? Our world will wish to take her intent apart. Is she a de-facto politician with valued input? A Tammy Wynette stand-by-your-man figure – or a power grabber, indeed capable of a little Lady Macbeth-like regicide.

Or does the green campaigner wish to be seen as the Westminster Evita? Well, she’ll have to get a shift on to suggest that sort of influence. Symonds wasn’t part of her partner’s rise to power, and unlike Evita and Marcus Rashford she has yet to use her influence to divert money to massive social programmes.

What we have to be careful to do, however, is not to hit out at Carrie Symonds because she is female, says Georgia Aspinall in Grazia Magazine.

We can’t run, apparently, with the Lady Macbeth analogy, says Aspinall. “Just as the disappointingly archaic narrative about Symonds spreads, the idea she’s forming a posse of like-minded women set on burning Johnson’s closest male aides further alludes to the ‘WITCHCRAFT!!’ vibes of this entire discourse.”

Perhaps Ms Symonds – once named the UK’s most powerful public relations professional by PR Week magazine and the daughter of Matthew Symonds, founder of The Independent newspaper, is a mix of Tammy and Evita and Lady Macbeth.

Whatever, her attempts to shift her partner away from an aggressive, bullying, single-minded form of government in the direction of consensus politics is morally sound.

There’s no doubt her partner needs to be repositioned and able to, at least, pretend to have empathy.

Yet, here’s the irony. If the clever fianceé is seen to be too strong, Boris Johnson may appear to be a puppet and ousted.

And Carrie Symonds, however well intentioned, may, like Lady M, suffer the worst of fates – and die an off-stage death.