What was claimed
An audience member on Question Time was actually Carrie Johnson’s mother.
Our verdict
Though the two could be said to bear a slight resemblance, the audience member is not Carrie Johnson’s mother.
Carrie Johnson’s mother did not appear on recent episode of Question Time
27 June 2022
Claims that a woman who appeared on BBC Question Time is actually the mother of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s wife, Carrie Johnson, have been spreading on social media.
The woman, who was an audience member on Thursday, 23 June 2022, told the panel: “For all his faults, and every Prime Minister we’ve had has had plenty of faults, I think Boris has been doing a valiant job.”
After a clip of the woman’s comments was shared by the TV show’s Twitter account, a number of users began sharing images of Ms Johnson’s mother, Josephine McAffee, with some suggesting that she was the woman in the audience.
Some of these posts appear to be jokes, but others seem to seriously claim that Ms Johnson’s mother was in the audience.
Ms Johnson’s mother is a private citizen with no public social media presence, and as such there are limited photos of her online. Those that are available do not appear to show the same woman who appeared as an audience member on Question Time last week, though there may be some resemblance.
The BBC confirmed to Full Fact that no one of Ms Johnson’s mother’s name was in the Question Time audience last Thursday.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Carrie Johnson’s mother did not appear as an audience member on a recent episode of Question Time.