You can say what you like about Johnny Mercer’s wife Felicity — ‘grifter’, ‘deluded infant’, ‘t**t’, ‘rancid’, ‘thick’ is a smattering of the appalling name-calling directed her way on social media this week — but you can’t knock her sense of humour.

Take when ‘celebrity attack dog’ (Mrs M’s words) Carol Vorderman accused her of ‘harassment’, claiming Felicity had sent her ‘really misogynistic’ stuff in a particularly nasty, ongoing Twitter spat between the Countdown-presenter-turned-anti-Tory-activist and the wife of Johnny Mercer, Minister of State for Veterans’ Affairs.

Felicity responded: ‘I did call her “big and bouncy” once when she kept calling the PM “little” to patronise him. I apologise.’ She ended her post with a hand-over-mouth laughing emoji.

Or take last week when one of Ms Vorderman’s ‘rabid dog’ (again, Mrs M’s words) Twitter followers — she has 831,200 compared to Felicity’s 24,900 — superimposed Mr Bean actor Rowan Atkinson’s face on to hers.

Felicity punched back with a post: ‘I had a lovely holiday in Turkey last week; took advantage of the cheap cosmetic surgery to give my face a new lease of life. Got to keep up with all those celebs doing it and they do seem so keen on us Mercers.’

The tongue-in-cheek remark was interpreted as a sideways snipe at 62-year-old Ms Vorderman, who’s repeatedly denied having plastic surgery, despite intense media speculation.

‘I’m not an authority on what Carol Vorderman has or hasn’t done to her body,’ Felicity says now. ‘But I’ve read what everyone else has read so had a little fun [on Twitter] in response to the doctored picture.

‘I’m not going to just sit back and ignore this vile, vile stuff that’s being posted. To say all Tories are revolting, disgusting and corrupt is not true. I will push back on it because I am married to a Tory and I know there’s nothing revolting, hateful or disgusting about him.’

A notification on her phone alerts her to a new tweet. She looks at it, then rolls her eyes.

‘You just think: “I’ve got to laugh,” because otherwise . . . just look at my feed, look at the comments. It’s an absolute cesspit.’

It is. The lack of accountability and ‘Wild West’ feel to the online world, where anonymous social media users consider it good sport to verbally attack and, at times, threaten those in the public eye with impunity, means that many of the comments are not publishable in a family newspaper. Some have been forwarded to the police.

And the threats are not just online. Since the murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, the Mercers’ detached four-bedroom home, where they live with their three children — Amalie, 14, Joey, ten and three-year-old Audrey — is fitted with panic buttons and security cameras.

All post going into their constituency office is scanned and they have both had to attend situational awareness courses to teach them how to respond to a threat to their safety.

Felicity says: ‘There is a security risk to MPs. Trolls on Twitter are probably massive wimps, aren’t they? But, if you have been whipping up all this hatred and anything else happens to somebody, you’d have to think: “Did I have a hand in that?”’

In November 2020, during the Covid pandemic, when her three-year-old was only a few months old, Felicity was sent a nappy covered in human excrement through the post.

She suspects it was sent in response to the vote on footballer Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign, which Johnny, along with the majority of Conservative MPs following the government whip, voted against.

‘I was still in the zone of having had a baby so I was quite emotional and it was the pandemic,’ she remembers. ‘The last thing you want to do is pull bodily fluids from a Jiffy bag.

‘Johnny was sitting where you are.’ Felicity nods to a chair at the kitchen island. ‘I said: “Oh my God, it’s s**t!” He ran over, grabbed it and threw it on the grass.’

You know from the horror on her face that Felicity is reliving that moment. I suspect she has many times.

‘I couldn’t stop washing my hands. I felt really vulnerable, just gutted by the whole thing, and washed my hands until I had no soap.

‘We’ve got all these security measures but this was sent to our home. Where did they find our address? I don’t know. It’s difficult. If you think about it too much you’d never leave the house. You can’t really live like that, can you?’

The appalling incident ignited something in Felicity: fury, and a determination to fight back. She decided to open a Twitter account to stand up against such hatred.

‘I wanted to take control. Show them who we were. Until then I’d been under the impression that if your husband is in politics, you’re just The Good Wife. You don’t say anything, you just watch it unfold. Well, I’m not built like that. If I see an injustice now, I’ll go for it.’

She sees a lot of injustice in the Twitter posts of Ms Vorderman, who was condemned by Stroud MP Siobhan Baillie for eating ‘political hate for breakfast to get social media hits’.

Ms Vorderman ratcheted up her attacks on Tory politicians earlier this year when she took it upon herself to call out those who hadn’t included ‘Conservative’ on their Twitter profile. Bizarrely, for a very smart woman, she seemed to view it as some sort of cover-up, maintaining the culprits, who included Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss, were too ashamed to call themselves Tories. She encouraged her followers to target their MPs, one of whom was Johnny.

There was an immediate uptick of particularly nasty comments on the Mercers’ social media.

‘The whole thing was ridiculous because there’s a very good reason why MPs — Labour and Conservative — don’t put their party on their social media,’ says Felicity. ‘It’s because they’ve been elected to represent their entire constituency, no matter who they voted for. Who on Earth needs Carol Vorderman to tell them Boris Johnson is a Conservative? It would be laughable if the response wasn’t so extreme.

‘Suddenly we were getting this traffic asking: “Are you embarrassed? Are you this? Are you that?” Obscene stuff.

‘I tagged her in on the tweets to show her the abuse she was sending our way.’

This week Ms Vorderman posted a video of those tweets as evidence of being ‘harassed’, which is when Felicity tells me: ‘If you don’t laugh you’ll cry.

‘For me, it’s about Johnny. I don’t care what they say about me, but I feel very protective over him.

‘He’s the best person I know. To watch your favourite person being attacked all the time is really, really hard,’ she says, her voice thick with emotion. ‘I’m not alone in that. There are many other spouses up and down the land, across the political divide, who would give you the same story.

‘I think people should realise how politicians and their families are being treated. Someone like Carol Vorderman makes a direct attack on us and, boom!’ She throws her arms in the air to illustrate. ‘“The Mercers are w*****s”, “The Mercers are this”, “The Mercers are that”. Then it becomes more personal.’

Johnny’s Plymouth Moor View seat is one of the country’s more marginal constituencies, and a poll has shown it’s going be tightly fought at the next election.

On July 8, Carol Vorderman remarked on Twitter how neither of the Mercers has a university degree, asking: ‘So who’d employ them?’

The Twitter pile-on was swift, with comments like, ‘You guys are clearly thick’, ‘The gravy train’s ended’ and ‘You’re all going to starve and die’.

‘I find it really frightening. She pushes this hatred out there, and then everyone who can’t seem to think for themselves piles on top,’ says Felicity. ‘As if we didn’t have jobs before politics. I’ll do whatever it takes. When we first moved to Plymouth I was a cleaner because I couldn’t find a job. Johnny worked on a building site to raise money for his campaign [to become an MP] here. We both roll our sleeves up.’

Indeed, I’ve known the Mercers for several years now. They’re neither self-entitled nor out-of-touch, and they’re certainly not ‘thick’.

Johnny, a Sandhurst-trained former Army captain, is a thoughtful, dry-witted man who works every hour God sends for veterans. While he might not have decades of political experience under his belt like so many of his colleagues who’ve harboured Cabinet ambitions since their undergraduate days, he’s a fast learner. And, of course, he has Felicity.

‘Johnny didn’t know how to sell himself when he first went into politics. In the Army he was a tiny cog in a huge machine, where you’re supposed to just fit in. But I can talk the hind legs off a donkey, so we’re a team,’ she says.

Johnny is rightly proud of his wife, whom he married in 2014. ‘Johnny told me some of his colleagues have said how brilliant it is I am sticking up for them against this hatred. He’s told me how proud he is of me. He loves it that I’m willing to put myself out there for him.’

Felicity is a sparky woman who is a trained lifeguard and works for Johnny in his constituency. You know jolly well she’d walk through hell and high water for her family.

‘This is real, not the nonsense on Twitter,’ she says, gesturing around her open-plan kitchen where the older two girls join in the conversation. This is a family that ‘doesn’t do secrets’ and both girls have been made aware by Felicity of ‘certain things and what to do’.

It is not what she signed up for when Johnny, a former commando who served three tours in Afghanistan, decided to go into politics in 2014, before social media began to dominate.

‘Johnny was running the commando course in Okehampton,’ she says. ‘It was the day that [they realised] more service personnel had killed themselves after getting back from Iraq and Afghanistan than had been killed on operations there. He had seen a lot of his friends falling apart because they weren’t able to deal with what had happened.

‘He couldn’t put up with it any more. He said: “I’m going to have to do something about it. I’ve got to fix it. I’m going to have to become a politician and change veteran care in this country.”

‘Johnny has always been a doer. I thought he was crazy at first, but it didn’t take me long to realise he was 100 per cent right.’

Against the odds, Johnny, who had no experience in politics, stood at the 2015 election as a Conservative candidate and took the seat from Labour by just 1,026 votes. He increased his lead to 5,019 in 2017 and 12,897 in Boris Johnson’s landslide victory of 2019, after which he was appointed Minister for Defence People and Veterans.

Johnny finally achieved his ambition of a separate department for veterans when he became Minister of State for Veterans’ Affairs in 2022 — until Liz Truss sacked him two months later. A furious Felicity took to Twitter to decry Truss as ‘an imbecile’.

‘I was absolutely fuming,’ she says. ‘When she and Rishi were up against each other for the leadership, Johnny said the veteran stuff he’d built up was his only skin in the game. I heard him on the phone to her twice and both times she’d said things wouldn’t change. Then he was the first person she sacked.

‘I don’t know whether she just can’t control herself or whether she was nervous, but she laughed when she told him she was going to bin him.

‘He said to her: “I don’t understand. This is a department I’ve put together. It hasn’t been going very long. Why dismantle it? Why needlessly upset 2.2 million veterans?” She just sort of laughed and said: “I can’t tell you that.”

‘He was broken by it. I know people call it the game of politics and you expect things to go up and down, but this was something else. Why was there any need to dismantle the department? Was it because he wasn’t her buddy? That was when I broke my Twitter rule about only ever reacting to the abuse we get. I’m not a bully. I don’t go after people. But when I called Liz an imbecile that was me tweeting off my own bat. I was livid.’

She began a petition to reinstate a dedicated Minister of State for Veterans’ Affairs which, within days, received more than 10,000 signatures. And then, as she says: ‘Truss was gone and Rishi put the office of Veterans’ Affairs back.’

Johnny has only ever wanted to do his best for veterans. He was on Sky News promoting an initiative to end homelessness for them when Carol Vorderman boiled his views on food banks down to an incendiary tweet.

He’d been asked by interviewer Kay Burley if there was any need for military personnel to use food banks. He replied: ‘These are personal decisions about how people are budgeting every month.’

He added: ‘I think being in the military still affords you a good wage and a good quality of life and that will continue to be the case.’

Taking his words out of context, Carol Vorderman then posted on Twitter that Johnny Mercer ‘thinks food bank use is a personal decision. He’s wrong. I grew up in poverty. Mum had five jobs, nearly killed her. It was NOT a choice.’

Suddenly, the Army captain who has devoted his political career to doing right by those who have served in the Forces, stood accused of saying everything wrong.

He decided to go on Question Time to set the matter straight.

‘She’d already made out he was some sort of maniac. Twitter went mad, like: “Oh my God, Johnny Mercer is so arrogant.” They didn’t like the way he was sitting, didn’t like the way he was looking at other people. They didn’t like anything.

‘The funny thing was he phoned me straight afterwards to ask me how I thought it had gone, but had to hang up because so many people from the Question Time audience wanted a selfie with him. Twitter hated him; the audience didn’t.

People who aren’t glued to it are not filled with hatred. They’re getting on with their lives. They’re more rational; fair. You can have a million rabid followers on Twitter but that doesn’t make it real. It’s not what we see on the streets.

‘That’s why I get really protective of Johnny. I don’t agree with that level of blanket hatred when she [Vorderman] tries to incite people to believe all Tories are evil and corrupt. It’s unhealthy and, in this day and age, possibly dangerous.

‘I was going to say she really annoys me, but actually she really p***es me off.’ So much so that I wonder, if Carol Vorderman was in trouble at the local swimming pool, would Felicity use her lifeguard skills to jump in and pull her out?

‘I’d save anybody. I don’t have to agree with them,’ she says. ‘That’s the whole premise of the real world we live in. You might not agree with someone, but that doesn’t mean you wish them any ill will.’