Sorry, I know this is going to sound awful. But the moment I set eyes on Carrie Johnson’s Instagram photos of her cuddling Frank, her newborn baby, I burst out laughing – and I haven’t stopped since. I don’t mean to be rude. The photographs are beautiful.

But that’s exactly the problem. Because those pictures make the rest of us poor parents look absolutely terrible.

I mean, come on. Think back to when you first brought any of your children home from hospital, and collapsed in wall-eyed exhaustion on your bed. How did you look? Probably not as if you’d just stepped daintily off the cover of Vogue, with fabulously styled hair and flawless skin. But more to the point, how did your bedroom look?

I’m guessing that it looked nothing like Carrie’s. In her photos, the Johnson bedchamber looks almost disturbingly immaculate. The bed, with its plump pillows and delightfully chic cushions, is beautifully made. The sumptuous cream walls look freshly painted. And the room as a whole is spotlessly tidy.

But this can’t be right. Because it’s a room with a newborn baby living in it.

Where on earth is the mess? The bedraggled bedsheets, the dog-eared magazines, the crusty muslins, and the general air of tearfully sleep-deprived chaos? And how come the duvet is dazzlingly white and stain-free – as, indeed, is Carrie’s elegant Victorian nightgown?

Are we seriously expected to believe that a room so impeccably spick-and-span is home to a mewling, puking baby? And, for that matter, Boris Johnson?

Don’t get me wrong. It is a lovely room. But I wouldn’t want to let a baby loose in it. Every item of furniture, from the lamp to the bedstead, looks like a priceless antique. As one of my colleagues put it: “Has she given birth in the 18th century?”

I almost wonder whether the room is actually the Johnsons’ at all. The scrupulous absence of clutter makes it look less like a family home, and more like a suite in a five-star hotel.

Then again, if it is a five-star hotel, good for Carrie. Staff on hand 24/7 to do all the washing, change the sheets, and mop up the vomit.

So much better than having to do it yourself at home.

Anyway, wherever it is, it makes me feel like Harry Enfield’s Wayne Slob. I’ve just been looking at an equivalent photograph of our own son as a baby. Our bed looks as if a hurricane has just hit it. Next to it, our cheapo chest of drawers from Argos groans beneath a heap of random books, forgotten paperwork, an empty plastic water bottle, and a piggy bank designed to look like a football, which I must have had since I was 10.

On the floor, meanwhile, lies my dressing gown, plus an ominous-looking dinner plate. For the life of me, I can’t think why I would have left the plate there. Or how long for.

As for our son, he’s pictured on my pillow, wearing an expression of unmistakable bewilderment. I wonder what he was thinking. Perhaps something like: “Do my parents really  have to live in such a godforsaken dump? Why couldn’t I have been born to a multimillionaire former prime minister?”

Still, shambolic as it was, that’s what the bedrooms of new parents tend to look like. But now Carrie’s implausibly perfect photos have made the rest of us look bad. And there’s only one way she can make it up to us.

She must urgently post a photograph of her bedroom looking like a total pigsty. If Carrie needs any help achieving this effect, she can always ask her husband.

I’m sure that he can manage it in no time.