Michael Aschroft - First Lady: Intrigue at the Court of Carrie and Boris Johnson

O n 24 July 2019, Carrie Symonds entered Downing Street as the first unmarried partner of a Prime Minister in British history. She was thirty-one years old and she was the girlfriend of one of the most polarising politicians to take the highest office in the land, Boris Johnson.

There is no question that becoming the prime ministerial consort, a job for which there is no official description, would be daunting for anybody regardless of their age or the identity of their partner. What might have made the situation for Carrie harder still is that most people who had heard of her in July 2019 probably knew only that she had been named as the young lady who had been accused of being at the centre of Johnsons divorce from his second wife, Marina; or that there had been a domestic dispute involving Johnson at her flat in London the previous month to which the police had been called. To have attracted the attention of the press for such matters before even crossing the threshold of No. 10 must have been unsettling. xiv

What made the circumstances under which Carrie set up home in Downing Street even more unusual was that, thanks to her being a former employee of the Conservative Party and an ex-government special adviser, she was also the first consort of any Prime Minister to be part of what is known as the Westminster bubble the insular world of Lobby journalists, politicians and aides whose lives are centred around Westminster and Whitehall. Some journalists concluded that her professional background made her a political figure in her own right. Again, this set her apart from previous consorts.

Politics and power are in Carries bloodline. As her rather complicated but very colourful family tree shows, her great-grandmother Hilda Harrisson and her grandfather John Beavan also had close friendships with Prime Ministers of their respective eras. Indeed, in the 1970s, Beavan sat as a Labour member of the House of Lords and later went to Brussels as one of Britains first MEPs. Furthermore, Carries father, Matthew Symonds, became a man of public standing in the 1980s when he helped to found a national newspaper, The Independent.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that since 2019, Carrie has come to be thought of by many people in Westminster and beyond as influential herself, especially in the areas of policy and patronage. Power ought to come with accountability. This book addresses a series of events which have dominated Boris Johnsons premiership to date and puts these claims about his now-wife to the test. Often, what I heard about Carrie while working on this project surprised me a great deal. Readers must judge for themselves, however, what her behaviour in a political context says xv about her relationship with Boris Johnson and what this has meant for the way Britain has been run under him.

Officially, there is no such thing as a First Lady in British politics. This title tends to be associated by most people with the wife of the American President. Yet in the case of Carrie Johnson, as she has been since May 2021, it does not seem entirely out of place that some have ascribed it to her as well. For while it is true that she regards herself as a private individual with no formal role in public life, she has shown a remarkable ambition compared with most, if not all, of her predecessors. This book explores just how far-reaching that ambition has become.

Michael Ashcroft

February 2022

I have chosen to refer to Carrie Johnson as Carrie throughout this book. Partly this is to avoid confusion because she changed her surname from Symonds to her married name, Johnson, in May 2021, and much of the text covers her life and career before that date. Using just her Christian name also differentiates her from her husband, Boris Johnson, who is referred to in narrative sections by his surname.