Seeing Prime Minister Johnson’s fiancee trending on Twitter with the hashtag #CarrieAntoinette, I recalled the old saying of Sir James Goldmsith ‘When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy.’ Though Miss Symonds and her boyfriend have not yet married, last week has seen Carrie slide from the seaside-postcard stereotype of sexy blonde man-catcher (the first unmarried consort of a British prime minister to move into Number Ten) to the equally hackneyed cliche of Bossy Battle-Axe - She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Like many lifelong Labour voters, I voted for Boris Johnson in 2019 purely to Get Brexit Done. But additionally, his election was a pleasing reminder that if the British ever were as stuffy about sex as the Continentals liked to scoff (we invented the Swinging Sixties, after all) that was certainly no longer the case. We all knew that he’d left his first wife Allegra for pregnant Marina, then left cancer-survivor Marina for Carrie Symonds, dallying with many a girl-about-town on the way, most notably the American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri. Symonds seemed a clever choice of consort for such a libertine; the *love child* of an adulterous journalist and a lawyer (rated in a recent poll of public distrust towards the professions at 23% and 61% respectively) she would be neither cowed or flattered by the spotlight which would inevitably fall on the companion of the most powerful man in the country.

It went well for a while. Animal-loving feminist Brexiteers such as myself were pleased to discover that Symonds was a keen Leaver partly because of the shocking treatment of farm animals which the European Union facilitates. She was widely believed to have been behind Johnson’s promise to promote animal welfare in his first speech as prime minister; some turnaround for a dedicated carnivore who has spoken of his support for blood sports, including fox hunting and even bullfighting. She was also revealed as a young woman of bravery and character, waiving her anonymity to reveal that as a teenager she had been targeted by the black-cab rapist John Worboys (who police estimate may have assaulted around a hundred women), after it was announced that the parole board were set to release him after only a decade in jail: ‘We knew he remained a danger to women and we knew we had to do all we could to prevent anyone else being drugged, assaulted and raped. And now – finally – we’ve been listened to and proven right. We won.’

Then there was her physical appeal. When the story of their affair broke in 2018, there was the usual eye-rolling exasperation that a man of 54 had fallen for a woman of 30, five years older than his eldest daughter. But young people tend to be more attractive than older ones, something equally true of both sexes; if I’m not going to criticise the 62-yeat-old Madonna for having a 27-year-old boyfriend (three years older than her eldest daughter) I’d be a hypocrite to slander this union.  Symonds is not a classical beauty, but something better; she has a vivacity and sauciness which would be ideal to come home from a high-pressure job to. 

But what happens when the angel of the hearth becomes the busybody of the bedroom? In the winter of 2020 it transpired that she was known as ‘Princess Nut Nuts’ by some of Number Ten’s sacked staff, who felt that her influence over the PM was pernicious. Her fondness for animals in particular is considered a problem by some, taking in everything from her alleged persuading of her swain to stop an imminent badger cull to interrupting a Covid meeting at the height of the pandemic demanding that Boris made a formal complaint to the Times after they ran a story claiming that she loved her dog less than she once had. The British being a nation of animal-lovers, this didn’t hurt her. 

And I’m thinking that the current fuss will slide off of the First Couple too. That rich Tory donors may have contributed as much as £200,000 towards the refurbishment of the Downing Street flat - the Tatler magazine claiming that the flashy new chatelaine wanted gold wallpaper to replace ‘the John Lewis furniture nightmare’ left by the previous occupants - won’t scandalise a British public who are still seething over the habitual misuse of public funds for private pleasures by politicians. More than a decade after the Tory MP Peter Viggers resigned for claiming £1,645 for a ‘floating duck island’ for his garden pond, the electorate don’t care who pays what for whom - so long as it’s not being wangled from the public purse. 

Still, it will be funny if the most licentious and libertine of modern Prime Ministers is not brought down by soft bosoms, but soft furnishings. The witty actress Mrs Patrick Campbell once described marriage as the ‘deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue’ - how ironic it will be if his lover’s longing for a chaise longue finally undoes the man who bounced from bed to bed with impunity.

 

Julie Burchill has been a published writer since the age of 17. She is now 61 and is a columnist at the Sunday Telegraph. Her hobbies are spite, philanthropy and learning Modern Hebrew.