The Guardian - 01.08.2019

• The Guardian
  4 Thursday 1 August 2019
  Women

Symonds
watches as
Boris Johnson
delivers a speech
outside No 10

What Carrie Symonds can expect at No 10

Carrie Symonds

is not some ingenue blond playmate

of a rich and powerful older man.

It is almost worse than that. As

the partner of the new prime

minister , she has become the

visible authentication of the Boris

Johnson brand: that’s Boris the

priapic, convention-busting, law-

unto-himself, human bulldozer;

a man of as many confl icting

opinions as wives and mistresses

and more children than principles.

For him, moving his girlfriend into

Downing Street while he is still

married to someone else is one more

way of saying that the normal rules

don’t apply.

I’m only guessing, but it seems

realistic to assume that Symonds

knows all this and is ready for

the role as the fi rst ever live-in

girlfriend at N o 10. She is in the

communications business herself,

after all. She did eight years at

Conservative party headquarters,

peaking with a year as boss of party

communications. Hardly a role

she’s likely to submit for the public

aff airs category of PR Week’s 2019

awards, but then, in the lipstick-on-

a-pig challenge, selling the Tories

after the catastrophe of the 2017

general election must come pretty

near the top.

She is used to hanging out with

senior politicians. She fi rst met

Johnson when she was seconded

to his mayoral re-election

campaign. She knows her way

round Downing Street. Last

summer, about the time gossip

surfaced about her relationship

with Johnson, she moved on

from the Tory party to an entirely

diff erent and strikingly unpolitical

role as an advis er for Oceana , a

global marine protection charity.

Yet, of all the dramatic changes

of tone Johnson has brought with

him as prime minister, perhaps

the most remarkable and the least

observed aspect of the handover

of power is that the traditional role

of Downing Street as the arbiter

of public respectability has been,

well, redefi ned. The gap between

Theresa May, a prime minister of

unimpeachable moral uprightness,

whose worst acknowledged sin

was to run through a fi eld of

standing wheat and whose idea of

a good time is to act as steward at a

constituency fun run, to Johnson – a

serial adulterer, a man who has been

sacked by at least two bosses for

lying and who is openly attacked by

former colleagues as a charlatan? In

its own way, it represents a reversal

as startling, if not as signifi cant, as

the US turn from Obama to Trump.

All Downing Street wives fi nd

they have a role that the media

requires them to inhabit. Carrie

Symonds has the thankless role

of embodying this transformation

to the age of Johnson. More, she

has to lend it a kind of cover: she

has to put it beyond question.

For it is important to remember

that Johnson’s bid for power only

once looked fragile. It faltered in

the aftermath of reports that the

police had been called to the home

he shared with Symonds after

neighbours became alarmed by a

late-night dispute – the police took

no action – and it only regained

momentum after a media campaign

backing a reversal of the traditional

model: the idea that even a prime

minister is entitled to privacy. A

readers’ poll in the Daily Express

enthusiastically confi rmed that

Johnson’s private life was his own.

In his favour, on this Johnson has

Greenish and

economically

rightwing,

Boris Johnson’s

live-in partner

legitimises the

PM as a lustful

law unto himself.

Can she navigate

the rocky road

ahead? By

Anne Perkins

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