First girlfriend’s making history
With Boris set to become the first Love, Actually Prime Minister, Harry Mount takes a look at the relationships of No 10’s past residents
Carrie Symonds, girlfriend of new British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is expected to keep a low profile this week and instead slip into Downing St at the weekend by the back door.
No 10 looks a relatively modest prime ministerial house in front. But it hides a rabbit-warren of buildings — and plenty of back entrances.
Whatever approach Symonds takes to Downing St — and to her new role — we are in uncharted waters, historically speaking. There has never been a British Prime Minister living openly with his girlfriend in Downing St before — apart from in the Richard Curtis film Love, Actually.
Gordon Brown got married in 2000 to girlfriend Sarah Macaulay, just as he was contemplating his leadership bid — even though he didn’t get inside No 10 until 2007.
Even if Johnson did want to do the decent thing and marry Symonds now, he can’t. He’s separated from but still legally married to his second wife, Marina Wheeler.
Of course, there have been FMs — First Mistresses — before. David Lloyd George, the last Liberal Prime
Minister, was an incorrigible Welsh goat, with multiple girlfriends. After the 1935 election, the
BBC’s Wynford Vaughan-Thomas famously interviewed the old boy in a hotel room, sitting in bed with a naked woman either side of him.
In October 1943, aged 80, Lloyd George married his second wife and secretary, Frances Stevenson. He had been having an affair with her for an astonishing 30 years — during which time he was Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922. For most of those 30 years, he was still married to his first wife, Margaret.
Lord Palmerston — twice Prime Minister, from 1855-58 and 1859-65 — was a vigorous swordsman, too. He is reputed to have died in flagrante, aged 80, while he was still Liberal Prime Minister. At the time, he was seducing a maid on the billiard table at Brocket Hall, his wife’s stately home in Hertfordshire. As I played snooker on the billiard table at Brocket Hall last year, I doffed my cap to the man. It was hard enough potting a few balls on that table, let alone making love to someone less than half your age.
Symonds is herself reputedly the love child great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, another amorous Liberal Prime Minister (from 1908-16), who reportedly had an affair with Symonds’s great-grandmother, Hilda.
Around the same time, in 1915, during World War I, Asquith wrote three letters a day to his crush, Venetia Stanley (it’s still debated whether they actually graduated from intimate friendship to sex). He even wrote the letters during Cabinet meetings.
But none of these Prime Ministers openly publicised their girlfriends while in office. Of course, Johnson announced he was separating from Wheeler in a joint statement last September. The couple, who have been married for 25 years, said their decision was taken some months before they made it official. Prime Ministers, like all of us, behave in radically different ways. Anthony Eden had a much younger second wife. Clarissa Avon, who is still with us, and turns 100 next year — was 23 years Eden’s junior; Symonds is 24 years Johnson’s junior. Tony Blair was the first Prime Minister to have a child in office since Lord John Russell in 1849. Theresa and Philip May didn’t fit the nuclear family model.
And so we now have the first Love, Actually Prime Minister, with a girlfriend in office.
Northern Anglo-Saxon Protestant puritanism is shifting towards a southern Continental, Catholic, laissez-faire model of behaviour. In France, people were delighted when twice-divorced Nicolas Sarkozy married the impossibly glamorous Carla Bruni while he was still President. The French didn’t mind Sarkozy’s successor, Francois Hollande, leaving his partner, Valerie Trierweiler, while he was President — and exchanging her for another extremely beautiful woman, actress Julie Gayet. Some say they admire a man going out with a much younger model — it gives hope to all French men. The same goes for shifts in the moral compass across the pond. Twenty-one years ago, Bill Clinton was impeached — and acquitted — of lying and obstruction of justice after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Now we have a President who has five children from three marriages and was caught openly boasting about “grabbing women by the p **** ”.
Symonds was literally born into the media elite. Her father, Matthew Symonds, was one of the three journalists who helped to found the Independent in 1986, and her mother, Josephine McAfee, was a newspaper lawyer there. It’s unlikely she will give up her Camberwell flat, now famous as much for its nosy neighbours as that red-wine-stain-on-the-sofa row. She is planning to keep her job with the environmental group, Oceana — a useful way of keeping away from the 24/7 pressure-cooker of No 10.
With a general election possibly in the offing, the south London property could also be somewhere the couple can move to after what might be the shortest ever spell in Downing St. The current record is George Canning, with 118 days in 1827.
Symonds’ spell behind that famous black door could be extremely short. By November, commentators may well be saying of No 10, in the words of Sir Cliff Richard: “Carrie doesn’t live here any more.”