Girlfriend will not join in for Johnson’s big moment
BORIS JOHNSON’S girlfriend will not join him for his big moment entering Downing Street if he becomes prime minister, The Daily Telegraph understands.
Mr Johnson is expected to make a speech outside No10 at around 5pm on Wednesday but will enter his new home alone as Carrie Symonds does not want to become a distraction on the most important day of his life.
Prime ministers traditionally pose for the cameras and wave with their husband or wife in front of the famous door when they take up residence, but Mr Johnson is not yet divorced from his wife Marina and the presence of Ms Symonds would risk overshadowing the speech he will make.
She will not accompany him when he meets the Queen to accept her invitation to form a government.
Instead, the 31-year-old is expected to move in over the weekend, once Mr Johnson has appointed the Cabinet, addressed the Commons and got down to work. As a former chief of the Conservative Party’s press office, Ms Symonds is aware of the need to carefully stagemanage her move into No 10, and wants Wednesday to be “Boris’s moment”.
Yesterday, the couple were spotted leaving Mr Johnson’s home in Oxfordshire but were careful not to be photographed together.
It emerged that Mr Johnson wants to buy new furniture for No 10 – including a bed – using taxpayers’ money.
He is reported to have told civil servants he “didn’t have any stuff ” because his estranged wife has kept their furniture and Ms Symonds’s furniture is being used in a £1.3million house in south London the couple have bought together.
Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leadership candidate, has written to the Cabinet Office demanding to know how much Mr Johnson is claiming in expenses for furniture, suggesting that he is wealthy enough to buy his own furniture without expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill.
Ms Symonds has made clear her intention to carry on working in her current public relations role for the Vibrant Oceans Initiative, an environmental pressure group set up by Bloomberg, the financial firm.
However, Mr Johnson has been encouraged to spend August “schmoozing” MPS and their partners with Ms Symonds’s help by holding private parties at Chequers to win them round before he completes the job of getting Britain out of the EU in October.
Sources in the whips’ office said Mr Johnson needed to give Tory MPS the “full-on treatment” to get the party past Brexit and take on Jeremy Corbyn in a general election. The office source said Tory MPS were crying out for some “love” from the new leader, who had to “be bold, show the party where you want to go, talk to it, caress it”.
The source told The Telegraph: “He has got to schmooze them over the summer with trips to Chequers, making sure he meets them and their other halves. They have got to get to know him, and get the full-on treatment.”
He should give senior roles to prominent Brexiteers, like Jacob Rees-mogg or Steve Baker, the source said, to shut down the separate whipping operation run by the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tories.