Spotlight on Carrie Symonds will intensify en route to Downing St

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As Boris Johnson’s girlfriend, Carrie Symonds has for a while attracted the sort of routine attention that normally accompanies the spouses and partners of putative prime ministers.

Now the focus on Miss Symonds will reach new intensity, with questions asked about whether she will move into No 10 if Mr Johnson is elected and what kind of role she will take.

The Sunday Telegraph understands that in the hours before the argument flared in the early hours of Friday, Miss Symonds had been particularly upset by reports that John Worboys, the black cab rapist, had pleaded guilty to a further string of assaults.

She was one of his many victims. At 19, Miss Symonds suffered at the hands of Worboys when he plied her with drugged vodka. She blacked out and, to this day, does not know what happened.

“The worst thing is not having peace of mind. I’m 99.9 per cent sure that nothing happened to me, but I will never know,” she said.

What appears to have ignited the row with Mr Johnson, which ended with police visiting the flat they share in Camberwell, south London, was his apparently careless disregard in spilling wine on the sofa.

In a recording sent to The Guardian, made by the neighbour who called the police, Miss Symonds is heard shouting: “You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt. You have no care for money or anything.”

Despite attending his campaign launch this month, Miss Symonds did not appear by Mr Johnson’s side at the Birmingham hustings yesterday.

Miss Symonds’s association with Mr Johnson dates back to when she worked on his successful re-election bid as London mayor in 2012.

Indeed, the 31-year-old, who is described as “popular”, has been at the heart of the so-called Westminster bubble for much of her career.

Miss Symonds joined the Tories’ media operation in 2009, first as a press adviser, then head of broadcast ahead of the 2015 general election. Media runs in the family. Her father Matthew was one of the founders of The Independent, while her mother, Josephine Mcaffee, was one of the paper’s lawyers.

She grew up in south-west London and attended Godolphin & Latymer, a girls’ school in Hammersmith, before graduating from the University of Warwick with a degree in theatre studies and history of art in 2009.

Today, she is a senior adviser at Oceana, a US-based environmental campaign group, working with its marketing operation in London.

Whatever happened inside the flat – and it was serious enough to alarm neighbours – Miss Symonds appears to have retained a sense of humour. Yesterday, she temporarily “liked” a tweet by Victor Olliver, a writer and astrologer on The Lady, which urged her to “please just carry on”. In it, he added: “We must have entertainment at No 10. Three years of boredom is quite enough.”

Of course, whether she will move to No 10 still remains open to question.