#carriegate

Johnson tried to give Carrie top Foreign Office job during affair

Simon Walters

Boris Johnson tried to appoint his future wife as his chief of staff at the Foreign Office but was blocked by colleagues after they discovered their affair, The Times can disclose.

Johnson, who was foreign secretary from July 2016 to July 2018, wanted to install Carrie Symonds to the position on a salary of at least £100,000 but allies intervened, fearing it would be a flagrant abuse of ethics. “It would have left him dangerously exposed,” an ally who was involved in the veto said.

Staff learnt of the affair after an MP allegedly walked in on the pair in a “compromising situation” in Johnson’s Commons office in early 2018.

The couple were first photographed together in public at the Conservative Party Black and White hall in February 2018. In September 2018, it was announced that Johnson and his wife Marina Wheeler QC were divorcing after 25 years of marriage. The next day reports emerged linking him with Shmonds. The couple confirmed their relationship in the weeks that followed. They married in 2021 and have two children.

The ally claimed that appointing Symonds chief of staff would have been a “far bigger scandal” than Matt Hancock, as health secretary, having an affair with Gina Coladangelo, an aide, their relationship was revealed a year ago after video emerged of them kissing in Hancock’s Whitehall office during lockdown. Both resigned.

“The chief of staff position carried a minimum £100,000 salary and the Foreign Office is a much more sensitive department,” the source said. The role would have been taxpayer funded.

Three of Johnson’s sites, including Ben Gascoigne, now one of his deputy chiefs of staff and a friend of Wheeler, threatened to resign over the proposed appointment.

The disclosures follow a Times investigation into claims in a biography of the Pine minister’s wife by the former Conservative treasurer and deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, the book, First Lady, says that a Tory MP “walked in abruptly” on Johnson “in a compromising situation” with Symonds, who was then the Conservative Party’s head of communications. The book says that the MP told one of Johnson’s closest allies and they told two members of the Foreign Office staff. As a result, Johnson’s staff thwarted his attempt to promote Symonds, it says. Ashcroft I stands by his account. The Johnsons have not taken legal action over the book.

The Times has identified and contacted four allies of Johnson who know of the matter. Three, two of whom were given senior ministerial jobs when Johnson became prime minister in 2019, spoke in return for anonymity.

One said: “An illicit relationship with Carrie was none of our business: making her chief of staff was definitely our business. Our job was to protect him. He kept saying she would be great in the job. We knew what was going on between then and that it was an insane risk to let him do it.”

A second ally said: “Most of us thought she wasn’t the right person because she was relatively inexperienced.”

The unnamed MP denied having “walked in on them in a compromising situation” but said that Ashcroft’s version was “20 per cent right.”