Boris Johnson: Third time’s the charm?

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is ‘delighted’ at the prospect of a new wife and baby — but will it last?

Carrie Symonds with Boris Johnson In a picture she posted on her Instagram account, announcing their engagement and their baby news

The clues were there all along. Boris Johnson’s mantra in the six-week election campaign before the December poll was about his EU deal being “oven-ready”.

He would, in his bumbling way and ruffling his hair, pepper the oven-ready deal with talk of buns in the microwave, a means by which Britain could leave the EU.

Then he wanted to “love-bomb” the internal Tory critics, the ­intransigent Brussels officials and the Scottish referendum agitat­ors.

And so the ground was prepared­ for this week’s happy news from Britain’s unmarried Prime Minister and the nation’s “first ­girlfriend”, Carrie Symonds, an environmental campaigner and former spin doctor for the ruling Conservative Party.

Symonds, 31, announced on her Instagram account: “Many of you already know but for my friends that still don’t, we got engaged at the end of last year. And we’ve got a baby hatching early summer. Feel incredibly blessed.”

The baby — the bookies’ top names are Winston, as in Churchill, and Emmaline, as in Pankhurst — is due in late June and the couple­ will wed at a date yet to be announced.

Johnson, 55, says of the news: “Absolutely delighted, I’m abso­lutely delighted, of course.”

But he is not thrilled that baby No 6 (or is it 7?) has cast the spotlight once again on his exotic love life. For nearly all of Johnson’s adulthood has been a bodice-ripping­ tale of intrigue. He consistently has refused to talk publicl­y about his family, and one cover-up even cost him a job.

Just a few months ago, London radio host Nick Ferrari pressed Johnson on how many children he had, not an unexpected question for a potential leader of the ­country.

“I think what people what to hear is what plans we have,” Johnson­ replied. “I love my children very much but they are not standing at this election and I’m not therefore going to comment.”

But was he fully and wholly involve­d in all their lives?

Johnson adroitly deflected: “I am not going to put them on to the pitch in this election campaign.”

Boris Johnson and partner Carrie Symonds watch last year’s election results from No 10. Picture: Andrew Parsons/i-Images

Oxbridge blues

What is known is that ­Johnson’s first marriage, in 1987 to fellow Oxford university student Allegra Mostyn-Owen, was abruptly­ curtailed six years later when she discovered he was having­ an affair with Marina Wheeler, a lawyer and one of Johnson’s old school friends. In 1993 his first marriage was legally­ dissolved, and Johnson tied the knot less than two weeks later with Wheeler, who was heavily pregnant.

The new Mrs Johnson gave birth to Johnson’s first child, Lara Lettice, now 26, five weeks after the wedding. Three other Johnson babies followed: Milo Arthur, now 24; Cassia Peaches, 22; and Theodore Apollo, 20.

But all was not well behind the doors of their Highgate home in north London. Wheeler was publicl­y humiliated time and time again — and through the years she threw Johnson out of the house in what was to become a semi-­regular routine.

The first hint of lasciviousness involved The Spectator magazine columnist Petronella “Petsy’’ Wyatt, a daughter of a prominent Labour politician, Lord Wyatt. She had a four-year fling with ­Johnson, beginning about the time of the birth of his fourth child, and when he was the editor of the same magazine. Johnson would describe reports­ of their affair as an ­ “inverted pyramid of piffle”.

But in 2004, when the affair became­ public, Tory leader Michae­l Howard forced Johnson — then combining his editorship with being the ­fledgling political MP for Henley and shadow arts minister — to resign­ because he had categoric­ally denied the relationship, which was proved to be a lie. Wyatt’s mother publicly re­veale­d­ that her daughter had an abortion after becoming pregnant to Johnson. Nearly 15 years on, Wyatt wrote in The Spectator about how that time of her life continues to have an impact.

“I am beginning to feel like a sort of fairground curiosity­: one of those pickled things in jars that Victorians stared at,” she wrote in an article published last July.

“It is Boris’s fault. Because I once had a close friendship — all right, all right, a tendresse — with Mr Johnson, I am pointed at, photographed, and harried in the aisles of shops.”

Wyatt revealed that Johnson had few close friends and “like many loners, he has a compensating need to be liked”.

She went on: “I sometimes think his ambition is a consequence of this. There is an element of Boris that wants to be prime minister because the love of his family and Tory voters is not enough. He wants to be loved by the entire world.”

With his quick wit, self-deprecat­ing humour and persistent attention to women who catch his eye, Johnson has had little trouble attracting female interest. He joked to one interviewer who asked about his conquests: “I’ve slept with far fewer than 1000.”

In 2005, when ­Johnson was the father of four children under 12, he sidelined both ­Wheeler and Wyatt by having a dalliance with another journalist, Anna Fazackerley. On one journalism assignment he rerouted his way home from China via the city of romance, Paris, for a tete-a-tete with her.

Johnson with second wife Marina Wheeler. Picture: AFP

The Spectator in those years was openly referred to as The Sextator.

Fazackerley, like Wyatt, is more than a little frustrated at being forever tainted as one of Johnson’s conquests when she was 29 and single.

She wrote in The Guardian: “That was a long time ago, and a lot has changed in my life. But the harassment of women in the media hasn’t changed at all. Each new story about Johnson provides an excuse to rehash the same ­tawdry details: this woman had an abortion and that woman had a ‘love child’. (Love child? Is this the 18th century?).”

That particular love child is called Stephanie and she is now about 11 years old. Her mother is Helen Macintyre, an unpaid art adviser who was helping fundraise for the London Olympic Orbit sculpture when Johnson was mayor of London.

Myriad legal injunctions for several years prevented public­ation of Stephanie’s parentage. A giveaway was her mop of wild blonde hair and blue eyes.

Eventually three appeal court judges ruled that media outlets could write about Johnson being Stephanie’s father because it showed aspects of his character, but the judges tantalisingly hinted, without giving any detail, that there might be a second child out of wedlock.

In their judgment, they said: “What was material was that the father’s infidelities resulted in the conception of children on two occasion­s. The judge was entitled to hold that this was of itself reckless­ behaviour, regardless of whether any contraceptive precautions were taken.”

There have been various rumour­s about who this second child might be, or if it refers to Wyatt’s abortion, but nothing substantia­l has come to light.

While the public raises its eyebrow­s about Johnson’s peccadillos, it’s uncertain if his imper­viousness to moral criticism stems from his social class, his gender or his sense of humour.

But there is little backlash becaus­e the women involved have generally remained supportive of him.

Petronella Wyatt.

Juicy gossip

For instance, Macintyre spoke to Tatler magazine about being a mother but left the juiciest gossip to one’s imagination: “It didn’t occur to me that I needed a baby but then I fell pregnant and I just went into this haze of happiness,” she told the magazine.

“I did sort of see things falling apart around me with (then boyfriend) Pierre but I just thought everything would come right.”

The boyfriend, Pierre Rolin, a high-roller property magnate, responded to the Evening Standard about how he was cuckolded by Johnson.

Rolin said: “I think he has no moral compass. He thinks he is completely entitled and thinks he’s above it all. I’m not on some rampage about him, but everyone is accountable.”

As a sideline, it appeared that the public naming of Johnson as Stephanie’s father, and Stephanie as Johnson’s fifth child, was a step too far for Macintyre’s subsequent relationship with William Cash, the son of Tory grandee MP Bill Cash.

Johnson had given his approval for Stephanie to be reared by Cash at his Shropshire pile, but Mac­intyre broke off the relationship with a devastated Cash when it ­became front-page news that Stephanie’s father was Johnson.

Confused?

When the Telegraph’s editor Charles Moore told Johnson that he didn’t care about his private life, Johnson quipped: “Nor do I.”

During Johnson’s pitch last year to become Tory leader, ­another woman who worked for City Hall, Jennifer Arcuri, told of her “special relationship” with Johnson, refusing to deny or confirm­ an affair but admitting to being heartbroken after being cast aside by Johnson.

Arcuri, an American who founded the Innotech Network, received £11,500 in sponsorship from the mayor’s tourism body, London & Partners, and went on trade missions to Tel Aviv and New York, all of which she said were won on merit.

Arcuri revealed how her friendship with Johnson led to them ­acting out passages from Shakespeare and how she would use pole-dancing in her Shoreditch flat in London’s East End as a “conversation starter”.

Last week, Johnson called the four children he has with Wheeler and told them of his plans to wed Symonds, and that a baby was coming.

The bombshell announcement has caused further fracture in the family, especially as Lara has been furious at her father for beginning a relationship with Symonds ­before divorcing her mother. “A selfish bastard”, she has called him.

Symonds and Johnson got togethe­r in 2018 about the same time as Wheeler and Johnson announced­ they had separated. Their divorce settlement was ­approved last month and Wheeler now can apply for a decree absolute to formally end their marriage.

Wheeler is said to be “crushed” at the developments. Separately, while she has had her marriage crumble and watched Symonds move into Downing Street, she has had a tough time recovering from treatment for cervical cancer.

Friends of Symonds say she won’t put up with any shenanigans from Johnson — pointing to the loud shouting match between the two that saw Metropolitan Police turn up at their door last June. The source of that row was spilt red wine on the sofa.

She has helped him with his diet and smartened his fashion choices, and in her short time as his official consort hasn’t put a foot wrong. Johnson, say his friends, is wildly in love. Time will tell.