This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Boris Johnson will attend Tory leadership hustings while embroiled in a scandal after police were called to his home after a loud altercation with his partner.

The Guardian revealed that an argument between Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, a former Conservative party head of press, was heard by a neighbour who called the police and recorded the row.

They said they heard a woman screaming followed by slamming and banging. At one point Symonds could be heard telling Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat”.

As Johnson prepared to go head-to-head with Jeremy Hunt in Birmingham for the role of Conservative leader, in the first runoff hustings on Saturday, questions over his private life dominated the battle for Downing Street.

Tory former attorney general Dominic Grieve told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he wasn’t in a position to comment on the specifics of the story but when asked a more general question, said character mattered in the leadership race.

“It will be relevant and it has to be relevant … but we have to be careful about what aspects of character really matter. Clearly reliability and honesty are important things.”

Speaking on the programme, Sonia Purnell, an author of a critical biography of the Tory politician called Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, who has worked by him, said knowing his character was important.

She said: “We have a right to know what the character of our future prime minister is like, imagine that job… that is an unbelievably pressured job … You have to have an equilibrium, a clear head and stability to cope with that.”

Others, however, have sprung to the defence of the leadership hopeful. Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson said: “What right do we have to listen in to a private lovers’ tiff?”

She told the Today programme: “The Tory members won’t care about this. They’ve been waiting since 2016 to vote for Boris Johnson.”

In a tweet, security minister Ben Wallace, who is a close ally of Johnson, said: “What a non-story, ‘couple have row’. Lefty neighbours give recording to Guardian. Newspaper reaches new low is a better news story.” The tweet was later deleted.

Tim Sinclair, a member of the Stratford-on-Avon Conservatives and a candidate in recent local elections, said he expects the incident will “puff up and blow away”.

“I suspect that this isn’t going to be a good story for him, he wouldn’t have ideally wanted it,” he told BBC Newsnight. “However, ironically despite his background, he’s actually regarded as a man of the people purely because he acts normally – he speaks his mind, he does things and behaves in ways that normal people can look at.”

When contacted by the Guardian on Friday, police initially said they had no record of a domestic incident at the address. However, after they received the case number and reference number, as well as identification markings of the vehicles that were called out, they issued a statement saying:

“Police attended and spoke to all occupants of the address, who were all safe and well. There were no offences or concerns apparent to the officers and there was no cause for police action,” a spokesperson said.

Johnson’s office was contacted earlier on Friday for comment but had still not responded by the time of publication.