Boris Johnson and his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, recently announced that they are engaged and expecting a baby.

Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party, is the first British prime minister to reside with a non-married partner in 10 Downing Street. Very little has been made of that fact, which is itself a reminder of the significant shift in British “conservatism” in the last few decades.


Symonds’s first child with the prime minister will be Johnson’s sixth. (That we know of.) The prime minister has four children with his ex-wife Marina Wheeler, whom he separated from “some time ago” after continual allegations of his infidelity. Proof of the prime minister’s extra-marital activities exists in his eleven-year-old daughter with art dealer Helen MacIntyre, as well as newspaper reports from 2004 on his four-year affair with Petronella Wyatt, resulting in a pregnancy and subsequent abortion.