Mail on Sunday Exclusive: Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds ‘wed in secret’

Boris Johnson married girlfriend Carrie Symonds in a secret ceremony this morning, the Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Mr Johnson, 56, exchanged vows with Ms Symonds, 33, in Westminster Cathedral in front of a handful of close friends and family – becoming the first Prime Minister to marry in office since Lord Liverpool married Mary Chester in 1822.

It comes just six days after the couple – who became engaged on the Caribbean island of Mustique in December 2019 and have baby Wilfred, aged one – sent out save-the-date cards to guests telling them to keep Saturday, July 30, 2022 free for a marriage celebration.

Despite sending out the cards, the couple are understood to have been secretly planning the small ceremony for six months.

Under current Covid rules there is a limit of 30 guests at weddings – although the cap is expected to be lifted on June 21st – ‘freedom day’ – when most restrictions are expected to be lifted. 

With Mr Johnson set to be back at work next week, it looks unlikely the couple will have a honeymoon.

During Covid, many couples have held a small marriage ceremony with just close friends – while arranging a larger celebration for after the end of all restrictions.

The 30 guests were invited at the last minute, with only a handful of church officials were involved in the preparations for the service at 2pm today: armed police stood guard as visitors were ushered out half an hour earlier by staff who told them the building was going into lockdown,

Ms Symonds wore a white dress, without a veil, for the ceremony and walked down the aisle to the strains of classical music. 

They kissed after exchanging their vows for Father Daniel Humphreys, who baptised Wilfred into the faith at the same cathedral last autumn. 

Ms Symonds is a practising Catholic. Mr Johnson abandoned his mother’s Catholicism and became an Anglican joining the Church of England while at Eton. 

One guest described Ms Symonds as looking ‘extremely happy’ and Mr Johnson as ‘very smart and dapper….he didn’t take his eyes of her’.

While their official guest list is still under lock and key, Mr Johnson’s father, Stanley, was photographed outside No10 this evening with his daughter Julia, shortly after attending the service. 

Northern Ireland First Minister Arlene Foster was the first political figure to send her best wishes, writing on Twitter: ‘Huge congratulations to Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds on your wedding day.’

Keir Starmer said: ‘Congratulations to Boris & Carrie. Whatever our political differences, I wish them a happy life together’.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, said: ‘What pleasant news. I wish the Prime Minister and Carrie well, and hope he has time for a honeymoon!’

But Labour former frontbencher Jon Trickett said the wedding was ‘a good way to bury this week’s bad news’ on Mr Cummings’ testimony, the spread of the Indian coronavirus variant and the row about funding of the Downing Street flat. 

Until today’s ceremony, the pair had been the first unmarried couple to reside in Downing Street.

They live in a flat above No.11 Downing Street with their son and a Jack Russell-cross puppy called Dilyn.

Ms Symonds, who becomes the third Mrs Johnson, announced their engagement on social media in February 2020, at the same time as she disclosed her pregnancy. 

Friends of the couple say the pandemic interrupted their plans to marry sooner. 

It has been suggested in the past that Ms Symonds could not become a fully-fledged ‘first lady’ until the couple were married.

Mr Johnson was coy when asked about the subject in 2019, telling reporters that marriage speculation was ‘a tiny bit premature’. 

The PM’s first marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen was annulled in 1993.

He then married childhood friend Marina Wheeler. The pair were separated in 2018, and divorced in February 2020.

The marriage to Ms Symond’s is Mr Johnson’s third, after he was first married at the age of 23 to Ms Mostyn-Owen in 1987. They met while they were students at Oxford. 

Their union was annulled in 1993 after it emerged he was having an affair with childhood friend Ms Wheeler who he married in 1993.

But they separated in 2018. Their divorce was finalised after he arrived in Downing Street in 2019. 

Mr Johnson and Ms Wheeler have two daughters, Lara Lettice, 26, and Cassia Peaches, 22, and two sons Milo Arthur, 24, and Theodore Apollo, 20, together.

Mr Johnson had affairs with three women during their 25-year marriage.

The PM also has a fifth child, Stephanie Macintyre, with art consultant Helen Macintyre. It is now known if any of his children attended the wedding today.

In 2013 it emerged during another court hearing that Mr Johnson had fathered a daughter during an adulterous liaison while Mayor of London in 2009.

In 2004, he was sacked from the Tory frontbench over a reported affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. 

Claims that Mr Johnson squeezed the thigh of journalist Charlotte Edwardes, at a private lunch at The Spectator magazine’s HQ shortly after he became editor in 1999, overshadowed his first Conservative Party conference as PM.

Ms Symonds, a former Conservative Party communications chief, was romantically linked to Mr Johnson just months after the announcement of his separation from Ms Wheeler. 

She joined the Tory party media machine in 2009, first as a press adviser, then head of broadcast at Conservative campaign headquarters ahead of the 2015 general election.

Her association with Mr Johnson dates back to the early years, having worked on his successful re-election bid at City Hall in 2012.

But a row that saw police called to their home in the early stages of the Conservative leadership race offered a glimpse into the complicated private life about which Mr Johnson tries desperately to avoid answering questions.

The couple had been living together at Ms Symonds’s flat in Camberwell, south London, until the well-publicised row recorded by neighbours in June 2019.

When she announced the news of the engagement she captioned the intimate holiday picture, in which he was kissing her cheek: ‘I wouldn’t normally post this kind of thing on here but I wanted my friends to find out from me… 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.’

Weeks later the couple was thrown into turmoil as the Prime Minister lay in intensive care with Covid and was given a 50-50 chance of surviving.

The Roman Catholic church does not allow divorcees to be married in its churches.

But Catherine Pepinster, Catholic author and broadcaster, explained that as Mr Johnson was himself baptised a Catholic but married previously in non-Catholic settings, the church did not recognise his previous marriages. She said: ‘As far as the Church is concerned, this is his first marriage.

‘They don’t need to be annulled.

‘They didn’t happen, according to Roman Catholic canon law.’

Downing Street declined to comment last night. 

THREE weddings, three affairs and a pole-dancing tech-guru: The very busy love life of Boris Johnson 

By Nick Enoch for MailOnline

The news that Boris Johnson has married Carrie Symonds marks the latest chapter in the PM’s turbulent love life.

His first marriage at the age of 23 to Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1987 collapsed six years later after it emerged he was having an affair with childhood friend Marina Wheeler.

Boris’s subsequent marriage to Marina lasted 25 years – during which he had affairs with three women. 

Here, we outline the Prime Minister’s colourful past relationships – as well as his links to one alleged lover of his – former pole dancer, and tech guru, Jennifer Arcuri. 

1987: The first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he met at Oxford 

Boris married his Oxford University sweetheart Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1987 when they were both aged 23.

They divorced in 1993 after his affair with the woman who would become his second wife, Marina Wheeler.

The daughter of renowned art historian William Mostyn-Owen and flamboyant Italian writer Gaia Servadio, Allegra was a socialite and former Tatler cover girl whose beauty had besotted young men falling at her feet at Oxford University.

 ‘When we got married, that was actually the end of the relationship instead of the beginning,’ Allegra would later say.  

Their relationship ended after six years following revelations of his affair with Marina Wheeler QC, who was a childhood friend of Boris.

Marina became pregnant with the first of their four children before his divorce from Allegra was finalised.

Johnson later reconciled with Mostyn-Owen before they separated in February 1990 and divorced in 1993 – just 12 days before he married Marina Wheeler, whom he had a child with five weeks later.  

1993: Boris marries Marina Wheeler – the woman who stood by him for years… but left her just as he was on the brink of becoming PM

Marina Wheeler married Boris on May 8, 1993 – just 12 days after his divorce from Allegra was finalised on April 26.

Together, Boris and Marina have four children: Lara Lettice, Milo Arthur, Cassia Peaches and Theodore Apollo.

After first meeting Boris at the European School of Brussels, they also attended private boarding school Bedales in Hampshire together before she went to Cambridge. 

Born in Berlin in 1964, she is of English and Indian Sikh descent. After being called to the bar in 1987, Marina returned to London. 

Marina and Boris met again in London when they were both in their mid-twenties. 

The couple remained married for 25 years despite Boris’s spectacularly colourful love life. 

Marina endured multiple public humiliations over Boris’s well-publicised affairs – locking her high profile husband out of the house more than once – only to forgive him, prior to their final split in 2018.

The affairs 

2004: Petronella Wyatt and the ‘inverted pyramid of piffle’ 

Around seven years into his marriage to Marina, she became aware that Boris was having an affair with Petronella Wyatt, daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite journalist Woodrow Wyatt.

In 2004, it was reported that ‘Petsy’ may have had an abortion, to which Boris declared to The Mail on Sunday: ‘I had not had an affair with Petronella. 

‘It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle.’ 

Boris was soon found to be lying and after days of publicity, Tory leader Michael Howard sacked Johnson from his position as Shadow Culture Minister. 

2006:  Emergence of liaisons with Anna Fazackerley

Alongside this, Marina was also alerted to another affair that Boris had been having with journalist Anna Fazackerley, which emerged in 2006.

When the affairs garnered publicity, it also became public knowledge that Marina had become pregnant at the time that Boris was still married to Allegra, who was quoted saying: ‘I divorced him for adultery. It enabled him to marry Marina.’

The divorce had been finalised on April 26, 1993 and Boris married Marina on May 8 of the same year, with Lara Johnson being born on June 12. 

Marina threw her husband out of their home after his affair with Anna was publicised, but they soon worked things out.

2009: The love child with Helen Macintyre

In 2009, Mr Johnson is said to have fathered a child with art consultant Helen Macintyre. 

It is understood Mrs Wheeler had, again, kicked him out of the family home at the time.

Mr Johnson’s fatherhood of Miss Macintyre’s daughter was first revealed by the Daily Mail in July 2010.

In 2013, a court ruled that it was in the public interest for the Press to report Mr Johnson was the father.

Police probe into Boris’s links with his alleged lover Jennifer Arcuri

Mr Johnson has faced two separate inquiries over his relationship with American former pole dancer and tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri, 34, while he was Mayor of London, both of which were put on hold during the election.  

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has been evaluating whether to investigate the Prime Minister for possible criminal offence of misconduct in public office since September. 

The watchdog confirmed it was doing a ‘scoping exercise’ to track down witnesses globally, and said that it had ‘never put a timescale on how long this process would take’, according to the Observer. 

In a statement, the IPOC said that the allegation date back ‘eight years’ and they have to ‘locate and speak with a number of potential witnesses both in the country and abroad’.

Mr Johnson has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to his friendship with Ms Arcuri.

On October 3 last year, Ms Arcuri told the Daily Mail she had ‘every right’ to go on trade missions with Mr Johnson. She calls all the allegations false, saying she is a ‘legitimate businesswoman’. 

It follows a report by The Sunday Times that Ms Arcuri, an American who moved to London seven years ago, was given £126,000 in public money and was treated to privileged access to three foreign trade missions led by Mr Johnson while he was mayor.

The Government has since frozen a £100,000 grant to Ms Arcuri’s company, Hacker House, pending a review.

It is facing embarrassing questions about the verification process carried out before awarding the money.

Digital Minister Matt Warman told the Commons that his department had done the ‘usual due diligence’ and that the company had a British phone number.

However, numerous reports said calls to the number were directed to an office in California, where Ms Arcuri, 34, is said to now be based.

Boris Johnson’s divorce from Marina Wheeler 

Boris Johnson and his estranged wife Marina Wheeler agreed a divorce settlement on February 18 2020, following a legal dispute over money.

Judge Sarah Gibbons oversaw a private hearing in the Central Family Court in London, which neither party attended.

During the short hearing, she gave Ms Wheeler permission to apply for a Decree Absolute, which would bring the marriage to an end.

A case number revealed Mr Johnson, who is now living with Carrie Symonds at Downing Street, and Ms Wheeler were involved in a dispute over money or assets.

Marina Claire Wheeler was named as the ‘petitioner’ and ‘applicant’ in the case, while Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson was named as the ‘respondent’.

Mr Johnson was said to have had £6.5million in cash and assets as of September 2018, but will have likely seen his wealth rise since becoming Prime Minister last July.

It is therefore plausible that Ms Wheeler will be receiving around £4million if it is an equal split. However, the judge said no detail from the case relating to money can be revealed in reports, apart from what is already in the public domain.

Judge Gibbons gave Ms Wheeler permission to apply for the decree absolute ‘out of time’.

This suggests that she was granted a decree nisi by the courts more than a year ago.

Those who are successfully granted a decree nisi have up to a year to apply for the next stage of divorce, the decree absolute.