Arthur Greene
When UK prime minister Boris Johnson was working as foreign secretary in 2018, an MP walked into his office to find he and his then-mistress Carrie Symonds in a “compromising position”.
According to an explosive report in the Private Eye, Conor Burns stumbled into Johnson’s parliamentary office to find Symonds performing oral sex on Johnson.
The government has denied the reports as “sordid and untrue”, while Burns says that he flagged up their relationship with government officials after walking in to find them “having a glass of wine together”.
The incident is part of a wider scandal involving Johnson allegedly trying to secure Symonds (now Johnson as they have since married) a senior role in the Foreign Office, a job which came with a R2 million salary.
The Times’s Simon Walters reported on the scandal on 18 June in a piece titled, “Johnson tried to give Carrie top Foreign Office job during affair”. When the article was mysteriously pulled from the Times’s website, UK media was set abuzz with speculation over why.
The Private Eye appears to have cracked the case. Walters’s story was pulled because of a reference to the “compromising position” in which Burns caught Johnson and Symonds.
Government insiders were apparently so terrified of the story surfacing that they convinced the Times’s editors to take down the article.
The scandal is just one of several that are miring Boris Johnson’s government.
Last week, the Deputy Chief Whip Chris Pincher resigned in disgrace after allegations that he had groped two men at a private members’ club.
The government has denied reports that it knew Pincher had a reputation for sexually innapropriate behaviour before the allegations became public. Johnson himself reportedly once referred to him as “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature”.
