Boris Johnson's fling with Carrie would have ENDED if Marina Wheeler had not terminated their marriage, claims new biography which chronicles PM's relationship with fiancée - including memorable flat fight and row over Wilf's middle name

If Marina Wheeler had not terminated her marriage to Boris, his fling with Carrie Symonds would have ended abruptly. Instead, he became unintentionally close to a woman only five years older than his eldest daughter.

When their affair began in 2018, nobody on the Tory Party circuit could avoid Carrie, the then 29-year-old director of its communications team who regularly posted glamorous photos of herself on social media.

While some praised her sound judgment and loyalty, others in party headquarters described her as manipulative, volatile and aggressive, especially towards women. Some said she has a ‘polarising personality’ and had been appointed because of a close friendship with Zac Goldsmith.

In 2017, her long-term relationship with a journalist broke up and she began advising Boris. Moody, uncertain and insecure, he needed company and reassurance from yet another new trusted female confidante.

Carrie’s critics said that what started as a fling became, to match her ambition, a serious affair. Others said she filled a vacancy. Inevitably, Marina found out about the relationship. There were fierce arguments, but after making a full confession, Boris had hoped for forgiveness from his loyal soul mate.

Boris Johnson pictured with his fiance Carrie Symonds during a holiday to Scotland with their baby son Wilfred. Boris seems never to have considered the consequences of a permanent break-up with his wife, or that it would wreck his relationship with their children

Marina was emphatic. She couldn’t take his infidelity any more. She explicitly blamed his father, Stanley. All Boris’s worst qualities stemmed from that relationship. She refused to live with her husband any more.

Boris seems never to have considered the consequences of a permanent break-up with his wife, or that it would wreck his relationship with their children. Lara, their eldest daughter, told a friend: ‘He’s a selfish bastard. Mum is finished with him. She’ll never take him back now.’ Lara later posted on Instagram that this period was ‘the hardest and most hurtful year of my life’.

Under Carrie’s guidance, Boris began losing weight – off alcohol and late-night binges of cheese and chorizo. Their relationship had taken a course that was not intended by Boris.

In March 2019, despite the turmoil just days before Brexit was scheduled to take place, Boris took Carrie for a long weekend to Positano, Italy, to celebrate her 31st birthday. Some feared that political priorities were being forsaken to satisfy Carrie’s wishes.

On June 21, it was reported that Boris and Carrie had been embroiled in a ferocious argument in her South London flat, and that the police had been called. Carrie is pictured in 2019

On June 21, it was reported that Boris and Carrie had been embroiled in a ferocious argument in her South London flat, and that the police had been called. It was claimed that Carrie was screaming that Boris had spilled red wine on her sofa. ‘You just don’t care for anything because you’re spoilt,’ she was reported to have said.

Then Boris is said to have shouted: ‘Get off my f****** laptop!’ followed by a loud crashing noise of glasses or plates. Carrie then allegedly shouted: ‘Get off me!’ and ‘Get out of my flat!’

Carrie denied saying ‘Get off me’ and other things she was quoted as saying. But no one disputed there had been an argument, fuelling intense speculation about the cause.

Some said Carrie was furious that Boris had returned late from seeing Marina, who at the time was recovering from cervical cancer treatment.

Others claimed Carrie was angry that former mistress Petronella Wyatt had texted Boris, mocking Carrie’s ‘undignified half-naked’ performance on top of a car (she had posted a fun photo of herself on Instagram), and saying ‘she needs her teeth fixed’.

There were claims that he was looking at photos of Jennifer Arcuri. The truth was that Carrie, in an emotional outburst, was upset by Boris spilling a glass of red wine on her sofa: a domestic tiff.

Little over a month later, Boris became Prime Minister. No PM had ever lived in Downing Street with an unmarried partner. It was whispered that Boris missed Marina and that his affair with Carrie was no more than a fling, and not a life choice.

In February, a High Court judge approved the financial agreement Boris had reached with Marina. A divorce could rapidly follow.

The announcement disappointed friends who had speculated how Boris pined for his wife and hoped for a reconciliation. In their opinion, Boris had depended on Marina’s wisdom and stability. Carrie, they lamented, was too young and inexperienced to offer the same. They would blame Carrie’s demands in the seventh month of her pregnancy for Boris’s absence from London at the start of the Covid crisis. In the middle of March he hosted a baby-shower party with Carrie at Chequers.

In February, a High Court judge approved the financial agreement Boris had reached with Marina Wheeler (pictured together in 2009). A divorce could rapidly follow

On April 29, just over a fortnight after Boris had been hospitalised with Covid, his sixth child, Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas, was born.

Wilfred and Lawrie were the names of his parents’ grandfathers, explained No 10. The origin of Nicholas seemed less clear. Boris had told his mother that he would name the boy after Nick Wahl, her second husband. That news provoked uproar in Stanley’s home. Any links with Charlotte were declared taboo. Then Boris declared that his son was named after Nicholas Hart and Nicholas Price, the doctors who had saved his life. The metaphorical temperature at Stanley’s home remained high.

In his flat in Downing Street, Boris was still weak from his illness. Nevertheless, Carrie believed Boris should be a modern father and change nappies. His sleep was constantly interrupted.

His relationship with his other children and family continued to be troubling, and in May his divorce was finalised. Charlotte, his mother, was the rock in his life, but the pressure on the sick man was remorseless.

‘Boris got caught by a flirtatious minx,’ said Jennifer Arcuri of Carrie. ‘She’s controlling him. It drives me insane that there’s such a huge difference between me and Carrie. She’s just a type-A worker bee, riding a bicycle around the Westminster village.’

by Glen Owens and Mark Hookhan for The Mail On Sunday

Boris Johnson's father Stanley hit the Prime Minister’s mother in a domestic violence incident that broke her nose and left her requiring hospital treatment, an explosive new book has revealed.

The astonishing disclosure is one of a string of revelations in The Gambler, a major biography of Mr Johnson by the renowned investigative author Tom Bower, which is being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, starting today.

Mr Bower describes Stanley’s first marriage, to Mr Johnson’s mother Charlotte, as violent and unhappy, quoting her as saying: ‘He broke my nose. He made me feel like I deserved it.’

Charlotte told the author: ‘I want the truth to be told.’

Last night, family friends confirmed the story to this newspaper, but insisted that the incident had been a one-off.

The friends said it happened in the 1970s when Charlotte was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and had ‘flailed’ at Stanley, who broke her nose when ‘flailing back’.

Father Stanley and mother Charlotte. Boris, centre, is pictured with his brother and sisters in the seventies. Mr Bower describes Stanley’s first marriage, to Mr Johnson’s mother Charlotte, as violent and unhappy, quoting her as saying: ‘He broke my nose. He made me feel like I deserved it’

Boris with Carrie Symonds in March. Following several humiliating exposés of Boris’s adultery, Marina Wheeler had tried to repair their relationship, but those efforts had been wrecked by his most recent affair with Carrie Symonds, the 30-year-old Tory communications chief

They added that Stanley, now 80, deeply regretted the incident, which led to Charlotte being taken to hospital, and denied that he had been violent on any other occasion.

Mr Bower says this secret, and Boris’s parents’ troubled relationship, defined the PM as a man.

Scourge of the rich and famous

Royal biographer Tom Bower

Described as ‘the most effective journalistic sleuth of his generation’, Tom Bower is admired for investigative books that for ever change the way we perceive the rich and powerful.

From Tony Blair to Richard Branson, Mohamed Al Fayed to Prince Charles, the former BBC Panorama reporter’s forensically researched ‘warts-and-all’ biographies are defiantly unauthorised.

Often, they’ve led Bower to court to successfully defend the truth, while crooked publisher Robert Maxwell tried to intimidate the author by setting private detectives on him.

Bower, 74, says: ‘The immorality of the rich and powerful has always fascinated and appalled me.’

He writes: ‘Boris agonised over his mother’s fate… unwilling to confide in others about his father’s violence, he became a loner.

‘To mask the misery and hurt, he demanded attention… But Boris’s bravado masked deep unhappiness.’

Charlotte’s detonation of the long-held Johnson family secret is one of a series of revelations by Mr Bower which come closer than any previous work to explaining Boris’s complex psychology.

Based on interviews with hundreds of colleagues and family members, including with Boris’s mother and first wife, the book invites sympathy for the Prime Minister by painting a portrait of a young boy who turned into a self-contained loner as he battled despair over his parents’ divorce and his feral childhood.

Boris, by this account, grew up unable to forge close relationships with men so sought out women as his soulmates instead, which explains his notoriously prolific love life, in which he recklessly poured out his heart to lovers in poems and letters, even threatening suicide to deter women from abandoning him.

The book also details Boris’s intense desire to become Prime Minister, jostling for advantage with fellow Old Etonian David Cameron and feuding with George Osborne in what is portrayed as the transfer of Oxford University’s infamous Bullingdon Club antics to Tory high command.

It chronicles Boris’s soul-searching over Brexit, the victorious Vote Leave campaign and his eventual march into Downing Street after the political quagmire of Theresa May’s Government, as well as the ‘terrorist demands’ that chief aide Dominic Cummings made before joining him in No 10.

The drama of the Covid pandemic is also described, with Boris presented as a Prime Minister who was panicked into a lockdown by overcautious scientists.

Underpinning every political development is the backdrop of constant, draining emotional drama in his private life, but Mr Bower concludes on a positive note – that as Prime Minister, he still has the opportunity and desire to improve fundamentally people’s lives.

When Stanley was asked by The Mail on Sunday outside his home in North London yesterday about the contents of Bower’s book, he said: ‘I haven’t read it. I don’t want to comment.’

He then rode away on his bicycle.

No 10 also declined to comment.

Boris Johnson is pictured with his mother Charlotte at his book launch in 2014. They added that Stanley, now 80, deeply regretted the incident, which led to Charlotte being taken to hospital, and denied that he had been violent on any other occasion

by Tom Bower for The Mail On Sunday

In the aftermath of one of his affairs, Boris Johnson told a friend: ‘My great-grandfather had four wives. I don’t see why I should be faithful.’ His dislike of monogamy has long informed his relationships with women. ‘Boris’s adultery,’ says his mother, Charlotte, ‘is just like his father’s. The motives were lack of love for their wives, boredom, selfishness and insecurity.’

According to Boris’s first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen: ‘When we got married, that was the end of the relationship instead of the beginning.’ By the time he and Allegra divorced in 1993, the woman who would become his second wife, Marina Wheeler, was already pregnant. Grounded, happy, secure and intelligent, Marina provided the substance and emotional interpretation of his life that Boris required.

In her, he had found a soul mate. Unlike his instinctive rivalry with men, Boris trusted Marina, a childhood friend, not to cause him any harm. A month after their wedding in 1993, their daughter Lara Lettice was born.

Adding to the Johnson heritage of Muslim, Jewish and Christian ancestry, she was also part Indian through Marina.

As the couple’s young family then expanded, Boris left his EU correspondent job in Brussels and the couple bought a house in Islington, North London. However, he began to feel life at home had become too routine.

Marina, he later confided to one person, was no longer a woman much interested in a close relationship or spirited conversations. She was no longer the full-time, uncritical confidante he required. Too often, she told him the unpleasant truth.

Despite enjoying time with his children, he discovered that fame had attracted other women. He felt waning loyalty towards Marina. Convinced that their relationship was secure, his appetite fuelled him to risk a new challenge.

Mary Wakefield, a commissioning editor at The Spectator magazine, who would later marry Dominic Cummings, developed a crush on Boris, and he, it appeared, was swooning for Mary, ‘one of the loveliest people’, according to their colleague Rod Liddle.

Jeremy Deedes, a director of the Telegraph group which owned The Spectator, observed that ‘Mary was besotted with Boris. She was like a spaniel on heat. Boris was scratching his head, “What are we going to do?” he asked me.’

In a newspaper interview, Boris gave a hint about his reckless attitude to life. ‘I am a juggler,’ he said. ‘I can have it all.’

As London Mayor between 2008 and 2016, he appeared to exert a similar fascination over women. In 2009, he joined Marina at Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for her father, the distinguished BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler. To the packed congregation, they appeared united. Yet Boris was in the midst of an affair with Helen Macintyre, a 37-year-old art dealer.

Sparky, sexy and good company, Macintyre had admired him for years. Engaging with her, despite all the risks to his marriage and mayoralty, revealed the paradox of Boris. Although a loner, he craved company. Loneliness plunged him into a deep depression, relieved by a conversation with whoever happened to be his mistress at the time.

Christchurch Commen Ball in Oxford on June 26, 1987. As London Mayor between 2008 and 2016, he appeared to exert a similar fascination over women. In 2009, he joined Marina at Westminster Abbey for a memorial service for her father, the distinguished BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler

In 2010, after she gave birth to a girl, it was reported that Macintyre’s boyfriend, Canadian-born financier Pierre Rolin, left her after taking a DNA test.

Contrary to Macintyre’s assertion, Rolin discovered that he was not the father of the blonde-haired child.

‘I was completely snowballed. I think he has no moral compass,’ Rolin said about Boris. ‘He thinks he is completely entitled. One day the truth will catch up with him.’

On the girl’s birth certificate, Macintyre had omitted the father’s identity.

When Boris previously had a brief affair with Anna Fazackerly, 29, a Times Higher Education Supplement political journalist, Marina had decided that for the sake of their children she would accept his apology and move on. But after the Macintyre revelations, Marina ordered Boris out of the marital home and into a rented flat. ‘Kicked out of the house like a tom cat,’ said a friend.

From there, he ordered takeaway curries and, occasionally, when Marina was out, returned to the house to see his children.

Later, after Marina had forgiven him, he seemed immune to embarrassment. ‘I now see all these disasters are temporary. You can move on,’ he said, adding: ‘There are no disasters – only opportunities, and indeed opportunities for fresh disasters.’

In 2013, Macintyre lost a legal battle to keep the paternity of her child a secret. The Court of Appeal ruled that in the public interest the electorate was entitled to know the man’s identity. By then, Boris was regularly visiting his youngest daughter, encouraging her interest in music.

When considering Boris’s fitness for office, the judges decided: ‘It is fanciful to expect the public to forget the fact that… a major public figure had fathered a child after a brief adulterous affair (not for the first time).’

The judgment mentioned Boris’s responsibility for ‘two conceptions’. Many wrongly deduced that the judges meant there was another ‘unknown’ child fathered by him. In fact, the judges were simply referring to his child that his former mistress Petronella Wyatt had aborted. Nevertheless, since he refused to state how many children he had fathered, the hunt for the ‘unknown’ child continued.

Camilla's train attack revelation

When he was London Mayor, Boris was summoned by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, to her London home, Clarence House.

Just as he was parking his bike, she appeared and grabbed his wrist. She said: ‘You and me, upstairs now.’

In the course of the next hour, she told Boris how she’d been assaulted on a train when she was 17.

‘I did what my mother told me. I took my shoe off and hit him in the nuts. And then I reported him to the police at Paddington,’ she said.

If Boris financed two rape centres, she promised, she would open them.

‘Oh God, what a woman!’ Boris told an aide later.

ON THE opening night of the Paralympics in 2012, no one spotted the London Mayor slipping away from the stadium to a flat in Shoreditch, East London. It was rented by a blonde 27-year-old Californian digital entrepreneur he had met the previous year. Intelligent and vivacious, her name was Jennifer Arcuri.

Arcuri had settled in London to make her fortune in the tech industry. With sassy humour, she flaunted her looks to ingratiate herself with anyone able to help her build Innotech, her fledging business that introduced aspiring entrepreneurs to policy-makers.

It was during a routine hunt for clients at a British Venture Capital Association reception in 2011 that she had stood among a group of expectant bankers.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘We’re waiting for the Mayor,’ one banker replied.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Boris. If you stand right here he might notice you.’

In her words, ‘a chubby guy arrives with his shirt hanging out and I watched him turn that group of sweaty old men into something on speed. I walked right up to him and said, “You should come to speak to my group.”

“I will,” he said. “Email me.” ’

By March the following year, Arcuri’s business had grown and she needed official endorsement. When Boris was standing for his second term as Mayor, she talked her way on to his campaign bus and sat so close that the Mayor could not help seeing her.

‘She clearly targeted him,’ a Boris aide said later. To Arcuri’s delight, Boris turned every 30 seconds to look at her. ‘I realised he was interested,’ she recalls nearly a decade later. ‘I was flirtatious. I mentioned Shakespeare. I made him smile, intrigued him and got him to laugh. I had him hooked.’

At the end of the journey, Arcuri gave Boris her card. ‘No, no. I just want to contact you directly,’ he insisted. She gave him her phone number and soon afterwards he called. She filed his number under ‘Alexander the Great’.

About a month later, Arcuri faced a crisis. She had hired an expensive venue to host a presentation and her speaker had fallen through. ‘I used sex to get people to come to my events,’ Arcuri admits.

In search of a replacement speaker she called Boris, who agreed to step in. To her further delight, ‘whenever I called him, he would call me back’. Conveniently, her flat was on his cycle route from City Hall home to Islington.

Arcuri’s presence in Boris’s life could not be kept secret from his closest staff for long. Although he ‘swore blind’ to Marina after his affair with Helen Macintyre that he would be faithful, some could see that while he worshipped Marina as a soul mate, their relationship, they mistakenly speculated, had become strained. Emotionally weak, he would never leave Marina.

Among the first to have scented a problem had been Lynton Crosby, Boris’s political lobbyist. He had extracted a promise from Boris that he would not start an affair until after he stood for re-election as Mayor in May 2012. Thereafter, Crosby was unconcerned.

A year into their friendship, after Boris was re-elected, Arcuri had decided that he was not a womaniser but just after her because, as he said, ‘I feel so horny.’ Instinctive and sensitive, she saw a self-obsessed man for whom relationships were difficult. He lacked close male friends and relied on her, but only on conditions. Until he was certain of his emotions and could trust her, allowing anyone into his personal life was regarded by him as a weakness.

She saw him as an introvert, a depressive who enjoyed solitude, and someone who needed to be alone. Paradoxically, particularly on those days of his greatest public successes, he could decline into an intense depression.

‘Do you want to be Prime Minister?’ she once asked him.

‘I’m a very competitive person, so it’s natural,’ he replied.

Jennifer Arcuri’s presence in Boris’s (pictured together in 2013) life could not be kept secret from his closest staff for long. Although he ‘swore blind’ to Marina after his affair with Helen Macintyre that he would be faithful, some could see that while he worshipped Marina as a soul mate, their relationship, they mistakenly speculated, had become strained

In the autumn of 2014, Boris spoke at another of Arcuri’s events, meeting her afterwards at a hotel. Plodding around the room in his underwear, eating cheese, conscious about his looks and his need to lose weight, she felt a bond was being forged.

He was clearly attracted to her interest in power, conflict, intellectual strength, and especially in Shakespeare. Between his expressions of affection, he asked what he could do for her, and how he could make her happy.

Convinced that she wanted to see more of him, Arcuri arrived at a reception later that day to promote his book about Winston Churchill. She found him in a hotel room writing his speech. He spoke about his loneliness and need for her friendship.

That December, Boris hosted a Christmas staff party in City Hall. At 10pm he announced that he had to go to another event. His next stop was Arcuri’s flat. The American’s home had become his haven. As always, Boris trusted a woman as his confidante. First, he was able to talk about the stress of being in a position of authority in City Hall. And second, it was a sanctuary from the sadness in his own home. Marina, he said, was often away. Not only had she become distant, but he feared that his family life was withering.

The cure to his depression, he said, was Jennifer Arcuri. Although the moment he arrived at her flat he would say he couldn’t stay, her direct manner soothed him.

Cool and in command, she never pressured him. The chase was his. The dalliance appeared to have become his only real friendship.

Partly mother figure and partly lover, she claimed to understand his mind, and he felt safe in her company. In return, he expressed affection, but she could never be certain whether he was being truthful.

Boris had an affair with Helen Macintyre, a 37-year-old art dealer, pictured in 2011. Sparky, sexy and good company, Macintyre had admired him for years. Engaging with her, despite all the risks to his marriage and mayoralty, revealed the paradox of Boris. Although a loner, he craved company

Despite his ability to quote Shakespeare and Wordsworth, she was falling in love with an unromantic man. He could never love women in the way a woman wanted to be loved. ‘I fell in love. I never admitted how much I loved him,’ Arcuri said.

Whereas his texts were recklessly amorous, and his crazy propositions – such as setting up a ski centre in Bulgaria, or the two of them becoming a political team in New York – were the product of often being alone in the evenings, there was what some might judge to be a foolishness behind inviting her to his empty Islington home.

Despite being surrounded by family photos, he was already divorced from that life.

‘Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way,’ he recited from Twelfth Night.

He no longer concealed the relationship from advisers in Conservative Central Office and City Hall.

With his help, Arcuri was invited to a party at Buckingham Palace celebrating technology. She had also received £15,000 from the international trade department to encourage foreign entrepreneurs to set up in Britain.

Boris’s departure from City Hall in 2016 coincided with Jennifer Arcuri’s exit from his life. Their last meeting was at his house. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said stepping into the street, without revealing her decision to move on. Wanting a child, she had found her future husband and they moved to Cheshire. Soon pregnant, she decided there would be closure and blocked Boris’s calls.

His last text message was sent on December 29, 2018, two years after their last meeting. ‘I miss you and I need you,’ he’d write. She deleted the text.

by Tom Bower for The Mail On Sunday

Adding to the Johnson heritage of Muslim, Jewish and Christian ancestry, she was also part Indian through Marina.

In a newspaper interview, Boris gave a hint about his reckless attitude to life. ‘I am a juggler,’ he said. ‘I can have it all.’

In 2010, after she gave birth to a girl, it was reported that Macintyre’s boyfriend, Canadian-born financier Pierre Rolin, left her after taking a DNA test.

Contrary to Macintyre’s assertion, Rolin discovered that he was not the father of the blonde-haired child.

‘I was completely snowballed. I think he has no moral compass,’ Rolin said about Boris. ‘He thinks he is completely entitled. One day the truth will catch up with him.’

On the girl’s birth certificate, Macintyre had omitted the father’s identity.

From there, he ordered takeaway curries and, occasionally, when Marina was out, returned to the house to see his children.

Camilla's train attack revelation

When he was London Mayor, Boris was summoned by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, to her London home, Clarence House.

Just as he was parking his bike, she appeared and grabbed his wrist. She said: ‘You and me, upstairs now.’

In the course of the next hour, she told Boris how she’d been assaulted on a train when she was 17.

‘I did what my mother told me. I took my shoe off and hit him in the nuts. And then I reported him to the police at Paddington,’ she said.

If Boris financed two rape centres, she promised, she would open them.

‘Oh God, what a woman!’ Boris told an aide later.

It was during a routine hunt for clients at a British Venture Capital Association reception in 2011 that she had stood among a group of expectant bankers.

‘What’s up?’ she asked.

‘We’re waiting for the Mayor,’ one banker replied.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Boris. If you stand right here he might notice you.’

“I will,” he said. “Email me.” ’

‘Do you want to be Prime Minister?’ she once asked him.

‘I’m a very competitive person, so it’s natural,’ he replied.

The cure to his depression, he said, was Jennifer Arcuri. Although the moment he arrived at her flat he would say he couldn’t stay, her direct manner soothed him.

Cool and in command, she never pressured him. The chase was his. The dalliance appeared to have become his only real friendship.

Despite being surrounded by family photos, he was already divorced from that life.

‘Will you hoist sail, sir? Here lies your way,’ he recited from Twelfth Night.

He no longer concealed the relationship from advisers in Conservative Central Office and City Hall.

His last text message was sent on December 29, 2018, two years after their last meeting. ‘I miss you and I need you,’ he’d write. She deleted the text.

by Tom Bower for The Mail On Sunday

Petronella Wyatt, Boris’s vivacious deputy when he was editor of The Spectator – at that time dubbed the ‘Sextator’ because of the numerous affairs between staff – found out about his passion for her by accident.

Rummaging through his untidy desk one day for a lunch guest-list, she found a handwritten love letter to her from him.

The mutual attraction for two vulnerable people was companionship. ‘You are the first woman friend I have ever had,’ Boris later said to Petronella.

She said: ‘He was a loner with few friends, and like many loners has a compensating need to be liked… he wants to be loved by the entire world.’

His hero Pericles, shameless populist

At school, Boris found a hero in Pericles – a revered Athenian statesman and general who, with charisma and shameless populism, pleased the crowds to win constant re-election.

Blending this and other influences – including Bertie Wooster, the fictional prep schoolboy Molesworth, and Just William – Boris developed a unique oratorical style combined with the belief that every speech must include humour.

He learned that in ancient Greece, endless sex was perfectly acceptable.

The wonder of male superiority in ancient civilisations was unrestrained relationships enjoyed without rancour or guilt.

And in Boris’s farewell to Eton when he went to Oxford, he inserted in the leaving book a photo of himself wearing two scarves and holding a machine gun, with his pledge to score ‘more notches on my phallocratic phallus’.

After their affair started in 2001, he revealed intense jealousy about Petronella’s friendship with two famous historians. Convinced that she was unfaithful, his rage exposed insecurity, especially about his own intellectual inferiority, his stretched finances and what he perceived were his inadequate looks.

During their first summer together, Boris told Petronella he wanted to marry her. About eight months after their relationship began, she was pregnant. Attracted by the idea of a second family, Boris urged her to have the child. She was torn. Unwilling to be a single mother, she insisted that they should marry.

Boris saw a divorce lawyer and confessed the situation to his shocked wife Marina, who persuaded him to end the affair.

He agreed, and as a guarantee of his promise, he wrote a cheque for a large amount, handing all his savings to his wife. The next morning, after looking at his four young children eating breakfast, Boris was faced with reality: his family’s certain disapproval, the prospect of confrontation and poverty, too.

Remembering his own horror of his parents’ divorce, he retreated. His marriage, he decided, was not over.

Petronella had an abortion. But the affair was not over. In summer 2002, Petronella was suffering from the pressure of the relationship. If Boris refused to marry her, she said, they should stop seeing each other. ‘He threatened suicide and cried – buckets full,’ a close friend of Boris revealed.

Petronella headed for a holiday in Tuscany. Boris was with his family in Sardinia. Abruptly, he left Marina and his children and flew to the Italian mainland.

He climbed the wall of Petronella’s villa and declared that his impulsiveness and bravery proved his love. But again he returned to Marina.

Exhausted by all the lies, Petronella moved to the US with an American she had met, but the chance of a permanent relationship was shattered by Boris’s constant phone calls. She returned to London and the relationship was reignited. In September 2004, Petronella, now 36, discovered she was pregnant again.

Boris was forced to make a decision. While he refused to divorce Marina, he did not urge Petronella to have an abortion, instead encouraging her to have their ‘daughter’.

Trusting Boris would be a good father, Petronella decided on a full-term pregnancy.

Petronella headed for a holiday in Tuscany. Boris was with his family in Sardinia. Abruptly, he left Marina and his children and flew to the Italian mainland. Pictured Boris with Marina Wheeler in 2015

But she had a miscarriage. In disguise, Boris arrived at the hospital and together, in genuine misery for their lost child, they sat grieving. Humiliated, Marina changed the locks to their house and took off her wedding ring before allowing Boris to return a week later. It was at this point he revealed to her his secret about his father hitting his mother.

‘Boris is a home-body,’ wrote Petronella, ‘who would prefer to be at home with Marina.’

In 2016, after his affair with Jennifer Arcuri ended, Boris asked Petronella if she wanted to revive their relationship. She declined.

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