Mystery deepens around Times story that claimed Boris Johnson planned to make girlfriend Carrie £100k chief of staff
Questions are growing about a story that appeared in The Times newspaper, claiming that Boris Johnson planned to hand his then-girlfriend Carrie a £100k a year role.
The story, which ran on page 5 of an earlier edition of The Times late last week, disappeared in later editions.
According to multiple reports, there were concerns “about the influence such a story could have on readers of The Times and the Daily Mail, given their base is largely right-leaning Brits. The story was quashed, and only resurfaced to much quieter fanfare later down the line,” according to the London Economic.
The story cited one of Johnson’s office staffers while the Prime Minister was still Foreign Secretary. The Times article quoted him as saying: “An illicit relationship with Carrie was none of our business. Making her chief of staff was definitely our business.”
“Our job was to protect him and we knew what was going on between them, and it would have been an insane risk to let him do it.”
Another staffer was quoted in the article as saying that, apart from anything else, Symonds was “relatively inexperienced” and the feeling was she wasn’t the “right person” for the job.
Walters referred to three of Johnson’s aides – including Ben Gascoigne, now one of his deputy chiefs of staffs and a friend of Wheeler, threatened to resign over the proposed appointment.
According to the ministerial code, “working relationships with civil servants, colleagues and staff should be proper and appropriate.”