WHAT’S THE STORY?

JUST in time to knock the Priti Patel scandal off the front pages, and that was no co-incidence, it was announced at the weekend that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds are engaged and expecting a baby.

Symonds has been variously described as the PM’s live-in lover and the “first girlfriend” and now she is his fiancee. But until she becomes his wife, there’s a good old Scottish term for Symonds’s status – a bidey-in. And since it is a term that has no gender discrimination, Johnson, too, is her bidey-in.

No bidey-ins have ever officially stayed at 10 Downing Street before Johnson and Symonds moved in together last July. Actually, they stay at Number 11, in the flat upstairs.

HOW UNUSUAL IS THIS?

PRIME Ministers have almost invariably had spouses by their side – 44 women and two men – and there have been four bachelors and nine widowers.

READ MORE: Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds announce they're expecting a baby

The last prime minister to marry while in office was Augustus Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton, who became PM at the age of just 33 in 1768 and then oversaw the Act of Parliament that gave him a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s scandalous behaviour.

He went on to become the only PM to get divorced and remarried in office, Boris Johnson having been divorced (twice) before he became Prime Minister.

WHAT’S HER BACKGROUND?

CARRIE Symonds will be 32 on March 17 and her life has been steeped in politics and the media. Her father, for instance, is Matthew Symonds, co-founder of the Independent newspaper.

He and her mother Josephine Mcaffee had an affair when she was working as a lawyer for the paper. Neither parent got divorced, and Symonds was largely raised by her mother. Interestingly, Symonds’s paternal grandfather was a pillar of the Labour Party. John Beavan, Baron Ardwick, was a newspaper editor turned Labour MEP.

Symonds’s father Matthew took his mother’s name rather than his father’s.

Private-school-educated Symonds studied theatre and art at Warwick University, and once considered an acting career.

As a 19-year-old student she was abducted by the infamous “Black Cab Rapist”, John Worboys, who gave her a spiked drink but denied raping her.

Symonds once said: “The worst thing is not having peace of mind. I’m 99.9% sure that nothing happened to me, but I will never know.”

Symonds joined the Conservative Party’s staff as a press officer, working for Zac Goldsmith and then Boris Johnson’s campaign to be mayor of London in 2010. Later, she worked for MPs John Whittingdale and Sajid Javid.

It is not known exactly when her relationship with Johnson started, but it was after she became Tory director of communications in 2018. Johnson and Symonds were living together when their neighbours called the police after hearing them row. That won’t happen in Downing Street.