Boris Johnson acts with “honesty and integrity”, his press secretary has insisted following revelations in a Sunday newspaper about a four-year affair with his younger American mistress, including a session on the sofa of his £3.35 million London townhouse while his wife was away.
The confessions of tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri to the Sunday Mirror will come as no surprise to anyone with even the most rudimentary familiarity with the Prime Minister’s rampant libido and chequered relationship history.
Johnson is currently living with Carrie Symonds, a left-liberal environmental activist — nicknamed ‘Princess Nut Nut’ and widely believed to have an unhealthy influence on the Conservative government’s green policies.
The priapic prime minister has had two marriages and a string of affairs, resulting in six children whose paternity he is prepared to acknowledge publicly.
This is the kind of scandalous track record that would have killed the careers of many lesser politicians. But Johnson has remained almost bulletproof throughout thanks in good part to the rumpled, tousle-haired charm which appears to ward off the disapproval he might otherwise have received, especially from female voters.
Johnson, it is clear from Arcuri’s confessions, is a passionate, cultivated lover. His idea of foreplay was to read extracts from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
We moved on to reading Macbeth, which was a kind of foreplay routine we had. I said, “Let’s skip to the good stuff”. He said, “I love that about you, you just want to get to the good part.”
But it’s also evident that he likes to live dangerously. On one occasion, Arcuri describes leaving his family home only ten minutes before his then-wife Marina (subsequently to divorce him over his infidelities) came back. On another, she found that she had inadvertently booked a trip to see Richard II at the Globe Theatre on the same night that Johnson had gone to see the show with Marina.
While Arcuri took every precaution not to give anything away, her secret lover was rather less cautious:
Arcuri avoided eye contact with her lover throughout the performance but says Mr Johnson “didn’t stop staring at me at any point”. She added: “My room-mate was my eyes, because I wouldn’t dare look at him.
“My room-mate made a joke at one point about him, ‘Is he going to beat me up later? Should I leave?’”
Mr Johnson later sent Arcuri a message which read: “I kept seeing a gorgeous blonde at Shakespeare and thinking she looked familiar.”
When she asked if he enjoyed the show, he replied: “Immensely. Richard II pretty good too.”
Is this really the kind of gambling, slippery chancer suitable to be Britain’s Prime Minister?
As a former friend and admirer who has known him since university, I used to think that he was. “So what if the man is an incorrigible philanderer who thinks with his willy. He only does what we’d all like to do given half the chance,” was my rationale. But as you grow out of your undergraduate phase of thinking and turn into an adult, you do start to wonder whether this kind of rampant libertinism is any kind of example for a stable society, especially in a man who ought to be setting some kind of moral example, first as Mayor of London, then as Foreign Secretary, and finally Prime Minister.
Far more worrying, though, than Johnson’s sexual incontinence is the deviousness, mendacity, and untrustworthiness that goes with it. Johnson is a serial liar: probably you have to be when you have had as many affairs as he has but what may have started out as a defence mechanism is now an inextricable part of his character.
Lying to your deceived wife or mistress is just one or two people’s problem. Lying to your country, as Johnson has done on countless occasions, is a problem for 68 million people.
Johnson cannot be trusted one inch.
Though Arcuri cannot speak out on the issue for contractual reasons, a friend says that the reason she spoke out about her old lover is that she is horrified by the creature he has become.
The friend says:
“There’s no amount of money or fame that would have made her disloyal to him. But she just doesn’t recognise the clown he has become as the tender, romantic, cultured man she knew. She particularly hates the idea that the Boris who became Prime Minister pushing a message of ‘freedom’ has turned into a totalitarian who has enslaved his nation on false data and manipulated statistics pushed by swamp rats. There is real corruption across Westminster and Whitehall, and as far as Arcuri is concerned, new Boris is part of this — where old Boris would never have dreamed of it.”
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