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At an intimate dinner last July at Chequers, the Prime Minister s official country residence in leafy Buckinghamshire, the wine and the conversation – a mix of high politics, policy, Covid, and Westminster gossip – were flowing freely between old friends and colleagues.
That night Boris Johnson and his partner Carrie Symonds were hosting Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata, and the high-flying media couple Allegra Stratton, a former BBC/ITV correspondent, and her husband James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator magazine.
Just three months earlier, Stratton had joined Sunak at the Treasury as director of strategic communications. She was being widely credited with turning the new Chancellor into one of the government s most popular and effective media figures as the pandemic took hold.