A former Conservative Party communications chief, Carrie Symonds is now reportedly the wife of Prime Minister Boris Johnson after the pair held a secret wedding at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday.
Ms Symonds first found herself making headlines when she was romantically linked to Mr Johnson, and has more recently been in the spotlight following the birth of their baby boy and rumours about her influence inside Number 10.
On April 29 last year, Ms Symonds gave birth to her first child, Wilfred, in the same month Mr Johnson was taken into hospital with coronavirus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds (Stefan Rousseau/PA)
26 Apr 2021
The United Kingdom is embracing its freedom from the EU and forging new partnerships, with the international trade secretary saying Brexit Britain could join a major trading bloc in as little as one year.
In September, the UK signed its first historic trade agreement as an independent nation with Japan, the world’s third-largest economy. The UK also is said to be making “rapid progress” on a New Zealand trade deal and has agreed on “the vast majority” of a free trade agreement with Australia, representing a reforging of trade ties with Commonwealth allies without the intercession of Brussels.
From the NS archive: The Major/Lamont relationship 4 October 1999: They never liked each other and had little in common. Could this be a lesson for Blair and Brown?
By 1999, Tony Blair’s Labour Party had been in power for two years, with Gordon Brown as chancellor. Blair and Brown’s relationship was notoriously difficult for the duration of their time in office. In this piece from around the middle of New Labour’s first term, Julia Langdon considers another recent pairing of previous prime minister and chancellor: John Major and Norman Lamont. She recalls a conversation she had with Lamont nine years previously, in which she’d clocked his bitterness to Major, three years before his resignation from Major’s government in 1993. As she contemplates their differences and the eventual disintegration of their relationship, she wonders: could Blair and Brown learn from this?