Carrie Johnson

Caroline Louise Beavan Johnson (; born 17 March 1988) is an English media consultant and is married to former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson. She is the daughter of Matthew Symonds, co-founder of The Independent. Symonds worked as a Conservative Party media official and an environmental activist, and remains a senior advisor to the ocean conservation charity Oceana, and is a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation. She began an affair with Johnson, then Foreign Secretary, in 2018 while he was still married to his second wife, Marina Wheeler. In July 2019, Johnson became prime minister and both he and Symonds officially moved into the flat above 11 Downing Street. She was the first unmarried partner of a prime minister to reside at Downing Street. On 29 February 2020, Symonds and Johnson announced that they had become engaged in late 2019. Symonds married Johnson in 2021. Early life and education Caroline Louise Beavan Symonds was born on 17 March 1988 to Matthew Symonds, co-founder of The Independent, and Josephine McAfee (née Lawrence), a lawyer working for that newspaper. Her paternal grandfather was John Beavan, Baron Ardwick (at one time editor of the Daily Herald and later, during the 1970s, a Labour Party MEP), and her paternal grandmother was Anne Symonds, a BBC World Service journalist.