Carrie Symonds is set to move to No 10

Hours after Boris Johnson learned that he had secured a commanding lead in the race for Downing Street, his girlfriend Carrie Symonds was heading to Wembley Stadium to watch the Spice Girls’ comeback tour.

In private, the 31-year-old has joked to friends that she identifies with ‘Ginger Spice’ Geri Horner, who combined the acumen to propel the band to stardom with the mischievous streak that drove her to once pinch Prince Charles’s bottom.

Close friends agreed with the assessment as they gave The Mail on Sunday a fascinating insight into a woman poised to become Britain’s new ‘first lady’.

In a series of revealing interviews, they told how:

• Boris and Carrie are a perfect ‘love match’ who enjoy evening painting sessions and cycle rides;

• The couple intend to live together in No 10 if he is elected Tory leader and to marry after his divorce is finalised;

• Claims she calls him ‘Bozzie Bear’ and he refers to her as ‘Little Otter’ are ‘utter nonsense’;

• Carrie is determined to campaign on environmental issues and violence against women, regardless of whether he enters Downing Street;

• She is helping ensure that the notoriously chaotic Boris does not ‘drop the ball’ and has urged him to run a ‘clean and friendly campaign’.

The intimate details of their life together are accompanied by touching family photographs tracing the life of the woman set to become the new chatelaine of No 10.

They show Carrie as a toddler sipping orange juice with her mother, Josephine, and the pair together again in 2009 when Carrie graduated from Warwick University with a first-class honours degree in theatre studies and history of art.

In another snap, perhaps a prelude to the future, Carrie sits at the Cabinet table in Downing Street during a meeting with the former Prime Minister David Cameron.

Those who know her best say that Carrie, a former director of communications for the Conservative Party, is playing a far greater role in Boris’s bid for power than many realise. She suggests ideas for his speeches and his weekly newspaper columns and has persuaded him to support a series of liberal issues, including campaigns against plastic pollution in the oceans and female genital mutilation.

Perhaps most importantly, however, friends say Carrie makes Boris, who is 23 years her senior, blissfully happy, and has brought a new sense of calm to his sometimes boisterous and restless nature.

The couple relax by spending their evenings painting together, a passion that Boris’s political hero Winston Churchill also enjoyed. Some of their paintings hang on the walls of her flat in South London.

They both also share a passion for cycling and, for her birthday in March, Boris bought Carrie a classic £645 hand-made Pashley bicycle complete with wicker basket on the handlebars.

While both are smitten, friends insist some of the more colourful stories about them are false. ‘Those stupid nicknames ‘Bozzie Bear’ and ‘Little Otter’ are utter nonsense,’ said one. ‘They’ve never called each other that. I know Carrie would find that incredibly cringeworthy.’

The couple met in 2012 when Carrie was seconded from Tory HQ to work on Boris’s campaign to be re-elected London Mayor. It is not known when their affair began, but they were spotted dining together at Rules restaurant in Covent Garden on Valentine’s Day last year.

Boris separated from his second wife Marina in September and is expected to propose to Carrie once his divorce is finalised.

That would set the scene for the first wedding involving an incumbent Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool married Mary Chester in 1822.

The couple currently divide their time between her London flat and home in Oxfordshire, but friends expect Carrie to move into No 10 should Boris win the leadership race. ‘Despite the age gap it is a proper love match,’ said one. ‘When they met it was very much a meeting of minds. Carrie is incredibly quick and funny. He found her brilliant. She is passionately pro-animal welfare and pro-environment, and Boris really loves that about her.’

Sources say Carrie’s ability to effortlessly combine the intense focus required to win a fiercely fought leadership campaign with a playful sense of fun has rubbed off on Boris, bringing a competency that his political operation once lacked. ‘She’s done an incredible job at keeping Boris on the ball,’ said another source.

‘She’s always very chirpy and keeps spirits up, but also makes sure everything gets done and that he never drops the ball. She’s adamant that Boris runs a clean and friendly campaign and you’ll notice Boris is probably the only candidate who hasn’t taken a swipe at anyone else.

‘Lots of MPs want Boris to be the liberal mayor figure who won London twice and, with Carrie by his side, they feel reassured that he will remain firmly in the centre ground. Issues like violence against women, homelessness and the environment have been pushed hard by Carrie.’

Life for Carrie in Downing Street is likely to be dramatic, but her life has had no shortage of drama. She is the result of an extra-marital affair between Matthew Symonds, now 65, one of the founders of The Independent newspaper, and Josephine, 71, who was one of the paper’s lawyers.

This was one of possibly three illicit affairs in Carrie’s tangled family tree which, if society gossip during the First World War was correct, may even include former Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith as her great-grandfather. Her father was the product of an extramarital affair between his mother Anne and journalist John Beavan, and Anne was rumoured to be the product of an affair between Asquith and a woman called Hilda Harrison.

Carrie, who left her job at Tory HQ last August to join Oceana, an environmental campaign group, has a band of fiercely loyal friends including Siobhan O’Flaherty-Hilder, a musician, and Nimco Ali, a campaigner against female genital mutilation.

‘The reason why we are such good friends is that we both do some incredibly serious things but never take ourselves too seriously,’ Nimco said. ‘She is incredibly fun and funny – and loves cheesy music’, particularly Craig David, Will Smith and, of course, the Spice Girls, who once described Margaret Thatcher as ‘the original Spice Girl’.

Last October, Carrie accompanied Nimco on a five-day trip to Somaliland where they met the self-declared state’s president Muse Bihi Abdi to discuss women’s issues and pollution. And Nimco has publicly endorsed Boris as ‘a real feminist’.

Carrie’s fine-tuned social skills appear to have also rubbed off on her partner. Criticised in the past for having few too few meaningful allies on the back benches, Johnson has devoted time to wooing the parliamentary colleagues that he needs to win.

‘More than one MP has said they are backing Boris purely because of Carrie,’ one friend revealed. 

But Boris Johnson isn’t the only one who’s had a style makeover: ALEXANDRA SHULMAN says his girlfriend Carrie Symonds pulls off a mix of high street fashion spiced up with accessories

If Carrie Symonds becomes First Girlfriend, what’s going to happen to her clothes?

Dressing as the female partner of the occupant of No 10 is a sartorial minefield – too fashion-forward, too dull, too expensive, too sloppy, chants the critical Greek Chorus. But that’s jumping ahead somewhat.

Right now, the 31-year-old is dressing just like any other young woman working in the media, in an individual mix of high street fast fashion spiced up with a few snazzy accessories. Her style is colourful and cheerful – a little like her beau.

With youth and a great figure on her side, Carrie could carry off anything. She seems to enjoy bright colours and bold prints – brilliant reds, yellows and oranges often paired with more neutral blues and whites like the £69 fruit-print dress from one of her favourite high street shops, Swedish-based & Other Stories.

An early adopter of this season’s neat collar trend, she is often seen with a prim buttoned-up neckline, such as in the leopardprint Karen Millen dress she wore at the launch of Boris’s leadership bid.

Carrie has got naturally thick hair which she’s recently taken down a shade to a more sophisticated streaky bronde – blending blonde and brunette.

In true millennial style, she piles on a ton of make-up – huge lashes, colourful eyeshadow and lipsticks. Having worked in PR for years, she knows the power of a well-managed image. Not only has Boris undergone a spring clean but her own style has been adjusted.

In recent weeks, Carrie has tended towards a more muted palette in a calculated attempt to merge into the background.

With youth and a great figure on her side, Carrie could carry off anything. She seems to enjoy bright colours and bold prints – brilliant reds, yellows and oranges often paired with more neutral blues and whites like the £69 fruit-print dress from one of her favourite high street shops, Swedish-based & Other Stories

Miniskirts and tightly fitted party frocks used to be part of her repertoire, but recently these have been exchanged for a more mature line of ditsy midi-length floral prints and tailored coats.

Her fondness for a scuffed flat ankle boot and black opaque tight harks back to her Godolphin and Latymer schooldays in West London.

As did the scrunchie she had round her wrist at last week’s leadership launch.

In all, Carrie’s a girl with a keen eye for a nifty bargain and shows all the signs of having the fun with her wardrobe that any woman should.

Miniskirts and tightly fitted party frocks used to be part of her repertoire, but recently these have been exchanged for a more mature line of ditsy midi-length floral prints and tailored coats