JOHNSON
Caroline

• 1. Career and political activism
• 1.1. John Worboys case

Caroline Louise Beavan Johnson is a British media consultant and the wife of 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.

Career and political activism

Symonds originally planned to become an actor, and unsuccessfully auditioned for the 2007 film Atonement. She subsequently worked in marketing.

In 2009, Symonds joined the Conservative Party as a press officer. She worked at Conservative Campaign Headquarters, and later campaigned for Boris Johnson in the 2010 London Conservative Party mayoral selection. During this period, Symonds had a role running campaigns for the newly elected MP Zac Goldsmith. She has also worked as a media special adviser for Conservative Cabinet ministers Sajid Javid (Communities, Local Government and Housing Secretary) and John Whittingdale (Culture, Media and Sport Secretary). Symonds was present when Whittingdale and others launched Conservative Friends of Russia (later called the Westminster Russia Forum and disbanded in March 2022) and has attended several of its meetings.

Symonds became the Conservative Party's head of communications in 2018, but left the position later that year, taking up a job in public relations for the Oceana project. It was reported that she was asked to leave her post as director of communications, with Conservative Party sources in the Daily Mail newspaper claiming that the firing was due to poor performance and allegations of significant unjustified expenses claims. These accusations were claimed by an anonymous "longtime colleague" to be a smear campaign allegedly spread by Symonds's political strategist, Lynton Crosby (subsequently denied by Crosby).

She is a patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation.

John Worboys case

In 2007, aged 19, Symonds was driven home from a King's Road nightclub by taxi-driver John Worboys, who in 2009 was convicted of multiple sexual assaults on his passengers. She later recalled Worboys offering her champagne and vodka, which she believed was spiked and, after returning home, began "vomiting and laughing hysterically before passing out until 3pm the next day".

Symonds was one of fourteen women who testified against Worboys at his trial. She subsequently told The Telegraph that he was "a sad, wicked man who is a danger to society. I feel so angry that he pleaded not guilty and made us go through the pain of giving evidence in court".

Symonds was the youngest of Worboys's victims, and waived her anonymity to talk about her experiences and, later, to campaign against his early release, fundraising for a successful judicial review of the decision.