When Jennifer Arcuri first met Boris Johnson in 2011 at an event for venture capitalists, she was a young businesswoman in her mid-twenties, and he was the mayor of London, 20 years her senior. They soon enough began a relationship that, though they dodge questions about whether they were having an affair, exploded two months ago into public view and generated a scandal and screaming headlines, but little effect on Johnson’s campaign for reelection.
The parallels with Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky are obvious: a powerful married politician — in Johnson’s case, allegedly — having an affair with a woman in her 20s. Clinton was then, as he is now, married to Hillary Clinton, while Johnson was living with his second wife, Marina Wheeler.
But also similar is how little the public cared about either event. Clinton’s popularity did not decline, neither after his affair was discovered nor after he was impeached for lying about it under oath. And Johnson, 55, is currently 10 points ahead of rival Jeremy Corbyn in polls and seems on track to win reelection as prime minister when Britons vote Thursday.
In both cases, the understanding among voters that the leader of their country was a cad seems to have been baked into their thinking, well before the revelations of the affairs with Arcuri, who is now 34, and Lewinsky, now 46.
A month before Clinton won the White House in 1992, Republican honcho Haley Barbour described Clinton as “the Teflon Candidate.” Johnson appears to be made of similar stuff.
Remarkably, it remains unclear exactly how many offspring Johnson has sired.
A senior Conservative official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the party leader’s private life, said her story would have forced the resignation of previous generations of politicians. Now, it is hardly a ripple as the British public prepares to vote in Thursday’s general election.
“We are at the stage where there is nothing that you should step aside for, no scandal big enough to bring down a politician and that you can always just tough it out,” said the official, who made a comparison with President Trump’s apparent ability to weather any storm.
Trump’s interest in, and marriages to, younger women was long known to Americans, and he was able to win the presidency as he incurred allegations that he had affairs with and even allegedly groped a number of women.
As was the case with Clinton and Trump, Johnson’s love life has long been the subject of media interest.
He has four children with Wheeler, his second wife: Lara, 26, Milo, 24, Cassia, 22, and Theodore, 20. Since his separation from Wheeler in 2018, Johnson, 55, has been dating Carrie Symonds, a 31-year-old senior adviser for the environmental group Oceana.
In 2004, when he was editor of the Spectator magazine, it emerged Johnson had had a four-year affair with writer Petronella Wyatt. It briefly slowed his rise through the Conservative Party ranks when he was sacked as shadow arts minister for lying about the relationship. But the saga barely slowed his long-term rise.
The British prime minister, a biographer of Churchill, also has a 10-year-old daughter, Stephanie, with Helen Macintyre, an art adviser with whom he had an affair.
He has refused to answer questions about how many children he has in total, perhaps because claims of a sixth child emerged during court proceedings in 2013.
In a media blitz last month, Arcuri described the genesis of their relationship and how she became enamored with Shakespeare at the age of 8, starting a journey that led her to acting and modeling in Los Angeles and eventually to England and the country’s emerging tech scene in 2011.
“I said I was a fan of Shakespeare,” she told The Times of London. “He said, ‘I would love to talk to you more. How can I get hold of you?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you just call me?’ So I gave him my number.”
The result, she later said, was what she coyly described as a “very special relationship.”
That relationship was exposed in September amid reports that Arcuri joined Johnson on overseas trade missions to Tel Aviv and New York. It was reported that one of her businesses received 11,500 pounds in sponsorship money from a mayoral organization when Johnson was mayor and a government grant for foreign entrepreneurs.
The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport awarded another 100,000 pounds this year. Johnson said all his dealings with the American businesswoman were “done with complete propriety.” But allegations of a conflict of interest have sparked four investigations and catapulted the relationship between Johnson and Arcuri into the media spotlight.
Both have dodged questions and they have since separated. But the prime minister is still dating Symonds. In June, police were called to the apartment they share after neighbors became alarmed by a loud altercation. At one point, Symonds was heard telling Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat.”
Those close to Johnson say his liberal stance on personal behavior neutralized attacks on a private life marked by affairs. “Never preach personal morality,” is how Guto Harri, Johnson’s spokesman when he was mayor, described the approach, “which is why he is largely untouchable on his own personal conduct.”
But the questions only intensified when Arcuri, who has returned to the United States, gave interviews in London recently and described how the two would recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 “like a weird sense of foreplay.” She said: “It was the most amazing thing ever. Because I had never had a man be able to keep up with me on Shakespeare like he had.”
In another echo of Lewinsky, Arcuri said she felt cast aside like a “gremlin” as media interest exploded in their relationship and snubbed when Johnson became prime minister. “When I expressed the interest to want to speak to him, I was told there are bigger things at stake, and I was brushed off as if I was one of Kennedy’s girlfriends showing up to his White House switchboard, you know, here to do my, you know, calling,” she told ITV News.
