Boris Johnson is frontrunner in the conservative leadership election, which means he’s leading the charge towards becoming actual Prime Minister.
And amidst lots of news about him as he sets out his plans for the leadership and for Brexit, there have also been reports regarding his private treatment of women.
Following reports last week that Johnson and his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, had a loud argument at her home which resulted in police being called, a woman who was friends with the Uxbridge and Ruislip MP’s first wife has come forward to allege that Boris has mistreated her.
Louisa Gosling, a data privacy consultant, was 21 at the time, and was friends with the then 24-year-old Johnson’s first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen. After a row with Johnson, Mostyn-Owen, which Gosling told__ The Sunday Times ‘Got out of hand, to the extent that she fled’, Mostyn-Owen stayed with Gosling for several weeks.
‘She communicated that he was frightening. That his temper was frightening.’ Gosling now says.
While Mostyn-Owen was staying with Gosling, she claims, Johnson followed her in the street, grabbed her arm and took her into a bar, where he pressed her to tell her the ‘lies’ Mostyn-Owen had been spreading about him. ‘He was unpredictable. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. ‘He was looming over me . . . bullying me — I was scared.’
When Mostyn-Owen was approached for a comment, she refused, simply holding up a copy of the New Statesman magazine, which has a cartoon version of Johnson in a cage, along with the headline ‘Restraining Order’.
Mostyn-Owen said: ‘You want a confirmation or a denial. I am not going to do that either way. Except that I think this is a very good cover.’
Johnson refused to comment on the allegations.
Though Gosling refused to say what spurred Mostyn-Owen moving into her home temporarily, because ‘That is her story to tell. Not mine’ she said ‘thirty years later - and now I am 51 - I am still scared of Boris Johnson.’
As Johnson’s attitude towards women in his private life might be argued as a private matter, here are some things he’s said very publicly about or to women.
Women go to university because ‘They’ve got to find men to marry’.
‘Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3’
People move to cities because ‘there are a greater range of girls at the bar, of reproductive choice.’
He has also, more recently, compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’.