As long ago as January, Boris Johnson's glamorous girlfriend Carrie Symonds was nicknamed Flotus by her friends. Shorthand for First Lady Of The United States, it was a reference to her role as prime ministerial wife-in-waiting. And after the victory of her darling Bozzie Bear in the first round of voting in the Tory leadership election yesterday, that position looks more secure than ever. Given that 105 votes will guarantee the former foreign secretary a place in the final two and therefore his name on the ballot when the decision is put in the hands of the party members who so revere him, his chances of making it all the way to Number 10 have never looked better.
No one doubts that Johnson has the self-belief to cope with the pressures of Downing Street but what of his girlfriend? After all, at 31 years of age, she is 24 years younger than him.
And while there was a time when the prime minister's consort could choose to remain in the background, these days they are expected to be front and centre at a wide array of conferences and summits.
And woe betide the leader's wife who turns up in inappropriate attire. The fashion police will be merciless in their condemnation of any outfit with shoes that don't match the dress or earrings which clash with the handbag.
If one former Westminster colleague is to be believed, however, we need have no concerns about Symonds' ability to cope with the stresses of the limelight.
"Carrie wants to reach the top," he says. "She is not interested in the slow lane. She wants to get there yesterday. She is a force of nature."
This judgment is borne out by the laserlike focus she has brought to furthering her career from the moment she left the very pukka £20,000-a-year Godolphin and Latymer School in west London.
In the course of studying for a first-class degree in theatre studies and history of art at Warwick University, Symonds appears to have spent very little time in the pub.
Boris Johnson with girlfriend Carrie Symonds (Image: Steve Reigate)
Carrie with Zac Goldsmith and Sajid Javid (Image: Tim Stewart)
She lists the extra-curricular activities in which she got involved in her entry on the professional networking website LinkedIn and it is worth quoting in full: "Lacrosse, running, acting, debating, events planning, art history, creative and critical writing, fundraising, arts marketing, British politics, international development."
And while many of her well-heeled friends spent their summer holidays enjoying villa holidays in sunnier climes, the young Carrie kept her nose to the grindstone.
At the end of her first year, she spent two months as an intern at the blue-chip PR agency Fishburn Hedges. It was the same story at the end of her second year except that this time she crammed in internships at three different agencies.
In the search for an explanation of what fuelled this extraordinary drive, it is worth examining her unusual background.
Carrie is the product of an extra-marital affair between Matthew Symonds, now 64, one of the founders of The Independent newspaper, and one of the paper's lawyers, Josephine Mcafee, 70. Intriguingly, just four months after she was born in 1988, her father's wife gave birth to her half-sister Isobel.
While Carrie was brought up by her mother in a three-bedroom house on a leafy she is a street in the prosperous southwest London suburb of East Sheen, perhaps her unconventional origins spurred her to make a name for herself. The fact that she maintained such a pace at university is all the more extraordinary given a traumatic event that occurred in 2007.
