Carrie Symonds, the partner of Conservative leadership candidate Boris Johnson, has said she is 'too scared to go home' after a private argument with Johnson was recorded by neighbours and reported to the police. The incident, which took place in their south London flat, has been described by Symonds as a 'political stitch-up'.
The neighbours, Tom Penn and Eve Leigh, who live in the flat above, said they heard 'screaming, banging and then silence' in the early hours of Friday morning, prompting them to call the police. Penn and Leigh, both playwrights, deny the call was politically motivated, claiming they acted out of concern for safety.
Eve Leigh, a New York-born writer and theatre director, has previously boasted on Twitter about giving Boris Johnson 'the finger' and has described herself as a 'Leftist'. Her father was the late millionaire composer Mitch Leigh, who wrote the 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Last week, she tweeted that the Tories were 'pretending to respect the memories of the Holocaust dead'.
Symonds, 31, has also been receiving hate mail at her Camberwell home, and the street has been plastered with anti-Boris posters. One local resident, Julie Gillings, criticised the neighbours for recording the argument, calling it an 'invasion of privacy' and 'dirty-handed tricks'.
Boris Johnson broke cover late on Saturday night to post a picture at a 'Back Boris' rally in Sutton Coldfield. The couple's neighbours on the building's WhatsApp group have largely sympathised with them, with Penn and Leigh reportedly the only ones not to do so.
