Unfortunately, We’ve Been Forced to Contemplate Boris Johnson’s Sex Life

Boris Johnson, somehow the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has spent decades carefully curating a bumbling and disheveled image as an effective visual trick to obscure the utter inhumanity of his policies (and the poshness of his pedigree). If the media is focusing on an unkempt shirt or hairdo that barely survived a head-on collision with Dippity Do, so the logic goes, they will spend less time scrutinizing the racist garbage he’s foisting upon his constituents and all the ways he fucked up Brexit. And so it stands to reason that Johnson, like so many stanky dirtbags before him, would (allegedly) bone a woman who is not his wife on the couch where his family ostensibly watched movies together. I imagine the couch is synthetic ultrasuede from the ’90s, the kind of teen-boy basement video-game perch that never sheds its stench no matter how vigorously one Febreezes it, but Boris Johnson is extremely wealthy and I am likely just anthropomorphizing my overall feeling about him onto this hypothetical imaginary sofa.

However, the couch boning is true, according to Jennifer Arcuri, a tech entrepreneur who says she had an affair with Johnson for four years, from 2012 to 2016, when he was the mayor of London. In a new report by British tabloid The Mirror, Arcuri detailed a tryst in Johnson’s £3.35 million townhouse when then-wife Marina Wheeler was away, and their foreplay was freaking reading from Macbeth to one another. I mean, can you imagine anything more simultaneously pretentious and utterly basic? Arcuri’s recounting of this particular evening, per The Mirror:

“He said, ‘I have a complete writer’s block. I need to figure what I’m trying to say but I want you to hear it. I really need you, baby, I really need you.’

“We moved on to reading Macbeth, which was a kind of foreplay routine we had. I said, ‘Let’s skip to the good stuff’. He said, ‘I love that about you, you just want to get to the good part.’

“After we made love… I felt conflicted being there in his family home and seeing him like this but I couldn’t help but love the feeling of being desired.”

Pardon me, while I die and gag a little! Additionally, Arcuri says that their pre-sex meal consisted of red wine and “cheesy pasta,” which certainly contained no seasoning, and that it was “perfectly inedible,” which is absolutely unsurprising:

“He can barely find his socks, let alone cook dinner. It was horrible. It was soggy and limp. This man was completely useless in the kitchen.”

Here is where we must pause to note that we are being forced to contemplate Boris Johnson’s sex life with a woman who was not his wife, and yet was actively and willingly interested in spending time with him in a copulatory fashion despite being fed soggy pasta by a man she herself claims was incapable of finding his socks. Not only that, but Johnson’s entire love life has been a sort of mercurial drama that is absolutely confounding to me as an outside observer: he married Wheeler in 1993, just 12 days after his marriage to his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, was annulled, and in addition to Arcuri he is alleged to have had affairs with two journalists and arts consultant Helen MacIntyre, who gave birth to their daughter in 2009. Johnson and Wheeler separated in 2018 and officially divorced in 2020, and by 2019 Johnson was living with Carrie Symonds, a Conservative party operative who gave birth to their son last year. He also has four children with Wheeler, which brings us to six kids, but there could be more out there—he famously does NOT want to talk about it.

My main question here is, what is going on? Is the specter of power really all that intoxicating? And can someone grab me a barf bag, por favor.