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Carrie Symonds (left) and British prime minister (right) embracing after their wedding. The couple were married in secret ceremony before a celebration at Downing Street./Rebecca Fulton/
The UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds were married on Saturday in a secret ceremony at Westminster Cathedral, the largest Catholic church in the country, with only close friends and family in attendance.
The wedding was confirmed the following morning, and only a small number of church officials knew about the event. According to reports, some of the prime minister's aides were also kept in the dark about the surprise wedding.
Earlier this week, the couple had reportedly sent out save-the-date cards for a wedding on July 30, 2022.
Who is Carrie Symonds?
Born in 1988 Symonds is 23 years younger than her husband. Her parents were Matthew Symonds, co-founder of the Independent newspaper in the UK and media lawyer Josephine McAfee.
Symonds is known for her career in politics. While she studied art history and theater studies at Warwick University, her first political job was working for the Conservative Member of Parliament, Zac Goldsmith.
Symonds and Johnson first met when he was running for Mayor of London./AFP
On Twitter, she said that "I wouldn't have worked for the Tories (Conservative Party) if it hadn't been for him."
After that, she joined the Conservative Party as a press officer and then met her future husband while working on his re-election campaign to be the Mayor of London.
She was also a special adviser to the former finance minister, Sajid Javid. In 2016, she became the director of communications of the Conservative Party at just 29 years old. But she eventually left that post to work for the ocean conservation charity, Oceana.
Carrie Symonds is prominent campaigner for cleaner oceans regularly tweeting about the issue./@carriesymonds/
In 2018 Symonds was listed in the top 10 figures in political communications by trade magazine PR Week showing how influential she had become.
On February 29, 2020 she and the prime minister announced that they were engaged and were expecting a baby. Their son, Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson, was born on April 29 2020 at University College London. She is a practising Catholic and had Wilfred baptized into the Catholic Church.
