Why the Daily Mail didn’t run Walters’ story

There’s no question that if Lord Rothermere hadn’t decided to relieve Geordie Greig of the editorship of the Daily Mail last year, then the paper would have run Simon Walters’ story about how Boris Johnson had attempted to fix a £100,000-a-year job for his then mistress Carrie Symonds when he was foreign secretary. That would undoubtedly have saved a great deal of embarrassment for the Times – which dropped the story after its first edition when Downing Street protested – along with Rothermere’s MailOnline, which gormlessly lifted the story from the Times and then dropped it quickly when they realised it was off limits.

I have now heard multiple accounts of why Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail’s proprietor, decided to drop Greig, whose final months as editor had been characterised by their savage front-page attacks on Johnson’s innumerable failings – often written by Walters. “Rothermere’s wife, Claudia, had repeatedly invited Boris and Carrie to dinner, but always the answer was no,” one well-placed informant tells me. “It was made clear to Claudia that there was no way they would come round while the paper was so hostile. So it was Claudia – often credited with getting Geordie the job in the first place – who almost certainly put in the fatal stiletto.”

The antipathy between Johnson and Greig was deep and longstanding, but it was petty things that seemed to be at the heart of it. “Whenever Geordie met Boris, he refused to address him as ‘prime minister’ and this grated,” another source tells me. “Geordie was several years older than Boris at Eton and had always looked down on him.”

The argument that senior executives at the Times briefed that the paper had dropped its story about Carrie Johnson for legal reasons makes less sense with each passing day. If the story was considered libellous, why did the legal department allow it in the first place, and why, now that it has been repeated around the world, has she not sued?

Walters is no longer on the staff at the Mail, but is on a retainer. He reportedly offered the story first to its editor, Ted Verity, who, unstartlingly, turned it down, so he then tried it on the Times.

At the time Johnson was trying to get his then-mistress installed at the foreign office as his chief-of-staff; she needed a job badly. As Walters had reported in the Mail on Sunday some years ago, she had ceased to be director of communications at the Tory party not long before, after allegations of poor performance, absenteeism and unauthorised expenses.

At the time, Symonds and Conservative party HQ both declined to comment on the allegations, but an unidentified friend of hers was quoted as saying they were “nonsense”.