The Unsettled Life of Boris Johnson Pal Jennifer Arcuri

I first met Jennifer Arcuri at Bloomberg’s London headquarters in 2015—four years before she became the center of a political scandal that has riveted the U.K. Arcuri was there to attend a conference on fintech, the hot new thing in British business, which I was writing about at the time. Dressed entirely in white, the bubbly Californian with a mane of beach-blonde hair and a rowdy laugh was in her element as she schmoozed with entrepreneurs and investors. She’d come out of nowhere a few years earlier to hold techie events of her own and cut a swath through London’s startup scene. A self-appointed master of ceremonies, Arcuri spoke in breathless monologues that swung from venture capital trends to industry gossip to something called “ethical hacking.” She seemed to know everyone, dropping the names of finance industry bigwigs and government ministers as if they were old friends. The most interesting VIP she talked about was “Boris.”

No surname was necessary for the then-mayor of London, the mop-topped politician who’d jolted Westminster with his disheveled charm and his ambition—and who, since July 2019, has been prime minister of Her Majesty’s government. It was clear straightaway that Arcuri was tight with the man she’d nicknamed “Alex the Great,” in a nod to Boris Johnson’s love of ancient Greece and Rome. The buzz in tech circles was that Arcuri and Johnson, who was married, were an item. With her flirty personality and penchant for striking provocative poses in pictures on social media, she didn’t exactly go out of her way to dispel the impression. As for Johnson, his philandering over the years was well chronicled in the British press.