While his allies may insist this week’s allegations are a politically motivated attack to spoil the Tory conference, Boris Johnson’s personal life has long been a ticking time bomb for his party.

If it hadn’t been for Brexit crowding out all other issues during the leadership race, it would almost certainly have received greater scrutiny than it did. But despite never putting a definitive figure on the number of children he has sired in and out of marriage, the Prime Minister breezed through that fight as people looked the other way.

Many supporters seemed to accept his waywardness as part of the Boris deal. But now details are emerging that make it far harder to laugh off the Prime Minister as some latter day Don Juan.

Now, there are allegations that public money accompanied one affair, and that Mr Johnson groped women in his previous career as a journalist.

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Throughout his life, relationships have overlapped and collided in often brutal fashion, and with Mr Johnson, 55, more than ready to lie about them. In 1987, he married his sweetheart from Oxford university Allegra MostynOwen.

He then cheated on her with the woman who became his second wife, marrying barrister Marina Wheeler just 12 days after his divorce from Ms Mostyn-Owen was finalised in 1993.

From 1999 to 2005 he edited the Spectator, a period that coincided with his first term as MP for Henley, which he represented from 2001 to 2008.

It was at one of the magazine’s famous office lunches that the Sunday Times journalist Charlotte Edwardes alleges Mr Johnson gripped her inner thigh so hard she jolted upright.

Writing for the newspaper on Sunday, she said that after the lunch, she confided in the young woman who had been sitting on the other side of Mr Johnson, who told her: “Oh God, he did exactly the same to me.”

Ms Edwardes said Mr Johnson also referred to Ms Wheeler as his “current wife”. Downing Street has called the groping claim categorically “untrue”, but one of Mr Johnson’s old Spectator colleagues, Toby Young, said the future PM did have a reputation for wandering hands.

“As far as I recall, back then at The Spectator, in those raucous days, you know, people complained if Boris didn’t put his hand on their knee during lunch,” he told a Tory fringe yesterday.

We know Mr Johnson was on the prowl around this time because he started an affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt in 2000 that would last four years.

She later reported having an abortion during their relationship.

She also claimed Mr Johnson had been a stout opponent of monogamy, telling her: “I find it genuinely unreasonable that men should be confined to one woman.”

In 2004, Ms Wheeler threw Mr Johnson out of the marital home over the affair, which he publicly denied as an “inverted pyramid of piffle”.

Then Tory party leader Michael Howard sacked him as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman for not being truthful about it. Although Ms Wheeler, with whom Mr Johnson has four children, took him back, it was not long before he reportedly resumed another affair, this time with journalist Anna Fazackerley.

The relationship was exposed by the News of the World in 2006. After being elected as mayor of London in 2008, Mr Johnson had an affair with art consultant Helen Macintyre, with whom he had a daughter in 2009.

Again, Ms Wheeler threw him out then took him back. Mr Johnson initially denied being the father of the child and was not named on the birth certificate. But the relationship was confirmed in a 2013 legal action that also heard he had a second, unidentified child conceived as the result of an affair.

Around this time, Mr Johnson is also alleged to have had an affair with US model turned businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri, who received thousands of pounds in sponsorship grants from City Hall while he was mayor.

The tech entrepreneur joined him on three foreign trade missions despite being ineligible, while he frequently visited her flat, ostensibly for IT lessons. One of Ms Arcuri’s companies, Hacker House. was also awarded £100,000 by the UK Government this year, despite her moving back to the US in 2018, making it ineligible. Ministers last week froze £53,000 of the grant yet to be paid to the firm.

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The Sunday Times reported this weekend that Ms Arcuri told friends she had had a sexual relationship with Mr Johnson, something he has not denied.

On Sunday, the PM said there had been “full propriety” in the use of public funds, but admitted he had not declared an interest at the time, arguing “there was no interest to declare”. Ms Wheeler filed for divorce in 2018. This summer it was confirmed Mr Johnson had a new partner, Carrie Symonds, a former head of Conservative Party press 24 years his junior. For now, Mr Johnson and Ms Symonds are said to be happy. But the ghosts of relationships and alleged advances past are now coming back to haunt his premiership.