Boris Johnson

• 1. Introduction

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  Boris Johnson's earliest recorded ambition was to be "world king". He was born on the 19th of June 1964 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He is one of only two British prime ministers to have been an American citizen.

  Supporters praise Johnson as humorous, witty and entertaining, with an appeal that reaches beyond traditional Conservative voters. Critics accuse him of lying, elitism, cronyism and bigotry. That split makes him one of the most controversial figures in British politics.

  How did a man with such a divisive reputation rise from a London mayoralty to the highest office in the land? Why did journalism and television make him famous before politics did? And what finally ended a career that so often seemed to survive its own scandals?

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• 2. Schooling Abroad And At Home

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  In September 1964 the infant Johnson was taken from New York to England, because his mother Charlotte Fawcett wanted to study at Oxford. His father, Stanley, had been studying economics at Columbia University. Charlotte was an artist. Her father, Sir James Fawcett, was a prominent barrister who presided over the European Commission of Human Rights from 1972 to 1981.

  For the next few years the family kept moving. They lived in Oxford and north London, then in Washington, DC, where Stanley worked with the World Bank, and then in Norwalk, Connecticut. By 1969 they were back in Britain, at West Nethercote Farm in Winsford, Somerset. A sister, Rachel, arrived in 1965, a brother, Leo, in 1967, and a fourth child, Joseph, in late 1971.

  Stanley spent long periods away, so au pairs helped Charlotte raise the children. Young Johnson was quiet and studious, and deafness led to several operations to fit grommets in his ears. With no other friends, the siblings grew very close. In 1973 Stanley took a job with the European Commission and moved the family to Uccle, in Brussels. Johnson attended the European School there and learnt French.

  Then Charlotte had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised with depression. In 1975 the children went back to Britain to board at Ashdown House, a preparatory school in East Sussex. There Johnson fell for rugby, Ancient Greek and Latin. His parents' relationship collapsed in December 1978, and they divorced in 1980.

  By then he was at Eton College, near Windsor, on a King's Scholarship. He arrived in the autumn term of 1977 and began using his middle name, Boris. He also took on the eccentric English persona that later made him famous. School reports complained of idleness, complacency and lateness. Even so, he won prizes in English and the Classics and edited the school newspaper. In late 1981 he joined Pop, a small, self-selecting group of elite prefects.

  After a gap year teaching English and Latin at Timbertop, a campus of Geelong Grammar in Australia, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. There he read Literae humaniores, a four-year course in Classics. He matriculated in late 1983 alongside a generation that would dominate British politics, including David Cameron, William Hague, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt and Nick Boles. He played tighthead prop for the college rugby team. To his later regret, he also joined the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive drinking society notorious for vandalism. A photograph of him and Cameron in its formal dress later drew harsh press coverage.

  His closest Eton friends, Darius Guppy and Charles Spencer, followed him to Oxford. With Guppy he edited the satirical magazine Tributary. In the summer of 1984 he and his sister Rachel volunteered at Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi in northern Israel. That year he was elected secretary of the Oxford Union but failed in his first bid for its presidency. He won the presidency in 1986, though his term was unremarkable and people questioned his seriousness. He graduated with an upper second-class degree and was deeply unhappy not to have earned a first.

  By then he was engaged to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, a Tatler cover girl whose father, William, chaired Christie's Education. They married in September 1987 and settled in West Kensington, just as his first job was about to begin.

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• 3. Brussels And Fame

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  In late 1987, through family connections, Johnson became a graduate trainee at The Times, and within months he was out of a job. He had written about the discovery of Edward II's palace and invented a quote. He pinned it on the historian Colin Lucas, his own godfather. Editor Charles Wilson dismissed him.

  Max Hastings, whom Johnson had met at university, then gave him a place on the lead-writing desk of The Daily Telegraph. His old-fashioned phrasing and habit of addressing readers as "my friends" suited the paper's Conservative "Middle England" audience. In early 1989 he became its Brussels correspondent, a post he held until 1994.

  In Brussels he became a fierce critic of Commission president Jacques Delors and one of the city's few Eurosceptic journalists. His articles told of euromyths. Officials were supposedly recruiting sniffer dogs so all manure would smell the same, and planning to dictate the curve of British bananas. He also wrote of a plan to blow up the Berlaymont building because of its asbestos.

  Fellow journalists complained that the stories were often lies meant to discredit the Commission. The Europhile Conservative Chris Patten later called him "one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism". His Brussels deputy and biographer, Sonia Purnell, argued that he made Euroscepticism "an attractive and emotionally resonant cause for the Right". Until then it had been associated with the Left. Conrad Black, the Telegraph's proprietor, said Johnson "greatly influenced British opinion on this country's relations with Europe". His writing also fed the rise of the UK Independence Party in the early 1990s.

  Allegra ended their relationship in February 1990, and the marriage finished in April 1993. That May he married Marina Wheeler, a childhood friend who had moved to Brussels in 1990. They settled in Islington in north London and had four children, all given the surname Johnson-Wheeler. Under the influence of that left-liberal neighbourhood and his wife, he moved in a more liberal direction on climate change, LGBT rights and race relations. He also wrote a book of verse, The Perils of the Pushy Parents: A Cautionary Tale, which received largely poor reviews.

  Back in London in 1994, Hastings refused his request to become a war reporter. He made him assistant editor and chief political columnist instead. The column earned him Commentator of the Year at the What the Papers Say awards. Praise went to its eclectic politics and distinctive style. Some critics condemned the writing as bigoted, citing words he used about Africans and gay men.

  He also wanted a seat in the Commons. The Conservatives rejected him for Holborn and St. Pancras, so he stood in Clwyd South in north Wales, a safe Labour seat. In the 1997 general election he won 9,091 votes, or 23 per cent, and lost to Martyn Jones.

  A different kind of trouble surfaced in June 1995, when a recording of a 1990 phone call with Guppy became public. Guppy said News of the World journalist Stuart Collier was investigating his insurance fraud. He asked Johnson for the journalist's private address so Collier could be beaten. Johnson agreed, though he worried about being linked to an attack. He later said he had not provided it. Hastings reprimanded him but kept him on.

  Fame came from television. In April 1998 Johnson appeared on the BBC satirical show Have I Got News for You, and viewers began recognising him in the street. He returned as a guest presenter and earned a BAFTA nomination for his 2003 appearance. Invitations followed from Top Gear, Parkinson, Breakfast with Frost and Question Time. Then, in July 1999, his proprietor made him an offer with strings attached.

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• 4. Editor And MP

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  Conrad Black's offer in July 1999 made the editorship of The Spectator Johnson's, on condition that he abandon his parliamentary ambitions. Johnson agreed. He kept the magazine's traditional right-wing bent but welcomed leftist writers and cartoonists. Circulation grew by 10% to 62,000, and the magazine became profitable. Critics said it avoided serious issues, and colleagues grew annoyed at his absences from the office.

  Controversy followed. His father-in-law Charles Wheeler and others criticised him for letting columnist Taki Theodoracopulos publish racist and antisemitic language. In 2003 he and Nicholas Burgess Farrell spent three hours interviewing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Sardinia. Published excerpts, including remarks on Benito Mussolini and the Italian judiciary, almost caused an institutional crisis.

  Johnson broke his promise to Black anyway. When Michael Heseltine retired, he sought the Conservative candidacy for Henley, a safe seat in Oxfordshire. Local members were split between those who found him amusing and charming and those who disliked his flippant attitude. Helped by his television fame, he won in the 2001 general election. Black called him "ineffably duplicitous" but kept him, since he raised the magazine's circulation.

  In Henley he bought a farmhouse near Thame and joined campaigns to save Townlands Hospital and the local air ambulance. In the Commons his speeches were widely judged lacklustre. He missed many meetings of a committee on the Proceeds of Crime Bill and attended only around half of the votes. He supported the Gender Recognition Act 2004. He first said he would not back the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then supported it and visited occupied Baghdad in April 2003. By December 2006 he called the war "a colossal mistake and misadventure".

  He kept several jobs going at once. He wrote for The Daily Telegraph and GQ, and he published Friends, Voters, Countrymen in 2001 and Lend Me Your Ears in 2003. His first novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, appeared in 2004. Challenged about juggling too much, he pointed to Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, who combined political and literary careers. He took up cycling to manage stress. Andrew Gimson called him perhaps the most famous cyclist in Britain.

  In November 2003 Michael Howard became Conservative leader and made him party vice-chairman, then shadow arts minister in May 2004. In October 2004 Howard ordered him to apologise in Liverpool for a Spectator article written anonymously by Simon Heffer. It said the crowds at Hillsborough had contributed to the disaster and that Liverpudlians relied too heavily on the welfare state. The next month the tabloids revealed an affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson denied it, but it proved true, and Howard dismissed him when he refused to resign.

  Re-elected in 2005, he backed David Cameron for leader and became shadow higher education minister. His support for university top-up fees damaged his 2006 campaign to become Rector of the University of Edinburgh, and he finished third. In 2005 the Spectator's new chief executive, Andrew Neil, dismissed him as editor. The Telegraph raised his salary from £200,000 to £250,000 to make up the loss. In 2007 he earned £540,000, the third-highest income of any MP that year.

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• 5. City Hall

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  "I'm voting for Boris because he is a laugh." Opponents complained that this was a common attitude among voters, even among people who disliked his policies. Johnson had won a public London-wide primary to become the Conservative candidate. His campaign focused on youth crime, safer public transport and a modern version of the AEC Routemaster double-decker. He targeted outer London suburbs that felt neglected by Labour.

  Incumbent Ken Livingstone portrayed him as an out-of-touch toff and bigot. Johnson took 43% of first-preference votes to Livingstone's 37%. Once second preferences were counted, he won 53% to 47%. He announced that he would stand down as MP for Henley.

  At City Hall he sacked staff seen as too close to Livingstone. He later dismissed his own deputy mayor, Tim Parker, after Parker took growing control. During the campaign Johnson had told Brian Paddick he doubted he could live on the £140,000 mayoral salary. So he kept his Telegraph column, which paid another £250,000 a year. He promised to donate 20% of it to charity but did not pay the full amount. On the BBC programme HARDtalk he called the fee "chicken feed", roughly ten times the average yearly wage.

  His first act was a ban on drinking alcohol on public transport. He ended the city's oil deal with Venezuela and scrapped the Londoner newsletter. He also abolished the western extension of the congestion charging zone. He kept Crossrail and the 2012 Olympic Games, which began under Livingstone, though critics said he tried to claim the credit.

  His name became attached to a public bicycle scheme that Livingstone's administration had proposed. Everyone called it "Boris Bikes". It lost a great deal of money but proved popular. He also commissioned the New Routemaster bus and a cable car across the Thames between the Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks. To finance these projects, his administration borrowed £100 million and raised public transport fares by 50%.

  In October 2008 he pushed for the resignation of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair, which Conservatives read as his first act of strength. Crime fell overall. However, his claim that serious youth crime had dropped proved false, and he admitted the error. His Mayor's Fund for disadvantaged youths first promised to raise £100 million. By 2010 it had raised £1.5 million.

  In 2012 his campaign pressed the claim that Livingstone had evaded tax, and Livingstone called him a "bare-faced liar". Johnson was re-elected. He was also co-chair of the board for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Critics accused him of using dust suppressants to clear air particulates near monitoring stations. In 2015 he called Donald Trump "frankly unfit to hold the office of President of the United States".

  A lingering question was his friendship with the American entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri. Her company, Innotech, won government grants, and Johnson helped her onto three trade missions. The Independent Office for Police Conduct reported in May 2020 and found no basis for a criminal charge. It did say the relationship had influenced decisions and that he should have declared an interest.

  He left office on the 5th of May 2016. A YouGov poll at the end of his term found 52% of Londoners saying he did a "good job". Another 29% said "bad job". Two years earlier he had already gone looking for a seat in Parliament.

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• 6. Leave And Foreign Office

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  In August 2014 Johnson sought selection for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a safe Conservative seat. He had earlier said he would not return to the Commons while mayor. He won it at the 2015 general election. That prompted speculation that he wanted to replace Cameron as party leader.

  In February 2016 he endorsed Vote Leave in the European Union membership referendum. Financial markets read it as making Brexit more likely, and the pound fell nearly 2% against the dollar, to its lowest level since March 2009. In April, President Barack Obama said Britain should stay in the EU. Johnson replied that an "ancestral dislike" of Britain, owing to Obama's "part-Kenyan" background, may have shaped his view. Several politicians condemned the comment as racist.

  Vote Leave was accused of implying that 80 million Turks would come to the UK. On the 22nd of June 2016 Johnson declared that the next day could be "Britain's independence day". Yet James Murdoch later said that when Fox News executives asked Johnson whether the referendum would pass, he answered only "We'll see".

  Leave won and Cameron resigned. Johnson was widely seen as the front-runner to succeed him. Then Michael Gove, a former ally, concluded that Johnson "cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead". The Daily Telegraph called it "the most spectacular political assassination in a generation". Johnson declined to stand, and Theresa May was elected uncontested.

  In July 2016 May appointed him foreign secretary. Analysts saw a tactic to weaken him, since new Brexit and international trade posts left the foreign secretary as a figurehead. The job also kept him abroad and made him answerable for problems caused by leaving the EU. Diplomats and foreign ministers compared him unfavourably to previous foreign secretaries. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi walked out of one meeting that never got beyond pleasantries.

  His September 2016 visit to Turkey was tense, because four months earlier he had won Douglas Murray's offensive poetry competition about President Erdogan. Asked whether he would apologise, he called it "trivia". In 2017 he told a parliamentary committee that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian citizen imprisoned in Iran, had been "simply teaching people journalism". He later said he was misquoted. That September he recited lines of Kipling's Mandalay in a Myanmar temple, and the British ambassador suggested it was "not appropriate".

  The March 2018 poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury hardened his stance on Russia. Johnson compared Putin's hosting of the World Cup to Hitler's hosting of the Olympic Games. Russia's Foreign Ministry called the comparison "unacceptable and unworthy". That April he flew to Italy for a party at the Palazzo Terranova. It was owned by former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev and hosted by his son Evgeny. Johnson went without security or officials and did not document the trip. In 2020 he granted Evgeny a peerage, against the advice of MI6.

  By June 2018 secret recordings caught him complaining that May was too collaborative with the EU. "Imagine Trump doing Brexit," he said. "He'd go in bloody hard." In July 2018, three days after the cabinet agreed a Brexit strategy, he resigned along with Brexit secretary David Davis. His resignation speech declared "it is not too late to save Brexit".

  Back on the backbenches, he signed a 12-month contract to write for the Telegraph Media Group. He was ordered to apologise for failing to declare £50,000 of earnings. In September 2018 he wrote that Britain had "wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution" and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier. In April 2019 the Independent Press Standards Organisation ruled that a claim in one of his articles was false and required a correction.

  On the 12th of June 2019 he launched a leadership campaign, saying "we must leave the EU on the 31st of October." He beat Jeremy Hunt by 92,153 votes to 46,656, or 66% to 34%.

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• 7. Landslide

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  On the 24th of July 2019, Queen Elizabeth II accepted Theresa May's resignation and appointed Johnson prime minister. He became the first prime minister born outside British territories. He named Dominic Cummings as his senior advisor. He also dismissed 11 senior ministers while six others resigned, the most extensive postwar Cabinet reorganisation without a change in the ruling party. Dominic Raab became foreign secretary, Sajid Javid chancellor and Priti Patel home secretary.

  His first speech promised that Britain would leave the EU on the 31st of October 2019 with or without a deal. He also vowed to remove the Irish backstop. The EU refused to accept that condition. On the 28th of August he said he had asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament from the 10th of September. That cut the time available to block a no-deal exit. Protests broke out across the UK on the 31st of August.

  Three Scottish judges ruled the prorogation unlawful on the 11th of September. On the 24th of September the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Johnson's advice to prorogue was unlawful, and the prorogation was null. Meanwhile his government was coming apart. On the 3rd of September Phillip Lee crossed the floor to the Liberal Democrats, leaving no working majority. Later that day 21 Conservative MPs lost the whip for backing an opposition motion.

  On the 5th of September his brother Jo Johnson resigned from the government, describing himself as "torn between family and national interest". Two days later Amber Rudd resigned as work and pensions secretary and left the party. She called the withdrawal of the whip an "assault on decency and democracy". The Benn Act, a bill to block a no-deal exit, had passed the Commons on the 4th of September. His motion for an election on the 15th of October failed to reach two-thirds of the House.

  After talks with Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, the UK and EU agreed a revised deal in October 2019. It replaced the backstop with a Northern Ireland Protocol. Parliament was dissolved for an election on the 12th of December. Under the slogan "Get Brexit Done", the Conservatives took 43.6% of the vote and a majority of 80 seats.

  In February 2020 he reshuffled his Cabinet and sacked five ministers. One was Northern Ireland secretary Julian Smith, and several commentators criticised that decision after his success in restoring the devolved government. Javid resigned as chancellor and was replaced by Rishi Sunak. Javid returned as health secretary in June 2021, after Matt Hancock resigned. Within weeks of that reshuffle, a pandemic dominated the government's agenda.

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• 8. Pandemic And Partygate

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  On the 3rd of March 2020 Johnson claimed to have shaken hands with COVID-19 patients in hospital. That was the same day scientific advisers recommended that the public avoid shaking hands. He had missed five COBR emergency briefings in the early months. The UK was among the last major European states to close schools, ban public events and order a lockdown. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty was quoted as saying an earlier lockdown would have significantly lowered the death toll.

  A lockdown began on the 23rd of March, and on the 27th of March Johnson tested positive. He entered hospital on the 5th of April and intensive care the next day. He left intensive care on the 9th of April and went to Chequers three days later. He returned to Downing Street on the 26th of April. He later said he had received emergency oxygen and that doctors had prepared for the possibility that he would die.

  In May 2020 Dominic Cummings travelled with his family to Durham during lockdown while showing symptoms. Both Cummings and Johnson refused calls for him to resign. The Lancet described the backlash as "the Cummings effect". A second national lockdown began on the 31st of October 2020, and the vaccination programme started in December. Half of UK adults had a first dose by the 20th of March 2021. When deaths passed 100,000 on the 26th of January, the first in Europe to do so, Johnson said he was "deeply sorry" and took "full responsibility".

  Other controversies piled up. In April 2021 Cummings alleged that donors had secretly paid for renovations to the flat at 11 Downing Street. Johnson told Parliament: "I paid for Downing Street's refurbishment personally." Lord Geidt found no breach of the Ministerial Code. He did call it "unwise" to proceed without "more rigorous regard for how this would be funded". The Electoral Commission fined the Conservative Party £17,800 for inaccurately reporting donations.

  In November 2021 Johnson backed a motion to block the suspension of Conservative MP Owen Paterson. A standards commissioner had found he abused his position through paid lobbying. After a backlash, the government reversed course, and Paterson resigned. In the North Shropshire by-election, Liberal Democrat Helen Morgan overturned a Conservative majority of nearly 23,000. It was the seventh largest swing in UK by-election history.

  Then came Partygate. In December 2021 reports emerged of Downing Street gatherings before Christmas 2020 that broke COVID rules, which Johnson denied. On the 10th of January 2022 ITV News reported an email from principal private secretary Martin Reynolds. It invited staff to "socially distanced drinks" in the garden on the 20th of May 2020. Johnson apologised to the Commons, saying he believed it was "a work event".

  David Davis, a Conservative former minister, urged him to go, quoting Leo Amery's words to Neville Chamberlain in 1940: "In the name of God, go." The Metropolitan Police began investigating on the 25th of January. Sue Gray's abbreviated report of the 31st of January found a "failure of leadership". In April 2022 Johnson was fined, becoming the first prime minister sanctioned for breaking the law in office. Eighty-three individuals in all breached the rules.

  Gray's full report in May 2022 and widespread dissatisfaction led to a confidence vote among Conservative MPs in June, which Johnson won. In July came revelations over his appointment of Chris Pincher as deputy chief whip, despite knowing of allegations of sexual misconduct against him. A mass resignation of ministers followed, and Johnson announced he would go. Liz Truss, his foreign secretary, succeeded him.

  His government did leave a record outside the scandals. It imposed sanctions on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and authorised aid and weapons shipments to Ukraine. Supporters praised the vaccination programme as one of the world's fastest.

  Johnson stayed on as a backbencher until June 2023. Then he received the draft of a Commons Privileges Committee report finding unanimously that he had lied to the Commons on numerous occasions. He resigned as an MP that same day, leaving the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat he had won in 2015.

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