Bumbling Bojo, the unlikely ladies’ man
By David Wilkes
FAMOUSLY dishevelled and with a bumbling persona, Boris Johnson might not seem like the archetypal ladies’ man. So how, it is often wondered, has he managed to have quite such a colourful love life? And why has Mr Johnson repeatedly been unfaithful?
A rare insight into these matters came from his former mistress Petronella Wyatt, now 50, who fell for his charms while she was Mr Johnson’s deputy when he was editor of The Spectator magazine.
Following their four-year affair, she told how he once ‘ grumbled’ to her: ‘I find it genuinely unreasonable that men should be confined to one woman.’
Miss Wyatt attributed this in part to Mr Johnson being ‘ inordinately proud of his Turkish ancestry’, and said his ‘views on matters such as monogamy are decidedly Eastern’. She had an abortion and suffered a miscarriage as a result of the relationship – which cost Mr Johnson his job after his claims that reports of his infidelity were ‘an inverted pyramid of piffle’ proved to be a lie.
He was forced to quit as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman in 2004 by then-Tory leader Michael Howard for failing to tell the whole truth about the affair. Mr Howard’s officials said the issue was one of ‘personal morality’.
Mr Johnson’s barrister wife Marina Wheeler – they had married in 1993 – threw him out of their home in Islington, North London, but later took him back.
In 2016, Miss Wyatt, whose late father, Lord Woodrow Wyatt, was one of Margaret Thatcher’s confidants, also said that Mr Johnson had told her he was ‘ a bit of a loner’ with few friends.
‘Like many loners, he has a compensating need to be liked,’ she wrote in The Mail on Sunday. ‘There is an element of Boris that wants to be Prime Minister because the love of his family and Tory voters is not enough. He wants to be loved by the entire world.’
She described her relationship with Mr Johnson as their ‘amitie amoureuse’, or ‘ amorous friendship’ – and said he was devastated by his parents’ divorce because his father Stanley promised he would never leave Boris’s mother Charlotte.
‘Boris never sets out to lie. It is just that he will do anything to avoid an argument, which leads to a degree of duplicity,’ Miss Wyatt said.
She also noted that ‘ he is the contrary of vain’, adding: ‘ Boris regards himself as rather ugly, requiring “half an hour to talk away my face”.’
In 2006 The News of the World reported that Mr Johnson had also had an affair with journalist Anna Fazackerley, then 29.
Mr Johnson, then 41, reportedly met her in his new job as Tory higher education minister. A source said: ‘Anna is really, really gorgeous – every thinking man’s pin-up. Boris finds her irresistible.’ Mr Johnson had married his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, his university sweetheart, in 1987.
They divorced after he had an affair with his current wife Miss Wheeler. After the fallout from his affair with Miss Wyatt, Mr Johnson ran successfully for London Mayor in 2008.
But the following year he fathered a love child with art consultant Helen Macintyre, then 39, who worked for him in an unpaid capacity. There were reports that his wife threw him out of his family home again – ‘like a tomcat’ – when that affair was revealed.
When the scandal broke a source close to Mr Johnson said: ‘Is Boris the father of this child? It’s quite likely he hasn’t the faintest idea.’
In a significant victory for Press freedom, a High Court judge said in 2012 that the Daily Mail was justified in publishing stories about the child.
This was because the politician’s ‘recklessness’ in conducting extramarital affairs, resulting in the conception of a child on two occasions, called into question his fitness for public office.
A friend once said that Miss Wheeler tolerated Mr Johnson’s philandering because she viewed it as a ‘childish side of his personality which one day he’ll grow out of’.
But he hasn’t, her tolerance has run out – and now they are divorcing after 25 years of marriage.