Stanley in the jungle
Will Johnson Sr be crowned king?
In the mid-sixties, and fresh out of Oxford, Stanley Johnson had a short-lived career as a trainee spy. He abandoned his newfound vocation after just six months, however, following a job offer from the World Bank – and amid concerns that his “incompetence might have cost people their lives”. Such concerns were, no doubt, ill-founded. Beneath the well-bred, affable, self-deprecating and occasionally bumbling persona cultivated by the paterfamilias of the Johnson clan, to which Foreign Secretary Boris belongs, is a razorsharp, highly educated and intelligent operator. Remind you of anyone?
If so, then it’s hardly a coincidence. Johnson Sr, 77, landed in Brisbane yesterday as it emerged he would number among the contestants on this year’s I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, the ITV reality show in which the great and the good (and the faded and forgotten) eat insects and apply the law of the jungle as they battle it out for victory – and a career reboot – through a series of unpalatable tasks. “Of course, I’m thrilled to have a chance to compete for the King of the Jungle award,” Stanley told me yesterday, from Australia.
It may well be thrilling – and, therefore, of great appeal to the adventurer who has climbed Kilimanjaro twice and once rode a motorbike from London to Afghanistan – but his appearance on the show is also historic, for it’s surely the first time that the parent of a serving British foreign secretary has appeared in a television reality show. Then again, this might barely make a top 10 list of the maddest things that this family has ever done.
So who is Stanley Johnson? And how has he shaped the dynasty that has given us a thrusting secretary of state (Boris), a government minister (Jo), a high-profile journalist and novelist (Rachel) and a partner at PWC (Leo)? Stick Stanley and Boris alongside each other and the clear answer to that question, at least in respect of the oldest Johnson sibling, is greatly. So much so, in fact, that despite their disparate politics, you might say that understanding Stanley is key to understanding Boris.
The patriarch, who has two further children, Julia and Max, from his second marriage, to Jennifer Kidd, had a frugal childhood. The son of an Exmoor hill farmer, he won a scholarship to Sherborne, a public school in Dorset, and then to Oxford University. A generation afterwards, Boris would go on to win a scholarship to Eton and another to Oxford.
“I was very lucky: as a kid I had everything thrown at me,” Boris once said. But his sister, Rachel, has added nuance to the picture. “Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives,” she said, in 2012. “So we were fed, we were clothed, we were loved, we had all the books we could read. But there was not the expectation of having every wish granted, as there is now, and that is the best thing that my parents could ever have given us.”
It was, then, a hands-off parenting style that Stanley and his first wife, artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, espoused. And it was one that sits comfortably with a conservative belief in pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps – even if the boots are of the rugby variety, and are worn on the playing fields of Britain’s top public school, as were Boris’s.
Yet if father and son both operate at the Conservative end of the political spectrum – Stanley as Tory MEP for Wight and Hampshire East between 1979 and 1984, and Boris as a current Cabinet member and former Mayor of London – their beliefs widely differ. While Boris famously threw his weight behind Brexit, his father, a pro-eu environmentalist, voted Remain.
After failing to be elected as Tory MP for Teignbridge in the 2005 general election, Stanley diverted his energies towards the issue of endangered species. He has written 10 books on environmental issues, as well as 10 novels, the most recent of which, a geopolitical thriller called
Kompromat, imagines Russian meddling in the Brexit referendum. (On the cover, none other than Ken Livingstone – who was defeated by Boris in the 2008 London Mayoral election – describes it as “brilliant”.)
Boris, meanwhile, has continued to climb the greasy pole, fuelling speculation that he is gunning for the top job with his every political move. In outward persona and demeanour, though, there is little to differentiate father and son.
“Stanley has that chronic, bottomless need for attention, so him going on I’m A Celebrity makes perfect sense,” says a source who has worked with him over the years. “He’ll do all sorts of silly things, and will be absolutely game for a laugh or a silly photo op. He’ll happily be the one standing on his head with a banana between his toes. But
‘He’ll happily be the one standing on his head with a banana between his toes’
underneath it all is an iron ambition, and I wouldn’t put it past him to win. Boris got his whole shtick from him, doing the endearing, bumbling thing. Stanley made Boris the public persona he is.”
Both similarly dishevelled, and with a disconcertingly uniform air and manner, it’s unsurprising that the father has, at times, been mistaken for the son – much to Boris’s annoyance. (“I’m 20 years younger than my father, for God’s sake. Can’t you tell?” he once exclaimed.) The charismatic buffoonery and wit associated with Boris seems to come from Stanley, too, who is equally apt to showcase his erudition with rambling and arcane historical references.
“Stanley’s character has informed Boris’s to the point that they’re like clones,” says another of Johnson snr’s acquaintances. “Like Boris, Stanley is a larger-than-life raconteur who chats away to people. And he’s immensely proud of his family’s achievements.” Oliver Dawnay, Rachel’s son, says his grandfather is “probably the bigger character in the family”. The 21-year-old, a student at Manchester University, describes a man bursting with energy who’s constantly cracking jokes. “He always needs to be the centre of attention,” he says of Stanley. “He and my grandmother are both very driven and ambitious people, keen to ensure that their children achieve as much as they can in life. Success is in the blood. All their kids have learned from them in striving to be the best. They sometimes come across as silly in public, but in reality they’re very clever people.”
Family life has not been consistently smooth, though. Stanley’s philandering during his first marriage is no secret, and his first wife wound up in a London psychiatric hospital for a period. Boris has had an equally fluid approach to marital fidelity, and has been evicted from the family home on more than one occasion.
“Although he is happily married, I think Stanley will enjoy any one-onones with women on I’m A Celebrity,” says a friend of the family. “He’s a real ladies’ man, and he certainly enjoys female company. I get the feeling that all of the women in the lives of both father and son are pretty long-suffering.”
But if, in Boris’s case, the apple has not fallen too far from the tree, this is not so strikingly apparent with his siblings. “Jo is less similar,” says Stanley’s acquaintance of the Universities Minister, whose physical resemblance to the others is, none the less, strong. Rachel, who was pro-remain, has, meanwhile, joined the Liberal Democrats (“for now”). And Leo takes pride in his distinction from the rest of the brood. “I’m the non-political one,” he told an interviewer in 2013. “I’m not blond. I’m not Tory. I’m born with the gene for self-publicity missing, or at least defective.”
In his 2009 memoir, Stanley I
Presume, Johnson snr plays many of his anecdotes for laughs. But he says: “Deep down I’m a horribly serious person.”
To a greater or lesser extent, this admission might apply to his children, too. No one gets as far as they have done without some degree of seriousness. Whether Stanley’s will surface in the jungle remains to be seen. But if he wants to win, it will have to. Even if he masks it with jollity.
‘Stanley’s character has informed Boris’s to the point that they’re like clones’