Boris Johnson divorce:
Former foreign secretary and second wife reveal split, as bookies slash odds on a leadership campaign
BORIS JOHNSON and Marina Wheeler are to divorce after 25 years of marriage, the couple announced yesterday.
In a joint personal statement issued through a family friend, Mr Johnson and Ms Wheeler, both 54, said: “Several months ago, after 25 years of marriage, we decided it was in our best interests to separate.
“We have subsequently agreed to divorce and that process is under way. As friends we will continue to support our four children in the years ahead. We will not be commenting further”.
The statement, which was sparked by an article in The Sun that revealed their separation, comes a day after Mr Johnson was spotted deep in talks over lunch with Julian Smith, the Government’s chief whip, at a Westminster restaurant.
The news has emerged ahead of a pivotal 12 months for Mr Johnson, with the former foreign secretary expected to challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
If Mr Johnson, MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, who writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph, succeeds Mrs May he would be the first divorced party leader in 10 Downing Street.
One MP said the news of the divorce would “clear the decks” to allow Mr Johnson to have a clear run at the leadership without having to worry about hostile revelations of his private life.
In the wake of the news Ladbrokes, the bookmaker, cut the odds on Mr Johnson replacing Mrs May as leader from 4/1 to 7/2 after a punter staked £2,500 on the outcome.
Nigel Evans, the Tory MP and former deputy speaker of the House of Commons, said he did not think the news would affect voters’ view of him.
He said: “It is 2018, we are not in the Fifties now, so things move on and people make judgments about people. They are able to distinguish between personal lives and their public lives.”
Nadine Dorries, another Tory MP who openly backs Mr Johnson succeeding Mrs May, added: “We cannot continue with a Prime Minister who is non-consensual, who doesn’t listen, who doesn’t take on board people’s concerns
‘It is 2018, we are not in the Fifties now, so things move on and people make judgments about people’
and acts in a presidential style.
“That is not how politics works, and I’m afraid it is the end of the road now.”
However, a major Tory donor who backs Mr Johnson to be leader suggested that it could damage Mr Johnson’s standing among female voters.
He said it “marginally” made it harder for him to succeed Mrs May but that his supporters tended to forgive him.
Ms Wheeler – a barrister who specialises in administrative and public law and family law cases – is Mr Johnson’s second wife. She married him just 12 days after the divorce that ended his six-year marriage to his Oxford sweetheart, Allegra Mostyn-owen, in 1993.
The daughter of Sir Charles Wheeler, the veteran BBC correspondent, and mother of Boris’s four children, Cassia, Milo, Lara and Theo, Marina was a childhood friend.
The pair met again while both were living in Brussels and he was covering the beginnings of the European Union for The Telegraph.
Mr Johnson’s career has been written off before over allegations about his private life. In 2009 he fathered a child by Helen Macintyre, an unpaid adviser in City Hall, London, prompting a senior Tory to say it showed he “was not a serious figure and could not possibly become prime minister”.
In 2004 he admitted to a four-year affair with Petronella Wyatt, a journalist, and was sacked from the shadow cabinet by Michael Howard for having earlier denied any infidelity.
Asked in 2014 whether he thought his private life was the public’s business, he told The Telegraph: “On the whole, I think that all that kind of thing is, or certainly should be, irrelevant to the job that you’re trying to do.”