BORIS’S DAD BROKE HIS MUM’S NOSE
PM’s mother reveals she ended up in hospital as she tells writer: I want the truth to be known...
BORIS JOHNSON’S father Stanley hit the Prime Minister’s mother in a domestic violence incident that broke her nose and left her requiring hospital treatment, an explosive new book has revealed.
The astonishing disclosure is one of a string of revelations in The Gambler, a major biography of Mr Johnson by the renowned investigative author Tom Bower, which is being serialised in The Mail on Sunday, starting today.
Mr Bower describes Stanley’s first marriage, to Mr Johnson’s mother Charlotte, as violent and unhappy, quoting her as saying: ‘He broke my nose. He made me feel like I deserved it.’
Charlotte told the author: ‘I want the truth to be told.’
Last night, family friends confirmed the story to this newspaper, but insisted that the incident had been a one-off.
The friends said it happened in the 1970s when Charlotte was suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and had ‘flailed’ at Stanley, who broke her nose when ‘flailing back’.
They added that Stanley, now 80, deeply regretted the i ncident, which led to Charlotte being taken to hospital, and denied that he had been violent on any other occasion.
Mr Bower says this secret, and Boris’s parents’ troubled relationship, defined the PM as a man.
He writes: ‘Boris agonised over his mother’s fate… unwilling to confide in others about his father’s violence, he became a loner.
‘To mask the misery and hurt, he demanded attention… But Boris’s bravado masked deep unhappiness.’
Charlotte’s detonation of the long-held Johnson family secret is one of a series of revelations by Mr Bower which come closer than any previous work to explaining Boris’s complex psychology.
Based on interviews with hundreds of colleagues and family members, including with Boris’s mother and first wife, the book invites sympathy for the Prime Minister by painting a portrait of a young boy who turned into a selfcontained l oner as he battled despair over his parents’ divorce and his feral childhood.
Boris, by this account, grew up unable to forge close relationships with men so sought out women as his soulmates instead, which explains his notoriously prolific love life, in which he recklessly poured out his heart to lovers in poems and letters, even threatening suicide to deter women from abandoning him. The book also details Boris’s intense desire to become Prime Minister, jostling for advantage with fellow Old Etonian David Cameron and feuding with George Osborne in what is portrayed as the transfer of Oxford University’s infamous Bullingdon Club antics to Tory high command.
It chronicles Boris’s soul-searching over Brexit, the victorious Vote Leave campaign and his eventual march into Downing Street after the political quagmire of Theresa May’s Government, as well as the ‘terrorist demands’ that chief aide Dominic Cummings made before joining him in No 10.
The drama of the Covid pandemic is also described, with Boris presented as a Prime Minister who was panicked into a lockdown by overcautious scientists.
Underpinning every political development is the backdrop of constant, draining emotional drama in his private life, but Mr Bower concludes on a positive note – that as Prime Minister, he still has the opportunity and desire to improve fundamentally people’s lives.
When Stanley was asked by The Mail on Sunday outside his home in North London yesterday about the contents of Bower’s book, he said: ‘I haven’t read it. I don’t want to comment.’
He then r o d e a way o n h i s bicycle.
No 10 also declined to comment.
‘ Boris agonised over his mother’s fate’