A baby boy for BoJo in a year of peaks and valleys

LONDON—Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s life has always had a you-can’t-make-this-up quality to it, never more so than this month, when he went from desperate coronavirus patient, kept alive by oxygen, to the proud father of a baby boy — his fifth, sixth or seventh child, depending on who’s counting.

The announcement by Johnson and his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, that she gave birth to a healthy baby at a London hospital Wednesday added a joyful milestone to a year of dizzying highs and lows: an election victory, a divorce, an engagement and a life-threatening illness — not to mention Brexit and a world-altering pandemic, which has killed more than 26,000 people in the country Johnson leads.

The latest twist in the Boris chronicles deprived political commentators of an important, if less anticipated moment: the prime minister’s first faceoff in Parliament with the Labour party’s new leader, Keir Starmer, at a time when the government’s handling of the virus has come under intense fire.

Johnson, who returned to work Monday, skipped the session because of his son’s birth. Starmer raised difficult questions about the rising death toll and the lack of testing or protective masks for health workers, but he prefaced them with congratulations to Johnson, 55, and Symonds, 32, who also suffered symptoms of the virus but was reported to be healthy.

On Wednesday, the government recalculated its death toll to include those who died in nursing homes and houses. That drove the number to 26,097, one of the highest totals in Europe.