Cripes, Boris! The ex mother-in-law is on the warpath...
AS IF Boris Johnson didn’t have enough on his plate, he’s now been given a ticking off by his former mother-in-law. Author Gaia Servadio, mother of the Prime Minister’s aristocratic first wife, former model Allegra Mostyn-Owen, has bitter memories of the couple’s relationship and describes him as a poor husband.
Boris married Allegra in 1987 and split six years later, before he went on to tie the knot with his second wife, barrister Marina Wheeler.
‘I have never liked Boris,’ Miss Servadio declares. ‘He and Allegra met at Oxford. They were the stars at university. She was beautiful and he had a drive to be the best. When they decided to get married, I tried my best to dissuade her.’
So desperate was she to prevent her daughter exchanging vows with Boris that she enlisted the help of one of America’s most celebrated novelists. ‘I got the author Philip Roth, who was my friend, to find her a job,’ Miss Servadio reveals.
‘He got her one in the United States to get away, but it didn’t work, Allegra refused to go.’
Allegra’s father was the late art historian William Mostyn- Owen. Although Miss Servadio leans to the Left politically, her antipathy to Boris is because of his personality, she insists. ‘I didn’t like the fact he was on the Right, but, above all, I didn’t like his character. For him, the truth doesn’t exist. His father [former MEP Stanley] is just the same — they believe their lies so they can increase their power. You just need to look at the rancour he’s causing in England.’
Although Boris has six children, Miss Servadio is relieved that none was with her daughter.
‘Fortunately, he and Allegra never had children,’ she says. ‘Then she realised the mistake she had made.’
The author adds: ‘He’s not a bad man, but he is unreliable.
‘He never treated her badly, but, for me, my son-in-law was always the exact opposite of what a mother desires for her daughter.’
Let’s hope, Josephine McAfee, the mother of his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, takes a more generous view...