Rachel Johnson: ‘I don’t want to be used as “sister of Boris”’
Journalist Rachel Johnson wants to be our next Member of the European Parliament – and unlike her famous brother, she’s anti-brexit. Gaby Hinsliff meets her…
shortly after Rachel Johnson declared she was standing for her first ever election on an anti-brexit ticket, a friend got in touch to praise her bravery. ‘I sent a text back and I said, “I’m frit [frightened] as fuck,”’ confesses the journalist-turnedwould-be-mep for the new Change UK party. But scary as the prospect of putting herself out there is, she adds, it feels like the time to stand up and be counted. ‘I don’t feel that I could get to my seventies and still be writing a column, thinking, “What did you do in the war?”’
If anything, it’s perhaps surprising she didn’t follow older brother Boris the Brexiteer (plus younger brother Jo, who quit his ministerial job in protest at Brexit, and EX-MEP father Stanley) into politics earlier. Rachel was approached years ago to stand as a Tory candidate, but the interview didn’t go well. ‘I had three small children, a husband with a life-threatening illness, a disabled mother, and he ignored everything on my CV and said, “So tell me, what have you done for the party?” And I went, “I haven’t even done my teeth this morning.”’
So, while her brothers rose through government, Rachel edited The Lady
magazine and wrote a gossipy column for The Mail On Sunday. But there’s always been a serious side to the woman who read classics at Oxford before becoming the Financial Times’ first female graduate trainee – and at 53 she’s harnessing it.
‘I want to do something that counts for something. I’ve always been a political nerd. I’d be sitting reading the latest blog from the LSE on Brexit, then I’d be talking to Geordie [Greig, then-editor of The Mail On Sunday]
about whether I should do something about who should walk Meghan up the aisle… it was a very schizophrenic six years.’
With her three children now grown up, she clearly feels liberated to take some risks. ‘The departure of oestrogen from the system means you don’t care whether the trainers are white or there’s milk in the fridge,’ she says. ‘I feel a woman’s fifties are her time.’
It was, she says, Brexit that really radicalised her. She initially joined the Lib Dems to push for a people’s vote, but felt used for publicity – ‘I want to get stuck in, I don’t want to be used as “sister of Boris”’. So when a handful of Labour and Tory MPS broke away to form the pro-remain Independent Group (now Change UK) in February, she registered as a supporter. When she saw an email over Easter soliciting candidates to stand in European parliamentary elections on 23 May, she had a ‘gut feeling that this was the one’. She’s passionate about both wanting a second referendum and giving Remainers an alternative to Labour and the Tories, who have both pledged to deliver Brexit.
If she doesn’t win, she’d consider standing for Westminster, despite her reluctance to invade Boris’s turf. ‘It’s not his fault and he’s fantastically generous-spirited. But everything I do and everything my father does and anyone does is always framed as something around him. That’s annoying for us and it’s also annoying for him. I completely accept that the publicity around what I’m doing is three-quarters triggered by the fact I’m his sister. It’s both the cross I have to bear and also my USP.’
They were competitive as children – when she beat him once at ping pong, ‘he was so cross he kicked the garage door and broke his toe’ – but Boris wished her luck when she told him she’d been selected, and even if he becomes Tory leader she doesn’t think that stops her representing a rival party. (If anything, she reckons it’s harder for Jo, a centre-left Tory: ‘Jo, frankly, should be PM; he’s absolutely fabulous.’)
But first she must beat Ann Widdecombe, the ex-tory MP standing in the South-west for the Brexit Party at the election on 23 May. It’s been dubbed the reality-tv election, given they first clashed as contestants on Celebrity Big Brother. ‘Since I did Big Brother I’ve become obsessed with the nexus between TV and politics,’ admits Rachel, noting that Donald Trump emerged via The Apprentice while Ukraine’s new president is a comedian and actor famous for playing a president. ‘Politics is becoming reality and reality is becoming politics.’
She’s realistic about her prospects, given Change UK is a brand-new party. Even if she got elected, it’s unclear how long she’d have a job, given Britain’s commitment to leave the EU – although when she told former PM David Cameron she was standing, ‘He said, “Watch out, you’ll find yourself in Strasbourg [the seat of the European Parliament] for the next five years.”’ So evidently he doesn’t see Brexit concluding any time soon.
But it’s important, she argues, that women aren’t intimidated by fear of failure. ‘Even if it risks failure and ridicule, I think it’s really important that women see other women fail as well as succeed, because this cult of perfection and success is an invidious cult,’ she says. ‘I’m fully expecting to fail and I’ll be really delighted to succeed, but I want to succeed on the back of hard work and people voting for a cause I believe in.’
Perhaps she won’t be in her brother’s shadow much longer.