The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Like son, like father?
Stanley Johnson is patriarch of the UK’S most go-getting political dynasty. As his oldest son, Boris, battles to become PM, Mick Brown meets the environmental campaigner/reality TV star on the verge of becoming the UK’S First Father
It can’t be altogether easy being Boris Johnson’s father, particularly now. Of course, you’d be proud that your son had climbed the greasy pole to the lofty heights – almost – of being Prime Minister. But the fretfulness, the concern, the sheer anxiety of waking up each day and wondering, ‘Oh God, what’s happened now…?’ It must get you down.
I met Stanley Johnson on a Friday, a couple of weeks ago. It was the day after Michael Gove had been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest, amid accusations of dirty tricks by the Johnson camp, ‘lending’ votes to Jeremy Hunt to kill Gove’s challenge, ‘stabbing him in the front’ as one, unnamed, ally of Boris put it… an act of revenge for 2016, when Gove reneged on a deal to manage Johnson’s leadership campaign, instead deciding to run against him.
That same evening, news broke that police had been called to the home that Boris shares with his girlfriend Carrie Symonds, prompting a furious public debate about ‘domestic violence’, invasions of privacy, Boris’s fitness to be Prime Minister, staged photographs, etc, etc.
I rather suspect that had the story broken 24 hours earlier, Stanley might have realised that he had forgotten another pressing appointment and cancelled our lunch. And who could have blamed him? But it didn’t, and he didn’t. So here he was, strolling into his local pub, on the dot.
I’d never met him before, and judgements on brief acquaintance are always hazardous, but I liked Stanley Johnson. To be frank, it’s hard not to. He is a jovial, expansive, hail-fellow-wellmet sort of man. Ask him what he thinks is the single most important quality his children have inherited from him and he replies, ‘GSOH: great sense of humour. Isn’t that what you see in the small ads in Private Eye?’
The shambling, bearish gate, the beetle brow, the quizzical, self-amused expression – meeting Johnson you immediately realise that the son is, in so many ways, a Xerox copy of the father. When, at the end of the meal, I went to pay the bill, the waitress remarked that she could have made a small fortune charging everyone in the restaurant who had been trying to take a surreptitious photo of ‘Boris’s dad’ as we talked. (He hadn’t noticed.) They might easily have thought it was Boris.
My meeting with Johnson had been arranged at short notice, but he had helpfully emailed to suggest that before we talked I should look at his website, read his two volumes of memoir – Stanley, I Presume ,and Stanley, I Resume – and his latest novel, the Brexit thriller Kompromat, which was published in 2017.
Time, the infernal enemy. I didn’t have a chance to read Kompromat, but the synopsis runs as follows: ‘2016. The world is on the brink of crisis. In Britain, the British Prime Minister is fighting a referendum he thought couldn’t be lost. In the USA, brash showman Ronald Craig is fighting a presidential election nobody thought he could win. In the USSR, Igor Popov, the Russian president, is using both events as part of his plan to destabilise the West...’ ‘It explains why we’re in this Brexit mess in the first place,’ Stanley says. ‘All a Russian plot.’
Stanley’s website contains links to practically everything he has said, written, or had written about him, in recent years, from the serious – his work to do with the environment, animal welfare and wildlife conservation – to the less than serious: ‘Hilarious moment: Piers Morgan helps Boris Johnson’s father, 76, do a HANDSTAND live on TV as his coins fly out his pockets’, and his late-flowering as a ‘celebrity’ TV star.
The paradoxes are mystifying. He is probably the only contestant on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! to have both won the Newdigate Prize for Poetry (in 1962) and been kidnapped by Pathans in the Hindu Kush (while on a student jaunt retracing Marco Polo’s journey to China; he escaped).
There is no question that he has led a varied and abundant life. Banking, politics, numerous books on environmental issues and nine novels. It seems that in terms of sheer endeavour, Johnson achieves more before breakfast than most of us accomplish in a lifetime.
‘So, here we are,’ he says, immediately launching into a peroration on the day’s state of play, as if speaking from a podium. ‘As of this morning, you could say that the Conservative Party, having winnowed a promising list of candidates down from 11 to two, is now gearing itself up for a run-off between two highly competent people. We should be so happy to have two stars out there! Now who can predict how the selectorate is going to work?’
Looking at the polling figures, he ventured that Boris ‘looks like he is in with a chance. But nobody’s going to count chickens before they hatch – particularly chlorinated chickens, we don’t want chlorinated chickens to be appearing on our horizon. But it is a very intriguing moment.
‘It’s like you sometimes hear people shouting over the tannoy in the Underground train – see it, say it, sort it! Well both Boris and Jeremy, in one way or another, have committed themselves to sorting it out.’
‘I’d say Boris’s commitment is harder than Jeremy Hunt’s’
He talks about Brexit and how Boris would handle it. The withdrawal agreement, the backstop, the possibility of renegotiation on the free trade agreement, and who was the ‘harder’: Boris or Jeremy Hunt. ‘If you were to measure the level of hardness, I would say that Boris’s commitment is definitely harder than Jeremy Hunt’s. I mean, if you were talking about lead in pencils, for example, we’re talking about a HH rather than a 2B…’ He reflects on this for a moment. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about lead in pencils…’ He roars with laughter.
‘What’s the words you journalists use – “Brexit in name only”. It’s not going to be that. It will be Brexit. And then I think you’ll find there’ll be a substantial negotiation on the terms of the free trade agreement.’
And if the EU did not accept a proposed renegotiation, and Parliament stymied a no-deal Brexit, then Boris would have no choice but to call for a general election. Does he see Boris as having the conviction and, above all, the concentration to pursue this course?
‘I think he does. The great thing about being Prime Minister is once you have the clarity of direction you do have teams of people who can go out there and deliver it.’ He ‘does not want to sound Churchillian’, he says, or ‘make any analogies between Boris and Churchill’, but he goes on to paraphrase Churchill’s famous Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat speech about ‘waging war… with all our might’ – spoken in ringing, stentorian tones that cause heads to turn in the restaurant.
Our waitress arrives with the food. He scrutinises his fish approvingly. ‘As Martin Luther King said, I have a bream…’
The problem, he goes on, is that Boris is much misunderstood. ‘Journalists are a bit slack in their attention to detail. They pick up a story and then it gets handed on like a parcel, so it becomes almost an accepted point: “Boris’s disastrous period as Foreign Secretary”. It’s all garbage! I’ve looked at the record, and in my field – my field being the environment – he was absolutely brilliant. We had movement on the illegal wildlife trade, female education, female genital mutilation…’
I wonder whether he had seen Fraser Nelson’s column in The Telegraph that morning, writing that Boris is ‘not just disliked by his enemies; he is utterly reviled’, listing a catalogue of failings levelled by Boris’s accusers: that he is a fraud, a philanderer, a serial liar, ‘a bigoted homophobe who ridicules Muslim women and published poems that were rude about the Scots’. (A list of accusations that would only be amplified in the press the following day.)
Stanley’s expression commingles pain and fury. ‘Unbelievable! For me it just confirms the fact that so many of these journalists like Matthew Parris and Max Hastings – and some of them are big-name journalists – just are sloppy. Anybody who had actually read Boris’s article about the burkas would have seen that he was actually defending the right of women to wear burkas. I got into trouble because I said Boris doesn’t go far enough, because there might be cases where it is not right for people to have the right. I cited the case of a female jet pilot, who you wouldn’t want to fly around wearing a burka. Although it then turned out that there are some Middle Eastern states where female jet pilots do.’
He fell silent, pondering on this.
Whatever the level of vitriol levelled at Boris so far, I suggested, it would be as nothing compared to the deluge if he became Prime Minister.
‘Certainly not! I don’t know whether the Polly Toynbees and the Owen Joneses of the world [both Guardian columnists] will, as it were, sheath their nibs – I can’t speak for Polly or for Owen. But I suspect we shall see a reining in of vitriol. There’s been a lot of vitriol, and I can’t imagine that will go on really.
‘What encourages me about the whole thing,’ he goes on, ‘is that Max Hastings, as I understand it, made an absolutely unbreakable promise that if Boris became Prime Minister, he would exile himself to Argentina. So I am extremely excited about the prospect of Max Hastings’ departure, which I will warmly applaud. And I will give him credit for honouring a promise.’
It seems a characteristic of Boris’s, I say, that he appears to be a man impervious to criticism; that no matter the insults and accusations flung at him, it’s all just water off a duck’s back. ‘Well you’ve got to remember. This was a guy who was a Brackenbury Scholar at Balliol.’
I confess that I have no idea what that means.
‘It means you’re a top classical scholar! The man has a brain!’ You must be very proud of him, I say.
‘Of course, I am extremely proud. But my line on this is you look at the political tree and its one career among several. It happens to be a career that attracts a lot of public interest. But I don’t have this total reverence for the political career. Being a Prime Minister is a pretty important thing. But if someone said to me, you have a chance of being Prime Minister or being Monet, Matisse or Pissarro, I’d go for the painter. Anyway, you
don’t know how long a Prime Minister is going to be there. It might only be two months.
But anyway, he says briskly, that’s enough about Boris. ‘Let’s move on.’
Stanley’s father was an RAF pilot who retired to run a farm on Exmoor, where Stanley was brought up. He was educated at Sherborne (head of school). He won a classics scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, and then worked at the World Bank, before becoming increasingly convinced that the Bank’s aid programmes were being jeopardised by the population explosion. His departure was hastened when he wrote an April Fool’s Day paper recommending a loan to Egypt to build new pyramids. He went on to work for the United Nations Association panel on world population, before moving to the European Commission. In 1979 he became one of the first British MEPS, serving for five years as Member for Wight and Hampshire East.
In the run-up to the referendum he was against leaving the EU, co-chairing with Baroness Young of Old Scone an organisation Environmentalists for Europe. But he changed his position after the referendum result. ‘I said, I am a remainer, but the country has voted to leave and as a democrat I must support Brexit. You may say it’s my life’s work – my life in the European Commission and the European Parliament – going down the drain. But this is the way the country has voted.’
In the 2005 general election, he stood for the Conservative Party in the constituency of Teignbridge, coming second behind the Liberal Democrat candidate. And in 2008 he put himself forward for selection to Boris’s parliamentary seat of Henley when Boris resigned to run for Mayor of London.
There is a story that when Stanley applied to become an MEP, he was asked by the selection committee whether he would accept the leadership of the Conservative Party. He replied that he had actually not been asked – yet. It was then pointed out to him that the committee was actually referring to whether he would accept the Tory whip. It was a quip, of course. But Johnson’s reply – if the story is true – speaks to the abundance of self-confidence, if not entitlement, that to outsiders seems to course through his family.
It was his daughter, the journalist and author Rachel, who once wrote that ‘like rats… in London you’re never more than a few feet from at least two Johnsons,’ a measure of the family’s ubiquity in public life. By any reckoning, Stanley has fathered an extraordinary clan – one might almost say a dynasty.
There are the four well-known children by his first wife, the painter Charlotte Wahl. Boris; Rachel. Leo, the co-presenter of the Radio 4 programme Futureproofing, and co-founder of the advisory firm Sustainable Finance. And youngest son Jo, a Tory MP who last November resigned as Minister of State for Transport and Minister for London, describing Theresa May’s Brexit plan as ‘a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the Suez crisis’ and calling for a second referendum.
Johnson met Charlotte at Oxford. A contemporary describes her in those days as being ‘wild, ecstatic and impulsive’. But in 1974 she suffered a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalised for several months. In 1979, she and Johnson divorced, and two years later he married the publishing editor Jennifer Kidd. They have two children, Julia, an author and musician, and Maximillian, a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur.
It was Jung who said that nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on a child than the unlived life of the parent, and it is no coincidence perhaps that two of Stanley’s children should have been politicians.
But he denies any suggestion of ambition on their behalf. ‘That has absolutely not been the case. All I was ambitious for was to make sure I had enough money to send them to good schools. I outsourced ambition, because I said to myself – in so far as I thought about this at all – what is the job of a parent? It’s to make sure a kid, among other things, gets a good education.
‘I remember my mother writing to me – a long letter, while I was still at prep school – saying I’m sure Daddy would be very pleased if you took over the farm in the end. Well, fine. I’m not sure that was necessarily her ambition for me. But I don’t buy into this idea that you have ambitions for your children. You say to yourself, they will find out for themselves what they want to do. But at least you can start them off in the right course by getting them a decent education.
‘Any parent is very pleased when good things happen to their children, but that’s not the same thing as hoping x, y or z is going to happen.’
His own life trajectory has taken a rather surprising turn in recent times, as a bringer of gaiety to the nation on sundry reality television programmes. In 2017 he appeared on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (cue jokes about Boris Johnson’s dad being ‘well prepared for reptiles’) becoming the fifth person to be eliminated from the show, after 20 days. He describes the
‘I am a remainer, but as a democrat I must support Brexit’
experience as ‘the most wonderful form of gastric surgery you could imagine’; and he struck up an improbable friendship with the winner, 24-year-old Georgia Toffolo (‘Toff ’), known for her appearances on another reality show, Made in Chelsea.
Last year he was to be seen on The Real Marigold Hotel, swanning around India with Selina Scott and the Krankies. ‘What a joy to be able to spend a month with the Krankies! Once I’d mastered this Glaswegian accent…’
On the day we met, Channel 4 was airing an episode of Celebrity Gogglebox on which he was paired with Toff, commenting on an episode of Love Island, and wearing a ‘has the world gone mad?’ expression at the references to ‘fanny flutters’.
So ubiquitous a figure has he become on television that it’s easy to forget he was, and remains, first and foremost an environmentalist – he is currently an ambassador for the UNEP Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.
Before meeting Stanley, I happened upon an article published in The Sunday Telegraph 39 years ago in which he talked about the looming environmental crisis. ‘I wish people would realise that they can’t go on expecting more and more. We’re all going to have less and less.’
He is, by nature, an optimist, he says. ‘But you could say that in the area I deem to be most important - the environmental area – everything is a complete shambles. I’m not saying people haven’t got richer. They have got richer – which is part of the problem.
‘The Government has this idea to reduce emissions, but I think they must say we therefore have to impose restrictions. I’m not saying individual action doesn’t help, but we have to be absolutely clear that if it’s Government policy, we no longer drive our cars to Heathrow, or whatever it may be.’
The day before we met there had been a furore over Greenpeace activists disrupting the Chancellor Philip Hammond’s annual Mansion House speech about the state of the UK economy, and one being manhandled out of the room by the Foreign Office minister Mark Field. ‘Well, good for them,’ Johnson says – referring to the protestors, not Mark Field. ‘I’m very much in favour of direct action.’ A few months ago he was to be found standing outside the Japanese embassy, addressing a protest against whaling.
Reality television, I suggest, was perhaps not quite the swerve in his career he might have expected back when he was working as head of the Prevention of Pollution and Nuisances Division at the European Commission.
‘It’s a jolly good one to have at the present time, I can tell you! Last week I did something called the Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, which involved going up to Yorkshire and being given a 1962 Jaguar to drive around buying up antiques, which you then sell at auction and hope to make a profit,’ he chuckles. ‘I just cannot tell you...
‘But your question was a very good question, because the undertow was, “How come you, at your age, are doing something as frivolous as that?”’
Well, yes. ‘And I’m going to say, look, don’t underestimate the chance of using these things to make a point you want to make. Why do people listen to Joanna Lumley when she talks about animal welfare and so on? They listen to her because they know her. Do you see? That’s my thought.’
I wonder aloud whether that is all there was to it. His own grandson, Oliver, once described him as ‘always needing to be the centre of attention’.
Stanley’s face darkens. ‘I’d forgotten that. I must reduce his allowance… I’m joking. No, I don’t think that’s true at all.’ He sighs. ‘It’s another one of these things...
‘My line is, you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ve just had an email from someone saying would I like to go to Ascension Island… No, not Ascension: I’ve just been there! Would I like to go to St Helena. Why not? I just did a bike ride in India, Bike4tigers. Last week my wife and I were in the Galápagos. I’m an ambassador for the Galapagos Conservation Trust. I don’t complain at all. How could I complain?’
After lunch, we stroll in the sunshine to a nearby park where he is to be photographed. On the way we talk about grandchildren – he seems unsure how many he has – and marriage.
He has been extremely fortunate, he says. ‘I’ve had one extremely talented wife who is the mother of my first four children. One extremely talented wife who is the mother of my second two children. Six children all getting on with their thing.’ He says it again, ‘How could I complain?’
I mention the poem he had written to his first wife after they had separated, and which he published in Stanley, I Presume, and he begins to recite it. ‘You ought to know/that even if we cannot live together/i have loved you and will still, de dum, de dum, de dum…’ For a moment he looks wistful, and pauses. Then: ‘What a glorious day!’
And that evening, the storm broke.