Western Daily Press (Saturday)
I was shaped by the beauty and nature of Exmoor – Rachel Johnson
Journalist, author, reality TV star and – in her own words - ‘failed politician’, Rachel Johnson, spoke about her love of Exmoor and how it made her who she is at Dulverton Literary Festival. Lewis Clarke was in the audience.
RACHEL Johnson, born in 1965, is the daughter of former Conservative MEP Stanley Johnson and artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl. She is also the sister of Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister, and Jo Johnson, the former MP for Orpington.
She was educated at Winsford First School on Exmoor, where her grandfather bought Nethercote Farm in 1951, and later at Oxford, where she read classics and edited the student paper Isis. She is married to Ivo Dawnay, a director and consultant with the National Trust, and they have three children. Johnson lives in Notting Hill in London and Exmoor.
Speaking at the Dulverton Literary Festival last month, Johnson covered sections of her own lifestory.
A lifetime of imposter syndrome
“This event is a culmination of a lifetime of imposter syndrome for me. My grandfather moved to Exmoor and bought Nethercote Farm. Therefore, I was known as the granddaughter of Johnny and Buster. Then, of course, my father was a celebrated writer and environmentalist, so I was then the daughter of Stanley. I then married Ivor, and I became the mother of Ludo, Millie, and Oliver. Then, of course, for ten years, I was nothing more than the sister of Boris.”
She spoke about growing up on Exmoor, saying: “I cannot calculate the benefits and the bonus and all the fantastic endurance qualities that it endows somebody who lives and spends any time here. The appreciation of silence, beauty, animals, nature, all of that you drink in with your mother’s milk here. Plus, incredible resilience I have to add.
“I went to Winsford First School as a four-year-old with my brother. My father disputes this but my mother did not have a car. Therefore, every morning she got two children up and a baby in a pram and we walked a mile and three quarters down our track. Those who have been up our track know it’s a mile and threequarters there and a mile and threequarters back. She did that in the morning when we were picked up by the local garage man, Phillip Visey
When she [my mother] asked for mod-cons, my father would say, having returned from some long trip to the third world, that Tunisian women did not have dishwashers, why did we need one RACHEL JOHNSON
although I always thought it was Vullop as that’s how people pronounced it.
“He would take us from Larcombe Foot into Winsford. The school was by the church and then we’d have our day, and then he would take us back to Larcombe Foot, where Kemps Farm is, and my mother would have walked down the track with my baby brother in a pram all the way. She did it four times a day – I did it twice.
“I think I owe everything to living in the cottage with my mother, who had three children, then four, without any mod-cons. When she asked for mod-cons, my father would say, having returned from some long trip to the third world, that Tunisian women did not have dishwashers, why did we need one, or that they didn’t have cars in Sudan and they had eight children, and all that sort of thing.
“I think it was a very, very good start in life, and I would not have changed a moment of it.”
A political midlife crisis
She also talked about her book Rake’s Progress, which came out in 2020 and chronicled her failed attempt to become an MEP for Change UK, a pro-Remain party.
She said: “My older brother, in order that this got no attention or publicity at all, called a lockdown on March 23, so it disappeared into a complete vortex of anonymity, even though it was serialised in The Times.
“My nickname is Rake, and I can’t remember why. It’s called Rake’s Progress because I just couldn’t think of another title. It’s called My Political Midlife Crisis; everyone says all political careers end in failure, but mine began with failure. I was selected to contest the 2019 European elections which, as you will remember, shouldn’t have happened because we should have left the EU by then, but we didn’t.
“Change UK, who I stood for, was smashed by the Brexit Party, and I stood against Ann Widdecombe, and we didn’t win a single seat, but I did get a book out of it, and I did get 46,000 votes in the South West.”
She added: “I’m glad I stood for something, and I put myself up for election, even if it was humiliation. Unless you do, you don’t see all the people who work behind the scenes to make democracy happen. The people who count throughout the night, the party officials, the people who give up their time and money to make sure we’re a democracy.”
A problem of churn
She said on the current situation regarding politics and the environment: “I don’t even know who the Environment Secretary is now. The fact that we’ve had four prime ministers in six years, seven foreign secretaries in seven years, eight housing ministers in four years, and I don’t know how many environment secretaries in four years shows that as far as the leadership is concerned, it doesn’t matter to them who’s doing jobs.
“The average lifespan of a government minister is shorter than that of a Johnson family hamster; it doesn’t matter to them who’s doing jobs, so how can the job matter to them? I think we’ve got a real problem at the moment of churn. There’s a year till the election – I would sack all the government and let the civil service run the country until at least after the general election because they would probably do a better job.”
If she had been elected, she said the environment would have been one of her top priorities, and improving the relationship with the EU, particularly with goods and services.
A need to build on Exmoor
Johnson also spoke of the need to build on Exmoor to stop people from leaving the villages and towns where they were born.
“They’ve got to be really beautiful houses which people want to look at as well as live in, and that’s not impossible. They need to be affordable too,” she said.
“This serious problem affects all rural communities, especially areas like Exmoor where people want second homes. Perhaps a housing quota should be set aside for people on local incomes and not people from London who could use it as a twoweek summer holiday.
“My husband lives here full-time, and I come up and down because I work in London on Sundays. I’ve spent much more time since 2020 on Exmoor than I have for a long time.
“You can see the problems that local businesses have, such as the pubs, in trying to get local people to work here because there aren’t any young people here. There are, but they tend to gravitate towards London because that’s where the axis of the economy is.”
A reality TV star
She also spoke about her time on reality television, how she rejected the chance to appear on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, and the challenges of appearing on Celebrity Big Brother, where she was evicted second in 2018.
She said her Exmoor upbringing had helped with her appearance on Celebrity SAS Who Dares Wins, filmed in New Zealand.
“They would tell us to swim across this lake and then get in a helicopter, be dunked in a lake, retrieve an asset and then swim to the top of the lake before abseiling down a 300ft dam forward-facing vertically,” she said.
“You had to feed yourself down; it was a race, and I broke a rib. The first person who got boots on the ground won the race, but I hadn’t heard the boots on the ground bit, so I got down first and watched Bianca Gascoigne coming down, put her feet on the ground, and I lost.”
She also spoke about the dangers of writing a column or presenting her radio show: “It’s very dangerous now if you are writing or you are talking on a radio show such as my three hours on a Sunday. You feel that almost anything you say can get you cancelled.”