Boris Johnson - Parental Origins, Education and Marriages

Parental Origins, Education and Marriages

Johnson is the eldest of the four children of Stanley Johnson, a former Conservative Member of the European Parliament and employee of the European Commission and World Bank, and the painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl (née Fawcett), the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, a barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights. His younger siblings are Rachel Johnson, a writer and journalist; Jo Johnson, Assistant Government Whip and Conservative MP for Orpington; and Leo Johnson, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers specialising in Sustainability.

Johnson's maternal great-grandparents were palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe and translator H. T. Lowe-Porter. On his father's side, Johnson is a great-grandson of Ali Kemal Bey, a liberal Turkish journalist and the Interior Minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was killed during the Turkish War of Independence. During World War I, Johnson's paternal grandfather and great-aunt were recognised as British subjects and took their grandmother's maiden name of Johnson. In reference to his cosmopolitan ancestry, Johnson has described himself as a "one-man melting pot"—with a combination of Muslims, Jews, and Christians comprising his great-grandparentage. His father's maternal grandmother, Marie Louise de Pfeffel, was a granddaughter of Prince Paul of Württemberg through his relationship with a German actress. Through Prince Paul, Johnson is a descendant of King George II and, through George's great-great-great grandfather James I/VI, a descendant of all of the previous British royal houses. Johnson is an 8th cousin of David Cameron.

Johnson was born in New York City, but his family returned to Britain soon afterward, as his mother had yet to take her Oxford University final exams. Johnson's sister Rachel was born a year later. As a child, Johnson suffered from severe deafness and had to undergo several operations to have grommets inserted in his ears. He was reported to have been rather quiet as a child. He was educated at the European School in Brussels, at Ashdown House School and at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar. He read Classics at Oxford, as a Brackenbury scholar and was elected President of the Oxford Union at his second attempt. Frank Luntz and Radosław Sikorski have claimed Johnson touted himself as a supporter of the Social Democratic Party, then a dominant faction in the university, as a strategy to win the Union presidency, although Johnson denies that he was more than the SDP's preferred candidate. Along with David Cameron, George Osborne and Radosław Sikorski, he was a member of Oxford's Bullingdon Club, a student dining society known for destroying restaurant dining rooms and paying for the repairs afterwards. He graduated from Balliol College with a 2:1.

In 1987, he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen; the marriage was dissolved in 1993. Later that year, he married Marina Wheeler, a barrister and daughter of journalist and broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler and his Sikh wife, Dip Singh. The Wheeler and Johnson families have known each other for decades, and Marina Wheeler was at the European School in Brussels at the same time as her future husband. They have two daughters—Lara Lettice (born 1993) and Cassia Peaches (born 1997)—and two sons—Milo Arthur (born 1995) and Theodore Apollo (born 1999). Johnson and his family live in Islington, North London. Johnson's stepmother, Jenny, the second wife of his father Stanley, is the stepdaughter of Teddy Sieff, the former chairman of Marks & Spencer.