Prologue

A Family’s Secret

On Friday 16 August 2019, Boris Johnson hosted a dinner at Chequers for his father’s seventy-ninth birthday. Stanley Johnson was understandably proud that his son could entertain his family at the prime minister’s official Buckinghamshire country estate. Elected by the members of the governing Conservative Party nearly four weeks earlier, Boris had fulfilled his childhood ambition to become the nation’s leader. As the staff served dinner in the Jacobean wood-panelled dining room, Stanley’s familiar bonhomie and the new prime minister’s joviality could not conceal the tension. At the very moment when the famed Johnson clan should have been rejoicing, the family’s relationships were splintering.

Just over a year earlier, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary, Boris and his wife Marina had left Carlton Gardens, the minister’s formal St James’s residence, in separate cars. After twenty-five years of marriage, they had agreed to divorce. Some were surprised that the marriage had lasted that long. After several humiliating exposés of Boris’s adultery, Marina had tried to repair their relationship but those efforts were wrecked by his most recent affair with Carrie Symonds, the thirty-year-old Tory Party communications chief. Too many lies, betrayals, confessions and apologies had been offered over the years to make any credible amends. ‘He’s a shit. He’s utterly selfish. He’s destroyed the family,’ exclaimed one of the Johnson clan. Those raw emotions were barely concealed during Stanley’s birthday celebrations.

Rachel and Jo Johnson, Boris’s younger sister and brother, the latter an MP, had both come with their spouses and children. (Leo, the fourth sibling, had not returned from holiday in Greece.) To Stanley’s disappointment, Boris’s and Marina’s four children had rejected the invitation to the party. Not only were they angry about their grandfather shaking Carrie’s hand at a public meeting about the environment, but they also refused to speak to their father. On top of that resentment was the friction between Stanley’s older children and his new family, one that had simmered for years but only intensified in the wake of Boris’s latest achievements. In recent months Jenny, Stanley’s second wife, had openly denounced Boris and had even forbidden him to visit Nethercote, the Johnsons’ family farm on Exmoor. Boris’s brother and sister were understandably surprised that Jenny, an intelligent woman, and Max, her son, had agreed to come to Chequers. Stanley tried to brush the troubles aside and, to explain her presence at Chequers to the three older Johnson children, Jenny said that Stanley had insisted that she join his birthday celebrations and under duress she had agreed.

During all the media appearances over the previous years, the striking similarity of appearance, mannerisms and jokey tone shared by Stanley and Boris would suggest that the two men were closely bonded. Few people noticed during the Tory party’s leadership campaign the cold stares Boris shot as he walked past his father, invariably standing in the front row. The ambiguity of Stanley seeking his son’s recognition was partly explained by Boris’s first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen. Boris’s worst habits, she discovered, were inherited from his father. But even Allegra, after their eight-year relationship, was unaware of the real reason for Boris’s deep anger towards Stanley. Only Charlotte Wahl, Boris’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, could explain her son’s cold stare. It reflected the family’s great secret.

Stanley, the star after twenty days in the jungle of the 2017 series of I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!, could not understand how his son had become prime minister. Earlier in 2019, he said that Boris, despite a masterly understanding from Pericles about risk and power, was not personally ambitious and never took risks. Looking across at his son during the dinner, Stanley imagined that in life everything happens spontaneously without much forethought. In his self-centred approach to life, Stanley misinterpreted much about the world, not least what his son had learnt from his father’s mistakes.

As usual, Boris’s enthusiasm and jokes during the Chequers dinner hid his own feelings. Secretive and untrusting, his accomplished performance concealed his vulnerability to stress. Compartmentalisation has been a key to his public success. Few outsiders could imagine any anxiety provoking an occasional meltdown. An extra gear in his life, fuelled by defiance, set him apart from his contemporaries. Ruthless ambition had allowed him to exploit the natural reserve of his competitors. Any sadness about his children’s absence was cancelled out by his triumph. ‘It’s all about Boris,’ many of those working with him would frequently assert. But even for his family that truism merely highlighted the enigma. Did anyone, they wondered, know the real Boris? They agreed he was a loner with few close friends. Among those few had been Marina, his anchor and consigliere, and the ghost at the feast. ‘Marina’s Magic’ had held the Johnson clan together for years, especially more recently at the family parties in Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s official country home. Boris’s disloyalty to Marina had generated intense hostility towards him and deep sympathy for her.

Marina blamed Stanley for her marriage’s collapse and refused to speak to him. Like Allegra, she said that Boris’s adultery and his other misdemeanours mirrored his father’s habits. The same unhappiness Stanley had spread among his own children, she said, was being repeated by Boris towards his four children with Marina. ‘Like father like son’ echoed across the Chequers dining room.

To understand the new prime minister required forensic examination of his relations with his father, both as a child and as an adult. Naturally, the fracture of their close relations was concealed from the public. United by intelligence, charm and their blond hair, the Johnsons were lauded by the media as a dynasty of achievers although a profile written two years earlier by Prue White in The Times had, after focusing on Stanley’s successful appearance on I’m a Celebrity, concluded ‘All his wit, charm and self-deprecation were a smokescreen for narcissistic, rapacious ambition.’ Stanley gave the impression that he was never hurt by the truth. That was an illusion. The seamless friendly competition generated by Stanley among his eldest children, endlessly described by the media, had been both remarkable and destructive. The first fractures of their relationships had appeared many years earlier but Brexit had become the public lightning rod for their disagreements.

Rachel was openly opposed to Boris’s Brexit campaign and her husband had rarely missed an opportunity to express his dislike of his brother-in-law. By contrast, although Jo, the quietest and most intelligent of Stanley’s six children, was a committed Europhile, he remained a loyal MP and minister in Boris’s new government. His wife, Amelia Gentleman, a Guardian journalist, opposed Boris but she had remained silent in public. Likewise, Leo was a Europhile displeased by Boris’s leadership of the Brexit campaign, but he also remained diplomatically silent. The major surprise was Stanley’s stance. Unlike his children, the patriarch of a previously united family had abandoned his lifelong passion for a united Europe to share the limelight with his son. Anxious to stay close to the flame, he had switched from an ardent European to a Eurosceptic.

Amid so many conflicting emotions, especially the mix of Brexit and Marina, no Johnson family gathering could escape a meltdown argument, and that evening was no different.

Looking across the darkened fields at the end of the meal, Stanley was naturally proud that his eldest son was prime minister. His own political ambitions had largely failed but he enjoyed basking in his son’s triumph. He had eagerly accepted the opportunity to stay the night at Chequers with all his family. The campaigner, adventurer and celebrity could not miss the chance to sleep under the same roof as Britain’s past leaders and see the magnificent house’s remarkable collection of paintings and artefacts, especially those from the Cromwellian era.

At breakfast the following morning, Boris expected everyone to stay for Stanley’s birthday lunch. Instead, Rachel and Jo had other long-standing arrangements and departed with their families. To those who remained, their departure appeared ungracious. Suddenly, it was rather quiet. At lunchtime on the sunlit lawn, Boris was as usual in good spirits, pleased when the staff brought a birthday cake. After the traditional good wishes, Stanley blew out the candles and enjoyed the cake. Soon after, he too left.

One year later, on the eve of Stanley’s eightieth birthday, the unforeseen circumstances of Boris’s premiership had severely tested the nation and the Johnson family. During 2020, as the prime minister battled to save the nation from the Covid pandemic and bankruptcy, the family tensions simmering at Chequers erupted into an irreconcilable feud. Throughout extraordinary roller-coaster weeks in the spring, as Boris faced the possibility of his own death from the Covid virus and the birth of his sixth child, the tensions did not abate. The four older Johnson children had become more bewildered about their father’s second marriage, just as they all queried Boris’s relationship with his fiancée. As Boris struggled to protect 67 million Britons from disaster, his own family – still heralded by many as an enviable model of love, laughter and glory – was disintegrating in the shadows.

The question asked during those distressing summer months as Britain struggled to return to normality was whether the unseen collapse of the Johnson dynasty was a metaphor for Johnson’s premiership. Besieged by critics that he had ignored the early warnings about the pandemic, that he had failed to oversee his ministers’ chaotic mismanagement of the government’s response, and finally that he ignored his own warnings and caught the virus himself, he emerged hollow-eyed from illness to complaints that he had lost energy and authority. Some of the more detailed complaints have proven to be unfounded, but the long-standing rebuke about his laziness, disorganisation and lack of attention to detail have come to haunt him. Some blame his divorce from Marina, who was ‘unafraid to dispense home truths’, for the absence of an anchor and reality in his life. Contrary to Stanley’s imagination, Marina had held the dynasty together, and the prime minister’s fate was determined by both his loyalty and disloyalty to his friends and family.