Boris Johnson Totally Explained

Everything about Boris Johnson totally explained

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, MP (born 19 June 1964) is a British politician and the current Mayor of London; he's also a journalist and author, formerly serving as editor of The Spectator. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Henley in 2001, and was the Shadow Minister for Higher Education until the announcement of his intention to stand in the 2008 London mayoral election. He assumed the post of Mayor of London on May 4, 2008.

Early life

Johnson is the oldest of the four children of Stanley Johnson, a former Conservative MEP and employee of the European Commission and World Bank, and his first wife, painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, a prominent barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights. Stanley Johnson also has two children by his second wife. On his father's side Johnson is great-grandson of Ali Kemal Bey, a liberal Turkish journalist and interior minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence. During World War I, Boris's 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.
Johnson was born in New York City, New York, USA, but his family returned to England soon afterwards as his mother had yet to take her Oxford finals. Johnson's sister Rachel was born a year later. As a child, Boris Johnson suffered from severe deafness and had to undergo several operations to have grommets inserted in his ears, and was reportedly rather quiet as a child., Ashdown House and then at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar. He read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford as a Brackenbury scholar, and was elected President of the Oxford Union, at his second attempt. Frank Luntz and Radek Sikorski In 1987 he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen but the marriage lasted less than a year, finally being dissolved in 1993. Later that same year he married Marina Wheeler, a barrister, the daughter of journalist and broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler and his Sikh Indian 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 sons (Theodore Apollo and Milo Arthur) and two daughters (Lara Lettice and Cassia Peaches).

Journalism and historiography

Upon graduating from Oxford with a 2:1 he lasted a week as a management consultant at L.E.K. Consulting ("Try as I might, I couldn't look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious"), before becoming a trainee reporter for The Times. Within a year he was sacked for falsifying a quotation from his godfather, Colin Lucas, later vice-chancellor of Oxford University. After a short time as a writer for the Wolverhampton Express & Star, he joined The Daily Telegraph in 1987 as leader and feature writer, and from 1989 to 1994 was the paper's European Community correspondent. He served as assistant editor from 1994 to 1999. His association with The Spectator began as political columnist from 1994 to 1995. In 1999 he became editor of The Spectator, where he stayed until December 2005 upon being appointed Shadow Minister for Higher Education.
   He wrote an autobiographical account of his experience of the 2001 election campaign Friends, Voters, Countrymen: Jottings on the Stump. He is also author of three collections of journalism, Johnson's Column, Lend Me Your Ears and Have I Got Views For You. His first novel was Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2004, and his next book will be The New British Revolution, though he's put publication on hold until after the London Mayoral election. He was nominated in 2004 for a British Academy Television Award, and has attracted several unofficial fan clubs and sites. His official website and blog started in September 2004.
   Johnson is a popular historian and his first documentary series, The Dream of Rome, comparing the Roman Empire and the modern-day European Union, was broadcast in 2006.
   Boris currently lives in West London.

Political career

In 2001, Johnson was elected MP for Henley-on-Thames, succeeding Michael Heseltine, having previously been defeated in Clwyd South in the 1997 general election. In 2004 he was appointed to the front bench as Shadow Minister for the Arts in a small reshuffle resulting from the resignation of the Shadow Home Affairs Spokesman, Nick Hawkins. He was also from November 2003 vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, with an emphasis on campaigning.
Johnson was dismissed from these high-profile posts in November 2004 over accusations that he lied to Michael Howard about a four-year extramarital affair with Petronella Wyatt, The Spectator's New York correspondent and former deputy editor. Johnson derided these allegations as "an inverted pyramid of piffle", but Howard sacked Johnson because he believed press reports showed Johnson had lied, rather than for the affair itself.
He was appointed Shadow Minister for Higher Education on 9 December 2005 by new Conservative Leader David Cameron, and resigned as editor of The Spectator soon afterwards. On 2 April 2006 it was alleged in the News of the World that Johnson had had another extramarital affair, this time with Times Higher Education Supplement journalist Anna Fazackerley. The video shows him emerging from her flat and waving to her in a taxi. Subsequently, in a speech at the University of Exeter concerning student finance, he allegedly made comical remarks about his gratitude to the audience for not "raising other issues" during the talk, which may have been a reference to the allegations. A report in The Times stated that Cameron regarded the possible affair as a private matter, and that Johnson wouldn't lose his job over it.

Higher education

As Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Johnson became responsible for the Conservative's stance on university top-up fees.
Johnson stood for the February 2006 election of Rector at the University of Edinburgh, after receiving seven times more nominations than needed to stand. His presence as candidate caused an unprecedented turn-out and sparked an "Anyone but Boris" campaign. Protests included having drinks thrown over him at his first of two visits to the student body. Johnson eventually polled third of four, with 2,123 votes, behind 3,052 votes for journalist Magnus Linklater and 3,597 for Green Party MSP Mark Ballard.

Conservative candidate for London Mayor

On 16 July 2007, after several days of speculation and media interest, Johnson announced he was a potential Conservative candidate for the London mayoral election in 2008. At the same time he resigned as shadow Higher Education spokesman, but remained an MP, and according to The Independent enjoyed the "tacit support" of David Cameron. George Jones, political editor for The Daily Telegraph reported that the Evening Standard quoted Johnson as saying, "The opportunity is too great and the prize too wonderful to miss... the chance to represent London and speak for Londoners." His election campaign was launched in Edmonton on 31 March 2008, when David Cameron, introducing Johnson, commented "I don't always agree with him but I respect the fact that he's absolutely his own man."
   Johnson's outspokenness both as a politician and as a journalist and editor of The Spectator has led to his association with a number of controversies (see below). Some were brief flashes in the pan, while others were seized upon by opponents during his campaign for Mayor of London.
   On 1 May 2008 in the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative journalist Simon Heffer found Johnson an unsuitable proposition as Mayor. "Mr Johnson isn't a politician. He is an act", Heffer wrote. He criticised Johnson's scattergun attitude to everything he does and "the charm of doing nothing properly". Another conservative journalist, Peregrine Worsthorne on The First Post website, was similarly dismissive. He also thought Johnson couldn't be serious about anything and Worsthorne was gloomy about Johnson's potential impact on the Cameron project; "should he actually win, the Tory party could be in serious trouble", because of the implication that a Cameron government might be incompetent too.
   The British National Party advocated Johnson as their second preferential choice in the Mayoral election in 2008. On the BBC's Question Time pre-election live Mayoral election debate between the three leading candidates, when questioned on the BNP's call for support as a second choice vote, Johnson categorically stated he didn't want a single vote from any BNP supporter. As it turned out, the number of BNP votes cast in the Mayoral election wouldn't have swung the second preference count to such an extent that Johnson could have lost anyway.
   Johnson's candidacy was the subject of international interest. Germany's Der Spiegel and America's National Public Radio reported the race, both quoting Johnson as saying "if you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts, and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase.", without however giving a source for this; the BBC has quoted the same statement by him from his 2004 campaign trail.

Mayor of London

Mayoral victory

A few minutes before midnight on the evening of 2 May 2008, Boris Johnson was confirmed as having won the London Mayor election, beating the incumbent Ken Livingstone. He won on second preference votes, as he didn't receive enough first preference votes to win outright; 1,168,738 votes as against Livingstone's 1,028,966.

Staff appointments

Johnson appointed Richard Barnes as his Deputy Mayor on 6 May 2008, as well as appointing the following to newly devolved offices; Ian Clement as Deputy Mayor for Government Relations, Kit Malthouse as Deputy Mayor for Policing and Ray Lewis as Deputy Mayor for Young People.
The Mayor also appointed Munira Mirza as his cultural adviser and Nick Boles, the founder of Policy Exchange, as Chief of Staff. Sir Simon Milton has become Senior Adviser for Planning.

Alcohol ban

On 7 May 2008, Johnson unveiled plans to ban the consumption of alcohol on the London transport network, effective from 1 June.

Forensic Audit Panel

The formation of the Forensic Audit Panel was announced on 8 May 2008, which would monitor and investigate financial management at the London Development Agency and the Greater London Authority. The Panel would be headed by Patience Wheatcroft, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph.
Johnson's announcement was criticised by Labour for the perceived politicisation of this nominally independent panel (previously the GLA had investigated allegations of corruption itself). Wheatcroft is a life-long supporter of the Conservative Party and three of the four remaining panel members also have very close links to the Conservatives: Stephen Greenhalgh (Conservative Leader of Hammersmith and Fulham Council), Patrick Frederick (Chairman of Conservative Business Relations for South East England and Southern London) and Edward Lister (Conservative Leader of Wandsworth Council). In an open letter, Labour GLA member John Biggs challenged whether the appointment of these key Johnson allies to the panel - "to dig dirt on Ken Livingstone" - was "an appropriate use of public funds" .

Television appearances

Have I Got News for You

Johnson has appeared on the British television programme Have I Got News for You four times as a guest presenter and three times as a panellist. The tabloid press, before he became an MP, tagged him as the show's star, even though he'd then appeared only twice on a programme that had run for ten years. He has also taken part in the similar Radio 4 programme, The News Quiz.
   On his first HIGNFY appearance, in 1998, Ian Hislop chided Johnson over his previous association with fraudster Darius Guppy (see below). Johnson later claimed the show was "fixed", though he retracted the comment when invited back a year later. When asked why he'd come back, Johnson replied to the delight of the audience that it was "basically for the money."
   By his third appearance, Johnson had been elected to Parliament. He started by getting his own name "wrong", saying, "my name is Boris Johnson" and then being corrected by the host, Angus Deayton, who proceeded to quote his full birth name, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He was then subjected to a surprise Mastermind parody round on which he was forced to answer questions about his party's leader, Iain Duncan Smith. Despite claiming to be an admirer and supporter of his leader, Johnson proceeded to get no questions correct, whilst constantly questionning the need for such a round. He also admitted during this show he'd forgotten the title of his own book as he was writing it.
   Johnson later became one of the first guest hosts for the show, his opening remarks being: "When I first appeared on this show I complained that the whole thing was scripted and fully rehearsed. I'd now like to complain in the strongest possible terms, that it isn't." He initially promised Paul Merton a coconut instead of a point; Johnson then retracted the offer but Merton insisted on a coconut. At the end, a stage hand brought in a bag of them, giving Johnson a chance to say, "Coconuts, from the party that keeps its promises!" Johnson kept a chaotic show, frequently forgetting panellists' names, positions and losing answers, which caused the usually deadpan Merton to often laugh out of pure disbelief. He also opinionated his becoming leader of the Conservative Party was as likely as his "being locked in a disused fridge". Merton cheerfully told him, "These things do happen."
   In 2004, Johnson was nominated for a BAFTA Television Award in the entertainment category for his performance on the show in 2003. Johnson returned to front Have I Got News for You in November 2005. He admitted on the show that he once tried to snort cocaine, but sneezed and failed. He also hosted HIGNFY's Christmas special on 15 December 2006, his fourth appearance as host. Full, unedited versions of the shows can be found on the HIGNFY: Best of the Guest Presenters DVDs, on the "Full Boris" bonus disc, which features the entire uncut studio recordings.
   On the DVD commentary of The Very Best of Have I Got News for You, Merton and Hislop affectionately refer to Johnson as Wodehousian, and stated that "every time he's on it gets better".

Top Gear

Johnson has appeared on television motoring show Top Gear as a "star in a reasonably priced car" (one of the show's features). He set a time of 1m 56s in the Suzuki Liana, finishing nine places from the bottom before they changed car. While nearing the end of his timed lap, he failed to realise that he'd accidentally pressed the horn with his arm. After hearing the noise he looked around puzzled and said, "Who hooted at me?"

The Dream of Rome

Johnson presented a BBC TV series titled The Dream of Rome, which questioned how ancient Rome managed to unite Europe in a way the modern European Union has failed to. A book published by HarperCollins followed the series.

Persona

Johnson is one of the most recognisable figures in British politics — partly attributable to his trademark unruly hairstyle. He is one of few British politicians identifiable by his first name alone. Reportedly, fearing that this familiarity made him more likeable and was helping his chances during the London Mayoral Campaign, Labour MP Tessa Jowell set up a 'swearbox' where any campaign member referring to him as 'Boris' would pay a fine. Jowell herself denied these claims.
   Johnson has been a frequent target for satirists. The magazine Private Eye pictured him on the front cover of issues 1120 (26 November 2004) and 1156 (14 April 2006). He has featured regularly in its cartoon strip (currently called Dave Snooty and his Pals) as "Boris the Menace" (cf. Dennis the Menace). Online, the news satire website DeadBrain has published over 25 articles mentioning Johnson, and the website Backing Boris spearheads a lighthearted campaign to advance his cause.
   He has shown himself to be outspoken on issues which are treated by some as belonging to the realms of political correctness.
   Johnson made the following comments about Islam in his Spectator column shortly after the July 7 bombings in 2005:
In Friends, Voters, Countrymen (2001), Johnson wrote that "if gay marriage was OK - and I was uncertain on the issue - then I saw no reason in principle why a union shouldn't be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog."
   Johnson is known for his love of cycling and regularly cycles to work. He has been the victim of several bike thefts and has expressed his desire to plant "decoy bicycles throughout Islington and send Navy Seals in through the windows of thieves".

Controversies

Stuart Collier

Johnson was criticised in 1995 when a recording of a telephone conversation made in 1990 was made public in which he's heard agreeing to supply to a former schoolmate, Darius Guppy, the address of the News of the World journalist Stuart Collier. Guppy wished to have Collier beaten up for his knowledge of Guppy's failed insurance fraud. Collier wasn't attacked, but Johnson didn't alert the police and the incident only became public knowledge when the conversation was summarised in the Daily Mail. Johnson retained his job at the Telegraph but was reprimanded by its editor Max Hastings. Despite this admission in 2003, Johnson received no indication from the police that he was being investigated for theft until 2008, leading supporters of Johnson to express suspicion that the investigation coincided with his candidacy for the position of London Mayor. "This is a monumental waste of time," said Johnson.

People of Liverpool

On 16 October 2004, The Spectator carried an unsigned editorial comment criticising a perceived trend to mawkish sentimentality by the public. Using British hostage Kenneth Bigley as an example, the editorial claimed the inhabitants of Bigley's home city of Liverpool were wallowing in a "vicarious victimhood"; that many Liverpudlians had a "deeply unattractive psyche"; and that they refused to accept responsibility for "drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground" during the Hillsborough disaster, a contention at odds with the findings of the Taylor Report. The editorial closed with: "In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder."
Although Johnson hadn't written the piece (journalist Simon Heffer later said he "had a hand" in it), he accepted responsibility for its publication. The Conservative leader at the time, Michael Howard (a supporter of Liverpool FC), condemned the editorial, saying "I think what was said in The Spectator was nonsense from beginning to end", and sent Johnson on a tour of contrition to the city. There, in numerous interviews and public appearances, Johnson defended the editorial's thesis (that the deaths of figures such as Bigley and Diana, Princess of Wales, were over-sentimentalised); but he apologised for the article's wording and for using Liverpool and Bigley's death as examples, saying "I think the article was too trenchantly expressed but we were trying to make a point about sentimentality". Michael Howard resisted calls to dismiss Johnson over the Bigley affair, but dismissed him the next month over the Wyatt revelations.

Papua New Guinea

Johnson's journalism and public speaking is much given to overblown metaphor, and a 2006 column likening Tory leadership disputes to "Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing" was criticised in Papua New Guinea. The nation's High Commissioner invited him to visit the country and see for himself, while remarking that his comments might mean he was refused a visa. Johnson suggested he'd add Papua New Guinea to his global apology itinerary, and said he was sure the people there "lived lives of blameless bourgeois domesticity like the rest of us". His defence was conclusive: "My remarks were inspired by a Time Life book I've which does indeed show relatively recent photos of Papua New Guinean tribes engaged in warfare, and I'm fairly certain that cannibalism was involved."

Portsmouth

In April 2007 Johnson was called upon to resign by the MPs for the city of Portsmouth after claiming in a column for GQ that the city was "one of the most depressed towns in Southern England, a place that's arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs".

Allegations of racism

Two days after Boris Johnson's candidacy for Mayor of London took a six point poll lead over Ken Livingstone in a YouGov survey published by the Daily Telegraph, Doreen Lawrence, mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, said that he'd 'destroy London's unity', adding that 'once people read his views, there's no way he's going to get the support of any people in the black community'. She was referring especially to the occasion on which Johnson, as a journalist in 1999, accused the Macpherson Inquiry, which reported on police racism following the Lawrence murder, of 'hysteria', adding that the "recommendation that the law might be changed so as to allow prosecution for racist language or behaviour 'other than in a public place'" was akin to "Ceausescu's Romania".
   The Conservative London Assembly candidate for Bexley and Bromley and former Conservative candidate for mayor of Lewisham, James Cleverly, another black Londoner, rejected Lawrence's criticisms.
   In a piece in the Evening Standard on 6 August 2007, the journalist Andrew Gilligan responded to the allegations saying how 'outrageous – indeed Orwellian – it's to attack a man as a destroyer of racial harmony, one of the most serious charges you can lay, simply on the basis that he refuses to sign up for every dot and comma of a report of which she approves. While condemning the "grotesque failures" in the Lawrence case which "may well have originated in racism," Boris was far from the only person to oppose that particular Macpherson recommendation. Labour MPs opposed it, too. So did the Government, clearly, because they didn’t implement it.'
   These remarks were followed by criticism from two black Labour London MPs, Diane Abbott and Dawn Butler, who criticised a column written by Johnson in 2002, saying he'd used "most offensive language of the colonial past", showing "that the Tory party is riddled with racial prejudice". In the article in question, written to satirise the Prime Minister's visit to Congo, Johnson mocked "Supertone" (Tony Blair) for his brief visits to world trouble spots, bringing peace to the world while the UK deteriorated; Blair would arrive as "the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief", just as "it is said the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies".
   Johnson's campaign team rejected suggestions that their candidate might be prejudiced, insisting that he "loathes racism in all its forms". However, journalist Rod Liddle said that Johnson has used the word "piccaninnies" on another occasion to refer to black Africans. Greater London analyst and director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, Dr. Tony Travers, has written that "There is no way to dress up expressions such as "piccaninnies'" and "watermelon smiles" to take them within a million miles of acceptable."
   At an Evening Standard debate on January 21, 2008, Johnson apologised for these remarks, while insisting that they were taken out of context:

I do feel very sad that people have been so offended by these words and I'm sorry that I've caused this offence. But if you look at the article as written they really don't bear the construction that you're putting on them. I feel very strongly that this is something which is simply not in my heart. I'm absolutely 100 per cent anti-racist, I despise and loathe racism".

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