Children, it is not known exactly how many, from three marriages and innumerable adventures. Women, multiple, and some of them at the same time. And as for friends, the same can be said of Boris Johnson as of England, in Lord Palmerston’s famous phrase: he has no permanent friends, only eternal interests.
Wives, girlfriends and colleagues can feel betrayed by the conservative politician, a man who has his way. Voters could also rightly complain (although there are some who still idolize it), about the lies about Brexit and partygate, the corruption, dealings and racketeers, the relegation of honesty to the storage room. But to Caesar what is Caesar’s: with his father and one of his brothers he is a prodigy of loyalty.
Loyalty or nepotism? In the list of one hundred nominees to receive the official title of sir or knight, his last wish as prime minister (there have already been two more since he was expelled from Downing Street), is his father, Stanley Johnson, 82, an MP. European after the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community in 1973, one of the first British civil servants in Brussels, a former Tory MP, former World Bank employee and author of several books on population, demography and the environment.
“Nominating your father to be king sir is typical Johnson, an example of the kind of unscrupulous man he is,” Labor leader Keir Starmer has denounced. Even his sister Rachel (journalist) admits that “the decision has not generated a flood of popular enthusiasm, let’s put it that way.” Although it is also true, she adds, that he would not be the person who least deserves honor among all those who have chosen Boris, and other prime ministers, because there are many mediocrity ”.
Stanley (soon perhaps Sir Stanley) Johnson isn’t as controversial a figure as his son, but he also has a few skeletons in his closet. He of breed he comes to the greyhound. Two years ago he was accused by a Conservative MP of hitting him as hard as she could on the butt, and by a young political journalist of groping her during the 2019 Tory convention. And according to one biography, his late wife Charlotte had to be admitted to the hospital after being beaten in a domestic violence incident in the 1970s. To which Boris’s father has responded that “it was an isolated event that he deeply regrets.
If Johnson Jr. considered that during confinement there were some rules for him and others for others, the same can be said of Johnson Sr. If Johnson Jr. alleged that the illegal parties in Downing Street were actually “work meetings”, Johnson Sr. traveled to Greece when it was prohibited to do so except for circumstances of force majeure, on the pretext of refurbishing the house he has in that country “to rent it in the summer and make sure it met all the sanitary requirements demanded by the pandemic.” The dynasty has never lacked imagination or a tough face, depending on how you look at things.
Stanley Johnson was born in Cornwall, the grandson of Ali Kamal Bey, one of the last Home Ministers of the Ottoman Empire, assassinated in 1922 during the Turkish War of Independence. He campaigned for the permanence in the European Union but in favor of Boris. When Brexit came true against his wishes, he took advantage of the fact that his mother had been French to apply for French nationality, which was granted to him by the Macron government for his “obvious cultural, professional, economic or family ties”, despite the fact that In theory, the right to obtain it by kinship is lost after living more than fifty years abroad without having claimed it, as was the case. The Johnsons usually land on their feet and the exceptions fit them like a glove.
“It is a small gesture on my part – he said – to show that I am still deeply European despite the fact that the United Kingdom has left the EU. I am and always will be. It is one thing not to be in the single market and the customs union, another not to be in Europe”.
The decision to accept or reject Stanley Johnson’s nomination for sir rests with current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who is under great pressure to say no. Boris has already managed to get his brother Jo his and the Russian oligarch Evgueni Lebedev into the House of Lords. What less than to make a gentleman of his father. Family, first.