Stanley Johnson: The faltering rise of the ‘first father’

Following allegations of sexual harassment against Johnson Sr, Sean O’Grady looks back at the life of the prime minister’s father, and wonders whether he could ever be rehabilitated back into politics – and the daytime TV slots he so loves

Stanley Johnson speaking at an event in Westminster calling for a ban on trophy hunting (PA)

Last night, just for kicks (and because I’m paid to), I watched a video of Stanley Johnson chatting about the environment for 32 minutes on YouTube. It was recorded in 2012, and it was an impressive performance. With the strong physical resemblance, the same taste for a side quip, the similar fruity posh accent, slight stutter and expansive hands, it was like watching a more expert, knowledgeable, intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable version of BoJo.

Stanley Patrick Johnson, born 1940 – or StanJo, as perhaps he ought to be called – is a wild Europhile and a Remainer (or was, until the referendum – now he thinks we have to “make Brexit work”). In many respects, Stanley is the kind of liberal Tory that’s virtually been extirpated from his son’s populist party, and he genuinely knows his stuff on the climate science and all the rest of it. He wears his deep knowledge and expertise in such matters lightly, but listening to him reminisce about his six decades as an environmentalist, I realised that Stanley is the real thing, in the way that Boris isn’t (on anything). He may be an old buffer, but he’s not a bluffer.

While Boris was making lame jokes about polar bears and writing silly climate-change-denying columns in The Spectator and the Telegraph, his dad was doggedly at work writing pamphlets and manoeuvering directives through the interminable bureaucracies of the United Nations and the European Union. While Boris was on the rubber-chicken circuit trying to get the party leadership just because it was there, Pops was at the coal face, so to speak, trying to get the Chinese to build fewer fossil-fuel power stations.

Erm, I wonder whether we got the wrong Johnson as prime minister?

It was like watching a more expert, knowledgeable, intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable version of BoJo

Then again, the attractive qualities of Johnson Sr have to be balanced against some more distasteful, and indeed disgraceful, recent revelations. At 81, you might try to argue that Stanley Johnson is a product of his times, of his class (comfortably off yeoman sheep-farmer on Exmoor), and of his party’s unreconstructed attitudes. Public school (Sherborne), Oxford, a variety of nice well-paid jobs that took him around the world, minor celebrity, a life of some ease… He is a “type”.

But not every old boy of his generation sees fit to turn up at the Conservative conference bar and slap a female candidate as hard as he possibly can on the backside, declaring, by way of a joke, “Oh, Romsey, you’ve got a lovely seat.” It was in 2003, but no matter, really. Casting around for prominent figures in the Stanley Johnson demographic, one can’t quite imagine Ming Campbell, say, or Trevor McDonald or Michael Caine, indulging in a “friendly” bottom assault/slap/grope and then making a loud wisecrack. Humiliation is humiliation in any decade, and age isn’t an excuse.

Caroline Nokes’s story, told to an appalled Beth Rigby on Sky News, prompted a female journalist, Ailbhe Rea, to come forward and complain about Stanley’s “handsy” ways at the 2019 conference. So far that’s it. Boris Johnson has had a rough week, but his father hasn’t fared much better. The few green sinecures he can still call his own are in jeopardy (which will hurt), and he’ll maybe find himself a less frequent guest on the breakfast telly sofas, which are very much his milieu. Not to mention what he’s had to explain to his second wife, Jennifer, to whom he has been wed for 40 years.

For his part, a rather broken-looking Stanley was seen shuffling around outside his house, claiming: “I have no recollection of Caroline Nokes, and no idea what she was talking about.” Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition wants the police set on him.

Boris Johnson sits next to his father Stanley on the Bakerloo line after bumping into him by chance on the Tube (PA)

Stanley doesn’t offer much beyond banalities when asked about his private life and his famous family, and certainly not about the allegation, contained in the biography of Boris by Tom Bower, that he once hit his first wife, Charlotte Fawcett, so hard that he broke her nose. She suffered from poor mental health, and the couple finally divorced in 1974, when Boris was 15. They’d met at Oxford, married very young, and had four of Stanley’s six children together – Alexander, aka Boris (1964), Rachel (1965), Leo (1967) and Jo (1971).

The famous four have two half-siblings by their father and his second wife, Jennifer Kidd – Julia and Max. Kidd is eight years Stanley’s junior, and had been a widow for three years when she married him in 1981. She is a member of the Sieff family, of Marks & Spencer fame. It’s a little disputed, but Boris may have beaten his dad 7-6 in the reproduction premier league. So far. They do seem a competitive family.

In any case, there’s certainly little about domestic violence in Johnson Sr’s anecdote-heavy autobiographies, Stanley, I Presume? and Stanley, I Resume. One cannot know what really happened, and the accusations about the first Mrs Johnson hang in the air. It’s fair to say that his private personality might be a little different to his outwardly jolly persona and nice smile. Sounds familiar, actually.

Stanley’s sexism is more usually casual, or incidental. For example, a few years ago, when Boris won the mayoralty and he was wheeled on for a TV interview as “first father”, as he likes to style himself, he described the scene at City Hall, incriminating himself without much pressure: “So there I am, being interviewed by the delicious Emily Maitlis in some election-night programme with the not so delicious Polly Toynbee. Why ‘not so delicious’? Because she was rude to Boris in The Guardian. I told Polly that calling Boris a sociopath was extremely impolite and probably legally actionable. Polly replied: ‘I’m not going to talk to you, you’re Boris’s father.’ I wanted to pursue the issue but Emily Maitlis whisked her off for an interview.”

Delicious.

In purely career terms, son has obviously far exceeded father, but Stanley has had a life lived as well as most, and has been much more of an adventurer than Boris. He’s even won a prize for poetry. He’s campaigned with Brigitte Bardot on animal welfare – and all too predictably, he sent her a note asking her out to lunch. (Her secretary replied that it “would not be necessary”.) He’s written some passable novels, a couple of volumes of memoirs, and scholarly articles and books on green issues.

Unlike his boy wonder/blunder, Stanley has at least been remarkably consistent in his political passions. He always says he thinks Boris is much smarter than him, and that he takes no notice of his fatherly advice (“He is far too busy to talk to his father”), yet there’s just a tiny smidgen of regret you can detect when he trots the lines out. They don’t seem that close.

Stanley Johnson and Carrie Symonds at an anti-whaling protest outside the Japanese embassy in central London (PA)

As an environmental campaigner, he was there at the birth, you might say. He dates his interest to more than 60 years ago:

“For me, it goes back to 1959, being in the common room at Exeter College, Oxford when I was an undergraduate, and reading the results of the Pugwash Conference, and the sheer geometric increase in the world’s population, and I said to myself that unless something is done about population, most other efforts will fail.”

Of course, he himself hasn’t really joined in the drive for personal population control, and can only offer a plea that he has undertaken “compensatory” action, that being his work to save the planet and all who live on it.

Around his moment of epiphany at Oxford, Johnson went exploring – the Amazon basin, courtesy of hitching flights with the Brazilian air force, and a motorbike mission from Oxford via Venice to Afghanistan. He says he always says yes to things, including the inevitable appearance on I’m a Celebrity, aged 77. He notably hit it off with Georgia “Toff” Toffolo, 54 years his junior, who found him “handsome and agile”. She’ll be good for a character reference.

Stanley Johnson at the National Television Awards 2018 held at the O2 Arena (PA)

After university and marriage came jobs with John D Rockefeller III, the World Bank and the UN, variously in Washington and New York, naturally including some projects on population control. Boris, as we know, was born in NYC, and was given the second name Boris in honour of a Russian emigre his parents knew. By 1969, with much experience and learning already gained, Stanley was back in Britain, and ready to become the Conservatives’ first environmental research officer – first in opposition and then advising the party during Edward Heath’s government. It was not long after the first moon landing, the images of earth as a fragile spacecraft, and the giant Torrey Canyon oil slick off the Isles of Scilly.

Because of his time as an apprentice politician, Stanley is one of the few people still around who attended the various groundbreaking summits of the time, such as the Club of Rome and the landmark 1972 Stockholm conference – the first ever intergovernmental gathering on the environment, and the distant ancestor of today’s climate conferences and Cop meetings. He attended Stockholm with the then rising star of Tory politics, Peter Walker, a convinced “wet” or one-nation Tory who was later purged by Margaret Thatcher. Stanley had a useful mentor and sponsor there. He was friends with the likes of Teddy Goldsmith – founding editor of The Ecologist, brother of Sir James, and uncle of Zac (now Lord) Goldsmith.

Stanley sees Brussels as the place to get big things done

Johnson was also fortunate in that the UK joined the EU in 1973, and he was given the job of running the bloc’s new anti-pollution agency. He says his greatest achievements in life (apparently including his part in spawning Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson) came from his work in the EU – a measure to stop the trade in seal pups and seal meat, and the 1984 Protection of Habitats and Species Directive. It must have been odd to have his son, as Brussels correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, poking fun at the sort of “serious” work Stanley was, and is, so proud of: Stanley sees Brussels as the place to get big things done.

In 1979 he jumped over the fence and became a directly elected Conservative MEP, and kicked around the European parliament until 1984. After that he devoted himself full-time to environmental and conservation causes, such as protecting the few remaining mountain gorillas. Despite some valiant efforts, he never quite made it to Westminster: the nearest he got was being beaten by the Lib Dems in Teignbridge in 2005. Had he managed it, he, Jo and Boris would eventually have formed quite the family political bloc in the Commons, the largest since the Lloyd Georges.

Sadly, Boris and Jo fell out over Brexit, and it’s something Stanley doesn’t discuss in public. Confronted with the accusation that his son is a habitual and shameless liar, Stanley’s answer is that “we all tell the truth as we see it”, which sounds like he’s as guilty of that sort of thing as little Boris is. Stanley is far happier talking about how he helped save the seals, the gorillas and the tigers (which he did) than about private matters.

Stanley and Rachel Johnson ahead of the Boris Johnson fringe event at the Conservative Party annual conference in Birmingham (PA)

It wasn’t all greenery, mind you. After a discreet overture at Oxford, Stanley Johnson was recruited as a trainee spy, coincidentally just as the Bond franchise was getting going. Rather than Smersh, Agent “Johnson... Stanley Johnson” was tasked with “blowing up” the Blyth power station in Northumbria, and did so successfully. On his way home, though, and not in an Aston Martin with an ejector seat, he says he was tricked into accepting a lift from a blonde stranger and interrogated by the police for ten hours. At that point he decided that intelligence work was not for him.

Successful as Johnson was, and as stable and lovely as his Exmoor base was, he was not exactly a child of privilege.

Stanley’s father, known as Wilfred Johnson (the namesake of Boris’s first child with Carrie), had the name Osman Wilfred Kemal when he was born in 1909. His father was a famous Turkish journalist and politician, Ali Kemal, who had fled to England with his English wife, Winifred, to escape persecution.

Osman Wilfred was born soon after, but his mother died in childbirth and Ali returned to Turkey without his son. Wilfred was therefore brought up by his maternal grandmother, Margaret Johnson, who anglicised his name to Wilfred Johnson and secured him British citizenship. Wilfred was a bomber pilot in the war, and became a farmer after. Ali Kemal, Stanley’s grandfather, was assassinated in Turkey in 1922.

Stanley, then, is the grandson of an asylum seeker. There is some irony there when we think of the Vote Leave campaign’s scare stories about Turkey being about to join the EU. Among the exotica further back in the Johnson-Kemal line we find German aristocrats, King George II, and some libertines. The distinctive shock of blond hair – still surprisingly luxuriant on Stanley, if not Boris – derives from a genetic oddity of a village in Turkey, where blondes prevail. Or so the family legend goes.

Stanley Johnson does, as recent news coverage confirms, have some “traditional” habits and opinions. On the green stuff he’s obviously always been progressive, and doesn’t seem to be a social reactionary or moral hypocrite. Elsewhere, he’s quite reactionary.

His environmental views have evolved along the lines of the broader movement. He became interested during the era of the first TV wildlife safaris with David Attenborough, when it was about conservation. Soon after that came the concerns about DDT ravaging wildlife (highlighted in the seminal book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson), then pollution; the 1970s brought the earliest warnings about global warming, the successful campaign to save the whale, the hole in the ozone layer, deforestation, and then what we came to understand as climate change.

He’s attended virtually every green meeting, including the Rio conference in 1993 and Cop26 in Glasgow, and knows everyone in the movement. He admires Greta Thunberg. The one constant, though, from his teens onwards, was the problem of population growth, as he saw it. He even wrote a paper for the government in 1972, titled “Britain needs a population policy” (at that stage he only had the three kids).

However, this focus sometimes spills over from a neo-Malthusian outlook to a near Powellite one, with his remarking in 2012 that “the government has to start talking seriously about immigration, because if you look at the rise in Britain’s population now, you see that there is a really serious differential in the fertility of the immigrant population over what you might call the indigenous population … this is very political stuff”.

As for the Irish, and the Northern Ireland protocol, he displays a callousness and an ignorance that are shocking even by the standards of his son. Speaking of what Thatcher would do, he suggested: “She would have said: ‘Look, if the Irish want to shoot each other, they will shoot each other – whether there’s a hard border or not. That is something the Irish will do.’ Mrs Thatcher would not have been schemed by the EU to elevate the border question into a way of making sure we stay in the EU.”

Suggesting something of a pattern of attitudes, Johnson Sr also made a curious remark when his son was first elected mayor of London in 2008: “In one of those post-vote TV interviews I was kindly invited to give, I said – only half-frivolously – that a man who could master ancient Greek and Latin as well as Boris has can certainly run London. I say ‘only half-frivolously’ because, in the days when Britain ruled more than a quarter of the world, a classical education was considered more than adequate training for the job of handling populations certainly as large and diverse as London’s.”

On the green stuff he’s obviously always been progressive, and doesn’t seem to be a social reactionary or moral hypocrite. Elsewhere, he’s quite reactionary

A sort of “golf club” racism and old-fashioned male chauvinism are the distinctive flaws in old man Johnson’s make-up: toxic stains on an affable personality.

There’s no point in trying to net out Stanley Johnson’s undoubted gifts and charm with his outdated views and apparently boorish, at best, behaviour towards women – either when they don’t respond to his charms, or when he doesn’t think them worth charming. He’s tried it on with Brigitte Bardot, flirted with Norma Major, and tried a dirty joke out on Mrs Thatcher, and he just doesn’t care – again a bit of a trait there. According to his late first wife, Stanley was “one amazing womaniser”. I needn’t add to that.

No more or less than his son – or any of us – Stanley Johnson does not comprise columns of entries on two sides of a ledger, to be weighted, balanced and totted up. As he might say himself, Stanley Johnson is what he is, and most of what he is is in the public domain, and mostly because of his son. He is the most famous (living) dad a prime minister has ever had, with only James Herbert Wilson, William George Heath, Leo Blair and Ian Cameron living long enough to see their offspring enter No 10 in this century. Were it not for Boris, he’d still be a relatively obscure ex-MEP: a “red-faced faceless bureaucrat” in his words, a writer and environmentalist. As it is, he lives in the shadow of his eldest boy, and he is being judged by more exacting, modern standards – and that’s not working to the old roué’s benefit.