Former foreign secretary and senior lawyer make statement after reports he was unfaithful
Boris Johnson and his wife, Marina Wheeler, have announced that they are in the process of a divorce after separating some time ago.
The former foreign secretary and the senior lawyer, both 54, have been married for 25 years. They made the announcement in a joint statement after a story appeared in the Sun on Friday detailing claims that Johnson was unfaithful.
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Johnson resigned as foreign secretary in July over his opposition to Theresa May’s Chequers Brexit plan. He has since written a series of articles criticising the government, which have been viewed as attempts to position himself as an alternative prime minister.
Wheeler is a human rights lawyer who became a Queen’s counsel in 2016. Johnson credited her as a key voice in his decision to support Brexit before the referendum.
In a joint personal statement issued to the Press Association through a family friend, Johnson and Wheeler said: “Several months ago, after 25 years of marriage, we decided it was in our best interests to separate.
“We have subsequently agreed to divorce and that process is under way. As friends we will continue to support our four children in the years ahead. We will not be commenting further.”
Oh frabjous day, if reports are to be believed, the wife of Boris Johnson finally kicks him out for good. A statement announces their divorce. Marina Wheeler is only ever described as “long-suffering” or as a “high-flying lawyer”. She may well be these things and a lot more besides. She is certainly a very clever woman who is said to advise her husband politically. Together they have four children. The marital arrangements of our elected representatives are their own business. Up to a point.
The reaction to the news of this divorce indicates something beyond the state of their marriage. According to reports, he has cheated again and it’s the final straw. I am unclear as to when he has ever stopped cheating. Or lying about cheating. He has fathered what is euphemistically called a “love child” though he denied the child was his for a while. He has had affairs that every one knows about including a four-year one with Petronella Wyatt that resulted in two pregnancies. One led to an abortion, one to a miscarriage.
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Having had the experience of walking to a meeting with Wyatt and a newspaper editor and then bumping into Johnson, I am mortified to say that he ignored her completely as there was someone more important there.
But then Wyatt always was very understanding of Johnsons’s little ways. She wrote in 2016 that he very proud of his Turkish ancestry and that his views on monogamy “are decidedly eastern”. He told her that it was unreasonable that men should be confined to one woman. This may have been good enough for Petsy, no longer good enough for Marina – but is it actually good enough for the party faithful? Borisconi, as I like to call him, is well ahead in the leadership polls and therefore perhaps wanted to get the divorce news out before party conference as an exercise in “damage limitation”. The only damage he cares about is what may happen to his prime ministerial ambition. He may leave a trail of collateral damage but as it’s only women and children who really cares?
Johnson’s philandering can be seen as simply a personal matter: consensual sex is jolly good fun isn’t it? But it is not the fact that this man is busy “bonking”, as the tabloids claim, that rankles, but that he repeatedly lies about it.
When he was shadow arts minister, he was sacked by Michael Howard when the Wyatt affair became public knowledge. He called reports of it “an inverted pyramid of piffle”. Such phrase-making is still seen as Wildean and vaguely titillating to parts of the right.
I had to sit through Toby Young’s execrable play Who’s the Daddy? in 2005, which was about the riotous non-stop fornication at the The Spectator magazine. Johnson was in a broom cupboard. I can’t remember who with and care even less. Rod Liddle was doing some over-enthusiastic work experience. Blunkett was having an affair with the publisher Kimberly Quinn. I hate to get all Marxist about this hilarious carry-on, but does history repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce? For it seems the women become tragic while the men are tragically elevated.
Apparently allies of Johnson know that his infidelity is written into his “price” and his supporters won’t mind. They certainly haven’t minded about his attitudes to women in the past. His writing about “hot totty” at Labour conference, his ludicrous remarks about breast size, his general ogling is part of his brand. He is Trumpian in his appetites and in his disregard for the morality of little people.
But these are serious times and we need full-time politicians. Johnson the statesman, who bumbles around unable to master any briefs other than pulling down his own, was a terrible foreign secretary.
He is unfaithful not just in marital terms but to colleagues, to principles, to commitment to his post. How does he even have the time to have affairs? I guess he wings it as he does writing columns, putting together leadership bids, championing Brexit with no actual plan.
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The least we can say about Theresa May is that she does take the job seriously. Does anyone want a part-time prime minister? One whose moral compass points only in one direction, the direction called ME?
Leave may mean leave in his personal life. But politically he will remain. What will it take for his long-suffering party to give him up? Broken hearts mean little to him. He often writes of women as feeble, emotional, always on the lookout to curtail male liberty.
So I would look not to his wife to end him but to the few modern women in the Conservative party. The likes of Anna Soubry and Amber Rudd have his number. Either lying and cheating matter or they don’t. If it really mattered to the Tories, they would have divorced him long ago.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
Frankly, I don’t give a damn about Boris Johnson’s purple personal life. What he gets up to in the cabinet room is much more important than what he gets up to in the bedroom. But his personal life is today the focus of some media attention, the “political significance” of which is duly weighed and speculated upon, to much sucking of teeth and sonorously delivered verdicts.
Yes, Johnson’s allotted role is, it appears, to add to the gaiety of the nation. We can all have a laugh. Yet it is inappropriate. There is human misery involved. This is also, so far as I can tell, the story of a family being torn asunder, its privacy invaded once again by the press, with all the unhappiness that will add to the circumstances. Johnson’s family didn’t ask for this or give permission, yet they are caught up in it. All to give readers of The Sun, and supposedly the rest of us, a giggle at the plight of dear old Boris.
None of it matters. Long after Johnson has repaired his marriage, moved in with someone else or decided to take vows of silence and join a monastery (the least likely option, but you never know with our boy), Britain will be lumbered with a Brexit that nobody wants.
You may rest assured that he will, through his talent for journalism, telly appearances and his (no doubt) candid memoirs, make more than enough to live on. Others, effectively victims of his determination to himself before party and before country, will be chucked out of their jobs, and face family breakups of their own because of Brexit, for which he, above all, was responsible. There are many more family tragedies he will be accountable for, across the land.
Brexit will be Boris’s epitaph, not babies, and Brexit was designed principally to strengthen his hand in some long-distant Tory leadership election. He never intended Leave to prevail. Recall that he wrote those two articles – pro- and anti-Brexit – to help him make his mind up. Recall too that his column in The Daily Telegraph at the time advocated a Leave vote as a tactical device to get more concessions while staying in the EU.
When it all went right/wrong and Leave unexpectedly won, the Tory leadership campaign arrived early. He was ill-prepared for it, his party saw through him, his closest political ally, Michael Gove, broke the news that he wasn’t up to the job, and, thus, we were left with Theresa May, for want of better. The truth about Boris is that, for all his enthusiastic love-making, he reserves his most ardent affection for his own ego.
It is a long time indeed since it was thought that a man who can cheat on his wife can cheat on his country. I’m not sure it was ever true. Some premiers have had “colourful” private lives (say, David Lloyd George, John Major) and others relatively quiet ones (Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher). There is also a long list of other extremely talented figures who have had their careers cut short or derailed because of revelations, or fear of exposure, relating to their sex lives (Jack Profumo, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Portillo, Robin Cook). On balance, we’d have been better off if the British public hadn’t indulged in the periodic taste for moral panic.
What is more telling about Johnson is a much more general pattern of political selfishness, and carelessness, symbolised painfully in the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a mother banged up in some filthy Iranian jail at the pleasure of the ayatollahs. When Johnson casually declared she was in Iran to train journalists he seemingly sealed her fate. It was a far more heinous crime than breaking up with his wife.
If you think Johnson is a modern day saviour of Brexit Britain, then you shouldn’t care about whatever he gets up to outside his political duties, but you should care about the fact that he tries to busk his way through politics.
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If you think he is a an idiot masquerading as a brilliant man masquerading as an idiot, then you shouldn’t condemn any further, and need not for whatever he has done to his family. Imagine if it was Jeremy Corbyn, say, whose marriage was collapsing. Would you think much differently about his views on much more important issues – the future of his party, the antisemitism scandal, his economic policies, Brexit?
The tragedy of it all is that Johnson is being treated as a character in a reality TV show or soap opera, which denigrates politics. He is much more than that. Still, a potential leader of the country in some diabolical takeover of the Conservative Party by Leave fundamentalists.
What Johnson proposes to do next with his genitalia is nobody’s business than his own. What he proposes to do to the country concerns all of us, whether he is happily married or not.
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