Tory insiders suggest separation and claims of infidelity are unlikely to damage former foreign secretary’s fortunes
Boris Johnson and his wife, Marina Wheeler, have announced they are divorcing, news that highlights a unique tension at the heart of the former foreign secretary’s career: that he has an unusually vivid personal life for a Conservative MP, and that his political fortunes remain largely unharmed.
Johnson and Wheeler, a 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 had recently been unfaithful.
The statement, issued to the Press Association via a family friend, said the pair had decided several months ago that “it was in our best interests to separate”.
They said: “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.”
Wheeler is a human rights lawyer who became a Queen’s Counsel in 2016. Johnson credited her as a key influence in his decision to support Brexit before the EU referendum.
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News of the separation comes at a crucial moment for Johnson’s political ambitions. Having resigned as foreign secretary in July over his opposition to Theresa May’s Chequers Brexit plan, he has since positioned himself as the figurehead for such dissent, amid widespread speculation that he aims to topple the prime minister.
A leadership bid, let alone Johnson being installed in Downing Street, would place a renewed focus on his personal and political backstory. But most members of his party have concluded that he is immune to setbacks that would derail most other careers.
One senior Conservative figure who has worked closely with the former foreign secretary said he would be surprised if the latest news would hamper Johnson’s standing in the party at large. “I suspect it won’t make that much difference. Boris is loved for being Boris. It’s also nothing new – most people have known about all this for a long time,” he said.
“In days gone by a divorced politician seeking the leadership would have had no chance at all, but things have changed. There are things that have happened to him in his career that would leave most politicians absolutely ridiculed – for example getting stuck on that zip wire at the Olympics.
“But with him the response is: ‘Ah, it’s good old, lovable Boris.’ He gets away with things in a way that others don’t. Maybe it’s just [that] people find him likable and so are more willing to turn a blind eye.”
The marriage to Wheeler was Johnson’s second; he had a short-lived marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen, whom he met at university. The relationship was the subject of regular newspaper reports about his alleged infidelity, often denied by Johnson.
One denial caused a rare hiccup in Johnson’s ascent. In 2004, during his first stint as an MP, he was sacked from the Tory frontbench for misleading the then leader, Michael Howard, over an alleged affair with the journalist Petronella Wyatt.
Nine years later, while Johnson was London mayor, it emerged that he was the father of a daughter conceived during another affair, with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant.
The information was revealed after Macintyre lost a legal battle to keep her daughter’s paternity a secret. During the hearings the appeal court was told that the girl, born in 2009, was allegedly the second child conceived by Johnson from affairs.
The case did not prevent Johnson from returning to the Commons in 2015 and then being made foreign secretary.
It was in this role that he demonstrated how his Teflon reputation extended to political errors. Johnson emerged seemingly unscathed from blunders such as wrongly saying Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian woman jailed in Tehran, had been teaching journalism before her arrest; and joking that the Libyan city of Sirte could become a tourist destination once “the dead bodies” were removed.
Johnson remains popular with the Tory grassroots and would be a clear favourite to win the leadership if he made it to the final contest, in which a pair of candidates are put to a vote by members. A poll this week on preferred successors to May by the ConservativeHome website gave Johnson 35% of the vote, more than double anyone else.
To reach that stage, however, Johnson would require significant support from his fellow Tory MPs, who whittle down the list of candidates, something many believe would not happen.
One Conservative MP said he doubted the new revelations about Johnson would alter his fortunes very much, but that ultimately his chances of ever becoming party leader were thin. “It’s all priced in because I don’t think any of his buffoonery will surprise anyone,” the MP said. “He’s got a track record of affairs and dalliances, which is well known.
“Ultimately it’s likely to be moot because I don’t think he will get through to the final two in a leadership contest anyway.”
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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