Affairs, wives left in anguish and how Boris learned about adultery at his father's knee
Proud as he is of his sons success, Stanley Johnson is said to be pricked by irritation even jealousy every time he is introduced to an audience as Boriss father.
The two may be frighteningly alike, from their bright mops of hair (Stanleys now greying) and rumpled manner to those jokey self-deprecating one-liners. But the once-politically ambitious father has been far out-stripped by the dazzling success of his son, the Mayor of London.
Stanley was an MEP for five years but lost out to a Lib Dem when he tried to get elected as an MP in Westminster in 2005.
Like father, like son: Boris Johnson, aged five, with his father Stanley Johnson
Only in one area does Boris, 46, still scurry along in his 71-year-old fathers wake. Womanising.
This hardly seems credible does it? After all, isnt Boris a serial seducer described in Sonia Purnells new biography called Just Boris as a man with no moral compass? Wasnt he put out of his home like an alley cat by his long-suffering second wife Marina a year ago when it emerged that a mistress had produced a daughter with hair just like his? (Shes now let him come back.)
And yet, in the highly competitive arena that has always been the hallmark of Johnson family life, Stanley stands supreme, so to speak, where womanising is concerned - as indicated in the new book.
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It is a desperately unhappy story, one which explains why Boriss lawyer wife and artist mother have become very close. Who better for Marina to turn to when Boris goes off the rails, than his mother Charlotte, who, according to Purnells new biography, was brought to the depths of a nervous breakdown by Stanleys habitual philandering?
The new book reveals how, while the mother of four small children, she was treated for nine months in the Maudsley Hospital in London. Even after this period of care she had to be readmitted several more times with depression over a period of two years, before she was well enough to resume a normal life. Charlotte had lived every day for years knowing that every woman who came into close contact with Stanley was fair game, says a long-time family friend. It even included the wives of friends.
Philanderer: The Mayor of London with his apparently long suffering second wife Marina
One of these was the attractive wife of an eminent journalist who went on to become the editor of a national newspaper.
I remember the day my husband came home from the office saying hed had such a good lunch with this new person who was so amusing, she recalled this week. It was Stanley, and soon we all became friends, including Charlotte. She was, she says, cultivated and nice.
Although several decades have passed, she declines to talk about their affair or why it ended. But she is prepared to explain her capitulation to his charms with these words: He had such extraordinary joie de vivre and gaiety so like his son. He could laugh yo! u into b ed. A man can get anywhere if he can make a woman laugh, its such an irresistible quality.
The year of Charlottes breakdown was 1974, when she and Stanley were living in Brussels where he was working for the then European Economic Community as head of the Prevention of Pollution Commission. These were Britains early years in the Common Market. Money flowed, expenses were good, and lunches for Eurocrats such as Stanley long.
Boris looks set to follow in Stanley's footsteps, despite having been 'horrified' by his father's behaviour
Charlotte was 32, with four children, living in a fine home in the diplomatic quarter and working as a painter (she had at least one near sell-out exhibition there), and yet here she was suddenly being flown urgently to London for treatment, leaving her small children behind. They were allowed to visit her.
The children used to come over from Brussels and see me in hospital, Charlotte recalled in an interview when Boris was elected London mayor. Theyd run down the passage and it was sickeningly painful because then theyd go away again.
The children were Boris, then 10, Rachel, nine (now editor of The Lady magazine), Jo, six (now Conservative MP for Orpington in Kent), and Leo, three (now a senior writer on the Financial Times).
So what had happened in Brussels that brought this talented and gentle woman to this mental crisis?
Itwas no particular incident, says one of her friends, just the accumulation of all the years when she was trying to bring up the familyand Stanley was having affairs away on his interminable trips as wellas closer to home. It built up and built up and she became more and more depressed and then it got so on top of her that she just cracked. What woman wouldnt?
Onearea of constant gossip among their friends was the Johnson familys unusually high turnover in au pairs. This! talk ha d begun years earlier in 1966 when Stanley got his first proper job working on research projects for the World Bank in Washington.
It was a great mystery that the au pairs never lasted very long, says one close figure. All Charlottes friends knew about it. It started off as a joke, but then it was obvious that it was serious. It wasnt that Charlotte was being difficult shes lovely and peaceful and witty and nice, and Im certain she got on well enough with these young girls.
The inevitable conclusion was that Stanley was getting on well with them, too too well perhaps. So none of them lasted very long.
The widespread sympathy for Charlotte was matched by dismay at Stanleys apparent inability to see just how his wife was suffering from his philandering.
People were astonished that he could live with himself in this constant womanising mode, says one friend. But then, everything to him is just a jolly jape.
Mistreated: Boris's mother Charlotte, who now has Parkinson's
Womanising was a side of Stanleys character that Charlotte Fawcett, daughter of an international lawyer, could not see when she first sat next to him at a lunch at Oxford University early in 1963. She was reading English and he Classics. She was bohemian, warm, and already a talented painter. He wrote love poems. They married within months at Londons Marylebone register office. He was 22 and she two years younger.
In his own memoir, Stanley records that his father felt they were too young to be married and had muttered something about lambs to the slaughter.
But only one lamb, it seems, was being sacrificed.
Stanley started to go astray almost immediately, says a family friend, but at the time Charlotte didnt know. She was so in love with him.
Initially, he seems to have been a loving and loyal husband and the young couple moved to New ! York whe re Stanley took up a Harkness Fellowship (the U.S. reciprocation of our Rhodes Scholarship). But how caring a husband he was remains questionable.
Charlotte was three months pregnant with Boris when Stanley a passionate environmentalist with a lifelong craving for world travel took her on a Greyhound bus to Mexico City. She was uncomfortable and sick and they also ran out of money.
A rich Russian acquaintance called Boris Letwin put them up. He could see the pregnant Charlotte was in no condition to travel back to New York by bus and gave them two first-class air tickets. Hence when the baby was born they named it Boris after him (though the Mayors first name is Alexander and the family usually call him Al).
But just how Stanley became a ladykiller is a mystery to some of his female contemporaries at Oxford, including the Daily Mails distinguished writer Dame Ann Leslie who, coincidentally, was at convent school with Charlotte.
Stanley never made a pass at me but he used to go to my room and wait for me for hours and then sit there talking to me about his poetry, Ann recalls.
My girlfriends and I all thought he was the biggest baboon wed ever seen in our lives. Hed leave me his poetry. When we made our cocoa after all the boys had been thrown out, wed sit around reading it out loud and laughing our heads off at his ghastly drivel.
However, Johnson later won Oxfords esteemed Newdigate Prize for poetry. I underestimated him in so many ways everybody did, admits Ann. As I always say these days, never underestimate a Johnson!
This pretend incompetence has been a lifelong act, just as it is with Boris. In his memoir, published two years ago, Stanley even claims that he had to ask an American friend at Oxford who never seemed to be without a girlfriend, Whats the secret, Brad?
Stanley quoted Brads reply in an address at the Institute of Directors: Find out what you have in common...if she likes apples you say, Hell, I like apple! s too... Hole in one 50 per cent of the time.
The Johnsonian anecdote didnt go down at all well with two women in the audience who got up and stalked out muttering they were being patronised.
Charlotte stuck with Stanley for four years after her breakdown, but in 1978 they finally separated. She had remained with him all those years for the same reason that Marinas friends say she sticks with Boris for the sake of the children and the hope that one day he will come to his senses.
Wandering eye: The Mayor of London allegedly had a child with his mistress
Meanwhile, for Stanley Johnson, life goes gaily on. He has had two further children, Julia and Maximilian, with his second wife Jennifer (publishing editor and widow of Scottish theatre director Robert Kidd), whom he married in 1981.
And with Johnsonian earnestness, he continues to describe as complete garbage suggestions that he has ever been a philanderer, admitting only that he blames myself entirely for the breakdown of his marriage to Charlotte, without offering further details. Despite everything, he and Charlotte did remain friends.
But at 71, his interest in young women is not entirely dormant, as the frequent lunches he enjoys with them clearly demonstrates.
One such well-shaped creature who has enjoyed his company for lunch on several occasions, describes him as very flirtatious, openly so, full of very funny stories about his travels, and with a wandering eye that makes it quite clear hes having lunch with you for a reason.
But my feeling is hes pretty harmless these days. He even talks about his wife Jenny. He just seems to be trying to make himself feel young and in the game again. In a way, its sad.
As for Charlotte, she also married again, but her second husband Nicholas Wahl, an American politics professor, died of cancer after a mere five years of v! ery happ y marriage. For 17 years she has been a widow.
Nowadays in her Notting Hill flat she spends much of her time in a wheelchair, a victim of Parkinsons disease which she has fought for more than 25 years and has all but stilled her brilliant talents. She has much time to do a lot of thinking and sometimes talks of her worries for Boriss four children.
It has been, she told a recent visitor, quite a time.
But how bitterly ironic, after witnessing and being horrified at his mothers devastation over his fathers womanising, that Boris should himself take a similar path of infidelity, with the same risks of history repeating itself.
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