Politics UK
Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson ... For Boris Johnson’s wife, it’s one affair too many. But his party doesn’t care ... The Tories have long known he is a cheat and liar whose only loyalty is to himself. What will it take for them to ditch him?

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Boris Johnson For Boris Johnson’s wife, it’s one affair too many. But his party doesn’t care The Tories have long known he is a cheat and liar whose only loyalty is to himself. What will it take for them to ditch him?


Boris Johnson and Marina Wheeler

‘If reports are to be believed, Marina Wheeler, the wife of Boris Johnson has finally kicked him out for good.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

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.

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.

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.

Boris Johnson’s latest Brexit outburst combines madness and mendacity Simon Jenkins Simon Jenkins Read more

Boris Johnson has now moved from post-truth to post-shame Marina Hyde Marina Hyde Read more