Boris Johnson Meets His Destiny

Late morning on Tuesday, July 23, the denouement in Boris Johnson’s lifelong quest for political power will be revealed, when the committee that has organized the Conservative Party’s leadership election will announce the winner of the race to replace Theresa May. The following day, the winner—Johnson is the heavy favorite—will be driven to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen, and be formally appointed prime minister.

It will be the culmination of seven weeks of national campaigning in which Johnson has slowly and cautiously closed in on the prize. Yet in reality it has been a 40-year pursuit, relentlessly driving forward, each step a mere prelude to the next on his seemingly unstoppable rise.

There was his two years as foreign secretary, resurrecting his career following a failed initial bid at the top job in 2016; before that, his two terms as London’s mayor, the first (and only) Conservative to win the position in Britain’s left-leaning capital, during which time the city hosted the 2012 Olympics; and his time as a member of Parliament and journalist before that, all building to this point. He has often stood apart from his party’s leadership, and grown more powerful each time. Here is a man unshackled from the constraints that usually apply—one whose personal celebrity has given him autonomy from a party that has instead come to rely on him to save it from annihilation as a result of the one policy, Brexit, he was instrumental in bringing about.

And yet, despite decades in the public eye as one of the few internationally recognized British political figures, a national celebrity in his own right, the Boris Johnson that stands on the brink of power is still far more known than understood. The early events that shaped him—his ambition and intellect, independence and comic persona—are veiled by his own reluctance to speak about them.

To some of those who know him best, the most important period in Johnson’s life was not his time as foreign secretary or as a leader of the Brexit campaign; nor his time as London mayor or in journalism. The period that his own mother has said was crucial in the early molding of Johnson’s character came when he was just 10 years old. It is a period of his life he rarely talks about, one that holds a wound apparently too deep and too personal.

Then going by Alexander—his full legal name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or Al as he is still known to his family—Johnson had been living in Brussels with his parents and three younger siblings: a striking clan of blond, bohemian intellectuals wrapped tightly together by their warm, loving, and artistic mother, Charlotte. This scene is laid out in colorful detail in two major biographies of Johnson. (Neither Johnson nor any of his immediate family spoke with me for this piece, but several friends and former colleagues of his did.)

Charlotte had been the center of the children’s lives, the one constant in a peripatetic childhood in which the family shifted from one continent to the next—moving 32 times in 14 years—following their father, Stanley, and his ever-changing work in academia and institutions such as the World Bank and the European Commission. The upheaval, coupled with Stanley’s long absences, in which he would often leave the family for months at a time, had strengthened the bond between the children and their mother. They had shared idyllic periods of stability: a life and home in Washington; time on the family farm in Exmoor, southwest England, where Charlotte homeschooled the children; and then later in the comfortable, bourgeois Uccle suburb of Brussels, attending the local French-speaking European School.

It was at this moment, in Brussels in 1974, that Charlotte what has described as a mental breakdown, forcing her to leave her children and return to England for psychiatric treatment. She would spend several months at the Maudsley Hospital in South London; while there, she produced a cascade of vivid and sometimes disturbing paintings, collected in a book now kept in, Stanley, Charlotte, and the four children, all easily identifiable, are hanging by their arms with pained expressions on their faces.