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Stanley Johnson at home in Primrose Hill |
| In the footsteps of my son to Parliament |
Stanley Johnson is planning to follow his better known son, TV presenter and Tory MP Boris, into Westminster, writes Jane Wright
LIKE father, like son, runs the well-worn phrase, except in the Johnson household, a prominent pastel villa in Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill, where it is the other way round.
For this is home to Stanley, father of the better-known Boris, Johnson. And, three years after the son, editor of The Spectator and sometime host of Have I Got News For You, became a Tory MP, his father is also intent on election to Westminster. Stanley says: “I’m a romantic. I have a respect for democracy, and the Westminster variety has been around for hundreds of years.”
We rack our brains for any other sons in this long history who have preceded their fathers into Parliament, but can’t come up with any. Pitt the Elder clearly got there before Pitt the Younger and Tony Benn before his son.
Not that Stanley is there yet. But last month he made it to the Conservatives’ approved candidates list. Now he has to find a constituency to adopt him to fight the next general election. Apparently, Boris being at Westminster already wouldn’t cramp Stanley’s style at all.
“I agree with almost everything Boris does,” he enthuses. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he hits the nail on the head.”
His endorsement is delivered in the same patrician tones as Boris, from within entirely similar corduroys and beneath the same, strangely transparent, fringe.
So the sense of déjà vu is complete when Boris, his firstborn, bellows at me down the phone: “He’s going to be great on the green benches. He’ll wipe the floor with the opposition.”
The Johnson family has lived in Primrose Hill, on and off, since 1969. Both father and son like the place. “We used to roll down it as kids. There was less dog dirt then,” says Boris.
Was Stanley ever not going to be a Tory?
“There was no conceivable danger of that,’ he says. “My Conservatism flows from being brought up in the country.”
His own father was “not a landowner, but a farmer”, who used to dock his dogs’ tails by biting them off. Like his father, Stanley has a farm himself, on Exmoor.
He continues: “I’ve never understood rich Labour voters. I’m surprised how many there are in Primrose Hill. Yet they all live in big houses, send their children to private schools and fly off ski-ing at half term. They don’t lead a Labour sort of life.”
But can’t the rich have a social conscience? He bridles, beaming. “I’m not ready to cede the moral high ground to Labour,” he says. “Michael Howard made a powerful moral case for Conservatism when he spoke about letting people spend the money they’ve earned, rather than have state institutions take it and decide what to do with it.”
Then he adds: “But there’s no question that there has to be a social safety net.”
But he won’t be saddled with the label political ingénue, just because Boris got to Westminster first.
“I’m not a Johnny-come-lately,” he says. “I got involved in politics a long time ago. At 63, I don’t want a career at Westminster.”
Stanley was one of the first Brits to be appointed to a senior post at the European Commission. He reported for duty as head of pollution prevention in Brussels in 1973, just four months after we joined the then Common Market, and went on to represent the Isle of Wight and East Hampshire at the European Parliament. He says: “I had the second largest majority in Britain: 95,000.”
Ironically, his later fears about the expanding power of Europe have sparked his moves to join the House of Commons.
He explains: “The EU has been a great political advance, and I’m not saying we should withdraw, but it’s probably gone as far as it needs to. People ought to care that things we sign up to in Europe cost us hospitals and schools.”
So were his Euro days a waste of time?
“Definitely not. No-one knows what the European Parliament is or does, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
For a prospective Westminster candidate, Stanley appears surprisingly vague on some finer points of British democracy. “Which constituency are we in here?” he asks me, and, apparently without irony: “What is Camden? A council?”
Naturally, like Boris, Stanley went to Oxford University. So did four of his other five children. And the fifth? “Cambridge. Then London.”
After winning a major university poetry prize, he swapped his studies in Latin and Greek for English literature. Then came a stint at the World Bank in New York, where Boris was born. (He was named after a white Russian émigré who paid for Stanley and his pregnant first wife to fly back to New York, rather than go by bus, saving Boris from being born in Mexico).
Stanley’s bookshelf is filled with books by Johnsons – “a lot by my children, but mostly by me”. He writes environmental thrillers with names like The Marburg Virus and The Domesday Deposit.”.
But his latest passion is apes. “All my life, I’ve been an environmentalist,” he says, before declaring he’s firmly in favour of hunting deer on Exmoor.
Stanley was invited by the United Nations to “help out” on the Great Apes Survival Project, and he’s now become a trustee of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund, based in Gloucester Avenue. “I may go off to look at a new sub-species of mountain gorilla,” he says.
I recall that Boris became an MP without giving up The Spectator. Could Stanley give up his monkeys?
He smiles: “Well, if politics doesn’t work, there’s always something else.”
Published:
Thursday 4th March 2004
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