Parties and scandals in the life of Boris Johnson

The seemingly carefree, always widely gesturing and enthusiastically hand-shaking Prime Minister Boris Johnson is having a tough time. He weathered a lot of controversy over the years, but in 2022 the pressure on him to resign is finally too great to resist.

Boris Johnson has officially announced his resignation. The notorious Christmas parties in Downing Street (residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) during Britain's tragic COVID lockdown, have placed him in a compromised position.

Still, Boris Johnson is a peculiar character, a lover of risk and chaos, and very capable of emerging unscathed from a hurricane. This is how he became Prime Minister in the first place. Aside from his comfortable origins, of course. Let's have a look at his road to Downing Street nr. 10.

While both his parents are British, Boris Johnson was born outside the United Kingdom. His father was studying economics at Columbia University in New York City when Boris was born there on June 19, 1964. Later that year the family returned to the UK.

In the family tree of the Johnsons there is a little bit of everything. Boris Johnson has a Turkish grandfather, Russian jewish ancestors on his mother's side, and distant French relatives. He calls himself a melting pot of various cultures.

A more dominant side of Johnson's character, though, developed during his time at the elite schools of Eton and Oxford. Boris Johnson was a real preppy kid. He joined the Bullingdon Club of rich students who dedicated themselves to hefty alcohol consumption and vandalism.

The former Prime Minister David Cameron and Boris Johnson know each other from their time at Oxford. They were both members of the Bullingdon Club and did things together like throwing a flower pot against the window of a restaurant.

Boris Johnson confessed that he was arrested once and had to spend a night at the police station. Thinking back of that day, one of his friends says: "I never thought Boris could run so fast."

He was a journalist for The Times and The Daily Telegraph between 1987 and 1994.

Having joined the Conservative Party and obtained a seat in the House of Commons, Boris Johnson successfully ran for mayor of London in 2008. He was re-elected in 2012 and so became a protagonist in the Olympic Games hosted by the city that year.

Boris Johnson has always been a character with a tendency for excesses. There is his interesting hairdo, and his poses in front of the camera. But also his public remarks can be quite shocking. As the mayor of London, he often turned events into spectacles.

Boris Johnson's love life has been turbulent: the first marriage with Allegra Mostyn-Owen, a second marriage (and three children) with Marina Wheeler, an extramarital relationship with a journalist, including a son (which the media revealed with much buzz in 2006), and in 2019 the end of his second marriage and a new relationship with Carrie Symonds, 20 years younger than him.

The media have closely followed Carrie Symonds, a political animal, so to say: she was both the spokesperson for the Conservative party and a climate activist at the same time. That's some juggling there. And then there was the affair with Boris Johnson, followed by a baby boy in 2020, a secret marriage in May 2021, and a baby girl in December of that year.

Several media count that he has seven children, including the most recent two with Carrie Symonds. But there may also be other offspring from his infidelities, Spectator among other media reports. Either way, at this moment, he must be changing diapers and watching Peppa Pig with the two infants he fathered with Symonds.

Boris Johnson and Arnold Schwarzenegger were friends while the actor was governor of California. Donald Trump also supports Boris Johnson.

Ambition is one of Boris Johnson's fundamental characteristics. He always dreamed of going down in history as the leader of Britain. Perhaps since his Eton days.

In 2019, Boris Johnson managed to become Prime Minister. He had joined the ranks of the supporters of a British exit from the European Union and savored the sweetness of the victory of the pro-Brexit results in the 2016 referendum.

Boris Johnson admires Winston Churchill so much that he wrote a biography of the British leader. Critics applauded the biography and Johnson achieved some literary stature.

He will surely make the history books as a character, but maybe not in the likes of Churchill.
Johnson managed to offend both Republicans and Democrats when, during the 2020 U.S. election campaign, he said that he would not visit New York "at the risk of meeting Trump" and that Hillary Clinton looked like a "sadistic nurse in a psychiatric hospital."

In the book 'Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity,' his biographer Sonia Purnell writes that, according to various testimonies, he is a "god in bed." She also describes him as a mixture of "cultured man and scoundrel."

Has he finally angered enough people to make his position in Downing Street untenable? It seems like it. We are very curious to see where Boris Johnson is headed next!