Boris Johnson, well connected! The Queen and other people he's related to

According to the Independent, Boris Johnson called a certain family member before he announced his resignation to the public. This family member was the Queen. Did you know he was related to royalty?

Many people would be surprised to know who the outgoing Prime Minister is related to. From Winston Churchill to American Presidents; Turkish Traitors to Celebrity Reality Show contestants: read on to see the surprising list.

Boris Johnson handed in his resignation on Thursday 7th July. The outgoing Prime Minister of Great Britain, comes from a long line of Oxford graduates and political ancestry.

Much of Boris’ interesting family ties come from the ancestry of his father, Stanley Johnson. However, author and politician Stanley shocked everyone in 2017 when he decided to sign up for the year’s edition of ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’. He didn’t do too well on the show and was evicted quite early on. It was not a good publicity move from the Prime Minister’s dad.

British Journalist, Rachel Johnson is Boris Johnson’s sister. She has never shied away from publicity and took it to a whole new level in 2018, when she entered the celebrity Big Brother house. She appeared alongside housemates Ann Widdecombe and Amanda Barrie (and even had her toes sucked by Andrew Brady). The public were not impressed, however, and she was the second person to be evicted from the house.

That’s right, Boris is 'royal'?! And the relation isn’t that far removed… He is 5th cousins twice removed with the Queen. How is that possible? Boris’ great-great-great-grandmother Karoline was the illegitimate daughter of Prince Paul Von Wurttemberg, the son of the German King Friedrich of Wurttemberg whose wife was Princess Royal of Britain and Ireland. Follow the royal lines down and you reach the Queen on the ‘legitimate’ side and Boris on the other.

This means Boris’ ancestry ties him back to Frederick Louis Hanover, the son of King George II himself. All was revealed on the BBC show, ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ In 2008.

Boris’ reaction? “I would have been terribly proud just to have been related to the German king, but I can’t hide it from you that, even in our common European home, I am particularly thrilled to have some British royal ancestry as well. What it really teaches me is that our genes pulse down our lives and we don’t really know where they have come from and where they are going.”

Boris’s maternal great-grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant to the U.S. Boris Johnson's grandmother, Frances was the daughter of Russian-American palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe who was born in Russia in 1879. According to his US passport applications from 1919 and 1921, his family moved to America in 1889 and were naturalised there in 1900.

Boris and Winston are indeed 11th cousins twice removed. This family history is traced back to William “the Silent” van Nassau-Dillenburg, Prince of Orange, who was born in Hesse, Germany in 1533, and his wife, Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, Princess of Orange, as revealed by myheritage.com. Distantly related, but ‘nothing alike’, according to Nicholas Soames who launched an attack on the current Prime Minister in 2019.

Photo (Churchill): Yousuf Karsh. Library and Archives Canada, e010751643

Another Prime Minister who was also a descendant of George II. Both Boris and David are related to the past King through illegitimate lines, but the same royal blood flows in both their veins. They are, therefore, distant cousins.

Over the years the current PM has been accused of racism; he's changed his mind on being pro to anti-EU, supporting Brexit; he's been cited as making snide remarks and random insults against the Muslim community.  But Boris' apparently quintessentially English grandfather had been born with a rather exotic name: Wilfred's birth certificate showed that he was actually born Osman Wilfred Kemal.

This means that Boris is an eighth Turkish, through his father, then grandfather’s bloodlines. Boris said of the revelation: ‘It is interesting to look at how British I can feel and yet, actually, what a completely mongrel composition I really am,' he said.

Boris’ Turkish paternal great-grandfather is Ali Kemal. A politician whose life ended in tragedy. Ali Kemal wrote opinionated articles challenging the tactics of the nationalists but, when they regained power after another regime change, Ali was taken and executed for treason. It turns out authorities had sanctioned his arrest but not his killing, making this a very high profile situation at the time.

Photo: Getty/Wikipedia Commons

It was revealed that Boris’ great-great-grandmother was sold to his great-great-grandfather and that she was only set free when they married. He said, "I am the proud offspring of Turkish immigrants. I want you to know that my great-great-grandmother was a slave... She was a Circassian slave [from a region in southern Russia], and she was sold: my great-great-grandfather literally purchased her."

Gary Boyd Roberts, a researcher at American Ancestors, delved into Boris’ past. He found an interesting string of relations to the previous Presidents of the United States. This included Ulysses S Grant, William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover.

Photo: Getty/Wikipedia Commons

His family connections to the US don’t stop there. Boris is related to, either by blood or marriage to the following: Franklin D Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and both George Bushes!

Bollywood actress Sara Ali Khan is also related to the British PM. Marina, Boris Johnson’s first wife, is the daughter of BBC journalist Sir Charles Wheeler and his Indian wife Dip Sing. This means that Boris Johnson’s mother-in-law is Dip Sing. Dip’s brother-in-law is Bhagwan Singh and HIS niece is Amrita Singh - Sara Ali Khan’s mother.

Brexit could now be a family affair. It was revealed by MyHeritage that Boris is distantly related to the President of the EU. They are 16th cousins - a rather distant tie but, thanks to a marriage between families in the 1400s, they are most certainly related.

Perhaps the strangest revelation in all of Boris’ distant relatives. A mummy, which was discovered a few years ago in a Swiss church has matched DNA with the PM. Her name was Anna Catharina Bischoff, whose daughter married Christian Friedrich Pfeffel, making them direct ancestors of Mr Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Photo of mummy: YouTube / SWI swissinfo.ch

Dr Hotz, who worked on the project was over the moon to find such links to British Parliament. He said: "It was a risky project. We didn't know where we were going and whether we would gain anything. We had so much luck. And then entered Boris Johnson - what more do you want?”