Inside the life of Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl

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She seemed the eptiome of the modern woman who has somehow managed to have it all – graduating from Oxford while pregnant with her fourth baby, building a successful art career and raising four young children solo while her husband worked abroad.  

But Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl, who has died aged 79, had a rather more complicated life behind the successful facade, battling mental health issues, ill health and a crumbling marriage plagued by infidelity. 

The mother-of-four, who made a name for herself in the art world with little formal training, spoke publicly for the first time last year about her unhappy marriage with Stanley Johnson, who was alleged to be habitually unfaithful, claiming that the Prime Minister’s father broke her nose in the 1970s. 

Around the same time the artist was suffering with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), something she claimed was a precursor to her Parkinson’s diagnosis in 1982, and she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for treatment in 1974. 

But the Prime Minister speaks with warmth about his mother, who was openly more left-wing than the rest of her family, crediting her with teaching him ‘the equal value of every human life’.      

While Mr Johnson’s father Stanley – a former Conservative politician and MEP – is a familiar figure thanks to appearances on the TV talk show circuit and reality TV, it was his ex-wife Charlotte who was thrust into the spotlight last year with the release of a bombshell biography by journalist Tom Bower. 

Released in October 2020, The Gambler, detailed her troubled marriage to Stanley, with Charlotte reportedly saying at the time that she wanted ‘the truth to be told’. 

The book claimed that Boris Johnson’s father hit his mother and broke her nose in the 1970s, an aggression that left her needing hospital treatment. 

It was claimed that the incident took place when Charlotte was suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder and had ‘flailed’ at Stanley, who broke her nose when ‘flailing back’. 

Bower also claims that Boris’ distrust of his father is the reason he struggles to forge close friendships with men and seeks the company of women instead.

‘Charlotte is certain that her suffering preyed on the young Boris. Denied his mother’s embrace and the absence of any home warmth, while at prep school, Ashdown House in East Sussex, there was a vast emotional hole. Some called the result ‘the frozen child’, he wrote. 

Sonia Purnell’s biography, Just Boris, claimed that throughout their marriage Stanley was habitually philandering with other women. 

‘Charlotte had lived every day for years knowing that every woman who came into close contact with Stanley was fair game,’ said a long-time family friend. ‘It even included the wives of friends’, she writes.  

Born Charlotte Fawcett in Oxford in 1942, Charlotte was the daughter of the barrister Sir James Fawcett – who was president of the European Commission for Human Rights in the 1970s. 

She had described her parents as ‘rich socialists’, admitting that she had never voted Tory and found it ‘extraordinary’ that she came to marry one and have four Conservative children. 

Her grandparents were Elias Avery Lowe, a Lithuanian-American paleographer at the University of Oxford and Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, a writer best known for translating the works of Thomas Mann from German into English. 

Art had been a love of Charlotte’s since her childhood, revealing to Tatler that her parents gifted her a set of oil paints when she was five. 

‘I could handle them well and I immediately began to paint, without instruction. It was something I could make my own and be clever at. None of the others could paint’, she said. 

One of five children, Charlotte went on to study English Literature at Oxford University, where she met Stanley Johnson at a dinner in 1962.

At the time Charlotte was engaged to another student named Wynford Hicks, who she described in an interview with Tatler as ‘extraordinarily beautiful but quite boring’. 

Stanley sent her a note after the dinner asking if they could go for tea and a walk. She fell for him when he quoted Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, which made her laugh hysterically.  

Charlotte married Stanley a year after they met and she interrupted her education to travel to America with her new husband, who had received a Harkness Fellowship.

While they were in the US, she gave birth to their oldest child Boris in the Upper East Side of New York. 

She once explained how she settled on Boris Johnson’s full name – Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – while three months pregnant on a bus from the US to Mexico City.   

‘It was very uncomfortable, I was desperately sick’, she told the Telegraph. ‘We stayed with a man called Boris Litwin, who drew me aside and said, ‘You can’t travel back like this, here are two first-class air tickets. 

‘I was so grateful, I said, ‘Whatever the baby is, I shall call it Boris’.’

But she later changed her mind and called him Alexander Boris de Pfeffel.

‘At Eton, his friends discovered his foreign name and everyone started calling him Boris – even the beaks [teachers],’ she recalled.

‘But everyone who’s known him since childhood calls him Alexander. If I were to call him Boris it would mean something was really serious.’ 

Speaking of his birth in 1964, she said: ‘Boris was a champion when he was born. Because not only was he very big, looked like he was ready for prep school, but he had thick yellow hair. 

‘It was most extraordinary and it was the time when the Beatles had just arrived in New York, so he got called the blond Beatle and all the mothers having babies in that hospital were brought in to see the blond Beatle.’ 

The pair had four children together, three boys and one girl – Boris, journalist Leo, former minister Jo and broadcaster Rachel.  

Charlotte returned to England to complete her degree before the birth of her daughter Rachel in 1965, as the first married female undergraduate at her college, Lady Margaret Hall.  

She once recalled sitting her final university exams while pregnant with Rachel and Boris was ‘in the pram outside the exam hall’. 

As Stanley travelled for his career as an environmentalist, often Charlotte was alone at their home, deep in an Exmoor valley where she home-schooled her four children. 

During this period she balanced motherhood and painting, holding sell-out art shows in Brussels in the late 1970s. 

From the outside, she seemed something of a superwoman, having balanced her education with raising a young family and developing her career as an artist.  

But Charlotte was also struggling with a phobia of germs and dirt, eventually being diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Speaking to Tatler last year she said that it was a ‘relief’ to discover the condition often precedes Parkinson’s, adding that it ‘always felt such a bore’ undertaking daily rituals caused by the disease. 

When Boris was ten-years-old, in 1974, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the Maudsley Hospital, south London.

In the 2013 documentary Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, Charlotte spoke frankly about a breakdown she had when Boris was a child.

She said that while she was away for months being treated, Boris took on a role in caring for his younger siblings, protecting them while the family was subjected to a stream of often ‘dotty’ nannies.  

While she was being treated, Johnson Wahl held sell-out shows at the Maudsley Hospital, made up of 78 telling insights into her troubled psyche, many of which sold. 

Once out of hospital, Charlotte travelled to Brussels to be with Stanley. Purnell claimed she was readmitted several more times with depression over a period of two years.   

The mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1982, aged 40, but was still determined to continue her career as an artist.  

Speaking to the Telegraph in 2008, she said: ‘I try to paint every day if I possibly can, though I have to go to the hospital a lot. 

‘I still manage to paint, though my arm will suddenly do a movement which is completely unintentional and that almost brings me to tears.’  

Bower claims that ‘Stanley had promised Boris that he would never leave his beloved mother’, but that in Boris’ first year at Eton in 1978 Stanley told his children that he and Charlotte were divorcing. 

The mother moved with her children to Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, where she made a living painting to commission – with clients including Jonathan Miller and former Evening Standard editor Simon Jenkins. 

After meeting at a dinner party in Brussels, Charlotte began a close friendship with Nick Wahl, an American academic who lived in Paris, whom she regularly commuted to see before marrying in 1988.  

With Wahl Charlotte had moved to New York, but when was widowed in 1996, after her second husband died of cancer, she returned to the UK. 

She had another sell-out show at the Gavin Graham gallery, Notting Hill, in 2004. 

During her art career, Charlotte painted a variety of subjects though primarily portraits – including paintings of author Jilly Cooper and actress Joanna Lumley. 

She is said to have completed more than 2,000 pieces in her career and was the subject of an exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London in 2015.