The Prime Minister is in mourning today as his beloved mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, has died at the age of 79. A notice published in The Times newspaper said she had died suddenly and peacefully at St Mary's Hospital in west London.
Born in 1942, Charlotte was the daughter of Sir James Edmund Sandford Fawcett, the former president of European Commission for Human Rights, and his wife Frances Lowe. She studied English at Oxford University in the 1960s, but paused her studies to move to the US with Tory MEP Stanley Johnson, who she married in 1963. She later returned and gained a second class honours degree.
As Johnson resigns as Conservative leader, we revisit Tatler’s interview with the Prime Minister’s late mother, Charlotte Johnson: family matriarch, creative genius, generous spirit and a source of boundless strength and love to her four children Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo
The couple went on to have four children together, including Prime Minister Boris (57), journalist Rachel (56), politician Jo (49) and environmentalist Leo (53). Yet the marriage was not always a happy one, with Johnson Wahl telling biographer Tom Bower about an incident in which her husband had broken her nose in an argument. They were divorced in 1979, and she remarried artist Nicholas Wahl in 1988, moving to New York with him.
An accomplished painter, she was known for her portraits of the likes of Joanna Lumley and Jilly Cooper, before moving on to work on cityscapes while living in the US. In 1982, at the age of 40, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but continued to paint with the aid of a walking frame, and The Mall Gallery in London held an exhibition of her work in 2015.
She moved back to the UK in 1996, following her husband's death.
The PM has previously said his mother was the 'supreme authority' in the household growing up, saying that she had taught him 'the equal importance, the equal dignity, the equal worth of every human being on the planet.' She reportedly only once asked for her son to use his influence - to ask London buses to wait until everyone was seated before moving, because 'if you're disabled, you often fall.'
Her daughter Rachel once dubbed her 'the only red in the village when we lived on Exmoor', stating that her father only married socialists, making Johnson Wahl something of an anomaly in the Johnson household of Tory politicians.
Upon hearing the sad news, Leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, tweeted: 'I'm very sorry to learn of the prime minister's loss. My condolences to him and his family.'
No. 10 is yet to make a statement.
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