Tatler Archive: Boris Johnson’s mother on her ‘soft-hearted son’ 

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
Tatler Archive Boris Johnsons mother on her ‘softhearted son
Charlotte Johnson Wahl at home in the studioNick Ballon

I love Boris. Just the sight of him makes me happy. Yet even when he was editor of The Spectator and I was a weekly columnist, I was frustrated by only minimal access, as were all his devoted staff and, indeed, his public and petitioners, who, his secretary Ann Sindall complained, sent 40 emails a day, each of them wanting 'a bit of Boris'. Sindall acted as Cerberus so the colossus could get on with his massive projects. And then there is his reading. Once, on a holiday where all the Johnson siblings and their children were gathered together for a beach barbecue, I noted that only Boris was missing. Where was he? Hiding behind a rock at the end of the beach, engrossed in Roman history.

Rachel is just as dynamic – she can run and walk for miles, uphill as well (with an obedient dog in her wake). She can play men at tennis and swim around islands and read taxing volumes and write books quickly and make triple-word scores with every round of Scrabble. Moreover, she's also reliable and responsible. Some women bristle at Rachel's competitiveness, but my relationship with her is entirely harmonious since she would clearly win every conceivable contest she could enter against me, so there is nothing to compete over.

Boris and Rachel also have a tall, dark and handsome brother, Leo, now a television presenter on BBC World and an eco-entrepreneur. He is married to an Afghan woman, and both members of this couple are happy to tell hilariously self-deprecating stories.

The youngest is Jo Johnson, formerly a financial journalist heading the Lex column in the Financial Times, now head of the Downing Street Policy Unit and Minister of State. He is sporty and serious: driven, determined and brilliant – apparently even more so than Boris. His wife is the Guardian writer Amelia Gentleman, the daughter of the artist David Gentleman.

But where does all this genius and talent come from? How could one family contain so many über-alphas? Stanley Johnson? Hmm... An author and environmentalist, Stanley is great. He is now 78 and, apparently, as a younger man he too exuded a huge physical charisma. But no, there must be someone else. And that someone is Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo's mother, Charlotte.

Charlotte Johnson Wahl is a painter who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 40. She had noticed that one of her feet had begun to feel like a flipper, and the condition has progressed slowly since then. To keep her balance, she pushes a chic black walking frame that doubles as a seat. She has suffered from OCD and depression and been a patient in the Maudsley, the south London psychiatric hospital. Mental fragility is often linked to creativity and when you enter her home you find incontrovertible evidence that Charlotte is a true artist. 'Charlotte is the genius of the family,' says Dr James LeFanu. She is also a beacon of light and humanity. It's as though she has never met anyone unpleasant in her life – the emanation is goodness, rather than innocence.

But Charlotte is a little-known figure who has so far evaded publicity. This is partly because she has not lived in this country for large stretches of time and partly because, as an artist strapped for cash, she always sold each painting as she went along and therefore had no body of work for exhibitions; it is also, Rachel explains, 'because she considers personal publicity incredibly vulgar and is horrified by the amount all the rest of us get'.

Charlotte was born in 1942. Her father, Sir James Fawcett DSC, got a double first in classics at Oxford and was, over his career, legal adviser to the UN, general counsel to the IMF and president of the European Commission on Human Rights, as well as a prominent legal academic. He was a man, his Times obituary reported, 'of extraordinary charm and dignity and strikingly handsome'. Charlotte's mother, Bice, was the daughter of Elias Avery Lowe, a Lithuanian professor of paleography at Princeton, and Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, who, for 25 years, was the official translator of the works of Thomas Mann from German into English.

One of five children, Charlotte lacked confidence as a child because 'I often overheard my mother say, "Don't ask Charlotte to do it. She'll get it wrong." I felt I was the least favourite of my parents' children. However, I was Nanny's favourite, so it was all right.'

The great redeeming feature of her childhood was that, when she was five, her parents gave her a set of oil paints. '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.'

Charlotte got into Oxford to read English at Lady Margaret Hall but, before her own academic career had a chance to get going, she met Stanley Johnson at a dinner at All Souls held to celebrate Stanley's winning of the Newdigate poetry prize. It was 1962. 'I was engaged to somebody called Wynford Hicks, who was extraordinarily beautiful to look at but actually quite boring. Anyway, at this dinner I was between two geniuses, Alasdair Clayre, a very brilliant fellow of All Souls who used to sing medieval songs to a lute, and Stanley Johnson. Afterward, Stanley sent me a note asking if he could come to tea and go for a walk. So a few days later we went for a walk and he suddenly said, "Love is sweet. Revenge is sweeter far. To the Piazza. Ah ha ha har!", which made me laugh so much I fell in love with him. Then he said he had been offered a Harkness Fellowship (a bursary to study in America) and if I didn't go with him we would definitely split up.'

They married eight months later, aged 20 and 22, and she gave up her degree to accompany him to America.

Charlotte was a corker and so was Stanley. And there were happy times. Charlotte came back to Lady Margaret Hall as their first ever married female undergraduate and took her degree and got a second – not bad considering Boris was 10 months old and Rachel was in the oven at the time. The couple had four children in nine years, the youngest, Jo, born in 1971. They moved 32 times, due to Stanley's work as an environmentalist. On Exmoor, Charlotte lived alone with the children in the Johnson family farmhouse and home-schooled them. She was blissfully happy: 'I love small children.'

But Charlotte had a problem. 'I had become extremely phobic. I was terrified of all forms of dirt. In 1974, I had to go into the Maudsley as a patient of Professor [Hans] Eysenck [the influential late psychologist]. While I was there, I did 78 paintings and they gave me an exhibition.' (It was a sell-out). Stanley was in Brussels at the time and, with the help of two au pairs, he looked after the children. Charlotte says she will never forget the pain of the children running down the hospital corridor to see her and then having to leave again.

She has since discovered that there is a connection between her depression and her disease. 'It was such a relief to find that OCD often precedes Parkinson's and is a part of it. I always felt such a bore with these ritualistic things I had to do. It's much better controlled now with medication. I also discovered that depression and tiredness go hand in hand with Parkinson's.'

Once out of hospital and back in Brussels with Stanley, Charlotte managed to continue painting at the same time as looking after the four children, mostly on her own. The challenge was made considerably easier by the fact that her chief discipline issue involved trying to get the children to stop reading so much and go outside. She remembers the three smaller children calling for Boris, their leader, to come and play with them. When asked to think of a game, Boris would invariably say, 'Let's play reading.'

Meanwhile, 'things with Stanley were very difficult. I thought I was marrying a poet but he had become very interested in the environment, he travelled a lot and he enjoyed his travels and then a dear friend told me about that...' Stanley exuded an Elvis-like charisma. Women were throwing themselves at him. Charlotte is not willing to go into details, but the inference is clear enough.

In 1979, Charlotte and Stanley divorced. The children were all very upset, though Charlotte is on 'very good terms with Stanley because I couldn't bear not to be'. She lived with the children in Elgin Crescent, Notting Hill, and continued to paint portraits to commission – among her collectors were Rachel Billington, Jonathan Miller and Jilly Cooper. She painted twins, triplets and fantasy vorticist-type skyscapes of cities viewed from above.

Boris, Charlotte, Leo and Rachel Johnson as children

Then, in 1982, Charlotte met the American academic Nick Wahl. 'We were at a dinner party in Brussels given by [the diplomat] Crispin Tickell and Nick asked could he see my paintings. He was on a trial separation from his wife. There was an immediate connection. I flew out to see him and he came to see me. There were an incredible number of crossings of the Atlantic.' They married in 1988 – by which time Jo was in his final year at Eton, and the rest of the children were up and running – and lived in New York, on Washington Square.

'You could not have wished for a more engaged and loving stepfather,' says Rachel. 'He was so clever, incredibly warm, funny, loving and proprietorial. He was also exasperating – he was supposed to be writing his history of the French Fifth Republic but he put all his energy into his life.

'They lived in a large flat in perfect harmony – he writing, or allegedly writing, she painting. It was a great tragedy when he died a long-drawn-out death from cancer in 1996.'

Painting of the Johnsons by Charlotte Johnson WahlNick Ballon

'My children loved him and he they,' says Charlotte. 'Indeed he sometimes pretended they were his children. He had none of his own.' Following Nick's death, Charlotte came back from New York and settled in Notting Hill again. The Parkinson's began to get worse and 'I would spend all my time writhing and jerking.' Painting became more difficult as she had to hold her right arm with her left for steadiness. Then, two years ago, something of a medical miracle was performed by Ludvic Zrinzo at the National Hospital in Bloomsbury. 'He introduced two electrodes into my brain and linked them to a battery in my chest. It means I don't jerk any more and I can go to the cinema and the theatre again. It's bliss.'

Charlotte's children were lined up waiting for her when she was wheeled out of the operating theatre. Unfortunately, she had a brain haemorrhage immediately after the surgery and was rushed back in again. 'It was pretty frightful for them – they thought I was going to die. But Mr Zrinzo has done 250 of these operations. People are queuing up to have it done because you do survive it.'

These days Charlotte sings with 40 other Parkinson's patients in Pimlico once a week. 'We sing and we do rounds. Lovely. It's very good and strengthens the voice... [We sing] "My Bonny Lies over the Ocean" and "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes". She also does ballet in a practice room in the Albert Hall. 'Mainly we do the same ballet as they are practising there. We have a flautist, piano and drummer.' She goes to the theatre and reads masses, often political biographies: 'Currently it's The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson.'

Her children are, obviously, her great joy, and they are devoted to her. 'They are quite different to how they are perceived,' says Charlotte. 'Rachel is not the tough person she seems to be. She really minds about things and can become terribly upset and Boris is so soft-hearted.' The clan will be out in force to celebrate their mother at the retrospective of her work that will be held at the Mall Galleries in September. The exhibition is being organised by Nell Butler, a TV producer and family friend. Nell was dismayed to learn that Charlotte had not made a record of her prolific output and decided to throw herself into the challenge of tracking down, photographing and cataloguing the works sold to make a 'simple home-produced book of them'. Yet so impressive were her findings that she planned an exhibition instead: 'I'm passionate about Charlotte's paintings. I think she's the most brilliant original talent. And her brain is an extraordinary engine... not totally under her control, scarily impressionable, emotionally connected, damaged but undefeated.'

'As I get older, I realise how lucky I am to have her as a mother,' says Rachel. 'If I had one wish it would be to restore her health, even though I have to recognise that being diagnosed with Parkinson's aged 40 played its part in making her so wonderful and adored.

'She somehow enhances everyone she meets, and her extraordinary ability to appreciate other people – however apparently unblessed with charm or appeal – makes one see why they too are loveable. If any of her children have any empathy or humanity - I hope not too big an if – it is largely thanks to her.'

This was originally printed in the March 2015 issue of Tatler. Subscribe now to get 3 issues for just £1, plus free home delivery and free instant access to the digital editions.

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