Boris Johnson

British politician serving as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party since July 2019. He served as Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, and as Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018. Johnson identifies as a one-nation conservative and has been associated with both economically and socially liberal policies. On 23 July 2019 he was elected new Conservative leader in a ballot of party members and became the next UK prime minister. On 24 July 2019, Queen Elizabeth II accepted Theresa May's resignation and appointed Johnson as Prime Minister. In his first speech in the role, Johnson promised that the United Kingdom would leave the European Union on 31 October 2019. In August 2019, Johnson controversially advised Queen Elizabeth II to prorogue Parliament from 10 September to 14 October; on 24 September this action was unanimously ruled to be unlawful and of no effect by the Supreme Court. Subsequently, in a snap general election in December 2019, Johnson led the Conservative Party to their biggest victory since 1987, and biggest percentage vote share of any party since 1979. Initially coming to public attention as a journalist, he became editor of The Spectator in 1999, then later served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Uxbridge and South Ruislip since 2015, and was the MP for Henley from 2001 to 2008. Johnson is the eldest of the four children of Stanley Johnson, a former Conservative Member of the European Parliament and employee of the European Commission and World Bank, and the painter Charlotte Johnson Wahl (née Fawcett), the daughter of Sir James Fawcett, a barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights. Johnson's maternal great-grandparents were palaeographer Elias Avery Lowe and translator H. T. Lowe-Porter. On his father's side, Johnson is a great-grandson of Ali Kemal Bey, a liberal Turkish journalist and the Interior Minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was killed during the Turkish War of Independence in 1922. As a child, Johnson suffered from severe deafness and had to undergo several operations to have grommets inserted in his ears. He was reported to have been rather quiet as a child. On 5 September 1987, he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen; the marriage was dissolved on 26 April 1993. Later that year, on 8 May, he married Marina Wheeler, a barrister and daughter of journalist and broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler and his wife, Dip Singh. The Wheeler and Johnson families have known each other for decades, and Marina Wheeler was at the European School in Brussels at the same time as her future husband. They have two daughters — Lara Lettice (born 12 June 1993, Belgium) and Cassia Peaches (born 8 September 1997, London) — and two sons — Milo Arthur (born 3 February 1995, London) and Theodore Apollo (born 4 July 1999, London). In 2009, Johnson fathered a daughter with Helen MacIntyre, an arts consultant. Johnson's current girlfriend, Carrie Symonds, is the daughter of Matthew Symonds, a co-founder of The Independent newspaper, and Josephine Mcaffee, a lawyer. Link to Wikipedia biography