Clinton of the Thames
Famous for his bumbling and his outré utterances, 
Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson is married to a British Asian childhood friend. Government lawyer Marina Wheeler’s mother, Dip Singh, is Sikh. Wheeler’s politics are leftist; she handles a lot of EU cases:
Marina Wheeler has a mixed public and private law practice with a particular focus on social care, mental health and employment work (especially discrimination claims)… she worked for four years in Brussels and much of her work continues to have an EU or international angle. [Link]
Like Nelly Furtado’s, his kids are a quarter Indian:
Nihal: Are you down with the ethnics?
Boris: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me, Nihal.
Nihal: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years? Who’s your favourite bhangra artiste?
Boris: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian, so put that in your pipe and smoke it. [Link via SAJA]
By many accounts, Wheeler is pretty down-to-earth, but the couple should be hauled before Marina’s human rights courts for naming their kids Apollo, Lara Lettice and Cassia Peaches. What’s next, Dionysus Engelbert Sapodilla?
‘There was lots of curry-a-deux at the Kismet Tandoori’In 1987 he married Allegra Mostyn-Owen but the marriage lasted less than a year, finally being dissolved in 1993. Later that same year he married Marina Wheeler, a barrister, the daughter of journalist and broadcaster Sir Charles Wheeler and his Sikh Indian 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 sons (Theodore Apollo and Milo Arthur) and two daughters (Lara Lettice and Cassia Peaches). Boris Johnson and his family currently live in Highbury, North London. [Link]
Johnson’s first wife was socialite Allegra Mostyn-Owen:
“Boris is a man who needed someone very obedient and silent, who would be willing to stay in the background and create a soothing home life, while giving him space to build a glittering career”…
He arrived at her room at Trinity College on the wrong night for a party. “I was reading this textbook,” said Allegra. “And suddenly, there’s this stranger at the door, who goes, ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh.’ We drank a bottle of wine and talked. He made me laugh… I didn’t really think he was making a play for me, despite the fact there was lots of curry-a-deux at the Kismet Tandoori“… [Link]
Wheeler married him when he was on the rebound. They had a shotgun wedding:
His stories about the idiocies of the European Union were received with rapture by an ever-growing circle of fans, although his infuriated colleagues in the Brussels press corps accused him of making them up. As Boris’s career took off, his marriage collapsed. Allegra often didn’t know where he was: “I used to get the paper — yesterday’s news — and there’s his byline in f****** Zagreb…” Allegra felt she too was heading for a breakdown if she stayed with Boris. She left.
… living in Brussels was Marina Wheeler, a childhood friend. The daughter of Charles Wheeler, the former BBC correspondent, Marina helped Boris pick up the pieces. She was there as a friend, she says, but Boris reverted to the chase. She resisted, but that only intensified his pursuit. Although his Tory politics were abhorrent to Marina, a left-wing lawyer, she fell madly in love with him. [Link]
She was heavily pregnant by the time Boris’s divorce was finalised in March 1993, and they married 12 days later. [Link]
The Clintonian politician was demoted from a party post in ‘04 for lying about an affair:He’s the male equivalent of a blonde with big tits
Boris Johnson, the Tory MP and editor of The Spectator magazine, was last night sacked as a frontbench spokesman by Michael Howard for lying about his private life… Lady Verushka Wyatt disclosed that her daughter had an abortion last month as a result of an affair with Johnson, who is married with four children. [Link]
… I had lunch with a friend of his mistress, Petronella Wyatt, who told me that in 2003 she had got pregnant by Boris, and had aborted the child, but that he had told her he would look after any child she had by him… On the day he headed off to apologise for the Spectator editorial that had criticised Liverpool, Petronella aborted the second child she had conceived by him…
Marina had known about Boris’s affair with Petronella for some time… She felt he treated her fine and that, while the Petronella thing was unfortunate, it was not as bad as people made out. But she was also very angry with her husband for seeing Petronella again a couple of times quite recently, and she threw him out of the house temporarily. [Link]
“He’s the male equivalent of a blonde with big tits. He’s a powerful blond, he’s quite funny and he’s easy and he’d be in love with you for a bit. Then he’d piss off.” [Link]
His first wife never remarried and has no kids. She now runs workshops for young Muslims:
For the past six years she has been running workshops for five to 14-year-olds at the Minhaj-Ul-Quran Mosque in Forest Gate… “She is not a Muslim, but has been an important part of our attempts to deradicalise our young people.” [Link]
Johnson famously showed up to his first wedding in borrowed trousers and managed to lose the ring within an hour. His friends describe him as a more charming Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby: accomplished, funny, but irresponsible and unwilling to be bound by convention.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. –The Great Gatsby
Also check out Anil’s post on Johnson learning bhangra at the London Mela.
on Friday, July 18th, 2008, 9:50 pm in Profiles › 
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He’s also apparently Karl Malone on the Thames — watch here.
Boris is also an Islam hating racist.
Pagal_Aadmi_for_debauchery, you don’t have anything but slanderous rhetoric of the most foul kind. The wahabbi fanatics that make up the jumping up and down book burning brigade of the British Muslim establishment who are front organisations for the Muslim Brotherhood decided to smear him with that hysterical nonsense because he refused to bow down to Hamas and other organisations, and refused to stick his head in the sand about violent radicalisation amongst British Muslims. That you should regurgitate their nonsense is a very sorry indictment of you.
@2 Another one of those who conveniently conflates Islam and race when it suits them. I’m sure at other times they will also vehemently say that it isn’t a single race (when posts on profiling come up). Must be a lawyer.
For 3 & 4:
I meant Islam hating and racist.
He does hate Islam. He has said so himself, repeatedly. He did not say he hates radical Islam or extremist Islam. He said he hates ‘Islam’.
He is a racist not because of his comments about Islam but because of his racist writings against blacks and other minorities.
Boris rocks. His views are probably not that different from those of his great grandfather who was a reform minded Turk
I will never understand the hair. I mean, is it really that messy or is it like some clueless hipsters’ hair - the mess takes some effort to achieve? I choose the latter, despite the mess; the ends are trimmed to the same length in that video. That must take some effort, right?
Yes. I am that shallow.
Dude, Boris Johnson is hilarious. Have you ever read his writing? He’s really funny. That bit about out-ethnic’ing is obviously a joke in context, kind of like Robert Wexler saying that cocaine’s a fun thing to do.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-mayor/article-23478964-details/Boris%20to%20Asian%20host:%20I%27ll%20%27out-ethnic%27%20you/article.do?expand=true
In the BBC Asian Network debate, Mr Johnson said: “Almost 100 years ago my Turkish great-great grandfather came to London and I’m very proud of that.” Presenter Nihal Arthanayake asked: “What part of your Turkish culture do you maintain?”
BJ: A lively … interest in Turkey.
NA: How often do you go and see your family?
BJ: It turns out I’ve got plenty of Turkish cousins living and working in London.
NA: Did you just find out when you needed it to get the ethnic vote?
BJ: I’m happy to say that lots of Turkish relations have been coming and going in our family for a long time.
NA: Are you down with the ethnics?
BJ: I’m down with the ethnics. You can’t out-ethnic me Nihal.
NA: How many bhangra gigs have you been to over the last few years?
BJ: I can’t remember. But my children are a quarter Indian so put that in your pipe and smoke it.
NA: Okay, let’s not try to out-brown each other.
He does hate Islam. He has said so himself, repeatedly. He did not say he hates radical Islam or extremist Islam. He said he hates ‘Islam’.
So? What’s not to hate about Islam? It’s just another fiction like all the other sky god fairy tales, keeping people mentally enslaved.
So? What’s not to hate about Islam? It’s just another fiction like all the other sky god fairy tales, keeping people mentally enslaved.
Nothing wrong with that. But lets not pretend that he does not dislike Islam.
Since he is an elected official, the people who voted him into office don’t seem to have problem with his views.
I see that you support the Hamas.
Hamas ? How did you make that leap in logic from my post ? I don’t really care about why Londoners vote for Johnson.
Oh, based on your previous comments, I thought that you felt that he/his views were reasonable because he had been elected through a democratic process (like, say, that other party whose name sort of sounds like something you dunk your pita in. Or sorry to go all Godwin on you, a guy with a funny mustache.)
Of course, there might be that other point of view which states that the fact that he was democratically elected might still make him a racist Islamophobe. Of course, these days, that often counts as a mark of virtue in some circles.
@14 Seems like your Hamas/Hummus line has already been used by by a certain guy named Sacha Baron Cohen. You might want to be a bit more original. Ahmadinejad makes anti-Semitic statements about Jews & Israel and denies the Holocaust ever happened. He is an elected official in his country. Apparently his comments are a “mark of virtue” too and he gets to speak at the UN. I think you are overstretching yourself here. Give it a rest. Maybe water those blooming flowers.
Thanks for your concern. But I’m pretty limber, so don’t worry about me.
Well, what was the point of the Londoners comment then? Maybe you were agreeing with @2 that a majority of his constituency are Islamophobic and racist? Was that the issue the election hinged on?
There is a great deal of hostility to religion in general in UK/Europe. If there was an assertive kind of Protestantism (e.g Southern Baptist) rising in power I am sure they would be targets of this kind of speech as well.
@16: The comment in #2 was that Johnson was “Islamophobic racist”. You can see my response to that. Should be clear enough. As to whether the majority of the people who voted for him are islamophobic & racist, I don’t know. As in any election people have their own motives for voting for a candidate. At the end of the day Johnson is just a mayor. Not the Prime Minister of England.