Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson  (Conservative)
Member since 2015 - Member of Parliament (MP) for Uxbridge and South Ruislip
Years in office: 23.07.2019-present
Born: 19 June 1964
Nickname: None
Title: None
Age assumed office: 55 years 
Total time in office: Less than a year

Boris Johnson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Prime Minister

Main article: Premiership of Boris Johnson

Leadership election 23rd July 2019  11:45am

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a British politician serving as Prime minister-designate of the United Kingdom 
and Leader of the Conservative Party since 2019. He has been the Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip 
since 2015, and was the MP for Henley from 2001 to 2008. He was Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, and from 2016 to 
2018 he served as Foreign Secretary. A member of the Conservative Party, Johnson identifies as a one-nation 
conservative and has formerly been associated with both economically and socially liberal policies, and more recently 
with racist and homophobic rhetoric.

Office: Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Since 2015)

Spouse: Marina Wheeler (m. 1993 - 2018) · Allegra Owen (m. 1987 - 1993)
Children: Theodore Apollo Johnson (Son) · Cassia Peaches Johnson (Daughter) · Milo Arthur Johnson (Son) · Lara Lettice Johnson (Daughter)
Siblings: Jo Johnson (Brother) · Rachel Johnson (Sister) · Leo Johnson (Brother)
Education: Balliol College · European School of Brussels I · Eton College · Primrose Hill Primary School · Ashdown House, East Sussex

Timeline
1984:
In 1984, Johnson was elected secretary of the Oxford Union, before campaigning for the position of Union president, losing the election 
to Neil Sherlock.
1987:Johnson and Mostyn-Owen married in West Felton, Shropshire, in September 1987; Allegra e Boris – a duet for violin and viola – was 
specially commissioned for the wedding from Hans Werner Henze.
2015:In the May 2015 general election Johnson was elected MP.
2016:In 2016, Johnson became a prominent figure in the successful Vote Leave campaign for Brexit.
2016:After Theresa May became leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, in July 2016 she appointed Johnson Foreign Secretary.
2019:In January 2019, Johnson came under criticism for remarks he had made during the 2016 Leave campaign regarding the prospect of Turkish
 accession to the European Union; he denied making such remarks.

Boris Johnson, in full Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, (born June 19, 1964, New York City, New York, U.S.), American-born British journalist
 and Conservative Party politician who in 2008 became the second elected mayor of London and later served as secretary of state for foreign 
affairs (2016–18) under Prime Minister Theresa May.
As a child, Johnson lived in New York City, London, and Brussels before attending boarding school in England. He won a scholarship to Eton 
College and later studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford Union. After briefly working as a management consultant,
Johnson embarked on a career in journalism. He started as a reporter for The Times in 1987 but was fired for fabricating a quotation. He then began
working for The Daily Telegraph, where he served as a correspondent covering the European Community (1989–94) and later as an assistant editor (1994–99).
In 1994 Johnson became a political columnist for The Spectator, and in 1999 he was named the magazine’s editor, continuing in that role until 
2005.
In 1997 Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Clwyd South in the House of Commons, but he lost decisively to the Labour Party 
incumbent Martyn Jones. Soon after, Johnson began appearing on a variety of television shows, beginning in 1998 with the BBC talk program Have I Got News
for You. His bumbling demeanour and occasionally irreverent remarks made him a perennial favourite on British talk shows. Johnson again stood for Parliament 
in 2001, this time winning the contest in the Henley-on-Thames constituency. Though he continued to appear frequently on British television programs and became 
one of the country’s most-recognized politicians, Johnson’s political rise was threatened on a number of occasions. He was forced to apologize to the city of 
Liverpool after the publication of an insensitive editorial in The Spectator, and in 2004 he was dismissed from his position as shadow arts minister after rumours 
surfaced of an affair between Johnson and a journalist. Despite such public rebukes, Johnson was reelected to his parliamentary seat in 2005.

Johnson entered into the London mayoral election in July 2007, challenging Labour incumbent Ken Livingstone. During the tightly contested election,
he overcame perceptions that he was a gaffe-prone and insubstantial politician by focusing on issues of crime and transportation. On May 1, 2008, Johnson won a 
narrow victory, seen by many as a repudiation of the national Labour government led by Gordon Brown. Early the following month, Johnson fulfilled a campaign promise
by stepping down as MP. In 2012 Johnson was reelected mayor, besting Livingstone again. His win was one of the few bright spots for the Conservative Party in the 
midterm local elections in which it lost more than 800 seats in England, Scotland, and Wales. Johnson returned to Parliament in 2015, winning the west London seat of
Uxbridge and South Ruislip, in an election that saw the Conservative Party capture its first clear majority since the 1990s. He retained his post as mayor of London, 
and the victory fueled speculation that he would eventually challenge Prime Minister David Cameron for leadership of the Conservative Party.

Some critics, however, charged that Johnson’s personal political ambitions led him to be less interested and less involved in his job as mayor than he was in self-promotion. 
Even before leaving the office of mayor—having chosen not to run for reelection in 2016—Johnson became the leading spokesman for the “Leave” campaign in the run-up to the 
June 23, 2016, national referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union. In that capacity, he faced off with Cameron, who was the country’s
most prominent proponent of Britain remaining in the EU, and came under criticism for equating the EU’s efforts to unify Europe with those undertaken by Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler.

When all of the votes were counted in the referendum, some 52 percent of those who went to the polls had opted for Britain to leave the EU, prompting Cameron to announce his 
imminent resignation as prime minister. He said that his successor should oversee the negotiations with the EU over Britain’s withdrawal and that he would step down before the 
Conservative Party conference in October 2016. Many observers believed that the path now had been laid for Johnson’s ascent to the party leadership and the premiership.
In the morning at the end of June when he was set to officially announce his candidacy, however, Johnson was deserted by his key ally and prospective campaign chairman, Michael Gove, 
the justice secretary. Gove, who had worked alongside Johnson on the “Leave” campaign, concluded that Johnson could not “provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead” 
and, instead of backing Johnson’s candidacy, announced his own. The British media were quick to see betrayals of Shakespearean proportions in the political drama involving Cameron, 
Johnson, and Gove, whose families had been close and who had moved up the ranks of the Conservative Party together. When he left, Gove took several of Johnson’s key lieutenants with
him, and Johnson, seemingly concluding that he no longer had enough support in the party to win its leadership, quickly withdrew his candidacy.
When Theresa May became Conservative Party leader and prime minister, she named Johnson her foreign secretary. Johnson maintained his seat in the House of Commons in the snap election 
called by May for June 2017, and he remained foreign secretary when May reshuffled her cabinet after the Conservatives lost their legislative majority in that election and formed a 
minority government. In April 2018 Johnson defended May’s decision to join the United States and France in the strategic air strikes that were undertaken against the regime of Syrian 
Pres. Bashar al-Assad in response to evidence that it had again used chemical weapons on its own people. Opposition parties were critical of the May government’s use of force without
having first sought approval from Parliament.

Johnson himself was taken to task in some quarters for statements he had made regarding an incident in March 2018 in which a former Russian intelligence officer who had acted as a 
double agent for Britain was found unconscious with his daughter in Salisbury, England. Investigators believed that the pair had been exposed to a “novichok,” a complex nerve agent 
that had been developed by the Soviets, but Johnson was accused of misleading the public by saying that Britain’s top military laboratory had determined with certainty that the 
novichok used in the attack had come from Russia; the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory actually had only identified the substance as a novichok. Nonetheless, the British 
government was confident enough of the likelihood of Russian complicity in the attack that it expelled nearly two dozen Russian intelligence operatives who had been working in Britain 
under diplomatic cover. In May 2018 Johnson was the target of a prank—also thought to have been perpetrated by Russia—when a recording was made of a telephone conversation between him 
and a pair of individuals, one of whom fooled Johnson by pretending to be the new prime minister of Armenia.
While all these events unfolded, Johnson remained a persistent advocate of “hard” Brexit as May’s government struggled to formulate the details of its exit strategy for its negotiations
 with the EU. Johnson publicly (and not always tactfully) cautioned May to not relinquish British autonomy in pursuit of maintaining close economic involvement in the common market. 
When May summoned her cabinet to Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, on July 6, 2018, to try to reach a nuts-and-bolts consensus on its Brexit plan, Johnson reportedly was 
crudely obstinate. Nonetheless, by the gathering’s end, he seemed to have joined the other cabinet members in support of May’s softer approach to Brexit. However, after Brexit secretary
David Davis resigned on July 8, saying that he could not continue as Britain’s chief negotiator with the EU because May was “giving too much away, too easily,” Johnson followed suit the
next day, tendering his resignation as foreign secretary. In his letter of resignation, Johnson wrote in part:
It is more than two years since the British people voted to leave the European Union on an unambiguous and categorical promise that if they did so they would be taking back control of 
their democracy.
They were told that they would be able to manage their own immigration policy, repatriate the sums of UK cash currently spent by the EU, and, above all, that they would be able to pass 
laws independently and in the interests of the people of this country.…

That dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt.
May named Jeremy Hunt, the long-serving health secretary, as Johnson’s replacement. In 2022, Jeremy Hunt has been considered as anti-Brexit and deemed as unpopular by the Majority.
Johnson’s output as an author included Lend Me Your Ears (2003), a collection of essays; Seventy-two Virgins (2004), a novel; and The Dream of Rome (2006), a historical survey of the 
Roman Empire. In 2014 he added The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, which was described by one reviewer as a “breathless romp through the life and times” of Winston Churchill. 
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. This article was most recently revised and updated by Jeff Wallenfeldt, Manager, Geography and History.
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Boris Johnson
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Written By: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 
Last Updated: Jun 15, 2019 See Article History