Rachel Johnson

Johnson is the daughter of former Conservative MEP Stanley Johnson and artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl (née Fawcett). She is the younger sister of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip;[4][5] and the elder sister of Jo Johnson, former Conservative MP for Orpington.[4]

On her father's side, Johnson is a great-granddaughter of Ali Kemal, a liberal Circassian-Turkish journalist and the interior minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence in 1922. During the First World War, her grandfather and great-aunt were recognised as British subjects and took their grandmother's maiden name of Johnson.[6] On her mother's side she is a granddaughter of Sir James Fawcett, a prominent barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights.[7]

Johnson's middle name, Sabiha, means "morning" in Arabic and is often used as a given name in Turkey. It was the name of the second wife of her great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, who was a daughter of Zeki Pasha.[8] Stanley Johnson befriended his paternal half-uncle Zeki Kuneralp, Sabiha's son, when Kuneralp was Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James's in the 1960s.

She was educated at Winsford First School on Exmoor, Primrose Hill Primary in Camden, north London, the European School of Brussels, the independent Ashdown House School in East Sussex, Bryanston School in Dorset and St Paul's Girls' School.[9] In 1984 she went to New College, Oxford, to read Classics (Literae Humaniores);[10] there she edited the student paper Isis[11] and graduated with a 2:1.

Johnson with Emily Maitlis in 2014

In 1989 she joined the staff of the Financial Times, becoming the first female graduate trainee at the paper, where she wrote about the economy.[12] She spent a year on secondment to the Foreign Office Policy Planning Staff in 1992–93. She moved to the BBC in 1994, but left to move to Washington D.C. as a columnist and freelancer in 1997.[12]

She has written weekly columns for The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and other regular columns for Easy Living and She magazines, as well as the Financial Times.[12][13] She is a contributing editor of The Spectator and until 2009 was a weekly columnist on The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard, among other publications. She now writes a weekly column in The Mail on Sunday, a column for The Big Issue [14] and a column for The Oldie.

In April 2014 she was a judge in the BBC Woman's Hour power list 2014.[15][13] She sits on the boards of Bright Blue, the modernising Tory think-tank, and Intelligence Squared, the international debate forum. In March 2014 she appeared in Famous, Rich and Hungry on BBC1.[16] She is a panellist on Sky News' weekly debate show, The Pledge.

As a novelist, her works include Notting Hell (Penguin 2006), a novel about couples living in the Notting Hill area of London, Shire Hell (a follow up to Notting Hell), and The Mummy Diaries (Penguin 2004), a diary of her year living in London and Exmoor. She also commissioned and edited The Oxford Myth (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988) while still an undergraduate at Oxford. She is also the author of A Diary of The Lady, My First Year as Editor (Penguin, 2010) and A Diary of The Lady, My first Year and a Half (2011). A new novel, Winter Games, was published in 2012. Her final novel in the Notting Hell trilogy, Fresh Hell, was published in 2015.[18][19][20] She was a judge of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.[21]

Johnson's Shire Hell won the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which she described as being an "absolute honour".[22]

Her short story "Severely Gifted" appeared in The Sunday Times on 21 December 2008.[23]

Johnson was a member of the Conservative Party from 2008 to 2011, but later joined the Liberal Democrats in the run up to the 2017 general election because of the Conservative support for Brexit.[24] Johnson then considered becoming a Lib Dem candidate in a seat in the West Country, but was barred under the Party's rules, having been a member for less than a year.[24][25] Following the Grenfell Tower fire, Johnson expressed the view that Theresa May was also a victim of the fire "because she can do nothing right".[26]

In April 2019, she joined the new anti-Brexit party Change UK and was the lead candidate on the party list in South West England at the 2019 European Parliament election.[27] She later lamented this decision, describing herself as the "rat that jumped onto a sinking ship" and criticised the party leadership's focus group attitude to decision making structure and added that Change UK was a "terrible" name.[28]

As of February 2021, she remains listed on the board of directors of Bright Blue, even though she left the Conservatives in 2011.[29]

Johnson is married to Ivo Dawnay, a descendant of William Dawnay, 7th Viscount Downe,[30] and of the earls of Glasgow. Dawnay is a director and consultant with the National Trust. Johnson lives in London and Exmoor, Somerset.[31]

• Rachel Johnson at IMDb
• Authors On Tour Live Podcast Johnson discusses her novel Notting Hell
• How To Be A Lady: An Elegant History with Rachel Johnson
• Rachel Johnson on Twitter
• Rachel Johnson on LBC