British Prime Minister Boris Johnson - Monday 6 June 2022 - survived a no-confidence vote within the ruling Conservative Party, after 54 party lawmakers sparked the Partygate scandal related to violating restrictions related to the Corona virus.

For months, Johnson resisted calls for his resignation after he became the first British Prime Minister to violate the law while in office, as he attended rallies held inside the British government headquarters (Downing Street) while imposing precautionary measures to confront the outbreak of the Corona virus.

Birth and upbringing

  • June 19, 1964: Boris Johnson was born in New York City to upper-middle-class British parents, giving him both British and American citizenship.

  • His father, Stanley Johnson, was an economics student at Columbia University, had a job at the World Bank in Washington, and then moved on to a job with a policy committee working to control population size.

  • 1969: The family moved to Maida Valley, west London, where Stanley began post-doctoral research at the London School of Economics.

  • Johnson's mother is Charlotte Fawcett, an artist from a family of liberal intellectuals who married Stanley in 1963 before they moved to the United States.

  • His maternal grandfather, the lawyer Sir James Fossett, and his paternal great-grandfather is the Turkish Circassian journalist Ali Kemal Bey, who was a secular Muslim. On his father's side, he has ancestry that goes back to the English and French, and goes back to the grandchildren of George II, King of Great Britain.

  • He attended primary school at Primrose Hill, and attended European School in Brussels, then Eton College and Balliol College at Oxford University.

  • 1986: He was elected President of the Students' Union at the University of Oxford.

  • Boris renounced his mother's Catholicism and became an Anglican, joining the Church of England.

  • September 1987: Johnson marries Mustaine Owen.

his journalistic life

  • 1988: He began his career in journalism in The Times, but published an article quoting Colin Lucas in which he said, "University professor Colin Lucas says that King Edward II lived a period of debauchery with homosexual Pierce Gaveston in a palace built in 1325 However, this article contained two problems: the first is that Gaveston was executed in 1312, it is impossible to find him in a palace 13 years later, and the second problem is that Colin Lucas never mentioned this.

  • In the aftermath, Johnson was terminated by the newspaper for fabricating the quote, although he denied that he had.

  • However, Johnson, nicknamed "Pogo", who was a recent university graduate, moved to work at The Daily Telegraph, and became its correspondent in Brussels, where he covered the work of the European Commission with much exaggeration and chaos, by highlighting the The most unusual things about European institutions, like the size of sausages and toilets.

  • February 1990: His wife left him after several attempts at reconciliation, and they divorced in April 1993.

  • May 1993: Marries childhood friend Marina Wheeler in Horsham, Sussex, with whom he has a daughter soon after.

  • 1994: Became assistant editor at The Telegraph.

  • 1999: Leaves The Telegraph to become editor of The Spectator, a position he held until 2005.

Deputy in Parliament

  • 2001: He was elected as a Member of Parliament for the Henley region, until 2008.

  • 2004: When asked about his extramarital affair with Petronella White, a journalist in the "Spectator" magazine, Johnson - who was the magazine's editor-in-chief - replied that this was "nonsense".

  • Johnson, a married man with four children at the time, was a great hope for the Conservative Party.

  • But the journalist's mother revealed at the time that her daughter was pregnant and had a miscarriage.

    Faced with the exposure of his lie in this case, Johnson was excluded at the time from the leadership of the Conservative Party.

  • But a Conservative spokesman said at the time that "his (Johnson) days in politics are not over."

  • July 16, 2005: He wrote an article in Al-Shahed magazine - following the suicide attacks in London - criticizing Muslims, so some accused him of being hostile to Islam and Muslims.

  • Johnson made many statements offensive to Islam, and he once said that the Islamic faith was "strange and unattractive", and he likened Muslim women who wear the burqa to "bank robbers."

  • 2008: Became Mayor of London until 2016.

  • Boris Johnson admired US President Donald Trump (2017-2020) approach to politics, and joked that he wanted to have the opportunity to use Twitter as much as Trump does.

  • "In fact, I think Donald Trump's approach to politics has sparked the imagination of people all over the world," said Johnson, known for his diplomatic gaffe.

  • He described himself as a Zionist to the core, and was quoted by the Israeli intelligence website DEBKAfile as saying that he is an ardent Zionist, and that Israel is the great country that he loves.

Brexit Stream

  • Boris Johnson was one of the most important architects of the Brexit movement's victory in the referendum that took place in June 2016, and he still derives to this day a large part of his popularity.

  • Boris Johnson was Britain's foreign minister for more than a year in late 2017, when he made a lapse in the case of British-Iranian citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is detained in Iran and accused of participating in demonstrations against the Islamic Republic's regime.

  • The minister announced before a parliamentary committee at the time that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists when she was arrested in April 2016, strengthening Tehran's charges against her, at a time when her relatives were confirming that she was on vacation.

  • Boris Johnson retracted these statements, but this did not prevent him from calling for his resignation.

accusation of lying

  • The following was written in bold letters on a bus that toured the country during the referendum campaign on June 23, 2016: "Every week we pay 350 million pounds to the European Union, it is better that this money go to the health care system."

  • Boris Johnson considered the estimated value of those funds "reasonable", stressing that leaving the European Union allows "to regain control" of these amounts.

  • But according to European Commission data, the value of the UK's weekly bill to the EU rose to £135m between 2010 and 2014, two and a half times less than Johnson asserted.

  • According to politician Nigel Farage, described as a populist and one of the most extreme supporters of Brexit, such miscalculation of money is "the fault of the campaign officials".

  • Johnson was prosecuted for lying over his assertion of these random accounts, and the London High Court ended up dropping the charges, upholding Johnson's defense that they were "politically motivated".

  • When he was mayor, Johnson bought three hose-pipe vehicles from Germany to supply the British police, at a price of more than £300,000.

    Because it was never used, it was resold for thirty times less than its original price.

  • Johnson put forward an idea described as tempting, to erect a garden-bridge between the two banks of the River Thames: 366 meters of trees and flowers, Johnson described it as an "amazing oasis of calm" in central London when he was mayor in 2014.

  • But the project collapsed due to the financing file, which was not well studied.

    After it was initially presented as a "gift" to Londoners funded by private financial contributions, it turned out that it would eventually cost British taxpayers millions of pounds if it was completed, and his successor, Sadiq Khan (in 2017) decided to stop the project after it turned out to be very expensive.

  • July 13, 2016: Outgoing British Prime Minister Theresa May chose him as foreign minister in her new government that followed the resignation of her predecessor David Cameron.

  • July 23, 2019: British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wins the leadership of Britain's ruling Conservative Party, succeeding Prime Minister Theresa May.

  • November 6, 2019: He submitted his resignation to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and requested permission to dissolve Parliament in preparation for the election.

  • December 12, 2019: The general election is held, with the Conservative Party winning 365 seats or 43.6%, while Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party won 202 seats, or 32.1%.

  • Boris Johnson's political career was not without journalism writing and books, including Friends, Voters, Countrymen and The Churchill Factor.