Before politics, Boris Johnson was sacked from The Times for inventing a quotation
Long before he became prime minister, a young graduate trainee at The Times wrote about the discovery of Edward II's palace and put invented words in the mouth of a historian, who happened to be his own godfather. The editor fired him. Johnson moved to the Telegraph and made his name writing from Brussels.
His full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his birth, on 19 June 1964, took place on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where his father Stanley was studying economics at Columbia, which made him an American citizen until he later renounced it. The family returned to England in 1969, moving between an Exmoor farm and London. As a small child he was quiet, bookish and deaf, needing several operations to fit grommets. When Stanley joined the European Commission in 1973 the family moved to Brussels, where Boris learned French at the European School, until his mother's hospitalisation for depression sent the children to an English boarding school in 1975.
A King's Scholarship took him to Eton in 1977. There he started using his middle name and cultivated the eccentric English persona that later became his trademark. Teachers grumbled about idleness and lateness, yet he won prizes in English and Classics and edited the school paper. At Balliol College, Oxford, from 1983 he read Classics, played rugby as a tighthead prop, and became president of the Oxford Union in 1986, though his term was not thought memorable.
After The Times let him go in 1987, he landed on the leader-writing desk of The Daily Telegraph, whose editor Max Hastings he had met at university. Readers liked his old-fashioned phrasing and his habit of addressing them as my friends. From 1989 to 1994 he reported from Brussels as one of the few Eurosceptic correspondents there, needling Commission president Jacques Delors with stories colleagues dismissed as euromyths, such as plans to regulate the curve of British bananas.
He edited The Spectator from 1999 to 2005 while entering Parliament, then served as Mayor of London from 2008 to 2016, Foreign Secretary, and prime minister from 2019 to 2022.
Source: Boris Johnson
