Boris Johnson Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (born June 19, 1964), better known as Boris Johnson, is a British politician in the Conservative Party. He is Member of Parliament for Henley, Shadow Minister for the Arts, and a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party. He is also editor of The Spectator magazine and writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
He was born in New York to Stanley Patrick Johnson and Charlotte Johnson. He was educated at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar, and read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Brackenbury Scholar, and President of the Oxford Union.
After leaving university he lasted a week as a management consultant ('Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix, and stay conscious'), before becoming a trainee reporter for The Times in 1987, but within a year had been sacked for falsifying a quotation from his godfather, Colin Lucas, later Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Following a short period as a writer for the Wolverhampton Express and Star he joined The Daily Telegraph in 1987 as leader and feature writer, and from 1989 to 1994 was the paper's European Community correspondent. He served as assistant editor from 1994-1999. His association with The Spectator began with a stint as political columnist from 1994 to 1995. In 1999 he become editor of The Spectator but continues to write a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph.
Johnson is famously disorganised and once explained the lateness of his work by claiming that "Dark forces dragged me away from the keyboard, swirling forces of irresistible intensity and power".
In 2001 Johnson became MP for Henley-on-Thames, succeeding the outgoing Michael Heseltine. He had previously been unsuccessful in winning Clwyd South in 1997. In 2004 he was appointed to the frontbench as Shadow Minister for the Arts, part of the Shadow Department of Home Affairs and part of the Labour government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport. This was part of a small reshuffle resulting from the resignation of the shadow home affairs spokesman, Nick Hawkins. He is also a Vice-Chairman of the party, with emphasis on campaigning.
At 19 he was married briefly to Allegra Mostyn-Owen. In 1993 he married Marina Wheeler, a barrister (and the daughter of journalist and broadcaster Charles Wheeler), who is the mother of his two sons and two daughters.
Johnson has appeared on Have I Got News For You three times, and twice as guest presenter, and has also appeared on its sister radio programme The News Quiz. He has written an autobiographical account of his experience of the 2001 election campaign entitled Friends, Voters, Countrymen, Jottings on the Stump. He is also the author of two collections of journalism, Johnson's Column and Lend Me Your Ears. His first novel Seventy-Two Virgins was published in 2004, and he is currently working on a book about what it means to be British, due for publication in 2005. He was nominated in 2004 for a BAFTA television award, and has attracted several unofficial fan clubs and sites.
His official Boris Johnson.com web site and blog started up in September 2004.
On October 16 2004 The Spectator carried an editorial criticising the trend to mawkish sentimentality by the public. Using the public reaction to the recent murder of hostage Ken Bigley as one example, it claimed the inhabitants of Bigley's home city of Liverpool were wallowing in their "vicarious victimhood", and that many Liverpudlians had a "deeply unattractive psyche" and refused to accept responsibility of "drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground" in the Hillsborough disaster (a contention at odds with the findings of The Taylor Report). It closed with, "In our maturity as a civilisation, we should accept that we can cut out the cancer of ignorant sentimentality without diminishing, as in this case, our utter disgust at a foul and barbaric act of murder." Reaction to the leader was swift, particularly in Liverpool.
Although Johnson had not written the leader (for which Simon Heffer later accepted he 'had a hand in'), he accepted responsibility for it. Conservative leader Michael Howard condemned the Spectator editorial roundly, saying "I think what was said in the Spectator was nonsense from beginning to end.", and sent Johnson on a tour of contrition to the city. There, in numerous interviews and public appearances, Johnson defended the editorial's thesis (that the deaths of figures such as Bigley and Princess Diana were over-sentimentalised by the media and general public) but apologised for the article's wording (saying "I think the article was too trenchantly expressed but we were trying to make a point about sentimentality") and for using Liverpool and Ken Bigley's death as examples. Johnson appeared on a BBC Radio Merseyside phone-in show, in which Paul Bigley (brother of the slain hostage) flatly told Johnson "you are a self-centred pompous twit - get out of public life".
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