Stanley Johnson: The faltering rise of the ‘first father’

Following allegations of sexual harassment against Johnson Sr, Sean O’Grady looks back at the life of the prime minister’s father, and wonders whether he could ever be rehabilitated back into politics – and the daytime TV slots he so loves

Stanley Johnson speaking at an event in Westminster calling for a ban on trophy hunting (PA)

Last night, just for kicks (and because I’m paid to), I watched a video of Stanley Johnson chatting about the environment for 32 minutes on YouTube. It was recorded in 2012, and it was an impressive performance. With the strong physical resemblance, the same taste for a side quip, the similar fruity posh accent, slight stutter and expansive hands, it was like watching a more expert, knowledgeable, intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable version of BoJo.

Stanley Patrick Johnson, born 1940 – or StanJo, as perhaps he ought to be called – is a wild Europhile and a Remainer (or was, until the referendum – now he thinks we have to “make Brexit work”). In many respects, Stanley is the kind of liberal Tory that’s virtually been extirpated from his son’s populist party, and he genuinely knows his stuff on the climate science and all the rest of it. He wears his deep knowledge and expertise in such matters lightly, but listening to him reminisce about his six decades as an environmentalist, I realised that Stanley is the real thing, in the way that Boris isn’t (on anything). He may be an old buffer, but he’s not a bluffer.

While Boris was making lame jokes about polar bears and writing silly climate-change-denying columns in The Spectator and the Telegraph, his dad was doggedly at work writing pamphlets and manoeuvering directives through the interminable bureaucracies of the United Nations and the European Union. While Boris was on the rubber-chicken circuit trying to get the party leadership just because it was there, Pops was at the coal face, so to speak, trying to get the Chinese to build fewer fossil-fuel power stations.