Boris Johnson’s sister interviewing her father might seem odd – but it isn’t that unusual

Other prime ministerial relatives have made the most fleeting and often unwilling appearances in the public domain, writes Sean O’Grady

Family affair: Boris Johnson was the subject when Rachel Johnson quizzed father Stanley on LBC (AFP/Getty)

As has been widely noted on social media, Rachel Johnson scored another minor first for her family by interviewing her father Stanley about her brother Boris on her LBC radio show.

To be fair to Ms Johnson it’s not quite as unhealthy as it sounds. Rachel is an established journalist in her own right and, though personally loyal to her brother in his recent travails, has been sharply critical of his politics, especially on Brexit, going so far as to stand for Change UK at the last general election. Stanley, too, is his own man, though sometimes a misbehaving one, and is a genuine and long-standing environmentalist, and pro-European. They weren’t that complimentary about their brother/son.

Even so, it seemed a bit odd: I half-expected Jo Johnson, now Lord Johnson of Marylebone (and still a Conservative), to have joined the conversation and given some extra insight into Al, as the character Boris is known in the family.

As political discussions go, the Rachel Johnson-Stanley Johnson discussion was unusual, if not unique. About 20 years ago Carol Thatcher scored what would for anyone without a close family connection, have been a remarkable coup in securing an interview with… Denis Thatcher, aka her father. The questions were on the soft side of soft, such as the best way to plant a tree, how he got into rugby, and what it was like playing golf with President George HW Bush (“wet”) but it was interesting to hear Mr Thatcher speak publicly for the first time, cigarette in hand.

Other prime ministerial relatives have made the most fleeting and often unwilling appearances in the public domain. Cherie Booth (Blair) QC; Terry Major-Ball, brother of John, wrote newspaper columns and TV travelogues; and of course Carrie Johnson is an environmental campaigner in her own right. We probably know as much as we want to about the marriage of Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine and Michael Gove or, further back, the breakdown in the relationship between Robin Cook and Margaret Cook, who wrote a memorable account of her husband's behaviour in a memoir entitled A Slight and Delicate Creature.

Other relatives, such as Margaret Thatcher’s sister Muriel, Gordon Brown's television producer brother Andrew and Tony Blair’s lawyer brother William, kept shtum apparently willingly and quite voluntarily.

Apart from that, it’s more a matter of the political familial encounters we’d like to see but probably never will. A debate about the climate crisis and Covid vaccines between Jeremy and elder brother Piers Corbyn, for example, would be well worth paying money to see. So would a frank discussion between David and Ed Miliband about what went wrong for the Labour Party, and their part in it, over the past decade and more.

Sadly there are no more than a few fragmentary accounts of the journalist Randolph Churchill’s fiery arguments with his father Winston about their personal and political differences to illuminate that particular historical relationship.

The Rachel Johnson show on LBC and its occasional nepotistic guest list is the nearest we’ll get to witness a Johnson family reckoning with the consequences of its most driven member.