What distance has the apple fallen? This is the question that many people will ask this week about Boris Johnson’s father Stanley.
Charlotte Edwardes reported that Boris squeezed her inner leg under the table during a private dinner in summer 2019.
He had put his hand ‘high’ up her leg, she maintained, and had ‘enough inner flesh beneath his fingers’ to make her ‘sit suddenly upright’.
And, she went on, when she mentioned this afterwards to the person sitting on Johnson’s other side, the woman replied: ‘Oh God, he did exactly the same to me.’
Edwardes then dubbed the Prime Minister ‘the double thigh-squeezer’.
Boris Johnson denied squeezing anyone’s thigh under the table. As for his father Stanley, he said this week he had ‘no recollection at all’ of a senior female Tory MP who claimed he had touched her inappropriately before adding he had no comment to make.
Caroline Nokes (chair of the Commons women’s and equalities committee) accused Stanley, of hitting her in the stomach.
Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of Boris Johnson is pictured with Stanley Johnson (right) during Boris Johnson’s launch of ‘The Churchill Factor. How One Man Made History’ in 2014.
Caroline Nokes, 49 was a former minister and has claimed that Stanley Johnson has inappropriately touched her. Nokes also said she had “a wonderful seat” at the Tory Party conference held in Blackpool in 2003. This is when she was only in her 30s.
This alleged incident occurred at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, 2003. She was then the Tory candidate to Romsey.
Nokes told a Sky News panel on Monday discussing violence against women: ‘I can remember a really prominent man – at the time the Conservative candidate for Teignbridge in Devon – smacking me on the backside about as hard as he could and going “Oh, Romsey, you’ve got a lovely seat”.’
Stanley Johnson was the candidate who lost to be elected.
It’s not clear why Nokes, who did nothing about it at the time, felt the need to level the accusation 18 years later.
But in doing so, she prompted Ailbhe Rea, a journalist for the New Statesman magazine, to accuse Johnson Senior of ‘groping’ her at the 2019 Tory conference. (Stanley Johnson did not respond yesterday to journalists’ questions and have yet to address this allegation.
If the rumpus causes any embarrassment to Boris and Stanley, don’t expect Nokes to be sorry. She and the Prime Minister are not in love.
Nokes was livid to discover from a journalist’s Twitter feed that she had been sacked as a middle-ranking immigration minister in Boris’s first ministerial reshuffle in July 2019. Nokes is an outspoken critic of the Government.
It is not the first time Nokes has been featured in headlines for an unlucky encounter with a male. She was exposed in 2010 by a sting operation that revealed her relationship with James Dinsdale (a Tory councillor 10 years her senior).
Nokes, who was married at the time, met Dinsdale at 11pm in a £129.95-a-night hotel three miles from the Commons, a sum just within the limit MPs could claim on their expenses for overnight accommodation.
After two hours, he left and Nokes found a hidden camera in the ceiling on Nokes’ bed. The device was given to her by the Commons Authorities, and police were able to view the footage.
Stanley Johnson (ex-MEP) is the father of the Prime Minster and it’s alleged that he inappropriately touched Ms Nokes
Nokes’ horror, the men told Nokes that it had film of Nokes having sex. They also revealed the details in a Sunday newspaper.
Stanley has also been subject to difficult headlines regarding the other sex. A deeply unflattering portrait is painted of him in author Tom Bower’s 2020 biography of Boris, The Gambler.
In it Bower quotes Stanley’s first wife Charlotte – Boris’s mother – as saying: ‘He was completely unfaithful.’
According to Bower, Charlotte – an acclaimed artist who died this year aged 79 after a long battle against Parkinson’s disease – ‘found the pressure of her husband’s neglect and philandering overwhelming’.
Also, the book claimed that Stanley struck Charlotte in the nose during a marital fight. Stanley insists the injury happened when she ‘flailed’ at him, and he ‘flailed back’ during the argument.
Friends claimed that he regretted the incident deeply and denied being violent at any other time. But she is quoted in the book saying: ‘He broke my nose. It made me feel that I was worthy.
Stanley wanted to be loved, sex and power. And when I contradicted him, it threatened his power.’
Crucially, Bower claimed that the astonishing event defined Boris – who has had at least six children by three women – as a man.
‘Not only had he watched her [his mother] suffer, but also saw his father blatantly cover up the truth.’
Boris’ turbulent marital relationship, which ended in divorce in 1979 in 1963, is likely to be true.
Another biography, Just Boris, A Tale of Blond Ambition by Sonia Purnell, claims Charlotte was brought to the depths of a nervous breakdown by Stanley’s womanising.
Charlotte spent nine months being treated at the Maudsley Hospital, London for depression. In the two following years she was admitted again for depression.
Stanley was at that time working in Brussels for the Common Market. She was then flown to London and lived in a home in the diplomatic district. Boris was only ten at that time.
The breakdown was not triggered by one incident, claims the book: ‘Just the accumulation of all the years when she was trying to bring up the family and Stanley was having affairs – away on his interminable trips as well as closer to home.
“It got worse and worse until she was so depressed that it made her crack. What woman wouldn’t?’.
‘Charlotte had lived every day for years knowing that every woman who came into close contact with Stanley was fair game,’ the book adds. ‘It even included the wives of friends.’
Charlotte divorced her husband and she married again. However, her second husband Nicholas Wahl (an American political professor) died from cancer five years later.
Stanley and Jennifer were married by Robert Kidd (editor, widow) in Scotland. The couple has been married for 39-years and they have 2 children Julia and Maximilian.
Johnson Senior has described as ‘complete garbage’ suggestions that he has ever been a philanderer. Johnson Junior states that he won’t comment on Johnson Junior’s private life.
But what is beyond doubt is that they have both faced accusations of serial womanising over the years – whether garbage or not.