Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl dies at 79 Boris Johnson

Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the prime minister’s mother, has died at the age of 79.

The portrait painter died suddenly and peacefully in a London hospital on Monday, the family said in a statement shared with the Daily Telegraph.

The prime minister has previously described his mother as the supreme authority in the family. At his first Conservative party conference in 2019, Johnson said his mother had taught him the equal importance, the equal dignity, the equal value of every human being on the planet.

Born in 1942, she was the daughter of lawyer Sir James Fawcett, who was president of the European Commission of Human Rights in the 1970s.

She studied English at Oxford but discontinued her studies to travel to the US with Stanley Johnson, whom she married in 1963. She later returned to complete her degree, becoming the first female college woman married in college. her, Lady Margaret Hall, and achieving second- class honors.

She made her name as a professional portrait painter. In 2015, she told the Telegraph: My older sister was extremely smart, just like my little brother. My parents did not know what to do with me, so they gave me some colors and I turned out to be good at it. Once I started I could not stop.

Joanna Lumley and Simon Jenkins are among those sitting for her portraits, but she also painted other themes including landscapes. The Mall Gallery in London held a retrospective of her work in 2015.

She and Stanley had four children: Boris, Rachel, Joe and Leo, before divorcing in 1979. Prime Minister Wilfred’s son, born in April 2020, was her 13th grandchild.

She once recalled how the Prime Minister got her name when, after an awkward Greyhound bus trip to Mexico City while she was three months pregnant, a man named Boris Litwin, with whom they were staying, gave her two first-class plane tickets for the trip back. With I was very grateful, I said: Whatever the baby, I will call him Boris.

She later changed her mind and called him Alexander Boris de Pfeffel: In Eton, his friends discovered his foreign name and everyone started calling him Boris too [teachers]With But all those who have known him since childhood call him Alexander. If I were to call him Boris it meant something was really serious.

During the marriage Johnson Wahl suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital where he remained for nine months. She later described how she completely lost it, but used her time there to paint.

After leaving after her divorce, she earned a living by selling her paintings and later recalled that it had become very difficult. She talked about a Dickensian Christmas where the whole family she could afford was a kapon because turkey was too expensive.

In 1988 she married Nicholas Wahl, an American professor, and moved to New York, where she painted landscapes of the city, which were the subject of an exhibition sold in 2004. She was a widow in 1996 and moved back to London. .

She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 40, but continued to paint, using a standing frame to stand well if needed. The only time she is known to have asked her son Boris, whom she described as meek, to use his influence was when he was mayor of London she asked him to make sure the buses did not move until everyone to sit down, because if you are disabled, it often falls.

Condolences from parliamentary colleagues began pouring into social media on Monday night. Labor leader Keir Starmer wrote on Twitter: I am very sorry to learn about the loss of prime ministers. My condolences to him and his family.

No. 10 did not approach for comment.