Mourning for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson: his mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl passed away in recent hours at the age of 79.
Mourning for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson: his mother Charlotte Johnson Wahl passed away in recent hours at the age of 79. Speaking of his mother, Johnson said that she was the “supreme authority” in his family and that she had taught him to give “equal importance, equal dignity, equal value to every human being on the planet“.
The announcement was made in a note published in local newspapers, which did not clarify the cause of death. The obituary explains that the 79-year-old died ‘suddenly and peacefully’ at St Mary’s Hospital in west London. The news obviously found prominence in the Anglo-Saxon world where all the main political leaders expressed their condolences to the British Prime Minister for the serious loss of his mother.
Mrs Johnson Wahl, born in 1942 was the daughter of the lawyer Sir James Fawcett who was chairman of the European Commission on Human Rights in the 1970s. She married Stanley Johnson, father of Premier Boris, in 1963 before completing her degree at Oxford University as the first married student of her college. The couple had four children – Boris, journalist Rachel, former minister Jo and environmentalist Leo – before divorcing in 1979. The prime minister’s son Wilfred, born in April 2020, was her 13th grandchild.
In 1988 she married American professor Nicholas Wahl and moved to New York, where she began painting cityscapes but also made a name for herself as a portrait painter. Returning to London in 1996 after the death of her second husband, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but continued to paint, balancing herself with a walker while working. The Prime Minister had described her mother as ‘the ultimate authority’ in the family. At his first Conservative Party conference in 2019, Johnson said his mother had taught him to give “equal importance, equal dignity, equal value to every human being on the planet“.