AVALON
[the television series about the last days of
the Raj], which is wonderful, but it is
essentially through British eyes. So it was
interesting for me to get to know my
grandfather and mum’s lives, but also to see
what a privileged Indian family was living
through at that time.”
The project came about after she
mentioned her family history in a review
she wrote of the film Viceroy’s House, on the
70th anniversary of the partition in 2017,
and an editor contacted her suggesting a
book. The result is a charming memoir that
weaves the story of Indian independence
and the tragedy of the partition with that of
her mother’s own escape from an unhappy
marriage — a union that was “never
consummated ... she didn’t admire her
husband and he showed her no regard”
— and daring quest for personal freedom.
Eventually she married Charles, whom she
met while he was posted in Delhi, and
followed him around the world.
I mention the parallels between her
mother living in her father’s shadow and
her own marriage. She immediately stiffens.
“That’s my least favourite subject,” she says.
It’s not hard to understand why. Johnson
had a long-standing affair with Petronella
Wyatt, his deputy at The Spectator, who
twice became pregnant, the first time
having an abortion, then the second time
miscarrying the baby they had apparently
decided to have. Later came the art dealer
Helen MacIntyre, with whom he has
another child, and Jennifer Arcuri, the
Californian tech entrepreneur who gave
him “IT training” in her Shoreditch flat
with its pole-dancing pole. Arcuri finally
confirmed they had an affair last month.
And now of course he is engaged to Carrie
Symonds, who at 32 is only five years older
than Johnson’s eldest daughter.
Johnson and Wheeler finally separated in
the summer of 2018, just before he resigned
as foreign secretary over Theresa May’s
Brexit deal, and they moved out of a grace-
and-favour Carlton Gardens residence for
separate destinations. In the book her only
reference to the split is: “Six months into all
this ... my life hit turbulence, ending my
marriage of 25 years.”
She is not about to shed light on why she
stayed with him for so long, despite his
infidelities. “I feel strongly that my family
— especially children — need some calm,
quiet and privacy to take stock and find
a way ahead,” she says.
We do know, however, that infidelity
had also been a recurring theme of
Johnson’s own parents’ marriage. A new
book by Tom Bower claims Johnson’s father,
Stanley, had a string of affairs.
Wheeler’s childhood was far more stable.
She was a baby when they moved to
Washington, where her father was posted,
a time she describes as “idyllic”, living just
up the hill from Georgetown in a clapboard
house with a cherry tree in the garden,which she used to climb and “ping the pips”
on her elder sister Shirin’s head.
It was a fascinating time: Charles
Wheeler made his name covering the race
riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther
King and Robert Kennedy, the protests
against the war in Vietnam, and Watergate.
“The whole America period was an
exhilarating time,” Marina says. “When
Martin Luther King was assassinated I was
very young, but I vividly remember the
Apollo missions and Watergate. We absorbed
lots of politics. We went to a little school
that had a concentration of people linked to
politics in some way. One of my best friends
was Tracy Magruder, whose father, Jeb, was
involved in the Watergate cover-up. They
were this shiny wholesome do-no-wrong
American family, then their lives collapsed
around them. He had lied on behalf of Nixon
and I remember kids at school taunting
Tracy, ‘Your daddy’s goin’ to prison.’
“My mum was a homemaker at that time
so was very present. My father travelled a
lot, but we didn’t really feel an absence as he
would come back with presents and tell us
about the places he’d been, which really
opened our eyes.”
After Washington her father was posted by
the BBC to Brussels and the girls went to theEuropean School there. This is where she
met Boris, who was the same age and
studying at the school while his father was
head of the European Commission’s newly
established Prevention of Pollution division.
It was in Brussels that Wheeler says
“slightly randomly, at the age of 12, I
decided I wanted to be a lawyer. At that
time my mum had got quite interested in
feminism — women’s lib as it was called
then — and I was quite caught up in that as
well. I remember reading the Erin Pizzey
book Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will
Hear [a groundbreaking account of
domestic violence] and jumping on a sofa
and thinking I am going to be a women’s
rights campaigner. Of course I didn’t, but
I thought it would be good to become a
lawyer to do that and just fixed on the idea.”B
ack in the UK the family moved
to Garden Cottage, a country
home in West Sussex that her
parents had bought years
earlier. The two girls were sent
to the independent school Bedales, in
Hampshire, as weekly boarders. Bedales is
known as a progressive school, but
Wheeler’s time there was her “phase of
rebellion” and she ended up getting
suspended. “I broke almost every rule there
was, but I think on that occasion there
might have been a little bit of drinking on a
sand quarry. In fact quite a lot of drinking.
So much so that teachers had to be called ...”
She was sent home and later punished by
having to do the washing-up in the school
sanatorium every Friday evening.
She read law at Fitzwilliam College,
Cambridge, then did a master’s in EU law
back in Brussels and began working there as
a barrister. There she again crossed paths
with Johnson, by then The Daily Telegraph’s
Brussels correspondent and busy causing
trouble with his often fantastical
Eurosceptic stories. He was also breaking
up with Allegra Mostyn-Owen, his first wife
and fellow Oxford graduate. Wheeler’s
leftist friends from Cambridge, such as the
lawyer Philippe Sands and the writer Sonia
Purnell, were horrified. Wheeler was already
eight months pregnant when the couple
married in 1993. In his usual chaotic fashion
Johnson managed to get his divorce papers
signed just in time. Lara Lettice, now 27 and
a fashion journalist, was the first of their
four children. Then came Milo Arthur, now
25, Cassia Peaches, 23, and Theodore
Apollo, 21. One was born every two years as
Boris moved on to editing The Spectator and
then, in 2001, becoming MP for Henley.
It can’t have been easy juggling four
children and work? “I was very lucky with a
lot of support,” Wheeler replies. “We had a
nanny, Nicola, an Irish Catholic who came
back with us from Brussels and worked 16
years and is still in our lives. She was a
brilliant combination of being funny, quirky
and strict, and was an appalling cook,Last year she
discovered she
had cervical
cancer. “I never
thought I’d die,”
she says, “but
the children
were worried”
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25TAKING SILK Being appointed a Queen’s
Counsel barrister in February 2016