SUSAN GREENHILLbut I took the view it didn’t really matter if
they had burnt broccoli or overcooked pasta
as long as she kept them safe, I’m not the
best cook either. We also had Luz [their
housekeeper] for 20 years, who helped with
house stuff and kept everyone in order.”
Even so, “if you talk to my kids they
will each regale you with horror stories of
things I failed to do,” she admits, laughing.
“I forgot induction day for Cassie, so she
arrived at school when everyone else had
made friends, and I remember taking Milo
to watch his Christmas play, thinking, great,
I am so efficient, but it turned out he was
actually meant to be in the play.
“My youngest son, Theo, has his birthday
on the fourth of July and I’d just gone back to
work and was sent off on a death-in-custody
inquest, which tend to be long and far away.
So we decided to pretend his birthday was
later, as he was young enough not to know,
but one of the others told him. So now
there’s always this thing on birthdays: ‘Oh
well, let’s make it the sixth ...’ ”
Johnson began his affair with Wyatt
around this time. When the news came out,
he denied it as “an inverted pyramid of
piffle” until Wyatt’s mother, Verushka, lost
patience and went public. It was the first
time Wheeler changed the locks and took
off her wedding ring.
Wasn’t it hard dealing with this? Again
she stiffens. “I think I pretty much got on
with things,” she replies coldly. I try another
tack to get her to shed some light on their
relationship — did he ever help out with
the housework? “He’s my least favourite
topic of conversation,” she repeats,
stonewalling me. “Ask me about my mum.”H
er mother, who did a degree
in Russian then years later an
Open University degree in
experimental psychology,
sounds a remarkable woman.
She worked for years at Amnesty
International as a researcher, catching the
7am train to London each morning. Though
she wore saris and cooked Indian food,
Dip never talked about her past life. “Most
of her stories stripped out the difficultstuff,” Wheeler says. “It was a mystery.”
Thus began a quest involving six trips to
India and two to Pakistan, as well as many
visits to her ageing mum, who lived alone in
Sussex following Charles’s death, to try to
get her to open up — particularly about her
sexless first marriage in India in the 1950s,
which she upped and left one day. She later
met Charles while working as a social
secretary at the Canadian Embassy in Delhi.
“I didn’t really know how she would take
to doing it because she had always been so
private,” Wheeler says. “But I learnt a lot
about her and it helped me think through
a lot of things. And I didn’t know she was
going to die, she suddenly took a downward
path at the end of last year, but it was kind
of wonderful seeing her move from being
quite cagey to enjoying telling me some
stories about the past. Some she tried to
dodge and dive, like her first marriage.” Like
mother, like daughter, I can’t help thinking.
Wheeler has had a front-row seat at
Britain’s most important events of recent
years. She was Johnson’s wife when he was
the mayor of London and hosting the 2012
Olympics, and later when he led the battle
for Brexit. Given her background, I would
have had her down as a remainer. However,
in the run-up to the 2016 referendum an
article she had written was published in The
Spectator that was seen as sticking a knife in
David Cameron’s EU reform deal, providing
a harsh critique of the legal implications.
Reportedly it was one of the factors that
persuaded her husband to come out for
Leave. Did she influence him? She deflects
the question, like the skilled QC she is:
“I didn’t write in The Spectator, it was a long
piece I wrote on our chambers’ UK human
rights blog about the charter for human
rights. Fraser Nelson [The Spectator editor]
saw it and they took out all the cases and
evidence and just left the argument.”
So is she in favour of Brexit? “It’s now
become such a difficult subject, I don’t even
call it Brexit, I think we just need to focus
on what our relations will be with the rest of
continental Europe. The thing I feel
strongest about, I feel unhappy the country
is so divided and people aren’t really
listening to each other properly. I hope next
year things will be different when the
technicalities are sorted out. Just as with
views on Covid, it feels like a fractious,
angry time and I don’t like talking into that
atmosphere. It’s so noisy.”
Family get-togethers must have been
interesting, with her sister describing herself
on Twitter as a “proud Europhile” — after
leaving journalism she was a spokeswoman
for the European Commission and now
works for the European Investment Bank.
“I wouldn’t call it awkward, though we did
disagree strongly on many aspects of the
EU. But I too consider myself a Europhile.
I grew up with the EU, I went to European
School in Brussels and did a masters in EU
law. And I favour deep and extensiveco-operation on all things, cultural, political
and so on. I just think it’s a mistake to
merge political institutions.” She adds:
“I disagree with my sister on everything,
but don’t find it hard to say I love you ...”
She seems to enjoy a close relationship
with her children. She describes in the book
how her eldest son, Milo, went with her on
the first trip to Pakistan and her youngest,
Theo, joined her in India, where he was on
gap year before heading to Cambridge.
“They all went straight to the index to see
how much they are mentioned,” she laughs.
“Speaking of which, their names are
wrong [in the book],” she tells her publisher
who is sitting close by. “It says Johnson but
they are Johnson-Wheelers.”
I try one last time to understand why she
stayed in the marriage for so long. “These
are such complicated questions and I am
not going to go there,” she says. “Honestly
there’s a lot of mulling over stuff, it’s all
quite recent and I think my mum’s
technique is not a bad one. She didn’t speak
for years about what happened to her. Some
things you need to put to one side — maybe
like government papers, come back in 20
years or so.” It can’t be easy to ignore when
he is on TV and newspapers every day?
“It’s not ideal but ... I think I’ve managed.”
She tries to distract me with a photo of
her and her sister as young girls on the
SS France with her parents, and her grade 2
cello certificate that she found recently
while sorting out her parents’ papers at the
house in Sussex.
Once she is finished with that, she has
lots more projects she would like to get
stuck into. Now fully recovered from
cancer, she plans to become involved with
the Eve Appeal in raising awareness about
the need for regular smear tests, particularly
during the pandemic. She also mentions
working with refugee women and perhaps
writing another book — though not on life
with Boris. “I think my marriage is the least
interesting thing about me,” she says. Like
her mother, poised with that ketchup
bottle, she refuses to be defined by a man n@christinalamb. The Lost Homestead: My
Mother, the Partition and the Punjab by
Marina W heeler is published on Thursday
(Hodder & Stoughton £25)How did she cope
when Boris’s affair
became public?
“I pretty much
got on with things
... He’s my least
favourite topic of
conversation”
26 • The Sunday Times MagazineTHE WHEELERS With her parents at a party
for Boris’s book Seventy-Two Virgins, 2004