REX

sk Marina Wheeler her most vivid

childhood memories and she will recount

a supper where she, her sister and parents

took turns to say what they were good at.

When it was the turn of her mother, Dip,

her father, Charles, prompted her: “You are

good at cleaning the lavatory.” A frustrated

stay-at-home wife, Dip did not appreciate

the joke. Instead she stood over him and

insisted he take it back or she would pour

ketchup on him. He carried on laughing

so she did the deed. “It really was

something seeing his shock and all this red

gloop over his white hair,” Wheeler says.

“I didn’t know I had it in me,” her mother

told her afterwards.

Her father was Charles Wheeler, then

based in Brussels as the BBC’s Europe

correspondent and a household name as

one of Britain’s most distinguished foreign

correspondents. Now, decades later, both

her parents have died and Marina has

written a book about her mother. “I wanted

to bring her out of the shadows of my

famous father,” she says.

It is hard not to see the parallels. At 56,

Wheeler might have spent years as a

barrister fighting important cases involving

suspected Taliban commanders and

radicalised children, as well as bringing up

four children of her own, but she is better

known as the long-suffering wife of Bonkin’

Boris, whose rise to become editor of The

Spectator, then mayor of London, then

foreign secretary, then prime minister, was

accompanied by a string of affairs, extra-

marital pregnancies, lies and betrayals, all

splashed across the tabloids. Wheeler may

never have poured ketchup over that famous

blond mop, but she often changed the locks

on their Islington home and kicked him out.

Was she surprised when Boris — who as

a boy dreamt of one day being “world King”

— became prime minister? “Well, he’s been

talking about it for a long time,” she says.

Now, after two turbulent years that have

seen the end of her marriage, her battle

with cancer, the death of her beloved

mother and her ex moving into No 10 and

acquiring a much younger fiancée, a rescue

dog and another baby, not to mention

going into intensive care and almost dying

from coronavirus, Wheeler has, she says,

finally moved on.

Indeed, the door of her new terraced

house in a trendy, cobbled part of east

London opens to reveal a woman with a

wide pixieish smile, fashionably dressed in

a taupe silk shirt, swishy black pants with

broderie hems and lace-up boots. She looks

every inch the glamorous divorcée.

She shows me through to a vast, light-

filled room lined with bookshelves. Cosy

sofas face windows overlooking a courtyard,

and there is a coffee table with a cafetière

and a tray of pastries. She bought the house

after her divorce came through in February

and moved into it in June, though she says

with a shrug that there was “sadly no

housewarming because of Covid”.

“I feel excited,” she says. “This, for lots of

reasons, is quite a pivotal moment in my

life. My long marriage ended, my last two

kids off at uni, my parents no longer around,

the shifting around of places ... I took time

out from legal work and now am going back.

I feel I’m free to pick how I spend my time

in a way I haven’t been for decades.”

She is also celebrating the publication of

her book The Lost Homestead. It tells the story

of the end of British rule in India in 1947 and

its partition into India and Pakistan through

the eyes of Indians, a timely read given the

current reassessing of colonialism. Those

Indians are her mother’s family. Because of

her name, light olive skin and dark hair,

people often assume Wheeler is Greek, but

her mother, Dip Singh, was Indian, and she

keeps a copy of the epic Hindu poem

Bhagavad Gita in the guest loo.

Her book had a difficult birth. Last year

her plans for going away with a friend to

write were upended when a routine smear

test revealed abnormalities. When a doctor

at London’s Whittington Hospital told her

she had cervical cancer, her reaction was:

“I have no time for this. Quite apart from

anything else, I have a book to write.”

“I never thought I’d die,” she tells me.

“But the children were worried.”

The diagnosis and three subsequent

operations put paid to a writing trip to

Russia. A reaction to the gas used in keyhole

surgery made her appear like a “balloon ...

I looked like I was recovering from an

amateur facelift”.

After she had recovered, her mother was

diagnosed with bowel cancer and died in

February. Then the pandemic hit, and in

April Johnson ended up in intensive care.

Their children have been reported as not

speaking to him because of his behaviour,

but did go to the hospital.

“It’s been quite a time for them. My mum

had just died. They’ve had a lot of difficult

things.” On the issue of the children not

speaking to their father, Wheeler says:

“That’s a matter for them. I try hard to not

speak for them.”

Wheeler’s mother was born in the

Punjabi town of Sargodha, the fifth and

youngest child of a Sikh doctor who ran a

clinic for the poor but was also president of

the municipal committee that organised

the town for its British rulers. A prosperous

man, he owned farmland and an ice factory,

producing blocks of ice used for air

conditioning in the summer heat. Home

was an opulent house with Italian marble

floors, many bedrooms and rose-filled

gardens, which Dip described as “idyllic”.

When Dip was 14, however, the family

was forced to flee amid the chaos and

violence unleashed by the division of India,

which saw their side of Punjab end up in

the newly created Pakistan. They left

behind their comfortable life — and the

bike she had just been given for her birthday

— and moved to Delhi.

They were among 15 million displaced

— Hindus and Sikhs going one way and

Muslims the other — and more than a

million were killed. Partition also set off one

of the world’s most dangerous rivalries

between two countries — India and

Pakistan have both been nuclear powers

since the 1990s — which has seen three

wars, horrendous terrorist attacks and a

recent hardening of attitudes on both sides.

“Incredibly, here was this enormous

catastrophic event of the 20th century yet

I knew hardly anything about it,” she says.

“My mum didn’t talk about it. Growing up

I watched The Jewel in the Crown

A

“I feel excited. This

is quite a pivotal

moment in my life.

My long marriage

ended, my last

two kids off at

uni, my parents

no longer around”

EX AND THE CITY With Boris Johnson, then

her husband, at the London 2012 Olympics

The Sunday Times Magazine • 23