Revealed: How a chain-smoking Norland nanny raised Boris Johnson and his siblings while their mother was in and out of hospital being treated for crippling mental health issues
- The nanny ‘ran the family’ when Boris Johnson’s mother was hospitalised
- Charlotte Johnson Wahl struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Nanny moved with them to Brussels and became the children’s ‘second mother’
Boris Johnson was raised by a chain-smoking nanny who ‘became part of the family’ while his mother was in and out of hospital with crippling mental health issues.
The nanny became the former foreign secretary’s ‘second mother’, while his own was forced to leave the family to be treated for ‘galloping’ obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and depression.
Boris and his three siblings moved to Brussels with the nanny in the 1970s, who ‘steered the long-haired, collapsing Johnson clan’ while their mother was ill.
Father Stanley relocated them to the Belgian capital after securing a job as a civil servant for the European commission.
Boris Johnson was raised by a chain-smoking nanny who ‘became part of the family’ while his mother was in and out of hospital with crippling mental health issues
Mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, who was an esteemed artist, was struggling to balance life in a new country, her portrait paintings, four ‘precocious’ children and OCD
But their mother, Charlotte Johnson Wahl, who was an esteemed artist, struggled to balance life in a new country, her portrait paintings, four ‘precocious’ children and OCD.
She was later hospitalised at the Maudsley, a psychiatric hospital in south London, while the nanny stood in as mother to the Johnson siblings.
Sister Rachel Johnson wrote in the Sunday Times that her mother was ’32, had depression and galloping obsessive compulsive disorder (for which she’d been hospitalised at the Maudsley) and was finding things hard, trying to combine her painting and looking after Alexander (Boris), 10, me, 9, Leo, &, and Joseph, 2.’
Hired from Britain’s most renowned training school, Norland College, which is favoured by the the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the nanny soon began to ‘run everything’.
The 22-year-old, who had a ‘raspy voice and gurgling laugh’, became a real-life Mary Poppins to the youngsters.
And the nanny, who was aptly named Mary, ‘cut an unforgettable figure’ in their household while their mother was being treated in clinics.
Sister Rachel Johnson said her mother struggled to balance depression and galloping obsessive compulsive disorder, painting and looking after children
Ms Johnson told the publication: ‘My mother rotated in and out of clinic, but the show had to go on. “I had to run everything else” Mary tells me, “because there was no one else”.
She grew very close to the four boisterous children, who were notorious for being ‘rough’, and she even took baths with them.
Ms Johnson Whal has previously spoken about her struggles with the debilitating mental illness.
In a 2015 interview with The Telegraph, the artist said she ‘lost it’ and ‘went bonkers’ and had to leave the family to get treated.
Doctors said her case as one of the worst they had ever seen, describing how she would ‘wash her hands until they bled’, the publication reports.
In the same year, Ms Johnson Wahl told the Radio Times, she would turn around twice before going into a room, straightened cushions 12 times and hated mess from food.
She said: ‘Suddenly I had this terror of food on my clothes. Life got impossible.
‘With four children you can imagine the amount of mess and food around. And anything like a bit of omelette on my sleeve would completely panic me.’