Rachel Johnson: from Celebrity Big Brother to LBC

Rachel Johnson, sister of the prime minister, has been criticised for suggesting on her LBC radio show that allowing Vladimir Putin to “divide up” Ukraine might be the “only way” to end the conflict.

“I think it’s fine and fair enough – obviously fair is a silly way of putting it as nothing is fair in this war – if Putin claims and retains Donetsk and Luhansk, the Donbas, and allows Ukraine to get on with its life, I could live with that,” she said.

“But,” she continued, “I don’t think Ukraine will [and] that’s where I think we’re going to have enormous problems and it is going to be a long and frozen war.”

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Johnson’s inflammatory comments, made on Sunday, received an enormous backlash, with some listeners condemning LBC for broadcasting the segment. “What qualification does any member of this absurd family have to hold forth on this subject?” asked journalist and writer Tim Walker on Twitter.

Career as journalist

The 56-year-old Johnson joined the popular phone-in radio station in April 2020, presenting an hour-long show on Friday evenings. When her appointment was announced, LBC’s managing editor Tom Cheal described her as a “first-class presenter and journalist” amid allegations that she had only been handed the role because of her brother, Boris.

But Johnson has indeed had a long career as a journalist. She started work at the Financial Times in 1989, where she was the paper’s first female graduate trainee and wrote about the economy.

She’s since worked for publications including the Sunday and Daily Telegraphs, the Evening Standard, The Sunday Times, The Big Issue, The Spectator and The Lady magazine, which she edited for three years.

In 2018 she was sacked as the Mail on Sunday’s star columnist amid an editorial shake-up, despite having recently been given a year-long contract extension. Former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre had criticised her column, saying her writing gave “banality a bad name”, reported The Guardian. That same year she had been nominated for Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Reality TV

Johnson is equally as ubiquitous on the small screen as in print, with appearances on Have I Got News for You, Question Time and Sky News, where she once stripped off as part of a stunt to get people talking about Brexit. “We would not reveal to the public that I was wearing a beige bralet thing but let the public believe that I had gone Brextits up,” she later wrote for The New European.

In 2018, she followed her father, Stanley Johnson, into the world of reality TV, appearing in the 21st series of Celebrity Big Brother.

“I think I have been the only housemate (out of a grand total of 276) to appear on Celebrity Big Brother who actually had a celebrity big brother,” she wrote in a piece for The Times, describing the experience as like being at “a house party that never ends, put together by a sadistic psychopath”.

Bad Sex award

Since 2004, Johnson has penned several books, including the novels Notting Hell – described by Jilly Cooper as “shiveringly brilliant” – and its sequel, Shire Hell, which won a Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 2008.

“I always wanted to win a literary award and to bag this coveted prize – a prize that has been won by admired giants such as Norman Mailer, Sebastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe – is, for me at least, a tremendous honour,” she said at the time.

Foray into politics

Johnson famously supported Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. In her memoir, Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis, published in 2020, she claimed that she had attempted to persuade her brother to back the then prime minister David Cameron and to not campaign to leave the EU.

“I felt he had backed the wrong side, quite possibly not for entirely selfless reasons. But his rat-like nose for power – and channelling the instincts of the British people – could not ever be doubted,” she wrote.

It was with Brexit in mind that Johnson made her first foray into politics in 2019, standing as a European parliament candidate for Change UK, the beleaguered pro-Remain party set up by disaffected Labour and Tory MPs.

“I kept hearing the cries of my unborn grandchildren. ‘What did YOU do during Brexit, Grandma, when that man Farage was trying to take the country back to the Thirties?’” she wrote in her book when justifying her decision to stand.

But at the European elections in May 2019, Change UK failed to win a single seat and was accused of taking hundreds of thousands of seats from the Liberal Democrats – the party Johnson joined in 2017 in protest against Tory support for Brexit.

In 2020, she tweeted that she was “so unsuccessful a politician that people joked if I’d joined the Brexit Party instead, we’d have never left the EU”.

Husband and children

Johnson is married to Ivo Dawnay, a former communications director of the National Trust and now a freelance journalist, communications director and political researcher. He told the Evening Standard in 2013 that there was “hardly an aspect” of his life that had not already been covered in depth by his wife’s “forensic journalism”.

The couple have three children, Ludo, Charlotte and Oliver, and live in Notting Hill, west London, in a home Johnson has described as having “Tory energy” and being “Le Creuset everything”.

In January this year, Dawnay laid into Boris Johnson on Twitter, describing his brother-in-law as being “like Samson in the Temple, determined to pull everything down before he goes, like a tot with a temper tantrum”.

As Christopher Hope asked in The Telegraph, “with family like that, who needs enemies?”