Boris In Blue-Blooded Shocker

By chloeg Last edited 187 months ago
Boris In Blue-Blooded Shocker
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Think back to those hazy pre-mayoral-voting days when you would gaze at loveable candidate Boris's mischievous face in your daily edition of the Evening Standard, and ruminate on his status as ‘one of us’, or 'man of the people'.

Well, nostalgic friend, those days are over. Today's news reveals that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is not, as he would seem, just your average Tom, Dick or Harry. Johnson is the latest celebrity to be found shuffling around public records offices in the BBC documentary Who Do You Think You Are?, and was said to be shocked at the revelation that he is a direct descendant of King George (not the mad one, he came after.)

The edition of the programme was originally recorded last year but its showing was postponed on impartiality grounds, in case, one assumes, anyone in London started to ponder whether they could directly identify with plummy-toned, Etonian Johnson. Finding out about your lineage is de rigueur for any self-respecting media-savvy individual, and politicians win extra points for being able to claim some common blood-line with an ethnic minority or displaced group. One imagines Johnson's PR team was dealt a blow when his insistence that one of his great-great-grandmothers was a Circassian slave could not be substantiated.

Boris's royal blood comes from his maternal grandmother, known touchingly as 'Granny Butter' (feel free to pause, and just take this in), whose mother was the illegitimate daughter of a prince. This means that Johnson is a distant cousin of the Queen and related to the great royal houses of Europe, a status that most Londoners cannot claim to share.

Whether any of this has any bearing at all on an individual's ability to hold a mayoral post, or indeed whether it is of any consequence at all is of course, up to you, layperson reader, to decide.

Image courtesy of Matt from London's photostream via the Creative Commons License.

Last Updated 04 August 2008