Rachel Johnson

Early life and education

Johnson is the daughter of former Conservative MEP Stanley Johnson and artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl (née Fawcett). She is the younger sister of Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip and immediate past Mayor of London; and elder sister of Jo Johnson, Minister of State for Universities and Science, Conservative MP for Orpington.

On her father's side, Johnson is a great-granddaughter of Ali Kemal, a liberal Circassian-Turkish journalist and the interior minister in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who was murdered during the Turkish War of Independence in 1922. During the First World War, her grandfather and great-aunt were recognised as British subjects and took their grandmother's maiden name of Johnson. On her mother's side she is a granddaughter of Sir James Fawcett, a prominent barrister and president of the European Commission of Human Rights.

She was educated at Winsford First School on Exmoor, Primrose Hill Primary in Camden, north London, the European School of Brussels, the Independent Ashdown House School in East Sussex, Bryanston School in Dorset and St Paul's Girls' School. In 1984 she went up to New College, Oxford to read Classics (Literae Humaniores); there she edited the student paper Isis and graduated with a 2:1.

Journalism

In 1989 she joined the staff of the Financial Times, becoming the first female graduate trainee at the paper, where she wrote about the economy. She spent a year on secondment to the Foreign Office Policy Planning Staff in 1992-93. She moved to the BBC in 1994, but left to move to Washington D.C. as a columnist and freelancer in 1997. She has written weekly columns for The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and other regular columns for Easy Living and She magazines, as well as the Financial Times. She is a contributing editor of The Spectator and until 2009 was a weekly columnist on The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard, among other publications. She now writes a weekly column in The Mail on Sunday, and a column for The Big Issue.

In April 2014 she was a judge in the BBC Woman's Hour power list 2014. She sits on the boards of Bright Blue, the modernizing Tory think-tank, and Intelligence Squared, the international debate forum. In March 2014 she appeared in Famous, Rich and Hungry on BBC1. She is a panellist on Sky News' weekly debate show, The Pledge.

The Lady

In September 2009, Johnson became the ninth editor of The Lady, a weekly magazine established in 1885. Her first few months were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary entitled The Lady and the Revamp; this was nominated for a Grierson Award. After taking up the post she rebranded the magazine, introducing well-known contributors (including Justin Webb and Sir Tim Rice) and regular contributors such as Mary Killen and Alexander Chancellor, as well as overseeing a redesign by creative director Stefano Arata, to better compete with the mainstream women's magazines. She was replaced as editor by Matt Warren in January 2012. In March 2013 she presented an hour-long documentary for BBC Four entitled How to Be a Lady: An Elegant History.

Novelist

As a novelist, her works include Notting Hell (Penguin 2006), a novel about couples living in the Notting Hill area of London, Shire Hell (a follow up to Notting Hell), and The Mummy Diaries (Penguin 2004), a diary of her London-Exmoor year. She also commissioned and edited The Oxford Myth (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988) while still an undergraduate at Oxford. She is also the author of A Diary of The Lady, My First Year as Editor (Penguin, 2010) and A Diary of The Lady, My first Year and a Half (2011). A new novel, Winter Games, was published in 2012. Her final novel in the Notting Hell trilogy, Fresh Hell, was published in 2015. She was a judge of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013.

Johnson's Shire Hell won the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which she characterised as an "absolute honour".

Her short story "Severely Gifted" appeared in The Sunday Times on 21 December 2008.

Politics

A member of the Conservative Party from 2008–11, she joined the Liberal Democrats in the run up to the 2017 general election because of the Conservatives' support for Brexit. Johnson had then considered becoming a Lib Dem candidate in a seat in the West Country, but by the time of the election was technically barred under the Party's by-laws, having been a member for less than a year. Following the Grenfell Tower fire Johnson expressed the view that Theresa May was also a victim of the fire "because she can do nothing right".

Personal life

She is married to Ivo Dawnay, a descendant of William Dawnay, 7th Viscount Downe and of the Earls of Glasgow, a director and consultant with the National Trust, and lives in London and Exmoor, Somerset with their three children.