In my short, dazzling climb from Holland Park Tube station towards the
epicentre of Notting Hill, I pass property wealth that, even in today's
troubling times, must run into the billions. The basements of the white
stucco mansions on Lansdowne Road, I notice, now have their own drives. They
are for the owner's Filipino servants' cars, explains Rachel Johnson.
Johnson is the area's Jane Austen, its ironist and, as she says,
“long-standing irritant”. She lives in Rich List Zone but is not quite of
it, being, as she once estimated, six times less well off than her
neighbours. She does not look like one of Them, either. There is a distinct
lack of coiffure and designer label. In her jeans, sweatshirt and blonde
shag, she looks like Boris Johnson dragged up as Jilly Cooper, which makes
sense since she is Boris's little sister - “at 42, a year his junior” and
writes books firmly in the Cooper genre, whose advances are said to be
healthy.
“I have no help. I want you to say that. I have no help,” she exclaims,
suddenly inspired to differentiate herself from her neighbours. What, I say
impressed, no cleaner? “No. Well, I have a cleaner. But I want you to
emphasise that, unlike all the people around here, who have housekeepers,
dailies, home nannies, ironing ladies, chauffeurs, chefs, personal trainers,
nutritionists, gardeners, I have no help.”
Johnson's house, on a minor W11 road, does, however, have access to the
desirable garden square fictionalised so lightly in her 2006 novel, Notting
Hell. It is a jolly nice house, with a garden and a terrace, but I can
see that it is not done up to the customary standards of a boutique hotel in
St Tropez; I doubt, for example, if the en-suites have their own en-suites.
Who could blame her for not being slightly pleased to see the credit squeeze
coming to these town houses? “Somebody couldn't go to Courchevel. I remember
that being told to me in hushed tones. And somebody decided that not all
their children could be members of a tennis club, or they weren't going to
take the yacht somewhere, or they weren't going to take their chef on the
yacht. I want you to say that my family holiday this year will be a B&B
in Cornwall. All right?”
She prefers the country set des-cribed in her new novel, Shire Hell,
which is set in Dorset but clearly references her home in the Exe Valley,
where the Johnsons roll over many an acre. “They live in the real world,
where people earn £8,000 a year and really are short of money and have to
buy food past its sell-by date in Spar. Notting Hill people don't live in
the real world. They have private jets waiting at Northolt to take their
children off to the Bahamas for half term. I could never understand what one
man could do that would justify a salary in seven or eight figures. And now
we realise that nothing they did did justify it.
“When I sent my three children to the local state school, the C of E primary,
I can remember the rage I felt for the other children going to Wetherby in
their boaters.” Class envy! A Johnson has class envy! “I have. Raging class
envy! And for those nannies picking them up. It was just hard to like them.
So I can totally see why people would hate the Tories, particularly the rich
entitled ones we've got now. But I have to say my bro isn't rich and
entitled.”
Now, as she firmly tells me, this interview is not going to be about the
London's interesting new Mayor. Nevertheless, his blond mop looms invisibly
over our conversation. Their father, Stanley, once called him “that great
prodigious tree in the forest, in the shade of which the smaller trees must
either perish or struggle to find their own place in the sun”.
“Yeah, thanks for that, Pop. I mean, people write about it as if he's the
saviour sibling who's sort of giving cord blood in order to enable the
survival of his other ones. Not so.” I would be bloody furious if I were
given a supporting role in my family. “No, it doesn't feel like that at all,
I can reassure you. It's just annoying for all the rest of us in a way
because anything we do is just classed as, you know, Boris's sister, Boris's
brother, Boris's mother, Boris's father.” The Johnsons are notoriously
competitive.
The funny thing, I say, is that Stanley Johnson now finds himself withering in
his son's shade. When the former MEP volunteered to replace Boris as MP for
Henley, David Cameron firmly told him they needed a local candidate, ie, not
another Johnson. “I think he should stand as an independent,” says his
daughter, loyal again. “That'd test the preferences of the electors of
Henley.” Her relationship with the Central Office is currently fractious
after an attempt to silence her during the mayoral race. It was enough, she
says, to make her want to burn her membership card. And, indeed, it must be
very irritating to be told not to speak your mind when (a) you are a
professional columnist (The Sunday Times at present) and (b) you have
a novel out that needs publicising.
Especially since it is a very fine mind. Her prep school head remembers her as
“tremendous”, although “not as brilliant as Boris”. She got into Bryanston,
where she was expelled for “attitude”, but still made it to Oxford, where
she edited Isis. After New College, she policy-wonked in the Foreign Office,
“writing position papers on what should happen to Macedonia”. Her descent
into journalism began when she accompanied her husband, Ivo Dawnay, then a
journalist with The Sunday Telegraph, to Washington. For its
magazine, she began writing columns that wallowed in what Dawnay would later
complain was “the gutter” of their family life.
“Oh,” she says when I mention this. “I am always selling myself short.”
Perhaps her next novel will show 'em. It is partly set in Munich in 1938. At
present it's codenamed Sieg Hell, but, presumably, wiser counsels
will prevail.
Notting Hell and now Shire Hell are, meanwhile, triumphs of the
comic voice apparently adopted by the Johnsons generations back to get them
through. It was certainly not a hilarious upbringing for Rachel. Her mother,
the artist Charlotte Johnson-Wahl, now 66 and struck by Parkinson's disease,
has suffered mental health problems for most of her life. When Rachel was 9,
her mother had a “big breakdown” and spent nine months hospital. Her
children remained in Brussels, where Stanley Johnson worked for the European
Commission.
“It was grim. There's no doubt about it. We had a succession of deeply
unpleasant Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spike au pairs who would gang up against
us.” Her mother returned but was not “entirely well” for the next two or
three years. The next thing that happened was that her parents divorced.
Such fun.
In 1992 Rachel married Dawnay, an Old Etonian 13 years her senior (it was his
second marriage). He is now a PR but journalists who worked with him
remember him as very funny, and very camp, “in a heterosexual sort of way”.
Less funny was a diagnosis of hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver. Eight
years later, suffering from cancer, he underwent a liver transplant.
So why her relentless instance that life is a laugh? “I just feel incredibly
lucky. I do feel I've got really good health, three beautiful children. I've
got just enough money, but not too much money.” Was whingeing banned in the
Johnson family? “Yes. I don't remember any whingeing. We're relentlessly
upbeat.” Behind her on the kitchen wall hangs a wartime poster: “KEEP CALM
AND CARRY ON.” And, my, how her characters do carry on. In Notting Hell
there is much gossip about a Frenchwoman having an affair with an American
banker; in fact, she is bonking his wife. Her heroine, Mimi (as in “me,
Rachel”), discovers that her husband, Ralph, has impregnated a woman whose
husband is infertile in return for a discount on a property deal. She says
she came closer to the mark with some of these stories, based on local
apocrypha, than she intended. There were sticky phone conversations with the
locals when the book came out.
I offer my observation that in her books adultery seems to carry no
consequence or punishment. For example, in Shire Hell, Mimi observes that,
in the country, affairs are “accorded the least-said-soonest-mended
treatment”, a phrase once used in an interview by Boris when pressed on his
messy affair with Petronella Wyatt. Perhaps adultery doesn't matter here
because it exists in a jolly bonking days, Jilly Cooper fictional world. Or,
perhaps, if you are posh enough adultery doesn't hurt. Or, I ask, it is a
Johnson family attitude? After all, Stanley was quite a swordsman, too.
His daughter calmly points out that, actually, in Notting Hell, Mimi is
punished for adultery by being expelled from “the garden of Eden” to Dorset.
“And if you read the book carefully you would note that Mimi does not commit
adultery in Shire Hell. She has learnt her lesson and she does rebuild her
marriage. But Ralph, meanwhile, comes from the upper-class Edwardian era
where, you know, once the heir and the spare were produced, adultery was not
worthy of comment. Ivo is not Ralph, incidentally!” She pronounces Ralph
“Rafe”.
She then says something that really surprises me and makes me think the real
divide over this matter, at least in the Johnson family, is gender. “Women
never have sex for sex, for the sake of having sex. Women do it for other
things. They are like Edie in Desperate Housewives. They do it because they
want the next thing that comes with the sex, which is the relationship, the
status, the ring, or just to feel that they have some sort of connection
with somebody. Women don't care about sex. They can live without it. Even
Madonna said: ‘I'd rather be reading a book.'” Madonna, I point out wrote
the book on sex. “No, she did, but I've trapped myself into this whole
naughty romping persona and it's really not me at all. I've done that to
sell books. I actually quite like writing serious articles about the
environment.”
If only such articles attracted bonk-buster advances! The advances are much
exaggerated, she says. “The thing is, we don't have any money. We made the
stupid decision to educate our children privately. Every day I think they
could be at Holland Park comprehensive, which is fantastically good.” Do
they all board? “Yes.”
She decides that we need a little walk around the communal garden. We pass
those back doors that she has made infamous, portals to potential infidelity
every one. Beyond them, we imagine the credit crunching. It is, we agree,
hard to feel sympathy for the posh, however tortured they are. And Johnson,
I am sure, would not expect us to feel sympathy for the stupid money trap
that she has got herself into, the one that requires the expulsion of her
own children from this Eden. But as a setting for light fiction, this posh
garden is as good as any. It is, I conclude liberally, only Albert Square
with stucco.
