Since it’s not often that the domestic violence community enjoys official recognition, the knighthood proposed by Boris Johnson for the breaker of his late mother’s nose, Stanley Johnson, should be welcome to at least some people outside the family.
Would it be unreasonable for his fellow perpetrators of intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) to interpret Stanley’s honour, still more optimistically, as evidence that the Tory party now appreciates that its 2021 Domestic Abuse Act was totally over the top? The purported aim of that legislation being, first of all, to: “Raise awareness and understanding about the devastating impact of domestic abuse on victims and their families.”
In the case of Stanley, his ex-wife, the late artist Charlotte Wahl, kept his abuse secret until four years ago when she told Boris’s biographer, Tom Bower, that their marriage had been “ghastly, terrible”. “I want the truth told,” she said about Stanley’s violence, which was witnessed by Boris. “He hit me many times, over many years.” Early on he resented her seeing her friends “and that’s when he first hit me”. Later, she was deposited in the country, without a car. “To adultery and violence, his family could add deserter.”
Although the full extent of her domestic torment was not made clear in extracts published by the Daily Mail in 2020, it became national news that “Boris’s dad broke his mum’s nose”. After a breakdown, Wahl had been admitted to the Maudsley hospital where doctors, she said, “spoke to Stanley about his abuse of me”. Her parents confronted Stanley, “but he denied it”.
More allegations are available in Bower’s biography of Boris, The Gambler. Stanley’s denials have been reported, but remain hard to source.
Should Rishi Sunak allow his knighthood, there could hardly be a clearer sign that the Tory approach to domestic abuse will be resuming, after a temporary show of interest, the default complacency that allowed Theresa May to award the same honour to Geoffrey Boycott. He’d been convicted in 1998 for repeatedly punching a girlfriend. Sir Geoffrey’s response, when asked about this: “I couldn’t give a toss.”
The king, too, if he intends to indulge Johnsonian overreach, might want to consider the academic contention that public attitudes towards IPVAW shape, as one study puts it, “the social environment in which such violence takes place, and attitudes of acceptability to IPVAW are considered a risk factor to actual IPVAW”. It follows that policymakers and public figures who are serious about protecting women will not want honours conferred on men who hit them.
A knighthood for Stanley can raise awareness only of what remains evident from abject conviction rates, from sickening police attitudes again exposed in the case of David Carrick and, indeed, from much of the media’s lingering regard for post-disgrace Stanley: domestic abuse remains one lethal epidemic society can live with. After Wahl finally disclosed what Bower calls “the family’s great secret”, broadcasters’ appetite for her persecutor’s fatuous condescension continued as inexplicably keen as it was before he was exposed. Given an honour, he might even be able to increase his fees.
That Stanley has seen no necessity for perceptible regret or a hint of shame, can – if Sunak agrees to his elevation – only remind abuse victims that their assaults at home by the men in (or once in) their lives are still considered less, not more serious, than assaults by strangers. Had Stanley been revealed by Bower to have once broken a random woman’s nose in the street, or repeatedly hit female strangers in public, even his son might have anticipated an absolute refusal to honour such a man. Since the victim of these acts of violence was Boris’s mother, assaulted at home by someone he would call “a loved one”, he could reasonably expect what happened last week: a recoil from, above all, his latest venture in cronyism.
Many responses to news that our leading nepotist plans more nepotism, ranked Stanley’s domestic violence, supposing it came up, among the lesser objections to Boris’s continued perversion of the honours system. Keir Starmer said it was “absolutely outrageous”. Why? “The idea of an ex-prime minister bestowing honours on his dad.” On Question Time, Fiona Bruce helpfully depicted the nose-breaking as a “one-off”. So far Sunak has offered only a pleasantry about father’s day cards.
These interpretations spared defenders of Stanley’s promotion, such as his son’s ex Petronella Wyatt, the bother of defending a title for a wife beater. Wyatt argued that Stanley was a better environmentalist than his son, “who, on one occasion while driving with me in the country, threw empty champagne bottles out of the car window”.
Admittedly, the sheer range of awfulness associated with Stanley Johnson – from his zeal for population control and six children, unwanted touching, contempt for the public, China promotion and mask non-compliance, to a capacity for aggression Rachel Johnson called “muscular fatherhood” – complicates attempts to express just how overwhelmingly squalid and damaging would be his knighthood. Press caution, or squeamishness, about naming Stanley’s domestic violence is also understandable given his sympathisers’ determination to call the nose-breaking an “isolated” incident, as the Mail categorised it last week.
The same paper, when revealing the attack, had quoted “family friends” saying it was “a one-off”; that “it happened in the 1970s when Wahl was suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder” and incautiously “flailed” at Stanley.
You had to get the book to discover that his hitting was repeated and critical in her wish to divorce. Her close friends, Bower writes, “knew that the fact that she was no longer prepared to put up with the violence was the tipping point”.
As for the 70s: Wahl evidently did not think 2020 too late for everyone to learn more about the ubiquitous Stanley Johnson.
But perhaps Rishi Sunak, if he permits her abuser’s knighthood, will prove her wrong.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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