Johnson family saga: Amelia Gentleman on Boris’s response to Windrush

When Jo Johnson quit government, reports began to circulate that his wife Amelia Gentleman – the Guardian journalist – had put pressure on him to leave frontline politics and thereby not serve in his brother Boris Johnson’s government. The Sun reported that Gentleman had grown tired of ‘seeing Boris presiding over an increasingly fractured government, threatening to break the law and promising to drag the country out of the EU or die in a ditch’ and told Jo he had to choose between her and his brother.

Now Gentleman has offered an insight into her relationship with her husband’s brother. Writing about her work uncovering the Windrush scandal – which saw Commonwealth immigrants to Britain wrongly deported and blighted Theresa May’s government – Gentleman says she has always endeavoured to keep her private life separate to her professional life:

‘I am married to Jo Johnson, who at the time was a minister in May’s government.