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Rachel Johnson
Rachel Sabiha Johnson (born 3 September 1965) is a British journalist, television presenter, and author who has appeared frequently on political discussion panels, including The Pledge on Sky News and BBC One's debate programme, Question Time. In January 2018, she participated in the 21st series of Celebrity Big Brother and was evicted second. She was the lead candidate for Change UK for the South West England constituency in the 2019 European Parliament election.
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, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip; and the elder sister of Jo Johnson, former 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.
Johnson's middle name, Sabiha, means "morning" in Arabic and is often used as a given name in Turkey. It was the name of the second wife of her great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, who was a daughter of Zeki Pasha. Stanley Johnson befriended his paternal half-uncle Zeki Kuneralp, Sabiha's son, when Kuneralp was Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James's in the 1960s.
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 spent three months as a kibbutz volunteer and then went to New College, Oxford, to read Classics (Literae Humaniores); there she edited the student paper Isis.
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, a column for The Big Issue and a column for The Oldie.
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 modernising 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 former panellist on Sky News' weekly debate show, The Pledge, production of which was suspended in 2020.
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Rachel Johnson
Rachel Sabiha Johnson (born 3 September 1965) is a British journalist, television presenter, and author who has appeared frequently on political discussion panels, including The Pledge on Sky News and BBC One's debate programme, Question Time. In January 2018, she participated in the 21st series of Celebrity Big Brother and was evicted second. She was the lead candidate for Change UK for the South West England constituency in the 2019 European Parliament election.
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, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Conservative MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip; and the elder sister of Jo Johnson, former 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.
Johnson's middle name, Sabiha, means "morning" in Arabic and is often used as a given name in Turkey. It was the name of the second wife of her great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, who was a daughter of Zeki Pasha. Stanley Johnson befriended his paternal half-uncle Zeki Kuneralp, Sabiha's son, when Kuneralp was Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James's in the 1960s.
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 spent three months as a kibbutz volunteer and then went to New College, Oxford, to read Classics (Literae Humaniores); there she edited the student paper Isis.
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, a column for The Big Issue and a column for The Oldie.
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 modernising 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 former panellist on Sky News' weekly debate show, The Pledge, production of which was suspended in 2020.