Boris Johnson’s ‘great-grandfather’ was an Ottoman politician

Boris Johnson’s paternal great grandfather was a journalist and liberal politician who was killed after being kidnapped on a charge of treason as the Ottoman Empire entered its final days. Mr Johnson referred to his ‘Muslim great grandfather’ during yesterday’s televised Tory leadership debate as he defended himself against accusations of Islamophobia.

The reference may well have surprised many viewers unaware of Mr Johnson’s lineage but the true extent of his family’s links to modern-day Turkey was revealed in depth in 2008. The Tory heavyweight took part in the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? Programme which shed light on exactly where Mr Johnson had come from.

Ali Kemal, Mr Johnson’s great grandfather, was born in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in 1867. He was a prominent journalist, poet and politician who became known for his strong liberal democratic political views. But such views saw him exiled under Abdul Hamid II, the 34th Sultan, who reigned from 1876 to 1909.

Increasing instability within the Empire in the years before the First World War prompted Kemal to flee for his life to England where his wife Winifred gave birth to a son, Osman Wilfred Kemal, in Bournemouth, with the pair having already had a daughter called Selma.

His wife died after giving birth and Kemal then stayed with his mother in law, Margaret Brun, whose maiden name was Johnson. He subsequently returned to the Ottoman Empire where he remarried and had another son. It was then that he rose to great political prominence as he became Minister for the Interior in 1919 in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, who at the time was the de facto prime minister.