Boris Johnson’s youngest brother Max on Hong Kong, Covid frustrations, and a special trip with dad
- Max Johnson, 21 years younger than his half-brother, the former British prime minister, speaks Russian, lived in Beijing and Hong Kong, and married a Brazilian
I was born in 1985 in Brussels, where my father was working for the European Commission. My sister, Julia, is three years older than me and I have four half-siblings from my father’s first marriage – Boris, Rachel, Jo and Leo.
Brussels was a sleepy, pretty town. We had a house with a beautiful garden and a tennis court where I learned to ride a bicycle. We went for walks in the woods. If we’d been behaving, dad would take us to Quick, which is the McDonald’s of Belgium.
Who came first?
When I was four, we moved to Oxford, where I went to Greycotes School and then Dragon School. There was an assumption that I’d go to boarding school – Eton – when I was 13, so when I was eight, I boarded for a term to try it out.
It was nice to be with my friends all the time. Oxford was a lovely place to grow up in. I wasn’t in the top set, but I was in the one below that. I was quite clever, vaguely sporty and very competitive.
I come from a family where academic excellence is encouraged and then expected. If you came second in an exam, the classic joke in our family was that they’d ask, “Who came first?”
Summer with Boris
My grandmother on my mother’s side, Lois Sieff, was a big patron of the arts and she took us to the theatre.
