Stanley Johnson is seeking French citizenship. On the day the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s father has confirmed he is seeking French citizenship – in the process of applying for French nationality. Apparently, he is seeking a French passport, as his British one will no longer permit an unlimited indulgence of fine wine, cheese, foie gras, and picturesque summers in Bordeaux or on La Côte d’Azur.
Britons’ free movement in the European Union ends today, January 1, 2021, under Stanley’s son’s raison d’être – Brexit, which terminated Britain’s 47-year-old membership in the European Union.
While the prime minister campaigned for and has since worked hard to deliver Brexit and keep Europeans out of Britain, his father, Stanley Johnson, has stayed true to his nature to keep one British family in the European Union – his own. Although the optics are terrible and ranked with hypocrisy, Stanley Johnson is a man who plays it close to his heart – at least privately. Although he would later join his son’s bandwagon to demagogue the European Union as Boris’s leadership path, Stanley Johnson, the former member of the European Parliament (MEP), had previously voted to remain (against Brexit) in Britain’s 2016 referendum.
Stanley Johnson is Seeking French Citizenship – “Not Becoming French”
Stanley told RTL radio he is seeking French citizenship because he (and therefore Boris) has strong family links to France. If his application is accepted, he will become a dual national upon acquiring an E.U. member country passport. This would give him many advantages, including that of which his son has just deprived some 66.6 million fellow Britain – free movement within France and throughout the European Union.
“It’s not about becoming French. It’s about reclaiming what I already have. If I understand it correctly, I am French. My mother was born in France, her mother was totally French as was her grandfather. So for me, it is about reclaiming what I already have. And that makes me very happy. I will always be a European, that’s for sure. One cannot tell the British people: ‘you are not Europeans.’ That said, to have a link like that [passport] with the EU is important.”
Stanley Johnson, father of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, speaking in French to RT News
How many who have seen Boris Johnson’s opportunistic campaign against the European Union over the years could imagine that his dear “Nan” and great-grandmother were French? His father is not seeking to become French but rather to reclaiming his “Frenchness” – that which, by extension, extends to Prime Minister Johnson as well?
Like his father, the bourgeois-Europhile Boris Johnson, a former writer, had once used one of his columns to ridicule Britain’s idea of leaving the E.U. But on seeing an opportunity to ride a winning horse, Boris made himself the public face of the “Leave” campaign in the 2016 referendum.
Along with grifters like Nigel Farage (whose taste in women has so far been strictly European, not British) and others, Boris Johnson told Britain it could “prosper mightily” as a fully sovereign nation outside the overly bureaucratic E.U. Other promises included pumping billions of pounds now sent to the E.U. into Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – a promise seemingly forgotten, as the NHS entered its first day of Brexit in the middle of Britain’s worst modern pandemic, understaffed by about 84,000.
On Wednesday, on a more conciliatory note than usual, Prime Minister Johnson echoed his father’s sentiments, as parliament approved a new trade deal with the EU, saying:
“This is not the end of Britain as a European country. We are, in many ways, the quintessential European civilization. We will continue to be that.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson
Brexit Divide – The Family Johnson Is Seeking French Citizenship
Brexit divisions in the Johnson family have often spilled out into the public. Stanley’s son, Conservative MP Jo Johnson, resigned from his brother’s cabinet in protest in 2018 because he opposed Brexit and wished for the U.K. to have closer links with the E.U.
Stanley’s daughter, the journalist Rachel Johnson (the prime minister’s sister), left her brother’s Conservative Party to join the Liberal Democrats ahead of the 2017 election in protest against her one-club golfer brother Boris’s Brexit obsession. In a March book, Rachel wrote of her father’s plans to seek French citizenship. She noted that her grandmother was born in Versailles and said that if her father received French citizenship, she too would like to snap up un passeport français.
So we can envision an out-of-power Boris Johnson chanting La Marseillaise in the near future as well.
Stanley will likely get his French nationality based on his racines maternelles. But as a backup plan, he might try to go to France (if he can slip through the coronavirus dragnet) to become a frontline Coronavirus worker. That’s the fastest way to get a French nationality nowadays.
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