A friend who belongs to an old-fashioned London club tells me that all anecdotes related within its walls are met with one of only three accepted responses: Great Fun, Rather Fun and Shame. Stanley I Presume is rather fun. It would have been great fun if the author was less discreet and less loyal and less scrupulous, because his life story — the first 40 years of which makes up the present volume — has been crammed with incident.
Stanley Johnson has worked as a spy, a pioneering environmentalist and a Member of the European Parliament. As a youth he rode from London to Afghanistan on a motorcycle, hitch-hiked across South America and won a prestigious poetry prize. He has been married twice and fathered six children, the current Mayor of London (and erstwhile editor of this magazine) the eldest of their number.
Students of Boris Johnson’s hair will be intrigued by photographs of Stanley and his first wife as youngsters, both of them blessed with copious locks. Stanley never seems to have worn a crash helmet during his motorcycling days: perhaps he couldn’t find one which would fit over his generous quiff.
Conservative in both politics and temperament, Stanley Johnson is the sort of man who hangs on to things. In the course of this memoir he tells us that he still has his mother’s Cheltenham Ladies’ College lacrosse stick, his own tuck-box from prep school and a letter from Winston Churchill’s office, thanking him for writing, as a boy of 11, to congratulate the Prime Minister on winning the election of 1951. Among the greatest joys of Johnson’s life is that he continues to reside in the valley near Exmoor where he spent his chldhood.
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