The New Nation - Internet Edition

Boris Johnson was born in New York to English parents in 1964 and was, until recently, an American citizen.

He is of Turkish descent. His great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, a Turkish journalist, was briefly interior minister in the government of Ahmed Tevfik Pasha, Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.

His grandfather Osman Ali settled in the UK in the 1920s and changed his name to Wilfred Johnson.

Johnson appears to have had an idyllic childhood spent, in part, on the family farm on Exmoor.

The Johnsons were a close-knit, boisterous clan, forever trying to outdo each other

at table tennis or general-knowledge quizzes, or even who could learn to read the fastest.

In competition with his brother and two sisters, Boris always had to come out on top, but his ambition did not end there.

Asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say: "The world king."

In the early 1970s his father, Stanley, moved the family to Brussels after landing a job as one of the first European commissioners, in charge of pollution control.

Boris attended the European School in the Belgian capital, where he befriended his future wife Marina Wheeler, daughter of BBC journalist Charles Wheeler.

But in 1973, with his parents' marriage falling apart, he headed off to boarding school in England.

He shone at Ashdown House Preparatory School in East Sussex, developing a lifelong passion for the Classics and winning a scholarship to the UK's best-known public school, Eton, where he quickly made an impression.

His headmaster at the school which Prince William and Prince Harry were later to attend, Sir Eric Anderson, was also Tony Blair's housemaster during his schooldays at Fettes - often dubbed the Scottish Eton.