Crikey! Boris shocked by royal heritage

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has claimed that his ancestors include a slave in Russia and a Turkish government minister. Now, he has been revealed to be a direct descendant of the quarrelsome Hanoverian king, George II, albeit through illegitimacy.

The connection, uncovered by a BBC1 documentary, Who Do You think You Are?, which investigated Johnson's genealogy, was a bolt from the blue for the Old Etonian mayor - full name Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson - who said, "If you had told me I was related to George II, I would have thought you were absolutely crackers."

Like his own Conservative party leader, David Cameron, who is descended illegitimately from William IV, according to Debrett's, Johnson can only claim to be a very distant cousin of the Queen. He may, though, see it as a badge of honour that his royal forebear was the last monarch to lead his troops in battle - at Dettingen in 1743. (Continued below)

The BBC programme, to be shown on August 18, will disclose that the mayor is directly descended from the illegitimate daughter of the German Prince Paul von Wurttemburg. The prince was the great-great-grandson of George II.

The programme failed to uncover any evidence for Johnson's claim that a great-great-grandmother was a Circassian, an indigenous group from southern Russia, who was seized as a slave. But it did trace Ali Kemal, Johnson's great-great-grandfather who served as Turkey's interior minister but was killed by a lynch mob. His son, Osman Kemal, came to England and changed his name to Wilfred Johnson.

Ken Livingstone, the republican-minded Labour former Mayor of London is unimpressed by the new-found pedigree of the man who defeated him in May. He told the Sunday Times: "We're all probably related to the royal family because they put it about so much over the last 1000 years."