Camden News - By SIMON WROE Published: 17 April 2008
Boris digs in on the Heath earlier this year
The kid from Primrose Hill School
THE father of Conservative London mayoral candidate Boris Johnson has praised his son’s “multicultural” Camden education. Former politician and writer Stanley Johnson said the “broadmindness” of the mayoral hopeful was due in no small part to his early years at Primrose Hill primary school in Princess Road.
Mr Johnson, who still lives around the corner from the school, said: “[Boris] is very much a Camden figure. As you know Primrose Hill is a great mesh of children of all different backgrounds, and there’s no way you could say that was a toff’s upbringing because it certainly wasn’t. “There was a great sense of the multicultural community, which has formed a terrifically good basis for his own very broadminded approach to his campaign for mayor.”
In 1973, a young Boris left the school at the age of nine when his father was appointed to the European Commission in Brussels.
His father said: “In his Camden years he was relatively young. “He didn’t complete the whole cycle of the primary school. “But I’m perfectly sure it was a very formative time – it could hardly have been otherwise.”