Marriage and political beliefs reaffirmed - Boris Johnson's time living in the West Midlands

For a man who was born in New York, educated at Eton and a member of Oxford's all-male Bullingdon Club, life in the then-Black Country town would prove to be very different.

He arrived to join the Midland News Association, the publisher of the Express & Star and Shropshire Star after The Times, whose graduate training scheme he joined, thought learning about provincial journalism would do the young Mr Johnson good.

He lived in digs with a landlady called Brenda in Dimmock Street, Parkfields, next to an abattoir owned by then-Tory MP Christopher Gill.

“I was a mere toenail in the Express & Star,” said Johnson during an interview in 2014. “I went around doing, you know, ‘toddler locked in loo’ and ‘cat stuck up tree’ stories. I did lots of UFO stories.

“They were so sweet. They always said ‘no Boris, no more UFOs’.”

Star columnist Peter Rhodes, remembers being told that he was in Wolverhampton to learn about ‘real life’.

He recalls: “He looked like a fish out of water in a very expensive pinstripe suit and was usually hanging around the newsdesk looking lost or bewildered.”

It was during his time in Wolverhampton that helped shape his political beliefs that would have such a huge impact on the country decades later.

Mr Gill, MP for Ludlow, and Wolverhampton MP Nick Budgen were beginning to make their presence felt as opponents of what would become the EU - something Mr Johnson successfully campaign to remove the UK from in 2016.

The future Prime Minister said it was writing about housing issues in the Express & Star convinced him he was a Tory, even after his years at Eton and Oxford, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove.

“These were people who were long-term unemployed. And I remember feeling sorry for them," he recalled.

“Their lives weren’t getting any better. They were living in this house and there would be a baby or other pressures on them. And they would complain about the damp and the mould and the council wasn’t doing enough about it.

“I just felt, how much better would it be to try to get those people into work, get them off benefits, get them if possible to have a share in the value of their home or, if possible, to buy their home.

“That was when I started to think sometimes socialism, with the best possible intentions, can keep people in a rut. That’s when I migrated towards the Conservative way of thinking.”

However, it seems that not everybody was pleased with his journalism in the Black Country.

Mr Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, cites an incident where he was grabbed by the lapels by an angry social worker called Bruce, who accused him of patronising people in the area.

Mr Johnson also didn't have to worry about a shortage of home comforts in Dimmock Street.

He recalled his landlady, Brenda, cooking up hugely extravagant meals.

“She was so wonderful, she used to make the most extraordinary meals in the evening,” he said.

“The Times covered her expenses. She was such as sweet soul. She basically decided that they’d given her far too much money, So she used to produce the most colossal evening meal you have ever seen. There would be lasagne and incredible dishes of cheese, butter and so on.”

But while Mr Johnson’s time in Wolverhampton may have been an eye opener to the young man, it was not his first taste of life in the West Midlands. Indeed, by the time he was living at digs in the town, he was already a married man.

A year earlier he had married his first wife Allegra Mostyn-Owen at St Michael’s Church in West Felton, near Oswestry, and for a short time the couple lived in the Shropshire village.

While studying at Oxford the sister of a school friend living in neighbouring hall of residence invited Mr Johnson to party.

He accepted but turned up on the wrong night, clutching a bottle of wine. When he knocked on the door, he was greeted by the party host’s room-mate, Allegra. The pair shared the bottle of wine and Mr Johnson quickly decided she was the girl he wanted to marry.

Miss Mostyn-Owen, the only daughter of acclaimed Italian writer Gaia Servadio and multimillionaire landowner and art historian William Mostyn-Owen, arguably occupied a higher place in society than Boris.

The family owned Woodhouse, a country estate in West Felton, and by the time of their marriage she had already appeared on the cover of society magazine Tatler.

Remembering their time at university, she recalled: “He made me laugh. We had a very nice time together. We would leave each other notes several times a day. It’s always nice to get something in your pigeonhole, especially if they’ve got little rhyming couplets.”

The couple moved to London, but by the time he moved to Wolverhampton in 1987 the cracks were starting to show. His landlady Brenda advised him: “Boris, you’ve got to treat her like porcelain.”

But according to Gimson, Mr Johnson was “in too much of a hurry and too full of energy and ambition to treat his fine and delicate wife with the tenderness she needed.”

While the couple patched up their differences after his return to Londo, the cracks reappeared after they moved to Brussels in 1989 when Mr Johnson became the Daily Telegraph’s Europe correspondent.

They divorced in 1993.