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Allegra Mostyn-Owen was Boris Johnson’s university girlfriend and his first wife – 32 years ago. The pair were part of the ‘bright young things’ of the Oxford university elite, a golden, glossy, head-turning double act.

Allegra, the Italian for ‘joyful’ or ‘lively’, a word that is used to annotate uplifting music, was allegedly ‘not’ the state she was in following (and during) her marriage to Johnson. A union that lasted six years, between 1987 and 1993, when the couple divorced.

The Daily Mail described the wedding ‘as a cross between La Dolce Vita and Brideshead Revisited’. Allegra was the captivating daughter of art historian and Christie’s auction house Chairman, the millionaire William Mostyn-Owen and his Italian writer wife, Gaia Servadio. The family seat was Woodhouse, a grade-II-listed estate in Shropshire. The house was their wedding venue – when Allegra wove flowers through her hair and Johnson arrived with neither trousers nor shoes.

David Bailey An Oxford contemporary told the Mail that, ‘Allegra had a lot of the Italian Botticelli angel looks: blonde and ethereal. That quality made her seem untouchable to the rest of us – which is precisely what Boris would have wanted as a trophy.’

If you rewind back to the time of their meeting, Johnson was the Old Etonian President of the Union who had been awarded the Brackenbury Scholarship of Balliol for academic excellence – and Allegra was his mythological prize.

Allegra would reportedly later consider the day of their wedding, ‘the end of their relationship rather than the beginning.’

In light of the recent controversy around Boris’s recorded argument with his current girlfriend Carrie Symonds at their flat in Camberwell, a confidante of Allegra’s, Louisa Gosling, has spoken out against the likely next leader of the Conservative Party through The Times. In the article, Gosling claims that Allegra sought sanctuary in her flat for several weeks following a blazing row between the couple [Boris and Alexa] in 1990.

In spite of this, Allegra remains shtum. In fact, she has barely uttered a bad word against Johnson in the near quarter of a century since their divorce. It’s alternative sources that have leaked the negative reports; describing Allegra as ‘fragile’ and ‘sensitive’ in the years of her marriage to Boris.
Gaia Mostyn-Owen with her daughter Allegra, 3, and son Owen, 5, in 1967
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In the early days of their alliance, Boris was reportedly ‘married to the job’. He was the The Telegraph’s European correspondent, based in Brussels, and Allegra’s career at the Evening Standard was overshadowed by her husband’s. Allegra fled Brussels in 1990 – the year of ‘the row’ – but later enrolled at the Universite Libre in Brussels for a master’s in EU Law in a last-ditch attempt to repair their relationship.

At this point it was too late – Johnson was already entwined with childhood friend, Marina Wheeler. In 1993, the Daily Mail writes, Allegra ‘generously agreed to divorce her husband’ to allow him to marry the woman who he would eventually father four children with.
Allegra embarked on a new career teaching English and art to Muslim women at a mosque in East London. Through a friend who she met through her new work, Allegra was a guest at a wedding in Lahore, Pakistan, where she met her second husband, Abdul Majid. At 23, he was 22 years her junior; they married in 2010 after the relationship developed over long distance phone calls, with Majid eventually moving to Britain to continue his education and be with Mostyn-Owen.

On hearing the news, Johnson rang his ex-wife, who had taken the name Mrs Dilshad Farha Raji Sheikha Jaan Khan Kali Gori, to wish her well.
Allegra Mostyn-Owen
Shutterstock Reportedly, there is no animosity between the pair who are much happier as friends than they ever were married. ‘He’s a better ex than he was a husband’ Allegra told the London Evening Standard in an interview in 2012.

When Johnson was seeking re-election as London Mayor he recruited Allegra and Mr Majid as part of his Muslim Engagement Task force – a request that came to nothing.

After Louisa Gosling ‘broke her silence’ earlier this year, Mostyn-Owen still declined to comment when approached by a journalist. She reportedly held up a cover of the New Statesman, with a cartoon of Boris in a cage beneath a headline ‘Restraining Order’. She said: ‘You want a confirmation or a denial. I am not going to do that either way. Except that I think this is a very good cover,’ pointing to the magazine.

Mostyn-Owen left behind a sybaritic life, and has now crossed into the deeply conservative Muslim enclaves and opens up their worlds of the young people she teaches. Nine years ago, some secular Muslims organised a public event on the closing of the Muslim Mind, which Mostyn-Owen spoke at, and the audience were apparently gripped by the ‘creative and kindly’ woman. In 2007, she persuaded mosque elders in the East End of London to let her start art classes for boys and girls aged five to 14. The best of the bright and happy pictures were exhibited at the local library which parents, children and local people attended.

In an article in The Times, journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes about a long line of British female rebels who have been drawn to Islamic peoples and cultures, listing Gertrude Bell, Jane Digby, Jemima Goldsmith and Diana, Princess of Wales. ‘Mostyn-Owen treads where others daren’t. Conservative Muslim establishments can be forbidding places. Liberal Muslims eschew them. In contrast this privileged white woman quietly transforms the spaces.’
Mostyn-Owen has clearly had quite a journey; from a fleeting youthful romance with Boris Johnson to where she is now, in a life-affirming role, elevating the lives of the people around her.

ANNABEL SAMPSON