Boris Johnson makes an unlikely Pitt the Younger, but the parallels between 236 years ago and today are striking. My holiday reading this year included William Hague’s brilliant biography of William Pitt, published in 2005.

The king, George III (this was before he went mad), dismissed the government of Lord North and Charles James Fox, who had the support of a majority of MPs, and appointed Pitt, aged 24, as First Lord of the Treasury at the end of 1783.

Pitt formed a government but could not get his legislation through parliament. He refused to ask for an election, fearing that it wouldn’t make much difference to the makeup of the House of Commons.

Hague writes: “With the House of Commons now in a stalemate, Fox argued that the refusal of Pitt to leave office in defiance of the votes of the Commons would lead to ‘universal anarchy’. Pitt’s response was that ‘he considered himself as performing an act of necessary duty to his king and country, and so long as that continued to be the case he should persevere’.

Boris Johnson's famous relatives Show all 11 1 /11 Boris Johnson's famous relatives Boris Johnson's famous relatives 1. King George II of Great Britain and Ireland, Elector of Hanover (1683 to 1760) Boris Johnson is a Hanoverian, and, thus distantly related to the Queen, David Cameron (via William IV) and Danny Dyer (via Edward III), among others. Boris's paternal grandmother, Yvonne Eileen Williams, known in the family as "Granny Butter" and whose family name was de Pfeffel, was a descendant of Prince Paul Von Wurttemberg. The German prince was, in turn, a direct descendant of George II. Discovered by genealogists f other BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, Johnson commented, in 2008: "I felt I was the product of newcomers to Britain so it is totally bizarre, surreal in fact, to be told that in fact my Great x 8 Granddad is George II. But don't neglect the point that he shares that distinction with 1,023 others – there must be several thousand other people out there in the same position.” National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 2. The “Mummy of Basel”, Anna Catharina Bischoff (1719 to 1787) Last year, scientists in the Swiss city of Basel solved a decades-old mystery over the identity of a mummified woman. DNA extracted from the mummy’s gig toe indicates that the female is a great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother of Boris Johnson. The body was uncovered in 1975 while renovations were being done on Basel's Barfüsser Church, and was buried at the altar, wearing fine clothes, indicating she was at least well-to-do if not nobility. High levels of mercury in her remains suggested she had been treated for syphilis (the metal also helped preserve her). National Gallery of Basel Boris Johnson's famous relatives 3. Ali Kemal (1867 to 1922) (Pictured with wife Winifred Brun) For a man who made so much capital in the 2016 referendum on the prospect of Turkey joining the EU and its 80 million citizens thus enjoying free movement to the UK, Boris Johnson sometimes makes a surprisingly big deal of his Turkish Muslim great-grandfather on his father’s side, who he claims was an asylum seeker. Ali Kemal, according to his famous descendant, came to Britain because it was “a beacon of generosity and openness”. I t might be overstating it, but he did live in exile in England for a time. Unknown Boris Johnson's famous relatives 4. George Williams (1821 to 1905) Sir George, as he became, is the great (x4) grandfather of Boris Johnson, and was one of the founders of the Young Men’s Christian Association or YMCA, in 1841. An evangelical apostle of “muscular Christianity”, George took it upon himself to organise some fellow drapers and establish a safe place for young men where they could be shielded from the debauchery and the temptations of the flesh and the grape. No sofas would suffer red wine stains in the hostel. Since then it has gone global, today assisting 58 million people across 119 countries, which is almost as many as Boris helps. A social visionary of his time, George was knighted for his works by Queen Victoria in 1894. National Portrait Gallery Boris Johnson's famous relatives 6. King Friedrich of Wurttemberg (1754 to 1816) Though stocky of build, and handy in a game of rugger, Boris Johnson is not especially heavy or tall. This ancestor was. King Friedrich stood 6 foot 11 inches, and weighed 31 stone (2.12 metres/200 kilograms). Napoleon remarked that God had created the Prince to demonstrate the utmost extent to which the human skin could be stretched without bursting. There are rumours that he was bisexual and enjoyed the close companionship of young noblemen. This added to the strains on his marriage to Augusta, who was the granddaughter of King George II. One of their four children, Prince Paul is the link to the Johnsons, via an illegitimate daughter he fathered in Paris with an actor named Friederike Margrethe Porth. Ludwigsburg Castle Archive Boris Johnson's famous relatives 7. Professor Elias Lowe (1879 to 1969) Elias is Boris Johnson’s mother Charlotte’s great grandfather. The distinguished Princeton scholar and student of ancient scriptures (palaeographer) , Elias arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania in 1891, and was affine of Albert Einstein. Jewish, Lowe came for a line of revered rabbis. Although he cannot be counted Hallachially Jewish, the Jewish Chronicle makes him 5 per cent Jewish on their reckoning. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Boris Johnson's famous relatives 8. Helen Lowe-Porter (1876 to 1963) Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter. is Boris Johnson's mother Charlotte’s great grandmother. An American, she married the Lithuanian-born academic Elisa Lowe, and is said to have been probably the most prominent literary translator in the English-speaking world working from German to English in the twentieth century. However, not necessarily the best and in such circles her reputation is contested. In any event, she retained for 50 years the exclusive rights to translate the works of her friend Thomas Mann. Her and Elias’ daughter Beatrice is Charlotte Johnson (nee Fawcett’s) mother. Lowe-Porter family Boris Johnson's famous relatives 9. Sir Henry Fawcett MP (1833 to 1884) Before Boris and Jo Johnson became MPs and minsters, there was Sir Henry Fawcett – Britain’s first blind MP. He was the husband of the famous suffragette Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and thus an ancestor of Boris on his mother’s side - though the family tree isn’t clear on how close they are related. Glasgow University Boris Johnson's famous relatives 10. Prince Paul of Wurttemberg (1785 to 1852) Odd looking, an amusing womaniser (remind you of anyone?), this minor German aristocrat was the progenitor of the Johnson’s posh pedigree, such as it is. His affair with an actress is Paris, Fredericke Porth, gave rise to a daughter (out of wedlock as they used to say) provided the link back to the royal families of Wurttemberg and Hanover, and thus of Great Britain. By the same token it means that Stanley, Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo, and the rest of them along that branch of the tree, are also distantly related to most of the royal families of Europe including the Russian Romanovs – Johnson stands connected, albeit tenuously, to the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Luxembourg, Norwegian and Swedish families, plus the German Kaiser. Paul had five declared children, and two illegitimate ones, at least that are known about. National Archive Holland Boris Johnson's famous relatives 11. Fredericke Porth (1777 to 1860) When, on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? Boris Johnson discovered the identity of his 4x Great Grandmother, Fredericke, he was just a touch chauvinist: “An actress, could be a euphemism we may be about to turn up a prostitute here. Not that I mind. I want you to know they can get up to anything, my ancestors, they have carte blanche to commit whatever acts of fornication they want as far as I am concerned, but I want to know”. It seems Fredericke Margarethe was indeed an actress for most of her life, and was widowed by the time her illegitimate daughter, the product of her affair with Prince Paul of Wurttemberg was born, in 1805. Born Porth, Fredericke was married to a man named Vohs until 1804, and, in 1818, remarried to a man named Werdy. She was described as a “Royal Saxon Court-Actress”. Alamy Stock Photo Boris Johnson's famous relatives 12. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847 to 1929) Disappointingly, the ancestor who is sometimes mentioned as a stands as a standing genealogical reproach to Boris Johnson may not be a related at all. As a pioneering feminist and suffragette, she’d surely disapprove of Boris’ attitudes towards womankind. As President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the largest component of the suffragette movement, she did as much as anyone to get women into the political life of the nation, and the Fawcett Society, still fighting for equal human rights, is named in her honour. Millicent lived just long enough to see the vote being granted on an equal basis to all women, and said this when it was finally enacted in 1928: “It is almost exactly 61 years ago since I heard John Stuart Mill introduce his suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill on May 20th, 1867. So I have had extraordinary good luck in having seen the struggle from the beginning.” Bain News Service/Elliott & Fry

“That Pitt would simply stay in office despite all the defeats heaped upon his head never seems to have occurred to his opponents until this point. There was no precedent for this situation. For six weeks now the country had had a government with no power to govern, and a House of Commons which did not seem to have the power to turn it out.”

I got to this part of the book while journalists were in a state of high excitement over Dominic Cummings, the new prime minister’s henchperson, who said Boris Johnson would refuse to stand down if a vote of no confidence were carried against him in the Commons.

Just as in Pitt’s time, there is a clash of legitimacy. Johnson has no majority in the Commons for a no-deal Brexit, but appeals to the supposedly superior mandate of the referendum. Pitt had no majority in the Commons, which represented the “interests” of the nation, rather than “the people” (democracy was a dangerously subversive idea), but appealed to his superior mandate from the king.

In the 1780s, modern parties were forming, as were the rules for votes of no confidence, and the role of the prime minister. Today, the crisis of Brexit has put the constitution under strain again.

Does a prime minister have to resign immediately, if they lose a vote of confidence and there is an alternative who is “likely” to command a majority of the Commons? That is what is implied by constitutional convention, as described in The Cabinet Manual, but it has never been tested. Not since the 18th century has an MP had the support of a majority in the Commons while the incumbent prime minister refused to give way.

So, if a majority of MPs declared that Kenneth Clarke should be prime minister for long enough to stop a no-deal Brexit, and if Johnson refused to accept the opinion of constitutional experts that he should stand down from the position he has recently attained, no one knows what would happen.

In early 1784, Pitt waited, mobilising public opinion for the first time in a recognisably modern way. Petitions and “loyal addresses” flooded into London, swearing allegiance to the king and praising Pitt. He was much admired for his personal probity, his incorruptibility and his thriftiness with public money.

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So the parallels with Johnson are not exact, but some of them are still uncanny. “In two years there had now been five governments. Ministries had come and gone, alliances had been formed and broken, plots had been hatched and insults hurled with seemingly very little reference to the people outside the walls of Westminster,” Hague writes. “Many of those people had now had enough, and they were finally moved to do something about it.” One petition was carried from Wakefield to London with a flag declaring: “The King! The Constitution! The People! And Pitt Forever!”

By March 1784, the combination of public pressure and peerages doled out to Foxite MPs (Hague explains that they had a different definition of “corruption” in the 18th century) had eroded the opposition in the Commons. Fox finally let a government bill pass, “lacking the votes to obstruct it”.

Pitt, at last, asked the king to dissolve parliament and hold a general election. With a fair wind of public opinion behind him, and a vast expense of the exchequer in simply buying seats for supporters of the government (as I said, corruption was different then), Pitt secured an overwhelming majority in the Commons. He was the dominant “first minister” for the next 17 years.