Rachel Johnson - Rakes Progress: The Madcap True Tale of My Political Midlife Crisis

To adapt Tolstoy: all families are special, but big families aresimply by virtue or demerit of their sizemore special than standard-issue families just because of this one thing.

There are more of you.

The infinite scope for conflict, friction, jollity, japes, scrapes, fights, and sheer visibility (on a clear day in the U.K. it feels as if you can see and hear the blond tribe of the Johnsons from space) is multiplied exponentially by the number of its members.

No surprise then that large, noisy, public families have a grip on the public imagination. The Mitfords (six daughters, one forgotten son, crazy Farve who hunted his own children to hounds, submissive Mother). The Kennedys. The royal family. The Waltons (as you can sense, I am already running out of famous clans quite quickly before I fasten on my own).

It is a trope that every country regards itself as exceptional, while every child thinks his or her childhood, however peculiar, is normal, because that is all they know.

That wasnt the case in our family. I think we all knew, right from the beginning.

I definitely knew our family wasdifferent. From about the age of three I would lie in bed as I heard the grown-up shouts of laughter over those raffia-covered pregnant bottles of cheap Chianti and breathed in their cigarette smoke, thinking, Why am I part of this family and not another family? How did I end up HERE?

My parents were in their very early twenties when they started reproducing. Looking back, I cant help measuring my lifeand even my adult childrens livesagainst my parents own early milestones, even though I realise my mother and father were basically babies when they had babies and that fact alone explains a lot about how things turned out.

My mother had three children by the time she was your age, I said to my oldest son the other day and watched him wince. When I got pregnant with you, the NHS considered me an elderly primigravida AND I WAS ONLY TWENTY-SIX.

Im not sure what the point of these comparisons is, but I was always aware that my parents were virtual prodigies because they married straight outta Oxford, had four kids, then divorced seventeen years later.

It was always just assumed that said kids would all go to Oxford and at least one of usmaybe more, my father went on to marry again and have two more children, so I am one of six, and there is no limit to his ambition for his offspringwould become, at the very least, the most important person in the country. (Years ago, people would start asking, Did your brother always want to be prime minister? I would answer, No, hes far more ambitious than that.)

That was always the plan.

In 1970, when I was five, a family friend came to see us in Primrose Hill.

Johnson family, sitting room in Primrose Hill, ca. 1972. Left to right: Stanley, 32; Rachel, 7; Alexander Boris, 8; Leo, 5.

We lived in two houses in Primrose Hill. The first Johnson residence in NW1 was in Princess Road, bang next to our school, Primrose Hill Primary.

The house was a new-build brick box my mother found easy to clean, or at least easier to clean than our next house in NW1, a crumbling, Victorian, semidetached, stucco-fronted affair opposite the shops on Regents Park Road, where we moved shortly after my mother had a fourth baby, Joseph, and shortly before my father shunted the whole family to Brussels in 1973 (and then sold Regents Park Road over the phone to the journalist Simon Jenkins, whod called to say his current girlfriend, Gaylea high-maintenance Texas actress who went on to transform my tiny bedroom in the extension into a California-style storage solution just for her shoeswouldnt marry him unless he got our house. My father agreed, as he has never to my knowledge said no to anything. What was a chap to do? my father explained. Simon was, you know, very keen on Gayle at the time.).

We werent in either Primrose Hill or Regents Park Road long. I remember the latter mainly for the times we left home to go to Casualty.

One day Jo, nine months, consumed some succulent fungus hed found after crawling behind the washing machine in the basement. His eyes rolled back, he went a funny colour, and my mother had to rush him to University College Hospital, where, as chance would have it, I was already an inpatient, having inhaled eggshell after Al made me choke with laughter over breakfast while I was in the middle of my boiled egg. This resulted in a collapsed lung and pneumonia. I was in hospital so long I did morning lessons on the childrens ward and received my own post. All my little classmates were ordered to write me cards. (Maureen wrote, At School we have been making animals out of flet [