Rachel Sabiha Johnson is a British journalist, television presenter, and author based in London. Johnson has appeared frequently on political discussion panels, including Question Time and The Pledge. In January 2018, she participated in the twenty-first series of Celebrity Big Brother and was evicted second. She was the lead candidate for Change UKfor the South West England constituency in the 2019 European Parliament election.
In 1989 she joined the staff of the Financial Times, becoming the first female graduate trainee at the paper, where she wrote about the economy. She spent a year on secondment to the Foreign Office Policy Planning Staff in 1992–93. She moved to the BBC in 1994, but left to move to Washington D.C. as a columnist and freelancer in 1997. She has written weekly columns for The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard and other regular columns for Easy Living and She magazines, as well as the Financial Times. She is a contributing editor of The Spectator and until 2009 was a weekly columnist on The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard, among other publications. She now writes a weekly column in The Mail on Sunday, a column for The Big Issue and a column for The Oldie. In April 2014 she was a judge in the BBC Woman's Hour power list 2014. She sits on the boards of Bright Blue, the modernising Tory think-tank, and Intelligence Squared, the international debate forum. In March 2014 she appeared in Famous, Rich and Hungry on BBC1. She is a panellist on Sky News' weekly debate show, The Pledge.
''The Lady''
In September 2009, Johnson became the ninth editor of The Lady, a weekly magazine established in 1885. Her first few months were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary entitled The Lady and the Revamp; this was nominated for a Grierson Award. She was replaced as editor by Matt Warren in January 2012. In March 2013 she presented an hour-long documentary for BBC Four entitled How to Be a Lady: An Elegant History.
Literary career
As a novelist, her works include Notting Hell, a novel about couples living in the Notting Hill area of London, Shire Hell, and The Mummy Diaries, a diary of her year living in London and Exmoor. She also commissioned and edited The Oxford Myth while still an undergraduate at Oxford. She is also the author of A Diary of The Lady, My First Year as Editor and A Diary of The Lady, My first Year and a Half. A new novel, Winter Games, was published in 2012. Her final novel in the Notting Hell trilogy, Fresh Hell, was published in 2015. She was a judge of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013. Johnson's Shire Hell won the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, which she described as being an "absolute honour". Her short story "Severely Gifted" appeared in The Sunday Times on 21 December 2008.
Political career
Johnson was a member of the Conservative Party from 2008 to 2011, but later joined the Liberal Democrats in the run up to the 2017 general election because of the Conservative support for Brexit. Johnson then considered becoming a Lib Dem candidate in a seat in the West Country, but was barred under the Party's rules, having been a member for less than a year. Following the Grenfell Tower fire, Johnson expressed the view that Theresa May was also a victim of the fire "because she can do nothing right". In April 2019, she joined the new anti-Brexit party Change UK and was the lead candidate on the party list in South West England at the 2019 European Parliament election. She later lamented this decision, describing herself as the "rat that jumped onto a sinking ship" and criticised the party leadership's focus group attitude to decision making structure and added that Change UK was a "terrible" name. As of 24 July 2019, she remains listed on the board of directors of Bright Blue, even though she left the Tories in 2011.
