Boris Johnson, Britain’s lovably eccentric Foreign Secretary is seldom, if ever, referenced in relation to Armenian interests (though the fact that he won the “most offensive Erdogan poem” competition is certainly of interest to our community. What did he do with the £1,000 prize? Your guess is as good as mine!). In fact, he is so removed from the Armenian conversation, that one might be forgiven for thinking his first formal contact with Armenia came in the form of a 15 minute-long phone conversation with a Russian prankster claiming to be the newly elected Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan.

But curiously enough, the Johnson family’s run-ins with Armenians go way back. The story really begins in turn of the 20th-century Constantinople, where the young Ottoman technocrat, Ali Kemal Bey, had begun a relatively modest rise into the ranks of the Bosphorus intelligentsia.

Kemal, the son of a Circassian slave and a Turkish business magnate, had grown up in all the comforts his status could provide. He was educated in the prestigious new schools set up by Sultan Abdul Hamid, who had the hopes of preparing the dying empire’s future generation of reformers.

Instead, these campuses became hotbeds of opposition to the Sultan’s absolutist ruling style. Graduates, who took on the name Young Turks (this is before they were known for Armenian Genocide, or hosting left-wing talk shows), had a decisively Western-oriented outlook, spoke fluent French and longed to replicate the democratic, bureaucratic and industrial reforms they had witnessed in the capitals of Europe in their own country. His time in the Ottoman school system exposed Kemal to liberal ideas, causing him much trouble with the authorities. He was eventually imprisoned and exiled to Syria.

In time, Kemal developed an Ottomanist ideology. He argued for a free and multicultural Ottoman Empire, united under a civic Ottoman identity rather than ethnic nationalism. He had been vocal about the Empire’s treatment of its minorities such as the Armenians.

What You Didn’t Know About Boris Johnson’s Turkish Roots