'A girl you could get drunk with while talking philosophy': The woman who gave birth to Boris Johnson's baby


Helen Macintyre, 36, is said to have remarkable strength of character as well as an enormous amount of discretion about her former relationship

Steadfast loyalty: Helen Macintyre, 36, is said to have remarkable strength of character as well as an enormous amount of discretion about her former relationship

Throughout all the furious speculation, it is Helen Macintyre’s steadfast loyalty which has perhaps been most surprising.

From the moment rumours first began to circulate about her affair with Boris Johnson and the biological origins of her baby daughter Stephanie’s uncannily familiar wild mop of hair, the glamorous brunette has remained resolutely tight-lipped on the matter, giving her reason, simply but firmly, as ‘it’s private’.

Few would have blamed her for confirming her child’s paternity, about which friends say she is in ‘no doubt’.

After all, Helen, an art adviser, is the latest in a bafflingly long list of bright, successful women believed to have been seduced by the bumbling, unlikely Lothario, and he appears to be in no greater hurry to leave his long-suffering wife Marina for her than for any of the rest.

The episode ended her relationship with her long-term lover and left her alone to bring up a child whose father will not even publicly acknowledge her.

Of course, breaking her silence would prompt a scandal that would eclipse anything even Boris has experienced before, putting paid to any hopes he harbours of one day becoming Prime Minister.

It would also surely sever whatever thread continues to hold the Johnson marriage together.

Some would say the London Mayor deserves it, yet Helen continues to protect him, claiming somewhat unrealistically in an interview in the December issue of Tatler, on sale now, that in doing so, she is ensuring that her daughter is ‘allowed to grow up without intrusion’.

Such discretion speaks volumes of her regard for Boris, whom she has known for 15 years.

And for him, what is there not to like? She’s very definitely a man’s woman; she shares his love of the double entendre and has a smoky voice (cigarettes are a vice) ideally suited to telling dirty jokes.

She also has, according to Tatler, ‘a knock-out pair of pins’ and ‘seems expensive but accessible, feminine but up for anything, bright but a bit blowsy – the type of woman you could get drunk with while discussing philosophy’.

Somehow, Boris has always managed to choose women who are not only extraordinarily bright and beautiful but refuse to kiss and tell, however badly he appears to treat them.

But according to those who know her, Helen’s loyalty also reveals the remarkable strength of character of the 36-year-old, who runs her own highly successful company advising rich individuals and businesses on buying art in London’s St James’s, the capital of Britain’s art scene.

Helen Macintyre (left) with a friend at a social gathering in 2006.

Party girl: Helen (left) with a friend at a social gathering in 2006. Friends describe her as dignified, determined and a 'bloody good bloke with bosoms'

As her friend Annabel Rivkin said: ‘Helen is one gung-ho girl. She is basically your proverbial bloody good bloke with bosoms and a brain.’ It is a widely held view.

‘Helen has a core of steel and wasn’t fazed at all by the prospect of being a single mother once she got used to the idea,’ said another.

‘She is a very dignified woman who would never dream of airing her dirty linen in public - and anyway, she can cope with anything thrown at her.’

Her fortitude is evident in her impressive achievements. Through her business, Macintyre Art Advisory, which she launched in 2007, she has become a major player in the art world and, despite an intense fear of flying, has flown to Qatar 16 times in 18 months, tapping into the Middle Eastern art market by brokering million-pound deals for the ruling dynasty.

The means by which she elevated herself to this position reveal an extraordinary determination, energy and self-belief.

After meeting Chase Untermeyer, the then U.S. ambassador to Qatar, she decided to put on an exhibition in the capital, Doha.

Refusing to be daunted by small matters of distance, language and cultural barriers, she arrived with almost £40 million worth of art and hired a marquee at the Four Seasons hotel. Rather cannily, she took some paintings of sporting scenes and a couple of Picassos.

Through Mr Untermeyer, she managed to attract a host of the country’s great and good, including the prime minister, members of the Qatari royal family and Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani, deputy chairman of the Qatar Museums Authority, whom she charmed enough for him to act as the exhibition’s patron.

Most people would never dream of taking such a risk but Helen made sure it paid off. She left Doha with an impressive number of sales and a list of highly sought-after new contacts. 

The colourful mayor of London Boris Johnson is the father of Helen Macintyre's baby girl, Stephanie

Unlikely lothario: The colourful mayor of London Boris Johnson is the father of Helen's baby girl, Stephanie

Yet the route of her admirably vigorous approach to life can actually be found in a series of tragedies in her family background that have proved a driving force for her ever since.

She was the third daughter born to a Scottish father, James Macintyre, an artist, and Dutch mother, Wilhelmina, from whom she inherited her extraordinary Delft blue eyes. By all accounts, her childhood was initially happy.

She had two elder sisters - Enid, her senior by nine years, and Stephanie, older by seven.

The family lived in Herne Bay, Kent, and ran an art gallery, with James restoring the paintings before they were sold.

Her parents were loving but strict, and keen for their children to grow up surrounded by culture. She was not allowed to watch television and had to listen to classical rather than pop music. Weekends and holidays were spent in galleries and stately homes.

In 1988, when Helen was 14 and at St Edmund’s boarding school in Canterbury, the family suffered its first terrible misfortune when her father had a sudden and massive heart attack and died at the age of 68.

Helen’s mother worked hard to keep the gallery going but money was tight. While Helen returned to school, Enid started working as a translator and Stephanie became a nanny in London.

Wilhelmina’s pain at losing her husband was alleviated when she met a new man, solicitor Kerry Waitt, who runs his own successful firm and whom Helen has described as a ‘wonderful man’. They married in 1992 in Edinburgh.

Yet if the family thought their share of unhappiness was over, they were wrong. In March 1992, Helen’s A-level year, Enid, then 27, died in a fire.

The verdict at the inquest was that she had taken her own life. Helen has never spoken publicly about Enid’s suicide, preferring to refer to it as an accident.

Three months later, Stephanie had an operation on her liver. She suffered from Budd-Chiari syndrome, a condition suffered by only one in a million people involving an obstruction of the blood flow out of the liver, most often by a blood clot.

It causes abdominal pain and an enlarged liver, and patients are often operated on to relieve symptoms.

But Stephanie’s operation went wrong, and she died of liver failure, with the coroner recording a verdict of misadventure.

Suddenly, the family, which had begun as five, had lost three members.

Helen’s recollections of that time are a reflection both of her tremendous loss and her extraordinary resilience.

‘So there we were, down to two,’ she told Tatler. ‘And I thought that if my mother was still standing then I should still be standing.

'We never had any counselling or anything like that. We sort of counselled ourselves - and anyway, what can you do?’

Where many other people would have crumbled, Helen kept going, using her mother’s example as an inspiration. Wilhelmina had already proved that she could cope in the most difficult of circumstances, and her daughter did the same.

Instead of allowing herself to become depressed, her family’s awful misfortunes made Helen tougher and gave her a determination to make the most of every opportunity.

She added: ‘I was the only one left. But I’ve always been optimistic and cheerful, and I see that quality in my daughter.

She will not cry. She might be on the verge of complaining about something and she will just turn it into a smile.’

At Edinburgh University, where she studied history of art, she became known for her love of a good party. At one James Bond-themed event, her dancing partner swung her so high in the air that her foot hit a chandelier, which fell to the floor.

With her shiny dark hair, long legs and throaty chuckle, she attracted numerous male admirers but, according to university friends, she did not date fellow students.

Instead, her boyfriends included a lecturer at the city’s Napier University who was over 40 and a Dutchman whose family fortune came from a clog-making factory, hence his nickname ‘The Clogmeister’.

 ‘I was a bit of a loose cannon. I wanted to run my own show.’

It was at Edinburgh that she first met Boris, who was a journalist at the time.

‘She favoured moving in slightly grander social circles,’ said a friend. ‘You always knew she was going to go far in life. I had the impression she had quite a tough upbringing but it wasn’t something she often talked about.’

Her big break into the art world came soon after her graduation in 1996. She was interning at an art fair in Maastricht and met Richard Knight, the director of a company specialising in Old Masters.

Impressed by her sales ability, he offered her a job at his new dealership Hall & Knight, where she worked until 2004, organising international exhibitions and fairs. Next, she moved to Christie’s, where she assisted VIP clients to buy and sell artworks through auction, but she had already realised she wanted to start her own company.

‘I was very good with people and, rather than saying, “Here are the pictures, now place the pictures,” I thought that I could turn that around and find out what people were looking for,’ she said this month, adding: ‘I was a bit of a loose cannon. I wanted to run my own show.’

Her relationship with Pierre Rolin, the boyfriend she initially believed to be her daughter’s father, began in 2006 after they met at a Red Cross charity ball.

Rolin, a Canadian, ran his own company Strategic Real Estate Advisors, which worked mostly with Middle Eastern investors, until last November when it went into administration. The couple’s lifestyle was lavish.

They lived in a grand house in Belgravia, travelled by private plane and holidayed in Miami and St Tropez. He showered her with gifts including a Mini Cooper with personalised number plates and Cartier jewellery.

As Helen told Tatler: ‘We had an extremely strange relationship because he travelled. He was nomadic and was rarely at home.

'We got on very well as companions almost. One summer I spent eight weeks on a yacht in St Tropez. Pierre disappeared for work and I was stuck on this boat, having dinner alone with the captain and thinking, “How did I get here?” ’

Last year their relationship is said to have soured after Helen and Boris rekindled their friendship when he gave her an unpaid job as a fundraiser for a proposed landmark sculpture in the Olympic Park, the £20 million, 400ft Orbit Tower.

They split up after Stephanie’s birth in November last year, when the newborn’s wild blonde hair and blue eyes raised doubts that she could be the dark-haired Rolin’s child, and a DNA test confirmed she wasn’t.

Friends say that the child was the result of a brief fling with the mayor rather than a sustained affair.

  ‘Whatever happens with Boris, she can manage just fine.’

In February police issued Rolin with a warning for harassment after Helen complained to them that he had continued to bombard her with phone calls and texts.

By this time, Helen was having a live-in relationship with magazine founder William Cash, son of the Tory MP Bill Cash, but she is now single. She lives in a rented house in Chelsea, where a nanny looks after Stephanie while she is at work.

The pregnancy - and the 52-hour labour - was a surprise. But she adores motherhood. Now ‘bored’ of partying, Helen is ‘very happy’, despite being single, and enjoys the normality of looking after a baby.

‘I was never very broody,’ she told Tatler. ‘It didn’t occur to me that I needed a baby but then I fell pregnant and I just went into this haze of happiness.

'I did sort of see things falling apart around me with Pierre but I just thought everything would come right.

‘And remember, we lost all those people so to bring in a new life was exciting. Mum said to me, “Well, OK you are not married, but there’s always room for new life.” ’

Friends of Boris say he doesn’t mind the fact that Stephanie is his child, and is happy to support Helen in bringing her up. Whether that extends as far as openly acknowledging his role in her existence remains to be seen.

But, said one of Helen’s friends, ‘Whatever happens with Boris, she can manage just fine.’

And if the bottom falls out of the Qatari art market - well, there’s always the ‘semi-autobiographical’ novel she’s writing. Should make a riveting read, even with the names and locations changed.

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