"Insofar as my words have given offence over the last 20 or 30 years and people have taken those words out of my articles and escalated them, then of course I'm sorry for the offence that they have caused,” said Mr Johnson, previously foreign secretary and mayor of London.
He was keen to emphasise that his great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, was a Muslim.
Mustapha Ali Kemal Bey, an Ottoman politician who became a liberal journalist and later was a leading member of the Ottoman Freedom and Accord Party. He fell foul of the Sultan Mehmed V (yechh!) and fled to England. Kemal returned to the Ottoman a widower (His first wife was Winifred Brun) and married the daughter of an Ottoman pasha. After Kemal's brutal murder at the hands of Ottoman thug Nureddin pasha, Kemal's son and daughter living in England adopted their maternal grandmother's maiden name of Johnson. His son Osman became 'Wilfred Johnson' and later married Irene Williams of Kent. Their son was Stanley Johnson, member (EUP) and father of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.