British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has boasted of his near-unrivalled fecundity in British politics during his first cabinet meeting since Wednesday's near-bloodless reshuffle.
Urging renewed efforts to "deliver" on Conservative election promises, the PM quipped to his ministers that only Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg had sired as many scions as he.
“I’m just thinking about delivery, and you know I’ve seen a few delivery rooms," BoJo bantered to laughter from round the Cabinet Room table. "I’ve probably seen as many delivery rooms as anybody in this room with the possible exception of Jacob!"
"And I know that delivery usually involves a super human effort by at least one person in that room,” Johnson added.
Rees-Mogg, a fellow Roman Catholic, has six children by his wife Helena de Chair. They named the sixth, a boy born in July 2017, Sixtus Dominic Boniface.
"To mix my metaphors, this is, if you like, the half-time pep-talk," the PM continued, straying into the realm of rugby. "This is when we spit out the orange peel... we adjust our gumshields and our scrumcaps... and we get back out onto the pitch".
Johnson has six acknowledged children by three different women, with a seventh on its way.
His first daughter Lara Lettice was born to his second wife, barrister Marina Wheeler, just five weeks after their marriage — which itself came just 12 days after Johnson's divorce from Allegra Mostyn-Owen. Johnson and Wheeler had three more children — Milo Arthur, Cassia Peaches and Theodore Apollo — before their separation in 2018 and divorce in 2020.
But in 2009 the then-mayor of London fathered a child with arts consultant Helen MacIntyre, one of at least three mistresses he had during his second marriage. An injunction banning reporting of the out-of-wedlock birth was only struck down in 2013.
BoJo's sixth sprog, Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas, was born to his fiancée Carrie Symonds on April 29 2020 — exactly two months after they announced their engagement. The couple were married in a hush-hush ceremony at London's Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral on May 29 this year. On July 31 Mrs Johnson announced she was pregnant again, after suffering a miscarriage earlier in the year.