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Boris Johnson: 'I am descended from slaves'

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BBC: 'No you're not'.

London Mayoral candidate Johnson has been accused even by fellow Tory MPs as being an 'out of touch toff' - his Eton education and grating upper-middle class accent haven't helped matters on the numerous occasions he's made gaffes in the public eye - most notably in a newspaper article six years ago, describing Africans as 'piccaninnies'. The black playwright Patrick Augustus recently accused him of sounding like 'the slave master trying to keep the slaves down'.

But today Boris Johnson has made the startling claim that he is directly descended from slaves, telling reporters, 'I am the proud offspring of Turkish immigrants. I want you to know that my great-great-grandmother was a slave, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Livingstone. She was a Circassian slave [from a region in southern Russia], and she was sold: my great-great-grandfather literally purchased her.'

Intriguingly, when the BBC studied Johnson's story for a forthcoming edition of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, in which celebrities trace their family trees, it was unable to find proof. 'It's not in the film', a BBC source told the Guardian. 'They can only document the truth that can be backed up by documentation. It's just one of his old family tales'.
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