Rachel Johnson has been a broadcast and national newspaper journalist since the age of 23 when she joined the Financial Times as the paper’s first female graduate trainee. She has her own radio show on LBC, been a reporter on BBC Radio Four, written weekly columns for national newspapers, published nine books, and is the only former editor of The Lady magazine to have entered the Big Brother House.
In 1989 Rachel joined the Financial Times as a graduate trainee writing about the economy. She spent a year on secondment to the Foreign Office Policy Planning staff before moving to the BBC for three years.
1997 saw Rachel cross the Atlantic to Washington DC where she worked as a columnist and freelancer. Rachel has written weekly columns for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Mail on Sunday. She’s also been published regularly in The Oldie, The Big Issue, Easy Living and She magazines.
In 2009 Rachel was appointed Editor of The Lady, a weekly magazine established in 1885. Her efforts to reinvigorate the title were the subject of a Channel 4 documentary The Lady and the Revamp. Following her departure from the title in 2012 she made a BBC Four documentary How to Be a Lady: An Elegant History.
Rachel has been a regular on shows including Question Time, Any Questions, Have I Got News For You and Sky News’ weekly debate show The Pledge. She has won two Pointless Celebrity trophies, Celebrity University Challenge and Celebrity Mastermind with the specialist subject The Laconia Incident.
In April 2020 Rachel launched her podcast, Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women, for Global.
Rachel appeared on Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS : Who Dares Wins in 2024. She also presented and wrote the podcast for Tortoise Media – Master which is now being sold as a documentary in the USA.
