The rupture of Miguel Boyer and his first wife, Elena Arnedo, was very traumatic for their two children, Miguel and Laura, who had already passed away. It was an emotional earthquake that left deep wounds. The relationship of the former Socialist minister with Isabel Preysler was so mediatized that it did not contribute to family peace and a great distance developed among the different members.
Now Isabel Preysler is in the spotlight due to the publication of her long-awaited memoirs, My True Story (Espasa), where she recounts in first person her experiences that have been greatly gilded in the press and about which there has been much speculation because she has always been surrounded by a certain halo of mystery.
There are many voices that could participate in this dialogue with history, but it now takes on particular relevance an interview that Miguel Boyer Arnedo gave to El Mundo in 2016, in which he painted a not very edifying portrait of his father and in which Isabel Preysler did not come out badly, but not well either. To speak of the socialite, he moved in a gray spectrum, whereas against his father he pulled out all the stops.
We should note that Miguel Boyer Arnedo carved out his professional path apart from his parents, the “super minister” Miguel Boyer and the eminent gynecologist and activist for women’s reproductive rights, Elena Arnedo, who died of cancer on September 7, 2015, just as their daughter Laura Boyer, who succumbed to the same illness in February 2023.
The Son of Miguel Boyer Speaks About Isabel Preysler
The education of Miguel Boyer Arnedo was the most eclectic. He began by studying Engineering, Physics and Mathematics, but ended up in the Economics faculty, where he leaned toward Sociology. He later earned a Master’s in Journalism, served in the Santillana Group, spent two years in California, and also traveled through Latin America. Married and with three children, he now lives completely away from the media. Isabel, the queen of hearts, lived a great love with his father.
An important detail of the aforementioned interview is that, according to Father Ángel, at Boyer’s funeral he said he had known Isabel Preysler when she was a girl and the priest had been there as a missionary. Isabel would have asked the priest when their relationship began and revealed that the ex-minister was an atheist. Yet, at the time of his death, the parish priest noted that although he had been left-leaning in his day, he was perfectly capable of going to heaven.
Miguel Boyer and Isabel Preysler formed a very solid marriage.
The eldest son of Boyer did not identify with Father Ángel’s words, especially when he defined him as a family man, for him his father had not been at all such. Perhaps the most biting line of the whole account was: “People who achieve so much do not usually make good people.” According to him, his father had studied Physics and had betrayed Physics with Economics. Likewise, when he triumphed in politics, “he betrayed the PSOE and his first wife.”
Miguel Boyer Arnedo also stated that his father had fared badly in the companies he had been involved with and, more gravely, always according to his account, did not get along with his brothers nor with his nephews. Finally, he stressed that his father had become a character, which admits various interpretations.
According to him, after his father’s death, Isabel Preysler, whose life has been marked by tragedies, asked him if he had realized how well they had treated his father, but he insisted that he did not need journalists to tell him what his father was like and that he had stopped believing in him.
