The Blimp Deflates

The obituaries and tributes to Paul Johnson, a columnist with a penchant for 'entertaining' bigotry, show tedious contrarianism is not a modern affliction.

Previously: The Sun is a dirty bomb

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I tend to think it’s fine to speak ill of the dead if they spent much of their time living speaking ill of anyone who crossed their path. The counter-argument, of course, is that it isn’t the dead that we’re protecting by tip-toeing around reality but their relatives who might be comforted with a burnished remembrance of an old bastard.

Paul Johnson, the former Daily Mail and Spectator columnist who noisily migrated from being nominally of the left as editor of The New Statesman in the late-60s to undeniably on the right as an infamous bumptious blowhard in the decades that followed, has died. He is remembered inaccurately by The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Spectator, and with more unflattering detail through a still heavily-Vaselined lens by The New York Times.

The opening essay in Johnson’s collection of Spectator contributions, To Hell With Picasso (1998), is titled ‘The Art of Writing a Column’. It tells the reader more about his temperament and prejudices than it does about the columnist’s dubious ‘art’:

A columnist ought to have known and know a huge range of people, from the humble right up to the top. He who claims an extensive acquaintance with the common man or woman skates on thin ice, and I don’t advise a display of demotic knowledge. Taxidrivers should never be quoted, at any rate on politics. 

On the other hand, gardeners can be put to use and, with skill, built up into a serviceable stick character — not be brought in too often, however. Kingsley Martin made splendid use of his Sussex gardener for over a quarter-century, employing him to impart wisdom and comment covering a much wider ground than mere horticulture. I have quoted gardeners myself — and their dogs, for that matter. 

Cleaning women I do not advise. Butlers or valets are taboo, even if you have them. On the other hand, it is over convenient to have a well-informed and sensible detective-sergeant on tap: crime and criminals play a necessary part, these days, in a well-regulated column read by the middle classes. 

Notice that a “common man or woman” can’t be a columnist in Johnson’s world¹; he sees a world of characters to be exploited; caricatures to be drawn. Grudgingly acknowledging that women can be columnists, he tells the reader “[they] do not bore you with facts, more with opinions… the weakness of the sex is to supply too few”.

The oven-baked hypocrisy of most of Johnson’s output is also there in that essay. He advises that “name-dropping is fatal to a good column” a few pages after boasting that “[Lord] Beaverbrook himself told me that publishing [Arnold Bennett’s columns] gave him the greatest satisfaction of his entire career”. Skip forward a few pages and you’ll find another name clanging to the ground:

I have even seen Rupert Murdoch pick up a copy of one of his own newspapers, The Sunday Times — and my copy as it happened — recoil from it with fury, scrumple it up and hurl it with impressive force into the fireplace. 

One thing that Johnson gets right — though you get no real sense he believes it — is that “the columnist writes for tomorrow or this week, not for posterity”. His columns are not quoted by today’s contrarians and, beyond the more fetid corners of Britain’s revanchist right and the most easily-bamboozled Republican headbangers in the US, Johnson is no touchstone.

I’m writing this edition about him for two reasons: firstly, his columns illustrate that contrarianism varnished with pretension has been a feature of the British press far longer than the current crop of columnists have plied their trades. Secondly, I want to examine again how British journalism gives honourable deaths to its most dishonourable members, barely concealing their sins with a thin coat of euphemisms.

The Times’ obit begins with this anecdote:

The world is not a fair place. This was the first lesson that Paul Johnson learnt at school when a bully came up to him and told him he was going to beat him up for having red hair.

Johnson whispered something so that the bully would have to bend down to his level to hear what he was saying, at which point he gave him an uppercut. A teacher appeared, as if on cue, and Johnson was the one punished.

Another way of looking at that incident — if it even happened, given that Johnson was also fond of claiming that he was promoted to Captain during 2 years National Service in the Green Jackets — is to conclude that like many future columnists, he was fond of a cheap shot.

The narrative arc of Johnson’s life as sketched out in the obituaries and tributes is that he was a true believer of the left who was driven to the right by the unions. To accept that premise, you have to believe that he was genuinely engaged by left-wing thought to begin with. In The Art of Writing a Column, Johnson writes:

I have been writing columns of one kind or another virtually all my professional life. I began in 1953, when I was twenty-four, contributing a weekly column from Paris to the New Statesman (often paralleled by another one in Tribute under the pseudonym ‘Guy Henriques’…)  

I have written columns in the Evening Standard, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun, and the Daily Express, in the Catholic Herald, and the Paris weekly L’Express, in daily newspapers in Sapin, Italy and Japan. For many years, I wrote the ‘London Diary’ in the New Statesman and since 1980 have written a weekly column in the Spectator… 

The original “freelancer” was a medieval mercenary; that’s what Johnson was — a hack for hire. He delivered to the brief The New Statesman required of him but even before he became its editor in 1965, his instinctive conservatism was clear. He was 36 when he wrote ‘The Menace of Beatlism’ (1964):

Before I am denounced as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, let us pause an instant and see exactly what we mean by this “youth”. Both TV channels now run weekly programmes in which popular records are played to teenagers and judged. While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! The huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the broken stiletto heels: here is a generation enslaved by a commercial machine.

That is the writing of someone already comfortable to slide into dufferism. When it republished the column on its website, The New Statesman added a comment noting that “it became the most complained-about piece in the [magazine’s] history”. Young Johnson will have been delighted with that fact; it was his aim:

If the Beatles and their like were in fact what the youth of Britain wanted, one might well despair. I refuse to believe it – and so will any other intelligent person who casts his or her mind back far enough. What were we doing at 16? I remember reading the whole of Shakespeare and Marlowe, writing poems and plays and stories. At 16, I and my friends heard our first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; I can remember the excitement even today. We would not have wasted 30 seconds of our precious time on the Beatles and their ilk.

Are teenagers different today? Of course not. Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures: their existence, in such large numbers, far from being a cause for ministerial congratulation, is a fearful indictment of our education system, which in 10 years of schooling can scarcely raise them to literacy. What Mr Deedes fails to perceive is that the core of the teenage group – the boys and girls who will be the real leaders and creators of society tomorrow – never go near a pop concert. They are, to put it simply, too busy. They are educating themselves. They are in the process of inheriting the culture which, despite Beatlism or any other mass-produced mental opiate, will continue to shape our civilisation.

Johnson turned 16 in 1944. He was never a teenager in the sense of the word that was codified in the 50s when it became a distinct category of person with agency and spending power. He was a public school boy (educated at the Catholic boarding school Stonyhurst) who went up to Magdalen College, Oxford. The Times obit sniffily notes² that he “[took] only a second, to his chagrin but not to the surprise of at least one of his tutors.”

At first glance, Johnson’s New Statesman editorial on the student protests of 1968 is supportive, but scrape away the graffiti and you’ll find tweed underneath:

… the disparate debate is underpinned by a powerful thread of logic, which has transformed the French movement from a student revolt into a political event. The university is the matrix of society, the institution which produces its elites, assumptions and objectives; therefore student reforms are organically linked to the transformation of the adult world. Student agitation is meaningless unless it can join forces with the workers, the fall-guys in any consumer society.

Despite the piece opening with an echo of the Communist Manifesto’s opening line (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of student power.”), the analysis that follows privileges the university which “produces elites” over the workers who — the sentence ripples into a shrug — must be “the fall guys”.

To indicate that The New Statesman’s tone and office culture was snobby during Johnson’s editorship, The Times refers to “a certain de haut en bas³ attitude” which, is itself, a pretty de haut en bas way of putting it. By 1970, Johnson had been shifted out of the chair in fair of Dick Crossman, recently ejected from the cabinet by Labour’s loss in the general election.

The third of Johnson’s articles republished on The New Statesman website, ‘The Know-Nothing Left’ (26 September 1975), shows why he finally found such a comfortable berth at The Spectator. Having ended his New Statesman editorial in 1968 hoping that would have “a contribution to make” to “the revolutionary new spirit”, he now howled:

Degradation of the universities, of course, would fit in neatly with the syndicalisation of the Labour Party, since the ideal student – according to the anti-elitists – is one who conforms as closely as possible, mentally, emotionally and culturally, to a union militant… 

… How long will it be before the books are burning again, and the triumph of the “Common Man”, that figment of violent and irrational imaginations, is celebrated by another Kristallnacht? Already, at the extreme fringe of the syndicalist Left, the aggrosocialists are taking over public meetings, with their ideological flick knives and their doctrinaire coshes. 

Johnson continued his grotesque comparison of trade union action to the Holocaust in another New Statesman piece published in 1977, in which he announced he had resigned from the Labour Party, and argued:

In a system of belief where conscience is collectivised, there is no dependable barrier along the highways which ultimately may lead to Auschwitz and Gulag.

Both The Times and Telegraph obituaries cheer Johnson’s “never mind the quality, look at the length” output in the history books, columns, and book reviews he churned out. The former marvels…

If he possessed one professional quality above any other, it was perhaps energy. His daily output often consisted of a book review before breakfast, a column in the morning, an essay in the afternoon and then work on the index (which he always did himself) for one of his books in the evening. Scholars perhaps had reservations about his work for this reason, but he set a daunting example to others in the writing trade.

… while the latter recounts:

... the story the author and sometime literary editor A N Wilson told, of having commissioned Paul Johnson to assess a massive work on the American civil war: the result was “800 perfectly tuned words” – though Wilson’s assistant had forgotten to send the book.

That anecdote is included in admiration, not scorn. The Times includes his most public hypocrisy ...

In 1998 it was revealed that for 11 years Johnson had had an affair with the writer Gloria Stewart. She went public with this information after what she saw as Johnson’s hypocrisy over his views on morality, religion and family values. What tipped it was his claim to have advised Princess Diana: “Don’t commit adultery.”

… but buries it deep in the obituary and moves on quickly, just like The Telegraph.

Neither paper mentions that Johnson vigorously defended the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He included him in his book Heroes ("Pinochet remains a hero to me because I know the facts.") and campaigned with Norman Lamont to protect Pinochet from extradition to Spain when he was arrested in 1998. Johnson claimed at a press conference that:

There have been countless attempts to link [Pinochet] to human rights atrocities, but nobody has provided a single scrap of evidence.

In Heroes, he wrote:

The Soviet Union['s] propaganda machine successfully demonised [Pinochet] among the chattering classes all over the world. It was the last triumph of the KGB before it vanished into history's dustbin.

Chile’s Rettig Commission of Truth and Reconciliation (1991) and the Valech National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (2004), took testimony from more than 30,000 witnesses and concluded that Pinochet’s regime tortured 27,225, executed 2,279 and forced 200,000 people into exile with an unknown number of others subjected to disappearances and illegal detention.

There were so many scraps of evidence that you could have drowned Johnson in them.

The Telegraph obit says this dictator-defending, Nixon-admiring, affair-addicted man “reserved [his] fiercest scorn for what he called ‘moral relativism’. For him, there was no conflict between competing principles, no shades between good and bad. Right was right and wrong was wrong.” If that’s the case, Paul Johnson was bad and wrong.

Cheerily, The Times sums up his worldview thusly:

Certainly, no contemporary figure stood on his head so regularly and with quite the same insouciance that Johnson did. It sometimes almost seemed that it was not enough for him to renounce the opinions he had once upheld: honour required that he should fervently denounce such opinions, too — and this was how he came round to his robust views on capital punishment (pro), apartheid (more or less pro) and acts of homosexuality (against).

So a bloodthirsty racist homophobe then. But one who “never wrote a boring sentence”, according to both The Spectator editor Fraser Nelson (an avowed fan of commissioning and defending ‘entertaining’ bigots) and Stephen Glover (the resident zombie columnist at The Daily Mail).

In ‘The Life and Work of Paul Johnson’⁴ a review of Intellectuals for Critical Quarterly (1989), Christopher Hitchens — himself far from saintly — wrote that Johnson had…

… on a famous occasion in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street in 1973, [struck his wife] across the face for disagreeing with him in public and, when rebuked for this by a colleague of mine, threatened to put him through a plate glass window. 

Later in the piece, Hitchens says:

… this book is written by a would-be informer and stool pigeon, who would gladly sniff the sheets and snoop through the drawers and run lolloping back to dump the trophy at his master’s feet. 

The review was written 9 years before Stewart made the details of her affair with Johnson public — having been infuriated by his claim to have advised Princess Diana: “Don’t commit adultery.” — and discussed his taste for spanking. And yet, Hitchens opens by writing:

In a novel called Left of Centre which is now, to the relief of its publisher and author alike, safely out of print, Paul Johnson wrote what is generally agreed to be the most embarrassing spanking scene ever penned. 

Hitchens had probably heard whispers about Johnson’s peccadillos before Steward confirmed them. Once she did, he wrote a piece for Salon hooting:

Ms. Stewart unmasked Spanker Johnson to the tabloids because she could not bear to read another word of his "family values" tripe in the press. As recently as March, interviewed by Jacob Weisberg for The New York Times Magazine, he had claimed to be an adviser to the late Princess Diana. "Don't commit adultery," he said, had been his "chief advice" to the divine one. When various Tory MPs were found in a trouser-free condition not long ago, Johnson predicted the ruin of the state and said that adultery, especially when committed by those who opposed it in public, should be severely punished.

But here's the really bizarre thing. Johnson is not just a cult figure whenever two or three spankers are gathered together. He is an adored fetish on the American right. Norman Podhoretz loved Intellectuals. Nixon used to send out Johnson volumes for Christmas. Oliver North was once overcome with admiration at seeing William Casey read a whole Johnson on a plane flight. Dan Quayle kept a copy of Johnson's awful Modern Times by his side, and employed it as a prop against those who accused him of being no great reader. (When pressed for an exegesis of its contents he announced that it was "a very good historical book about history.") To be fair to Quayle, Modern Times is almost technically unreadable. And so is Johnson's most recent extrusion, A History of the American People. Upon release of this pseudo-scholarly atrocity — slavery a mere blip, the New Deal a monstrous tyranny, Watergate a liberal conspiracy, Reagan the summa of statesmanship — Newt Gingrich stepped forward in The Weekly Standard to declare it "perhaps [sic] the most important history of the American people in our generation." And Steve Forbes, in the Wall Street Journal, termed it "a magnificent achievement." Though neither of them, I feel confident, agrees with Johnson's grand, risk-taking entrepreneurial claim that Thomas Edison invented the telephone.

Those heavyweight volumes with their lightweight premises and featherweight fact-checking are what The New York Times describe as “outsize histories on a panoply of subjects”, politely skimming over the high bullshit content with the line:

[He was] writing more for a popular audience than for the approval of specialists… 

Translation: These are books for people who know nothing but wish to pretend that they know anything. See also the undeserved kindness of this sentence:

As a journalist, Mr. Johnson was versatile enough to tailor his views to the space limits and philosophic biases of many different magazines and newspapers.

Translation: He’d do anything for a fee and if you didn’t like those opinions, well, he had others.

Following Stewart’s revelations, Suzanne Moore — now at The Daily Telegraph — wrote for The Independent:

The only time I ever met [Johnson], he failed to acknowledge my existence except to shout "lovely girl" across the table every time I managed to open my mouth. Also at the table were Peter Hitchens, AN Wilson and Mary Kenny. Kenny, like Johnson, has also travelled the well-worn route from left-wing youth to right-wing dementia. 

My problem with these characters is not that they are right-wing or even opposed to much of what I believe, rather that they are so barking it is difficult to understand why they are taken seriously in the first place.

The New York Times takes Johnson seriously in the hope of mollifying glass-chewing Republicans, The Daily Telegraph and Times cast him as a titan because he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher and did favours for Rupert Murdoch. In one of his long-running And Another Thing columns for The Spectator in 1994, Johnson wrote:

British public life will be the poorer now that Kelvin MacKenzie has been kicked upstairs to run Rupert Murdoch's British satellite television operations…

… MacKenzie has his faults and is a gifted writer of cre-ative dialogue, but he brought to the busi- ness of popular journalism exactly the same blend of cheeky audacity and serious pur- pose which distinguished Hugh Cudlipp's long reign at the Mirror. In addition, he has wit, a quality in short supply among news- paper editors. To raise a smile on the face of the British working man every grey Mon- day morning is a real public service.

If somehow his penchant for Pinochet wasn’t enough to prove that there was a moral black hole at the heart of this supposedly ‘brilliant’ man, his encomium to Murdoch and McKenzie and obvious contempt for “the British working man” confirms it.

Stephen Glover for The Mail paints a rosy picture though:

With his Promethean energies and strong convictions, he might have walked out of the Victorian age.

For more than two decades Paul Johnson, who has died aged 94, was a regular columnist on the Daily Mail, where he displayed the extraordinary breadth of his knowledge, as well as trenchant opinion, on all manner of subject.  

As well as being an intellectual pillar of the Mail, he wrote for many publications including The Spectator (where he had a regular column for many years); Forbes, the American magazine; and the Wall Street Journal.

The. Intellectual. Pillar. Of. The. Mail. Like Rudolf Hess was the brains trust of Spandau.

The Times ends its obit with an anecdote that the writer no doubt found hilarious:

As for the American left, Johnson tried to reach out to them. On meeting the black American novelist James Baldwin, he said: “I’m not unaware of prejudice. If you’re born like me, red-haired and left-handed and Catholic, you know exactly what prejudice is.”

The Telegraph finishes with a scene featuring his ‘supportive’ wife Marigold Hunt (who survives him):

Their friends liked to compare Marigold, who worked as an NHS psychotherapist and was appointed MBE, with the still centre of a cyclone. When Paul fretted about what God would think of the article he was writing, Marigold, he wrote in The Quest for God, would be quick to remind him that “God has better things to do than to worry about that!”

A Mail interview from 2015 with Marigold — who received the MBE for her work on the Northern Ireland peace process — gives a different impression:

Stewart, she says, was an ‘awful woman who he probably had a fling with. She spilt the beans for money. I think it lasted about two days. But ever since,’ she adds, ‘it’s been a finger pointed.’... Is infidelity the biggest crime in a marriage? ‘Nooooo!’ she says. She gets up. ‘Just let me shut this door so Paul can’t hear.’ Then she whispers: ‘He’s got this awful woman now who’s been pursuing him for a long time. [She] turns up from time to time and he sees her, but he doesn’t, of course, do anything much now.’

Johnson was 86 at the time.

Nobody is perfect. No one’s life is free of guilt. But the point in picking over these tributes to Paul Johnson is to show how an industry that’s usually so ready to place moral failings and flaws under a microscope at best minimises and at worst erases them when one of its own reaches their final deadline.

In Intellectuals, Johnson wrote:

This book is an examination of the moral and judgemental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs… How did they conduct their own lives? With what degree of rectitude did they behave to family, friends, and associates? Were they just in their sexual and financial dealings?

So I’m sure he wouldn’t complain about this for a moment. Right?

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1. God forbid that a columnist be gay. Johnson writes in the same essay: “(It is a fact that confirmed bachelors rarely make good columnists for long — and even Bernard Levin, the great exception, would have been a better one under regularly wifely supervision.)”

2. In the world of The Times obituary pages, no one can truly transcend their degree class.

3. de haut en bas (adj.) condescending or superior in manner.

4. Later included in For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports