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Paul Bede Johnson CBE (born 2 November 1928) is an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter, and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he is now a conservative popular historian.

Paul Johnson

CBE
Johnson in 2005
Born
Paul Bede Johnson

(1928-11-02) 2 November 1928 (age 94)
Manchester, England
EducationStonyhurst College
Alma materMagdalen College, Oxford
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • popular historian
Known forEditor of the New Statesman (1965–70)
Spouse
Marigold Hunt
​
(m. 1957)​
Children4, including Daniel and Luke
Websitepauljohnsonarchives.org

Johnson was educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for and later editing the New Statesman magazine. A prolific writer, Johnson has written over 40 books and contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers. His sons include the journalist Daniel Johnson, founder of Standpoint magazine, and the businessman Luke Johnson, former chairman of Channel 4.


Early life and career


Johnson was born in Manchester. His father, William Aloysius Johnson, was an artist and Principal of the Art School in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. At Stonyhurst College, Johnson received an education grounded in the Jesuit method,[1] which he preferred over the more secularized curriculum of Oxford. Whilst at Oxford, Johnson was tutored by the historian A. J. P. Taylor[2] and was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society.

After graduating with a second-class honours degree, Johnson performed his national service in the Army, joining the King's Royal Rifle Corps and then the Royal Army Educational Corps, where he was commissioned as a Captain (acting) based mainly in Gibraltar.[2] Here he saw the "grim misery and cruelty of the Franco regime".[3] Johnson's military record helped the Paris periodical Réalités hire him,[2] where he was assistant editor from 1952 to 1955.

Johnson adopted a left-wing political outlook during this period as he witnessed in May 1952 the police response to a riot in Paris (Communists were rioting over the visit of American general, Matthew Ridgway, who commanded the US Eighth Army during the Korean War; he had just been appointed NATO's Supreme Commander in Europe), the "ferocity [of which] I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes."[4] Then he served as the New Statesman's Paris correspondent. For a time, he was a convinced Bevanite and an associate of Aneurin Bevan himself. Moving back to London in 1955, Johnson joined the Statesman's staff.

Some of Johnson's writing already showed signs of iconoclasm. His first book, about the Suez War, appeared in 1957. An anonymous commentator in The Spectator wrote that "one of his [Johnson's] remarks about Mr Gaitskell is quite as damaging as anything he has to say about Sir Anthony Eden", but the Labour Party's opposition to the Suez intervention led Johnson to assert "the old militant spirit of the party was back".[5] The following year he attacked Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Dr No,[6] and in 1964 he warned of "The Menace of Beatlism"[7] in an article contemporarily described as being "rather exaggerated" by Henry Fairlie in The Spectator.[8]

Johnson was successively lead writer, deputy editor and editor of the New Statesman magazine from 1965 to 1970. He was found suspect for his attendances at the soirées of Lady Antonia Fraser, then married to a Conservative MP. There was some resistance to his appointment as New Statesman editor, not least from the writer Leonard Woolf, who objected to a Catholic filling the position, and Johnson was placed on six months' probation.[citation needed]

Statesmen and Nations (1971), the anthology of his Statesman articles, contains numerous reviews of biographies of Conservative politicians and an openness to continental Europe; in one article Johnson took a positive view of events of May 1968 in Paris, an article which at the time of first publication led Colin Welch in The Spectator to accuse Johnson of possessing "a taste for violence".[9] According to this book, Johnson filed 54 overseas reports during his Statesman years.


Shift rightward


From 1981 to 2009, Johnson wrote a column for The Spectator; initially focusing on media developments, it subsequently acquired the title "And Another Thing". In his journalism, Johnson generally deals with issues and events which he sees as indicative of a general social decline, whether in art, education, religious observance or personal conduct. He has continued to contribute to the magazine, less frequently than before.[10] During the same period he contributed a column to the Daily Mail until 2001. In a Daily Telegraph interview in November 2003, he criticised the Mail for having a pernicious impact: "I came to the conclusion that that kind of journalism is bad for the country, bad for society, bad for the newspaper".[11]

Johnson is a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, mainly as a book reviewer, and in the U.S. writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and the National Review. He also contributes to Forbes magazine.[12] For a time in the early 1980s he wrote for The Sun after Rupert Murdoch urged him to "raise its tone a bit."[13]

Johnson is a critic of modernity because of what he sees as its moral relativism,[14] and finds objectionable those who use Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to justify their atheism, such as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, or use it to promote biotechnological experimentation.[15][16][17] As a conservative Catholic, Johnson regards liberation theology as a heresy and defends clerical celibacy, but departs from others in seeing many good reasons for ordination of women as priests.[18]

Admired by conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, he is strongly anticommunist.[19] Johnson has defended Richard Nixon[20] in the Watergate scandal, finding his cover-up considerably less heinous than Bill Clinton's perjury and Oliver North's involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In his Spectator column, Johnson defended his friend Jonathan Aitken,[21] has expressed admiration for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet[22] and limited admiration for Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco.[23]

Johnson was active in the campaign, led by Norman Lamont, to prevent Pinochet's extradition to Spain after Pinochet's arrest in London. "There have been countless attempts to link him to human rights atrocities, but nobody has provided a single scrap of evidence," Johnson was reported as saying in 1999.[24] In Heroes (2008),[22] Johnson returned to his longstanding claim that criticism of Pinochet's dictatorship on human rights grounds came from "the Soviet Union, whose 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."[25]

He has described France as "a republic run by bureaucratic and party elites, whose errors are dealt with by strikes, street riots and blockades" rather than a democracy.[26]

Johnson is a Eurosceptic who played a prominent role in the "No" campaign during the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the EC. In 2010 Johnson noted that "you can't have a common currency without a common financial policy, and you can't have that without a common government. The three things are interconnected. So this [European integration] was entirely foreseeable. Not much careful thought and judgment goes into the EU. It's entirely run by bureaucrats."[27]

He served on the Royal Commission on the Press (1974–77) and was a member of the Cable Authority (regulator) from 1984 to 1990.


Personal life


Paul Johnson has been married since 1958 to the psychotherapist and former Labour Party parliamentary candidate Marigold Hunt, daughter of Dr. Thomas Hunt, physician to Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Anthony Eden. They have three sons and a daughter: the journalist Daniel Johnson,[28] a freelance writer, editor of Standpoint magazine, and previously associate editor of The Daily Telegraph; Luke Johnson,[28] businessman and former chairman of Channel 4 Television; Sophie Johnson-Clark, an independent television executive; and Cosmo Johnson, playwright. Paul and Marigold Johnson have ten grandchildren. Marigold Johnson's sister, Sarah, an art historian, married the journalist, former diplomat and politician George Walden; their daughter, Celia Walden, is the wife of television presenter and former newspaper editor Piers Morgan.[29]

In 1998 it was revealed Johnson had an affair lasting eleven years with Gloria Stewart, a freelance journalist, who recorded them together in his study "at the behest of a British tabloid";[30][31][32] she claimed to have made the affair public via the newspapers after what she saw as Johnson's hypocrisy over his views on morality, religion and family values, but acknowledged that their affair had ended when Johnson "found another girlfriend".[33]

Johnson is a friend of British playwright Tom Stoppard, who dedicated his 1978 play Night and Day to him.

Johnson is a watercolourist, painting mainly landscapes, who has exhibited regularly.


Honours


In 2006, Johnson was honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President George W. Bush.[34]

Johnson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to literature.[35]


Partial bibliography


Johnson's books are listed by subject or type. The country of publication is the UK, unless stated otherwise.


Anthologies, polemics and contemporary history



Art and architecture



History



Memoirs



Novels



Religion



Travel



References



Footnotes


  1. As he saw it in his 1957 "Conviction" essay.
  2. Johnson, Paul Bede (22 July 2000), "Bugles softly blowing, national service was a time to treasure", The Spectator, Find articles
  3. Conviction, p. 206
  4. The French Left, p. 46
  5. "A Spectator' Notebook", The Spectator, 25 January 1957, p. 7
  6. Johnson, Paul Bede (5 April 1958), "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism", New Statesman, in Howe, Stephen, ed. (1988), Lines of Dissent: Writings from the "New Statesman", London: Verso, pp. 151–154.
  7. "The Menace of Beatlism", New Statesman: 326–327, 28 February 1964, reprinted as "From the archive: The Menace of Beatlism", New Statesman, 28 August 2014
  8. Henry Fairlie "Beatles and Babies", The Spectator, 6 March 1964, p. 4
  9. Colin Welch "AfterThought: Imbecile Power", The Spectator, 30 May 1968, p. 31
  10. Contributor: Paul Johnson, spectator.co.uk website
  11. Damian Thompson "'I'm very fond of that boy Tony'", The Daily Telegraph, 3 November 2003
  12. Contributor page: Paul Johnson Archived 4 January 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Forbes.com
  13. Paul Johnson "And Another Thing", The Spectator, 29 January 1994, p. 21
  14. Paul Johnson "What the temptations on the high mountain mean today" Archived 4 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine, The Spectator, 28 February 2009
  15. Paul Johnson "And Another Thing – Shaping up for a new moral catastrophe in the 21st century", The Spectator, 16 October 1998, p. 26
  16. Paul Johnson "The ayatollah of atheism and Darwin's altars", The Spectator, 27 August 2005
  17. Paul Johnson "And Another Thing – An entertaining evening finding out how Professor Pinker's mind works", The Spectator, 31 January 1998, p. 22
  18. Paul Johnson, "My Faith in Women" Archived 18 May 2015 at the Wayback Machine, The Tablet, 1 August 1998, p. 11
  19. Paul Johnson, Modern Times, passim
  20. Paul Johnson "In Praise of Richard Nixon", Commentary, 86:4, October 1988, pp. 50–53
  21. Paul Johnson "And Another Thing – The Aitken case: who is holding the scales of justice tilted?", The Spectator, 28 March 1998, p. 19
  22. "Pinochet remains a hero to me because I know the facts" (from Heroes, cited by Richard Lourie "Heroes Are People, Too", The Washington Post, 2 December 2007
  23. Paul Johnson "And Another Thing – Here is my list of the century's greatest political figures", The Spectator, 13 November 1999, p. 38
  24. Nick Hopkins "Rightwing fan club tinkers with Chile history", The Guardian, 20 January 1999
  25. Paul Johnson, Heroes, HarperCollins Publishers (US), 2006, p. 279.
  26. Paul Johnson "Anti-Americanism Is Racist Envy", Forbes, 21 July 2003
  27. "Paul Johnson: 'After 70 you begin to mellow'". www.telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 12 July 2021.
  28. Popham, Peter (10 March 1997). "Media families; 4. The Johnsons". The Independent. Archived from the original on 25 May 2022. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
  29. "My Mentor: Celia Walden on George Walden - Media, News - the Independent". Independent.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 April 2009.
  30. Al Kamen (22 May 1998). "FAN MALES". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C. ISSN 0190-8286. OCLC 1330888409.
  31. "I care about Paul Johnson's love affair with Tony Blair - not about". Independent.co.uk. 12 May 1998.
  32. Elizabeth Grice "Paul Johnson: 'After 70 you begin to mellow'", The Daily Telegraph, 4 June 2010
  33. Christopher Hitchens "The Rise and Fall of Paul "Spanker" Johnson", salon, [28 May 1998] Archived 13 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  34. "Paul Johnson", Desert Island Discs, 15 January 2012
  35. "No. 61608". The London Gazette (Supplement). 11 June 2016. p. B9.
  36. Foreman, Jonathan (10 December 2009), "Winston Churchill, Distilled", The Wall Street Journal, p. D6.

Sources




Media offices
Preceded by
John Freeman
 Editor of the New Statesman
1965–1970		 Succeeded by
Richard Crossman

На других языках

- [en] Paul Johnson (writer)

[ru] Джонсон, Пол

Пол Джонсон (англ. Paul Johnson, полное имя англ. Paul Bede Johnson, родился 2 ноября 1928, Манчестер, Англия) — британский писатель и спичрайтер, журналист-католик.


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