Acclaimed historian Paul Johnson moved from deep left to radical right

Paul Johnson was among the world’s most influential historians while being in the driver’s seat of Christian conservative thought.

Paul Johnson’s Modern Times sold more than six million copies. Picture: Corbis via Getty Images

OBITUARY

Paul Bede Johnson, historian and journalist.
Born Manchester, November 2, 1928. Died London, January 12, aged 94.

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Beyond being well written, Britain’s often very amusing New Statesman and Spectator magazines have, for a century, been the complementary opposite forces of political thought.

New Statesman describes itself as “of the left, for the left”, going soft on Stalin and preaching pacifism in our dangerous world, while publishing the words of future UK Labour leaders. Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens wrote for it. And it was once edited by the noted historian Paul Johnson.

The Spectator has moved about the dial, but only on its right, and has been edited by future Conservative leaders Nigel Lawson and Boris Johnson. Notable correspondents have included Winston Churchill, T S Eliot, Roger Scruton and … Paul Johnson.

Johnson’s journey from the deep left to the radical right was not unique, but its timeline was fuzzy. He wrote for The Statesman until 1970 but did not appear in the Spectator until 1980, raising the issue of Britain’s brutal union battles of the 1970s being when he saw a future for his country, and the world, in which small government, lower taxes and a less controlled economy were vital.

Towards the end of that decade, Britain was enmeshed in a cycle of inflation and union pay demands the government could not meet – peaking with 1978’s infamous Winter of Discontent and a memorable page one headline in The Sun with a photograph of prime minister James Callaghan asking “Crisis? What Crisis?” (probably inspired by the 1975 Supertramp album of that title).

About that time, Johnson turned right to side with new opposition leader Margaret Thatcher. She would famously announce in 1980, by then resident at No. 10 Downing Street, that “the lady’s not for turning”. But the gentleman was. Soon he was writing her speeches. “I was instantly drawn to her,” he explained later.

By then he had written with stylish vibrancy and foresight about Britain’s role in the 1956 Suez crisis, which he considered rash and likely to inflame Arab nationalism. He backed the 1968 student riots in Paris, encouraging his countrymen to come see it: “To be there is a political education in itself, to watch the birth-pangs of a new approach to the organisation of human societies. This is such a rare event in history that we are fortunate to be alive to witness it.”

Perhaps confirming his Frenchness, president Charles de Gaulle fled to Germany, but the protests faded and de Gaulle was re-elected.

Much had changed by the time Johnson published 1977’s Enemies of Society in which the author identified how the left is hardwired to undermine the West’s freedoms, moral values and culture, his zealous defence of which was rooted in a Jesuit education at Lancashire’s Stonyhurst College.

He had always been deeply socially conservative, as witnessed by an absurd 1964 New Statesman column headlined The Menace of Beatlism: “Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures …”

He wasn’t alone in believing the band’s revolutionary music was of no consequence, but the floridly pompous attack on its fans – “a bottomless chasm of vacuity” – was unforgivable: “The huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store makeup.”

No column in the magazine’s history received more letters of complaint and it remains proudly on its website.

Johnson’s 60 books of biography (from Socrates to Eisenhower) and historical analysis (including A History of Christianity and the later A History of the Jews) were written at a rate of 6000 words daily and aimed at a broad audience, not his former colleagues from Oxford’s Magdalen College. And they were popular.

Modern Times, his overview of the tyrants who killed so freely while changing the course of the past century, was his most successful with The Times describing it as “powerful, lively, compelling and provocative”. It sold more than six million copies.

His tranquil watercolour landscapes also sold well and were a contrast to the heaving debates about Christian morality at which he was so often the centre, not least when he wrote about the sanctity of marriage on the 40th anniversary of his own.

Gloria Stewart, with whom he had a decade-long affair, revealed Johnson’s hypocrisy. He was “a very considerate lover”, she said, adding: “Paul loved to be spanked and it was a big feature of our relationship. I had to tell him he was a very naughty boy.”

Johnson accepted that he had sinned. “I’ve been having an affair – but I still believe in family values,” he said.