Paul Johnson, the journalist, editor, and historian who died on Jan. 12 at the age of 94, was not quite a prophet without honor in his native Britain. He was, though, taken much more seriously in the United States. These contrasting receptions partly reflect the two stages of Johnson’s career. They also reflect his political odyssey from left to right and the enduring duality at the heart of conservative thought.
In the first stage of his career, Johnson was a British journalist and polemical columnist. As editor of the New Statesman, Britain’s leading left-wing magazine from 1965, he drove the magazine’s subscription to a record high. The second stage began in 1970, when he resigned from the New Statesman and went freelance, but it had gestated through the 1960s as the deficiencies of socialist economics and moral liberalization became apparent. In the 1970s, as Britain’s economy collapsed, Johnson broke into open revolt.
Johnson became Britain’s foremost defector to the Right and its most articulate scourge of the Left. He also began writing books that married the journalist’s training in condensation with the historian’s stamina in exegesis. This second Johnson is the Johnson whose death precipitated a torrent of tributes in conservative American media. The Cold War enemy of communism and state socialism. The defender of individual freedom, free markets, and Judeo-Christian civilization. The author of fluent yet encyclopedic one-volume histories of Christianity, the papacy, the Jews, the English, the Americans, and the modern times in which he played a dual role as combatant and chronicler.
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Paul Johnson was born in Manchester in 1928 to a Catholic family. His middle name, Bede, was that of the early medieval monk and saint whose Ecclesiastical History made him the first historian of the English people. His father was an artist and school principal at Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, the industrial terrain that had inspired Arnold Bennett’s novels. Paul was privately educated by Jesuits at Stonyhurst College. In 1946, he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford. He studied history under the arch-controversialist A.J.P. Taylor (Wrote Johnson: “His sense of humor was unreliable and sometimes nonexistent”) and encountered Ludwig Wittgenstein (“He had no tie: wore his shirt open-necked”) and the Christian humanist C.S. Lewis (“He filled Magdalen’s lecture hall to overflowing, the girls on the dais sitting at his feet. It was said he got them so excited your best chance of seducing them was on the evening of the day he lectured”).
Johnson showed promise as a painter, but his father advised against a career in art: “A bad time is coming for art, Paul: Frauds like Picasso will rule the roost for the next half-century.” After mandatory military service, he worked on a magazine in Paris. There he met Charles de Gaulle (“suffered from halitosis”), Ernest Hemingway (“he ordered seven dry martinis and lined them up”), Pablo Picasso (“probably the most evil man I ever actually came across”), and Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a “very ugly little man” but “unlike most intellectuals, especially left-wing ones, was generous” and picked up Johnson’s bill at Brasserie Lipp.
In 1955, Johnson joined the New Statesman. The following year, the Suez Crisis exposed how sharply Britain had fallen in the post-1945 order and led to the resignation of the prime minister, Anthony Eden. “An unlucky politician, but it must be said that he had bad judgment,” Johnson wrote of him. Johnson’s first book, The Suez War, appeared within weeks of the British withdrawal from the canal zone and was the first detailed account in English of Britain and France’s collusion with Israel.
Johnson was prolific and encyclopedic in the way of Samuel Johnson or H.L. Mencken. As an editor, writer, and regular TV performer, he was at the heart of the shiny new world of ’60s media. He looked set to be on the winning side as the Left started its long and apparently unending march through the institutions. His first misgivings were cultural and moral rather than economic and political. Johnson’s article “The Menace of Beatlism,” published just before Britain’s 1964 elections, attacked politicians who were genuflecting before “young people as guides as mentors” in a cynical play for their votes.
“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 confectionary 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. Behind this image of ‘youth’, there are, evidently, some shrewd older folk at work.”
Johnson’s view of teenagers and pop culture resembles the disenchantment of another northern English Catholic, Anthony Burgess, in A Clockwork Orange (1962). It also anticipates Johnson’s sustained assault on relativism, conformity, and trashiness in Modern Times (1983), his history of the 20th century. By the end of the 1960s, he was also losing his faith in Labour and its leader, Harold Wilson (“kindly … if you forget about his disastrous career”). Johnson had been married since 1958 to Margaret Hunt, a psychotherapist, and they had four children to support. By the mid-1970s, Britain was heading for bankruptcy, and Johnson was writing the first of his major histories (A History of Christianity, 1976).
“The left had no answers,” he recalled. “I became disgusted by the over-powerful trade unions which were destroying Britain.” In Enemies of Society (1977), Johnson called the trade union leaders “fascists.” His political conversion complete, Johnson became a trans-Atlantic advocate of small government, free markets, and personal responsibility. The British Left did not forgive his apostasy.
Established on the Right and hated on the Left, in 1981 Johnson started a 28-year run as a Spectator columnist. The dilettante Jonathan Miller said that Johnson’s red hair made him look like “an explosion in a pubic hair factory.” The aging juveniles at the satirical Private Eye magazine called him “Loonybins” Johnson. When Johnson’s mistress told the papers that Johnson liked being spanked, Christopher Hitchens mocked him as “Spanker” Johnson, the “barking Tory pamphleteer.” As the saying goes, the Right looks for converts, but the Left hunts for heretics.
Johnson knew Margaret Thatcher from his Oxford days (“She was not a party person. She was an individual who made up her own mind”). After her election victory in 1979, he became her adviser and speechwriter. In early 1980, when Johnson was a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he predicted to Thatcher that the Republican presidential nominee would be Ronald Reagan (“impressed me the first time I saw him”). They became, Johnson wrote, “one of the great Anglo-American partnerships in history.”
Thatcher and Reagan shared immense willpower (“more important than any other factor in politics”), strong feelings on “gut issues which they shared with a large number of ordinary people” and “clear views on two or three central points of policy.” These are not necessarily intellectual principles. Nor are they inherently conservative. Johnson was always an intellectual in both phases of his political life, and the conservatism that he advocated was always his own. The two Johnsons, the left-winger and the right, the British journalist and the American historian, existed in the same person and rested on the same Catholic foundations. If the passage of time disburdened him of the illusions of youth as it moved him from the avant-garde to the last ditch, it also confirmed some of youth’s lessons. Johnson’s Christian principles did not change, only the forms of their expression. This, too, influenced his reception in the U.S.
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The British generally regard intellectuals with suspicion, especially if they are Jewish or Catholic, and hence suspected of openness to European influence — Johnson’s early sympathy with left-wing French politics, for instance. Public displays of religious sentiment are considered vulgar, and a bit superfluous, too, given that the Church of England is part of the constitutional order. The Conservative Party rarely finds itself forced to campaign on social conservative issues, and it is uncomfortable when it does.
If conservatism’s lineage runs “from Burke to Kirk,” then Britain’s Conservatives are more like Edmund Burke, who saw the need for an established church but wanted to keep religion out of politics, than Russell Kirk, who considered religion critical to society and the politics that organize it. The same goes for the Labour Party, though it historically owes more to Methodism than Marx. “We don’t do God,” Tony Blair’s adviser Alastair Campbell said when Blair wanted to talk about his faith.
In America, by contrast, the free market in religion is part of public life. Social conservatives are a dynamic part of the Republican base. Testimonials of faith are a precondition of candidature for a run for the White House. The Left’s grip on the academy is outflanked by an archipelago of counter-institutions, think tanks, and magazines. Johnson’s arguments for religious morality were an intellectual challenge in British politics but a reflection of everyday reality in American society and politics.
Johnson did as much as any writer to spread the ideal Western civilization, and especially Judeo-Christian civilization, in the U.S. These ideas have little purchase in Britain. Johnson’s son Daniel is one of their few advocates, and he, too, finds more receptive audiences abroad. Like Roger Scruton, Paul Johnson found that Americans supposedly a frivolous and unthinking people, are more interested in ideas than the British are. It is telling that Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2006, but he was not appointed a Companion of the British Empire until 2013.
The contradiction between Johnson the economic advocate of small government and Johnson the moral advocate of government intervention reflects conservatism’s dual inheritance. Burke has a gentleman’s right to be left in privacy; de Maistre has a patrician duty to intercede. Similarly, economic liberalism produces a freedom of action whose outcomes may be incompatible with religious principle. It is not a sign of intellectual vitality that American conservatives now struggle to reconcile these traditions as Paul Johnson did.
Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.
