by PAUL COLLITS – A CONSERVATIVE giant passed in January 2023. I have few bookshelves where just about every book is written by one author.
One is the late Sir Roger Scruton. Another is Joseph Ratzinger. A third is WF Buckley Jr. Then there is Paul Johnson.
- Paul Johnson took the fight to the enemies of freedom, tradition and faith.
- He wielded the baseball bat. But with words that were elegant and torpedo-like.
- The Left hates its apostates. Especially vicious, effective ones.
Peter Hitchens recently suggested that the best (only?) kind of conservative is a former revolutionary Marxist. Only someone who has been there at the front line on the other side can truly understand what we are up against.
The American Catholic apologeticist (is that even a word? It is now) Michael Novak called his final 2013 memoir Writing from Left to Right.
MUGGED
The Neocon (before neoconservatism went doolally) icon Irving Kristol described his passage from the Left as being a liberal “mugged by reality”.
James Burnham and Frank Meyer were National Review stars in the glory days of Buckley. Ex-communists, both. David Horowitz made the journey.
The case is a strong one. Very few go the other way. Not many of us are mugged by social tyranny.
The recently passed Paul Johnson was another case study. Popular historian. Polemicist. Polymath. Journalist extraordinaire. Ex-Leftist. Brutal critic of his peers. Rigorous Catholic, educated to be so at the famed Stonyhurst. Traditionalist. Heavy drinker. Workaholic. Author of blockbusters. Loved to laugh.
The Spectator stated: “Paul Johnson, the author, journalist and historian, has died at the age of 94. He wrote more than 40 books, edited The New Statesman from 1965 to 1970, and wrote a column for The Spectator from 1981 to 2009.”
His range was phenomenal. He wrote histories of the modern world. Of the United States. He wrote biographies. Of Jesus and Churchill. Of Socrates. Of Napoleon. Of George Washington. Of Mozart. Of Eisenhower.
He excoriated intellectuals in a format that pre-dated Scruton’s attacks on the new Left. He wrote of his faith. He wrote a history of Christianity.
No, on reflection, his range wasn’t phenomenal. It was ridiculous. And every project was a work of majesty. This was a deep-thinking wordsmith. He wrote gazillions of words, with every work the outcome of deep and broad research and reflection.
He was the exemplar journalist-intellectual. There are few who can match him in this peculiar calling. Many journalists think they are intellectuals. In Australia, Paul Kelly, at his best, and Greg Sheridan, go close at times.
They are thoughtful and can be polished. In the United Kingdom, there are more. Simon Heffer. Auberon Waugh. Mark Steyn. Lionel Shriver.
And Paul Johnson was an accomplished editor as well.
FIRST-CLASS
The Guardian acknowledges as much: “In many ways, Johnson proved a first-class editor. Even writers such as Alan Watkins and Neal Ascherson, disdainful of his later political turn, spoke admiringly of his skills at handling copy and encouraging talent. In Watkins’ words, he was ‘affable and tolerant as an editor’, and he had the supreme quality of loyalty to his staff, whom he always stood by without recrimination when there was trouble from bullying politicians or libel lawyers. Under Johnson, The New Statesman reached its highest circulation of 94,000, an astonishing figure in today’s journalistic climate.”
It was ironic that Johnson once guided The New Statesman. It was this very organ that did the execrable, low rent hit job on Roger Scruton in 2019.
Paul Johnson left the Left. This occurred during the 1970s and coincided with the Left’s, and British Labour’s, unapologetic embrace of radical trade unionism which Johnson saw as catastrophic for Britain.
As The Telegraph noted: “The closed shop, he wrote, was the turning point for him; it was ‘the mark of Cain, blazed on the Party’s forehead’. It reversed socialism’s commitment to individual liberties and was therefore immoral. The movement had turned its back on its own history: having begun by fighting against the ‘mass anonymity of industrialism, the intrinsic inhumanity of drumming thousands of individuals into vast factories’, it now embraced the new tyranny of collectivism – and ‘in a system of belief where conscience is collectivised’, there is no barrier along the highway which ultimately may lead to Auschwitz and Gulag.”
The Left hates its apostates. Especially vicious, effective ones.
The Guardian tried to be even-handed in its obituary, but failed: “Johnson often wrote several thousand words a day. He was scornful of carping scholars who discounted his books, though these were sometimes slapdash. Intellectuals (1988) and Enemies of Society were diffuse tirades against half of the eminent thinkers of the Enlightenment and its inheritance, written with prurient personal abuse.”
The sneer always wins out, in these parts.
You probably cannot get a better obituary than from your son. Especially when that son (Daniel Johnson) is himself a famous warrior for conservative causes.
His twitter contribution was brief: “Paul Johnson, author and journalist, died this morning after a long illness at the age of 94. He is survived by Marigold, his three sons and daughter, ten grandchildren and four great grandchildren. May light perpetual shine upon him and may he rest in peace.”
The generous tributes included those from Ed West, Sajid Javid, Samuel Gregg and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Suggesting the breadth of his influence and appeal. He was “a legend”. A description often used but less often deserved.
FURY
Daniel Johnson titled his longer tribute “the faith and the fury”.
“Paul Johnson – who was a columnist for The Spectator from 1981 to 2009, and who died last week – did not merely write history: he helped to make it.”
Daniel shared some personal memories: “He seemed to know everyone. When I was puzzled by my part in a school play by JB Priestley, he suddenly said: ‘Let’s ring old Jack up and ask him’. Next minute, I heard an aged voice with a Yorkshire accent saying: ‘Oh yes, Time and the Conways. Damn good play, that. What’s the problem?’ ”
And this: “In old age, Paul had his share of recognition, most notably when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W Bush.”
The identity of the presenter doesn’t diminish the award. Or this: “He is at his best when angry,” declared an anthology of The New Statesman writers in 1963.
SINNER
Likably, he was a sinner who knew it: “Like the apostle after whom he was named, Paul had more need of redemption and forgiveness than those who already fancied themselves saints. Hence he held fiercely to his faith, the traditionalist Catholicism of which his mother was his exemplar. He prayed, if possible in church, every day of his life.”
A sinner – yes, there were alleged affairs, apparently involving spanking – who loved much, and so, like St Mary Magdalene, would be forgiven much: “Yet Paul also had a capacity for love that was inexhaustible. Friends, of both sexes and of all ages, were treasured all the more if they could not follow his political peregrinations.”
Charles Moore, biographer of Margaret Thatcher, spoke these words: “What was Paul’s importance as a writer? Much of it rested in his qualities as an old-fashioned preacher and equally old-fashioned man of letters.
“His well-stocked mind could turn to almost any subject and see where the high emotion and chief interest lay. He then rendered what he had found into strong, clear prose which one could read with excitement and engagement.
“This made him, deeply English though he was, extremely popular in the United States, where there is a great appetite for synoptic historical narrative combined with trenchant views. But although he loved to preach a line, Paul was much too independent-minded to be held to one.”
So, an ideologue who was also a scholar. Like Malcolm Muggeridge, the slayer of Soviet communism par excellence, before him, Paul Johnson took the fight to the enemies of freedom, tradition and faith.
He wielded the baseball bat. But with words that were elegant and torpedo-like – and invariably found their mark.
Vale, Sinner Paul.PC
