Paul Johnson (writer)

Paul Bede Johnson (2 November 1928 – 12 January 2023) was an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author.

Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.

Johnson was educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied history.

He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for and later editing the New Statesman magazine.

A prolific writer, Johnson wrote more than 50 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.

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, which he preferred over the more secularised curriculum of Oxford.

While at Oxford, Johnson was tutored by the historian A. J. P. Taylor 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.

Here he saw the "grim misery and cruelty of the Franco regime".

Johnson's military record helped the Paris periodical Réalités hire him, 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."

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".

The following year he attacked Ian Fleming's James Bond novel Dr No, and in 1964 he warned of "The Menace of Beatlism" in an article contemporarily described as being "rather exaggerated" by Henry Fairlie in The Spectator.

Johnson was successively lead writer, deputy editor and editor of the New Statesman from 1965 to 1970.

He was found suspect for his attendances at the soirées of Lady Antonia Fraser, who was at the time married to a conservative MP.

There was some resistance to Johnson's 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.

During the late 1970s, Johnson began writing articles in the New Statesman attacking trade unions in particular, and leftism in general.

Slightly later, the New Statesman may have repudiated this, when it published an article criticising him, in a series of articles "Windbags of the West" about various right-wing journalists.

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, leading Colin Welch in The Spectator to accuse Johnson of possessing "a taste for violence".

According to this book, Johnson filed 54 overseas reports during his Statesman years.

For a time in the early 1980s he wrote for The Sun after Rupert Murdoch urged him to "raise its tone a bit".

Johnson was a critic of modernity because of what he saw as its moral relativism, and he objected to 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.

As a conservative Catholic, Johnson regarded liberation theology as a heresy and defended clerical celibacy, but departed from others in seeing many good reasons for ordination of women as priests.

Admired by conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, he was strongly anticommunist.

Johnson defended Richard Nixon 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.

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 dealt with issues and events which he saw as indicative of a general social decline, whether in art, education, religious observance or personal conduct.

He continued to contribute to the magazine, although less frequently than before.

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."

Johnson was a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, mainly as a book reviewer, and in the U.S. wrote for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and National Review.

He also contributed to Forbes magazine.