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Paul Johnson (journalist)

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Paul Johnson (born Paul Bede Johnson on November 2, 1928 in Manchester, England) is a British Roman Catholic historian, journalist, speechwiter and author. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Johnson first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for, and later editing, the New Statesman magazine. A polific writer, since the 1970s, he has written several books and contributed to several magazines, gaining a reputation as a foremost conservative popular historian.

Contents

Early life and career

At Stonyhurst, Johnson received an education grounded in the Jesuit method, which he preferred over the more secularized curriculum of Oxford. One of his tutors was the famous historian A.J.P. Taylor.[link]

After graduating with a lower-second class degree, Johnson performed his National service in the army, joining the King's Royal Rifle Corps and then the Education Corps where he was commissioned as a Captain (acting) based mainly in Gibraltar.[link] Here he saw the "grim misery and cruelty of the Franco regime" (Conviction, p. 206).

In the early 1950s he worked on the staff of the Paris periodical Realités, where he was assistant editor (1952-55).

Johnson became a liberal during this period as he witnessed, in May 1952, the police response to a riot in Paris, the "ferocity [of which] I would not have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes." Subsequently, he also 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, he joined the Statesman's staff; he was leader writer, deputy editor and then editor from 1965 to 1970.

Statesmen And Nations (1971), the anthology of his Statesman articles, contains a curious split between numerous reviews of biographies of Conservative politicians and an openness to continental Europe; in one article Johnson even took a positive view of events of May 1968 in Paris, although remaining conscious of the problems of violence in periods of political change. According to this book, Johnson filed fifty-four overseas reports during his Statesman years. Alan Watkins, the political journalist and a former colleague at the Statesman, once claimed in a Guardian feature on Johnson that he is at heart a paternalist conservative who fitted in with the left for a time.

Recent decades

During the 1970s, the Johnson evolved into a (conservative) polemicist, which he remains. In his Enemies of Society (1977), following a series of articles in the British press, he vehemently attacked the trade union movement for what he saw as its violence and intolerance, terming them as "red fascists." He also at this time started to inveigh against liberal and left-wing causes. Despite the change in his polemics, he continued to find a home at the Statesman in to the late 'seventies. After Margaret Thatcher's victory in the general election of 1979 Johnson advised on changes to legislation concerning trade unions, and was also one of Mrs Thatcher's speechwriters.

Johnson began a column for The Spectator in 1981; initially focusing on media developments, it subsequently acquired the title "And Another Thing", which varies in tone and content. The most characteristic quality of his journalism is the "thin end of the wedge" argument where the situation is always perceived as deteriorating.[link] [link]

Johnson wrote a column for the Daily Mail until 2001.

In addition to his column in The Spectator, Johnson is a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph, mainly as a book reviewer, and in the United States to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the National Review. For a time in the early 1980s he wrote for the The Sun.

Johnson is a critic of the enlightenment because of its implicit disavowal of faith[link] and also finds Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution[link] objectionable for the same reason. He agrees with the traditional Christian view of the Bible as containing the literal truth about the nature of the universe (including truths which can be evaluated scientifically). As a result of Johnson's views on evolution, the Darwinian scientist and noted atheist Richard Dawkins[link] has been a target of Johnson's ire in the past. As a conservative Catholic, he regards Liberation theology as a heresy and defends Clerical celibacy, but sees women priests as inevitable.[link]

A hero of conservatives in the United States, he is strongly anti-communist[link]. Johnson has defended Richard Nixon[link] in the Watergate scandal, finding his cover-up considerably less heinous than Bill Clinton's perjury, and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra Affair. In his Spectator column he has defended convicted perjurer and friend Jonathan Aitken[link] and has openly expressed admiration for General Franco and General Pinochet[link].

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

Private life

Paul Johnson has been married to the psychotherapist and former Labour Party parliamentary candidate Marigold Hunt, since 1958. The marriage, by Johnson's own admission has been stormy; he once commented, before an affair of his became public knowledge, that his marriage could have broken up over a dozen times. Once reportedly a heavy drinker, he now limits his intake, and as a result, his wife is believed to have described him in the late 'nineties as "far less barmy than he used to be". [link][link] They have three sons and a daughter: the journalist Daniel Johnson, who worked until recently as an associate editor of The Daily Telegraph, before becoming a freelance writer in 2005; Luke Johnson, businessman and chairman of Channel 4 Television and Cosmo Johnson; and Sophie Johnson-Clark, who has worked as a television script editor and now resides in the USA. Paul Johnson has eight grandchildren.

Bibliography

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

Anthologies, polemics & contemporary history

Art

History

Memoir Novels

Religion

Travel

References

External links

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