As a young journalist, I remember listening to the legendary Paul Johnson at El Vino, Fleet Street’s famed tavern. Paul dispensed merry wisdom, often alongside Peregrine Worsthorne and Alan Watkins – leading scribes of the day. I was awestruck by the brilliant conversation: it seemed like being in the company of his 18th-century namesake, Dr Samuel Johnson.
Paul, who died in January, aged 94, was the most successful ever editor of the New Statesman; he brought the radical weekly to its highest circulation of nearly 100,000 and inspired exceptional loyalty in his staff (even though Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s widower, had considered a Roman Catholic unsuitable for the appointment).
By the mid-1970s, Paul would move from the left of the political spectrum to the right, in a critique of the overweening power of the trade unions and also somewhat smitten by Margaret Thatcher’s charisma.
It was regarded as a sensational conversion, sometimes compared to the original Paul’s path to Damascus. I saw other parallels with the apostle, too: the vivid prose, the unblinking insight, the sense of conviction.
Paul Bede Johnson was born in Manchester (and grew up in Tunstall, near Stoke-on-Trent) into a strongly Catholic family. His father, William Aloysius Johnson, was principal of an art school, but died when Paul was 13. Paul was the youngest of five, and after the death of the sibling before him, became an especially precious child, close to his widowed mother, Anne. He won a scholarship to Stoneyhurst, the Jesuit school, and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor was the historian AJP Taylor.
He did his national service, graduating to the rank of captain. His first journalistic job was at a magazine in Paris, Réalité. His first experience on returning to England in 1955 aft-er more than two years in France, he told me, was getting his copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses confiscated at Dover customs (although the ob-scenity ban had been lifted by then). He joined the New Statesman and by 1965 was editor.
Subsequently, Paul became an enormously successful and influential freelance journalist and an acclaimed author and historian. His History of Christianity was a million-copy best-seller; his Intellectuals was a brilliant collective biographical study of those who have influenced Western ideas. His Modern Times explained the 20th century to me, and his book on the Renaissance was illuminated by his love of painting.
He wrote about the Papacy, the Holy Land, a History of the Jews, and biographies of Jesus, Napoleon, Darwin, Churchill, John Paul II and more. His output was prodigious – often penning 5,000 words a day – fluent, and elegant. He had an adoring public in America, which included several presidents.
In 1957, Paul married the beautiful and intelligent Marigold Hunt, a High Anglican, whose father had been a physician to Winston Churchill. A former Labour Party candidate, Marigold didn’t always agree with Paul and said so; but she provided a warm ambiance in which he could be a productive writer, and is much admired for her lively personality. They had four children: Daniel, Cosmo, Luke and Sophie.
Paul could be highly strung, and after he quit drinking he became less sociable. He was accused of “cognitive dissonance” when, having told Diana, Princess of Wales, “do not commit adultery”, it was disclosed that he had had an extra-marital affaire himself. He didn’t offer an excuse: he just said that he was a sinner, and that was precisely why he went to church.
He was kind to younger journalists, and encouraging to young women on a professional basis. When Valerie Grove became the first female books editor at the Evening Standard he wrote a column praising the appointment, highlighting the pool of talented female journalists. Valerie recalls that if you wrote to Paul, “back came a postcard with a watercolour painting (by him) on the picture-side”. He supported women’s advancement – he believed the Catholic Church would ordain women, and advocated this step.
He once told my late husband, Richard West: “You should marry a sensible Irishwoman!” I’m not sure about the sensible – but the advice was taken. Paul was part-Irish himself: his paternal grandfather had been adopted from an Irish family called Cassidy. Daniel Johnson, Paul’s eldest son, sees his father’s faith as a mixture of the Irish and English Catholic strain – not always the same tradition.
At his funeral, at the exquisite St Mary of the Angels church in London’s Bayswater on February 16, the playwright Tom Stoppard paid homage to Paul’s deep faith – and grasp of science. His children, grand-children and great-grandchildren were on the altar, and the funeral Mass, said by Mgr Keith Barltrop, was replete with uplifting music.
He once quoted Samuel Johnson to me, when I suggested that laws could change humankind: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
Paul Johnson CBE, November 2, 1928 – January 12, 2023.
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