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My father had the good fortune to live in a time when journalists were enjoying a kind of renaissance. He liked to say that he had met every British prime minister from Churchill to Blair and every American president from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. It may even have been true.
The apotheosis of the journalist as politician came only in the next generation, when one of his former editors at The Spectator entered Downing Street. In old age, Paul had his share of recognition, most notably when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.
His CBE was ‘for services to literature’. The citation is apposite: none of the proximity to power would have meant much if he had not been the master of English prose that he was. Stephen Glover, an exacting critic, wrote that he was incapable of writing a dull sentence. Posterity is a harsh judge of journalism, but his best work will still be read when his detractors are forgotten.
Paul was no stranger to dangerous liaisons, but he had one that proved to be lifelong – with Clio, the muse of history. As a popular historian, he was often belittled by less popular academics. It is true that he relied on printed sources, but few could match the breadth and depth of his erudition. Sir Noel Malcolm tells me that as a reviewer he was staggered by the range of material deployed in this vast body of work, particularly as my father never used researchers.
‘He is at his best when angry,’ declared an anthology of New Statesman writers in 1963, apropos of his notorious review of Ian Fleming’s Dr No, ‘Sex, Snobbery and Sadism’. And, having made his mark as an angry young man, he morphed into an angry old one. The public Paul Johnson presented a pugnacious face to the world. Yet when he let down his guard, the private man was loyal, magnanimous and deeply vulnerable.
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.
He relied heavily not only on faith, but on friends and family. His inner demons tested all three. Drink made him a monster; infuriatingly, even in its grip, his work rate seldom slackened. Only the realisation that, unlike Churchill, alcohol was taking more out of him than he took out of alcohol drove him to give it up (with rare lapses) in his last few decades.
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. He was generous to, and inordinately proud of, the burgeoning tribe of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Though Paul gave Marigold ample grounds for not standing by him, their marriage endured for 65 years – the flying buttress which held up the entire cathedral of his work.
He was also generous to young journalists whose careers he encouraged, to students at Taunton College to whom he donated his art library, and to all those – from princesses and prime ministers to friends in need or in despair – who found their way to his door. To him, they were all equal before God and so in his esteem as well.
After I had followed in his footsteps to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history, he treated me too as an equal. Now it was I who introduced him to men he admired: the medievalist Sir Richard Southern, Professor Friedrich Hayek, and the raucous Norman Stone.
Later still, when our careers overlapped in the world of journalism, he would greet me cheerily with: ‘What news on the Rialto?’ He made sure that I never felt overshadowed. Only at the end of his life, when his world had shrunk into the beloved library that became his sickroom, did my dear old father feel able to say: ‘I love you very much.’
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