Adrian Lee is a Solicitor-Advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate.
Last week, on Thursday 12th January, a notice was posted on Twitter by Daniel Johnson, the journalist, announcing the death, at the age of 94, of his father Paul Johnson. This subdued and dignified message, coming as it did three years to the day since the death of Sir Roger Scruton, signaled the passing of another of the most influential conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.
Paul Johnson was known to millions as a popular columnist for both The Daily Mail and The Spectator. However, for a generation of young conservatives, who reached political maturity in the era of Margaret Thatcher, his lasting significance will be as the author of a series of volumes setting out a coherent analysis of religion, art, politics, and philosophy.
Paul Johnson was born on 2nd November 1928 in Manchester. His father became Head of Burslem School of Art in Stoke-on-Trent, and the family lived in the nearby town of Tunstall. Paul grew up during the Great Depression. In his memoir The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries (2004) he wrote of his parent’s “horror of debt” and remarked that “poverty was everywhere, but so were the Ten Commandments.”
As a family, their devout Roman Catholicism set them apart from many in the community. Paul was a diligent youngster and won a scholarship to Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic boarding school 100 miles from the family home. Tragically, at the age of 13, Johnson suffered the sudden death of his father, but this did not impede his progress to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied History under A.J.P. Taylor. It was during his undergraduate years that he first met Margaret Thatcher, but Anthony Crosland, the future Labour cabinet minister and diarist, was a much closer friend.
After graduation in 1949, Johnson was conscripted, eventually promoted to the rank of Captain in the Royal Army Education Corps. He spent most of his National Service in Gibraltar. Following de-mobilisation, he worked in Paris for several years as Assistant Editor of a French monthly. In these years, Paul Johnson, a sharp critic of the Suez intervention, identified strongly with the Left and supported Aneurin Bevan. Little wonder then that upon his return to the UK, he joined the staff of The New Statesman. Over the course of the following ten years, Johnson ascended from Leader Writer to Deputy Editor and finally Editor.
1975 seems to have been a pivotal year in the life of Paul Johnson for three reasons. Firstly, it was the year in which he unequivocally denounced socialism and compared the corporatist economic strategy of the Labour government to that practiced by Mussolini. Johnson argued that the Labour Party was increasingly at the mercy of “…the know-nothing Left” and the trade unions behaved like “gangsters” and displayed a “fascist anti-intellectualism”. He had come to loathe the union-imposed closed shops across British industry.
Secondly, he incurred the wrath of the mainstream by campaigning for a “No” vote in the European Referendum. Along with Tory journalist Patrick Cosgrave, Johnson presented several television broadcasts urging that Britain come “Out and into the World”. He never changed his opinion on Europe and later remarked “You can’t have a common currency without a common financial policy, and you can’t have that without a common government.”
Thirdly, and most significantly, 1975 was the year that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party. The two became close and he was to remain her confidant for many years. He later remarked: “Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around – decisively – the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than fifty countries.”
Paul Johnson’s first great history, The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People, was published in 1972. Here, whilst surveying 2000 years of societal evolution, he argued that the strength of England lay in the people’s preference for stability over change. The English resisted constitutional innovation and, as a result, were largely immune to the violent upheavals and excesses of the Continent. Johnson believed that no other people had such high regard for public order.
A History of Christianity (1976) followed four years later and was Johnson’s first exploration of religion. Once again, Johnson skilfully condensed a wide sweep of history into a single volume of 556 pages. The book starts in 49 AD, with Paul of Tarsus making his way from Antioch to Jerusalem to meet the remaining followers of Jesus. It culminates in 1975.
Here, he introduced his view that Christianity as a faith was based on historical facts. This theory was expanded upon in his later volume, A History of The Jews (1987), to embrace the texts of the Old Testament. Johnson emphasised throughout both works that Western civilisation was unthinkable without the presence of either Judaism or Christianity. Judaism was central to the evolution of our culture and “…wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline inevitably followed.”.
In 1983, Weidenfeld & Nicholson published the volume for which Paul Johnson will be best remembered: Modern Times: A History of the Twentieth Century. This book was arguably the most important conservative work of the Eighties. It was a phenomenal success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Johnson succeeded in presenting a distinctly conservative analysis of the course of the century, with particular emphasis on the secular tyrannies of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism. However, it was more than a mere distillation of the works of Robert Conquest and Jean-Francois Revel, as Johnson also eviscerated the post-colonial socialism of Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Over the following decades, Modern Times went through several revised editions, eventually taking the story up to the dawn of the millennium. It sold in huge numbers and was prominently displayed in most mainstream bookshops. Its impact on the Right was comparable to that of Gollancz’s Left Book Club publications on Labour forty years earlier.
Johnson’s next landmark work, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988), was an exposure of the flaws and hypocrisies of the utopian Left. The book started from the premise that “The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.” In addition to effectively dissecting the ideologies of writers such as Rousseau, Marx, Brecht, and Sartre, Johnson went on to contrast the moral principles that they espoused with their abusive treatment of their families and associates.
Two further substantive histories appeared in the following decade: The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (1991) and A History of the American People (1997). The latter led to a revival of interest amongst conservatives in the Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Johnson’s final “big book” was Art: A New History (2003). Like Scruton, he championed the creators of beauty and dismissed the “fashion art” of Picasso. In his final productive years, Johnson authored a series of short biographies of diverse figures from Churchill (2009), Washington (2005), Napoleon (2002) and Eisenhower (2014) to Darwin (2012), Socrates (2011), and Jesus (2010).
It is impossible to overestimate Paul Johnson’s influence. His achievements as a journalist, historian, broadcaster, and recipient of both the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006) and the C.B.E. (2016) were immense. Many of his themes are echoed by the new generation of conservative commentators, such as Emma Webb and the Rev. Calvin Robinson. Paul Johnson should be read by all those seeking to challenge the wrongful dogmatisms of the “progressive” Left.
Adrian Lee is a Solicitor-Advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative Parliamentary Candidate.
Last week, on Thursday 12th January, a notice was posted on Twitter by Daniel Johnson, the journalist, announcing the death, at the age of 94, of his father Paul Johnson. This subdued and dignified message, coming as it did three years to the day since the death of Sir Roger Scruton, signaled the passing of another of the most influential conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.
Paul Johnson was known to millions as a popular columnist for both The Daily Mail and The Spectator. However, for a generation of young conservatives, who reached political maturity in the era of Margaret Thatcher, his lasting significance will be as the author of a series of volumes setting out a coherent analysis of religion, art, politics, and philosophy.
Paul Johnson was born on 2nd November 1928 in Manchester. His father became Head of Burslem School of Art in Stoke-on-Trent, and the family lived in the nearby town of Tunstall. Paul grew up during the Great Depression. In his memoir The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries (2004) he wrote of his parent’s “horror of debt” and remarked that “poverty was everywhere, but so were the Ten Commandments.”
As a family, their devout Roman Catholicism set them apart from many in the community. Paul was a diligent youngster and won a scholarship to Stonyhurst College, a Roman Catholic boarding school 100 miles from the family home. Tragically, at the age of 13, Johnson suffered the sudden death of his father, but this did not impede his progress to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied History under A.J.P. Taylor. It was during his undergraduate years that he first met Margaret Thatcher, but Anthony Crosland, the future Labour cabinet minister and diarist, was a much closer friend.
After graduation in 1949, Johnson was conscripted, eventually promoted to the rank of Captain in the Royal Army Education Corps. He spent most of his National Service in Gibraltar. Following de-mobilisation, he worked in Paris for several years as Assistant Editor of a French monthly. In these years, Paul Johnson, a sharp critic of the Suez intervention, identified strongly with the Left and supported Aneurin Bevan. Little wonder then that upon his return to the UK, he joined the staff of The New Statesman. Over the course of the following ten years, Johnson ascended from Leader Writer to Deputy Editor and finally Editor.
1975 seems to have been a pivotal year in the life of Paul Johnson for three reasons. Firstly, it was the year in which he unequivocally denounced socialism and compared the corporatist economic strategy of the Labour government to that practiced by Mussolini. Johnson argued that the Labour Party was increasingly at the mercy of “…the know-nothing Left” and the trade unions behaved like “gangsters” and displayed a “fascist anti-intellectualism”. He had come to loathe the union-imposed closed shops across British industry.
Secondly, he incurred the wrath of the mainstream by campaigning for a “No” vote in the European Referendum. Along with Tory journalist Patrick Cosgrave, Johnson presented several television broadcasts urging that Britain come “Out and into the World”. He never changed his opinion on Europe and later remarked “You can’t have a common currency without a common financial policy, and you can’t have that without a common government.”
Thirdly, and most significantly, 1975 was the year that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party. The two became close and he was to remain her confidant for many years. He later remarked: “Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia. Not only did she turn around – decisively – the British economy in the 1980s, she also saw her methods copied in more than fifty countries.”
Paul Johnson’s first great history, The Offshore Islanders: A History of the English People, was published in 1972. Here, whilst surveying 2000 years of societal evolution, he argued that the strength of England lay in the people’s preference for stability over change. The English resisted constitutional innovation and, as a result, were largely immune to the violent upheavals and excesses of the Continent. Johnson believed that no other people had such high regard for public order.
A History of Christianity (1976) followed four years later and was Johnson’s first exploration of religion. Once again, Johnson skilfully condensed a wide sweep of history into a single volume of 556 pages. The book starts in 49 AD, with Paul of Tarsus making his way from Antioch to Jerusalem to meet the remaining followers of Jesus. It culminates in 1975.
Here, he introduced his view that Christianity as a faith was based on historical facts. This theory was expanded upon in his later volume, A History of The Jews (1987), to embrace the texts of the Old Testament. Johnson emphasised throughout both works that Western civilisation was unthinkable without the presence of either Judaism or Christianity. Judaism was central to the evolution of our culture and “…wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline inevitably followed.”.
In 1983, Weidenfeld & Nicholson published the volume for which Paul Johnson will be best remembered: Modern Times: A History of the Twentieth Century. This book was arguably the most important conservative work of the Eighties. It was a phenomenal success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Johnson succeeded in presenting a distinctly conservative analysis of the course of the century, with particular emphasis on the secular tyrannies of Communism, Nazism, and Fascism. However, it was more than a mere distillation of the works of Robert Conquest and Jean-Francois Revel, as Johnson also eviscerated the post-colonial socialism of Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Over the following decades, Modern Times went through several revised editions, eventually taking the story up to the dawn of the millennium. It sold in huge numbers and was prominently displayed in most mainstream bookshops. Its impact on the Right was comparable to that of Gollancz’s Left Book Club publications on Labour forty years earlier.
Johnson’s next landmark work, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988), was an exposure of the flaws and hypocrisies of the utopian Left. The book started from the premise that “The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.” In addition to effectively dissecting the ideologies of writers such as Rousseau, Marx, Brecht, and Sartre, Johnson went on to contrast the moral principles that they espoused with their abusive treatment of their families and associates.
Two further substantive histories appeared in the following decade: The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (1991) and A History of the American People (1997). The latter led to a revival of interest amongst conservatives in the Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Johnson’s final “big book” was Art: A New History (2003). Like Scruton, he championed the creators of beauty and dismissed the “fashion art” of Picasso. In his final productive years, Johnson authored a series of short biographies of diverse figures from Churchill (2009), Washington (2005), Napoleon (2002) and Eisenhower (2014) to Darwin (2012), Socrates (2011), and Jesus (2010).
It is impossible to overestimate Paul Johnson’s influence. His achievements as a journalist, historian, broadcaster, and recipient of both the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006) and the C.B.E. (2016) were immense. Many of his themes are echoed by the new generation of conservative commentators, such as Emma Webb and the Rev. Calvin Robinson. Paul Johnson should be read by all those seeking to challenge the wrongful dogmatisms of the “progressive” Left.