The several ages of Johnson
Christopher Booker
As we consider the recent startling political and journalistic career of Mr Paul Johnson, an image which may spring irresistibly to mind is that of a river crossing a great waterfall. Such a familiar fluminous proceeding may be said to go through three distinct stages. The first, as the distant cataract approaches, is that in which the whole flow of the river seems mysteriously to develop a new, purposeful energy. The current appears to speed up, the surface becomes increasingly flecked with angry eddies, to the point where the river even seems at times to be fighting against itself. Then comes the great moment of release when, with a great roar, the torrent moves all at once from one level to another quite different. The third stage, immediately following the change, is that where the river is left boiling in a great maelstrom of froth — from which eventually, one hopes, it recpvers, to resume a much more placid and reflective course towards the sea.
Mr Johnson, it might be said, is at present very obviously in the froth stage. It was two or three years ago that it first became apparent that something politically very remarkable was beginning to happen to the most brilliant left-wing journalist in Britain. As he launched with increasing fervour, particularly in the New Statesman, into a series of highly impressive articles (e.g. 'Labour and the New Leviathan', 11 February 1977) excoriating the growing drift of the Labour Party into a mindless, collectivist brutality, spellbound by the greed and power-lust of the trade unions, Johnson's journalism took on an energy, force and depth it had never shown before. So long as he continued to proclaim his loyalty to the ideals of Socialism, it was inevitable that eddies of apparent selfcontradiction would continue to bubble up to the surface. One of the more conspicuous was the curious moment he chose to declare that only Tony Benn could save the soul of the Labour Party — in almost exactly the same week that he published a book called Enemies of Society, savaging long-haired students, trendy theologians, modern playwrights, and generally, as I remarked at the time, proclaiming a view on the major political, social, moral, artistic and philosophical issues of our day 'indistinguishable from that taken for the past forty years by the Sunday Express'. Finally Johnson went over the top. In September 1977, the ex-editor of the New Statesman si an declared his newfound allegiance to the Conservative Party in a roar of steam and spray reported on the front-page of every serious daily in the land. And in recent months, in huge articles for the Sun day Telegraph, in lectures to American bankers and addresses at the Conservative Party Conference, he has churned away at his new political credo, in a vast, bubbling, mass of white foam which, as yet, shows little sign of abating.
Many people have been so nonplussed by the apparent conversion of one-time fiery, radical, Socialist Paul into tub-thumping apologist for Mrs Thatcher that they have actually missed the real point of the change which has come over him. There has in recent years been a fundamental change in Johnson's viewpoint, but it is by no means so simple and straightforward as various commentators, and particularly saddened Socialists like Mr Peter Jenkins of the Guardian, have tried to argue.
• Some thirteen years ago, in more frivolous days, I once began an anonymous profile of Mr Johnson with the following: 'The fashionable drawing rooms of London have always been happy to welcome outsiders —. if only on their own, albeit undemanding terms. Thatas to say artists, so long as they are not too talented, men of humble birth, so long as they have since amassed several million pounds, and Socialists, so long as they are Tories. Such a man and such a Socialist is elegant, cynical, red-haired Mr Paul Johnson, . newly-appointed Editor of the New Statesman.'
I went on to point out that one of the most interesting things Mr Johnson had ever written was his essay in a now totally forgotten book called Conviction, published in 1958, in which, along with several other fellow-sufferers such as Ken Tynan, he described how it was that he had come to be converted to a belief in Social ism and support for the left in politics. Johnson recalled how, as a young man, he had been a conventional, comparatively unthinking public school Conservative.
Then, seated one day in 1954 outside an agreeable café on the Left Bank, he had witnessed to his horror the French police beating up some demonstrating students. From that moment, Johnson conceived that there were two great forces which might shape a man's political convictions — the first was a Love of Power, the second a Sense of Outrage.
Now, no one can doubt that it was a Sense of Outrage which led Johnson over the next ten or twelve years to become one of the most brilliant journalists in Britain, and indeed to his position in 1965 as editor of our leading left-wing weekly. It is indeed ' precisely that same Sense of Outrage (presumably to be seen as always in direct and deadly opposition to the Love of Power) which had led him on in more recent years to perceive with more acuity and greater passion than any other journalist the evils of unbridled trade union power and the drift of the Labour Party into an ever more marked collectivism. In all this it might well be argued that Johnson has shown a much greater degree of consistency to his principles than has the Labour Party itself— and equally it might be argued that there is no 'reason why a Sense of Outrage and a distrust of power in themselves should lead a man to be politically left-wing any more than they should make him right-wing Nevertheless, even in the days when his left-wing credentials were still fairly impeccable, there was another aspect to Johnson's Sense of Outrage which occasionally disconcerted the comrades no end, and which was at least one of the reasons why in that profile in 1965 I implied that he was already a certain kind of Tory. I was not thinking of his perfectly innocuous habit of dining with Lady-Antonia Fraser, or even his alleged fondness for consuming more Oysters at the Beefsteak Club than all the dukes of England put together, so much as those occasional outbursts which so used to Upset the New Statesman readers, such his apoplectic outburst on one occasion against the way that Europe's newly-affluent pro-. letariat had taken to blocking the roads to the French Riviera with their beastly little new-rich cars. An even more famous occasion was his celebrated attack in 1964 on Beatle-mania, in which he lashed out at the proletarian kiddies mesmerised by the Fabulous Foursome, their 'huge faces, bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up', their =open sagging mouths and glazed eyes'. When Johnson himself had been sixteen, he recalled, '1 and my friends heard our first Performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I can remember the excitement even today. We would not have wasted thirty seconds of our precious time on the Beatles and their ilk'. Now, voiced as they appeared to be in the authentic accents of Sir Herbert Gussett in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, the conclusion one might well have drawn from articles like these was that what really offended Mr Johnson about our contemporary cultural scene was the hideous, mindless, soulless materialism produced in no small measure by a decadent, consumer-oriented capitalism — the very engine, after all, responsible for all those cars, Beatles records, `chea p confectionery and chain-store make UP' which had so debauched the proletariat that they no longer had precious time available for listening to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was exactly the kind of contradiction which many old-fashioned Tories have found it hard to resolve. The truly remarkable thing about the earthquake that has taken place in Johnson's views in recent years is not that he has suddenly decided to attack powe rcrazed trade union leaders, or the Proliferation of non-democratic bureaucratic Power in our society. Here, as observers still caught up in a mish-mash of 'social demo cratic' wishful thinking like Peter Jenkins cannot see, Johnson is quite right in proclaiming that he has only been inspired by precisely those same liberal, humane instincts which had once led himself and thousands of other intelligent, liberal, humane people into the Labour Party in the first place. What is remarkable about Johnson's change of heart is purely and simply his quite astonishing and blind new worship of the wonderful world of capitalism. As he first set out in that extraordinary book Enemies of Society, and recently repeated in an address to a .convention of American Bankers (reprinted last week by The Times), it is here that Johnson has undergone an almost spiritual conversion, comparable to the power and suddenness of that Damascus moment at Les Deux Magots all those years ago. No longer do we hear about the evils of an affluent proletariat having nothing better to do with their affluence than block the roads of the Riviera with their beastly motor cars, or the kids sitting glazed-eyed in front of their Japanese trannies. Now all human history must be seen as a mighty drama, which only has one hero — plucky little capitalism, which has brought such inestimable benefits to mankind, and yet today is beset by such terrible enemies that it may not survive. Why did the Roman Empire rise to its greatness? Because of Rome's capitalist middle-class. Why did it fall? Because imperial bureaucracy and high taxation killed .off the middle-classes. Why did that miracle, the industrial revolution, take place? Because of wonderful capitalism, which rescued millions from 'rural poverty, which was deeper and more degrading than anything experienced in the cities' and plunged them, presumably, into the utopian delights of nineteenth century industrialism. Why is our civilisation today under such threat of destruction? Because of the rise of the `eco-lobby', a maniacal group of 'Christian Scientists, antivivisectionists, those who campaign fanatically against the fluoridation of water supplies' and others who, with their 'hysterical' fantasies about over-population, the exhaustion of natural resources, pollution and the H-Bomb, stand almost alone in the way of the Johnsonian hope for the future of mankind — a Holy Vision of Capitalist inspired Growth leading humanity on an asymptotic curve up into the Heaven of Total Consumption. As one contemplates this lonely figure, dancing like a crazed savage round the totem of capitalism when even some of that faith's most devoted acolytes have long since begun to express the most profound doubts about the possibility of economic growth continuing for more than a few more decades, one cannot but be reminded of that familiar old dictum of Chesterton's that when a man ceases to believe in God, he believes not in nothing but in anything. It was ironic that in the very week when The Times was publishing the latest instalment of Johnson's Visions, the paper's Transport Correspondent should have soberly reported that in perhaps as little as fifteen years time, oil 'will have become far too scarce and expensive to be used in the ways that we use it today'. The article was based on an interview with the Director of Scientific and Technical Development of Renault —a man whose subsequent remarks showed that, even though his company is technically state-owned, he is precisely the kind of enlightened, liberal, forwardthinking, energetic capitalist whom Johnson should be regarding as among the high priests of his new religion.
I have already written in these columns of what I believe to be one of the saddest conclusions to. be drawn from Johnson's spiritual tergiversations — that when a man speaks as often as he does of his own devotion to 'reason', and of the 'fanaticism' of his opponents, one may look to his own works with confidence for a conspicuous absence of the former, and an overabundance of the latter. There is now another truth to which I fear he has borne scarifying witness. That when a man sees through the folly of one extreme and onesided view of the world there is no greater danger and no greater likelihood than that he will rush to another. As we have seen so. often in our time, the other side of the journalist who has a particular gift for exposing the follies of mankind is always a desperate, unspoken need to believe in something positive as well. When that need comes to the surface, he must be extremely wary of where he chooses to place his new-found faith.
Previous page
