SHARED OPINION
The name's the same, and so's the blame
FRANK JOHNSON
Perhaps an apology is in order for my burdening readers with another regular contribution written by someone called Johnson. This magazine already has a weekly piece by Paul Johnson. Douglas Johnson writes for us on France. Boris Johnson wrote the Diary recently and, I hope, will do so again soon. Another John- son's name will now appear once a fort- night. That is, mine.
This will undoubtedly lead to a further rise in Johnsonism. It is mercifully rare nowadays to encounter racism or sexism in polite society. Anyone, however, who con- tributes to the public prints, and is called Johnson, seems to be fair game.
A Guardian editorial not long ago implied that Paul Johnson was mad. One of that paper's columnists implies it all the time. The same columnist also implies that Boris Johnson, because of his friendship with Darius Guppy, is a criminal. The Lon- doner's Diary in the Evening Standard sometimes describes me as `ballet-loving', even though the Diary items in which I appear are never about ballet, and there- fore I suspect that the diarist is striving after some subtle point, though from my point of view it could be worse: it could be `ballet-loving bachelor'.
Johnsonism, then, is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It is fostered by igno- rance. The ordinary Guardian employee probably knows nothing about how we Johnsons live or what we do with one another. In fact, many of us live outwardly normal lives. Some Johnsons are married and have children. Certainly, a Johnson is no more a danger to young people than the average person working on the Guardian, perhaps less so.
I came to terms with being a Johnson once I realised, at school, that I wasn't like the other boys. They were interested in girls. I was interested in journalism. Even- tually, in adolescence, I met another John- son who inclined towards journalism. it was Paul, actually. I then realised there was nothing shameful about it.
Just as it is important to gays that there be more gay Tories — so as to remove anti-gay prejudice from the Conservative voting petite bourgeoisie — so it is impor- tant that there should be more liberal and left-wing journalistic Johnsons, so as to eradicate Johnsonism from the liberal classes. At the moment, the Johnsonists in the liberal press are aided in their foul big- otry by most of the journalistic Johnsons being right-of-centre or at least, in the case of Douglas Johnson, Eurosceptic. I look forward to the day when it becomes clear that a Johnson can be a tedious liberal too.
But, whatever the Johnsonists try to do to us, it is clear that in order to appear reg- ularly in the press it is best to be named Johnson, just as when I was a child I assumed that in order to become pope it was best to be christened Pius. This was because the first Pope of whom I was con- scious was Pius XII. In my Arthur Mee's Children's Encylopaedia, it said that the one before him was Pius XI, the one before him was Pius X, and that the last real star Pope was Pius IX. I was not to know at the time that these prelates were christened respec- tively Eugenio Pacelli, Achille Ratti, Giuseppe Sarto and Giovanni Maria Mas- tai Ferretti. I simply thought that, for years, all over Italy, mothers were insisting on christening their sons Pius on the off- chance that it would help them become pope. Likewise, even if a mother has a son named Worsthorne or Parris, she can be doubly sure that he will get a column in The Spectator if she allows him to assume the name of Johnson. But I pray that he will not have to endure the same persecution.
Among the crowds looking at the flow- ers for Diana, Princess of Wales in Kens- ington Gardens have been former Conser- vative Cabinet ministers, now shadow Cabinet ministers, worried about whether they are out of touch with the public. A friend tells me that they have included Mr Michael Howard.
Recently defeated office-holders nearly always fear they are out of touch. This is especially true of Conservatives. The sur- vival of Conservatism into the century of democracy tends to baffle them. They have assumed throughout the century that, any minute now, democracy is going to deny them office for ever. Margaret Thatcher She still considers him to be a good egg.' was the only Conservative leader who believed that history was going the Conser- vative party's way. It was not; it was just that she made it do so.
But this time we're really in trouble, the former Cabinet ministers say. This time we're up against a prime minister without an unworkable economic policy, and by whom people want to be hugged; hugging being very much the ideology of which the Princess was both theorist and executant, she being hugging's Marx and Lenin all in one. If Mr Howard, on his baffled wander- ings around Kensington Gardens, had tried to hug anyone, they would have called the park police.
The whole point of Conservatives, how- ever, is that they are not huggable. They are who the country turns to when the hug- ging gets out of hand. Thus the country turned to them in 1979 after governments had hugged the unions too much.
The Tories also fear what they see as the republicanism awakened by the Princess's death, and the royal family's initial reaction to it. Republicanism cannot be good for Conservatism, they say. But this is to be taken in by the republicans who are trying to use the tragedy for their own ends. Mr Blair is not thus deceived. His actions sug- gest that, like prime ministers before him, he believes that the best way to deal with an unpopular monarch, or putative monarch, is to make him or her more pop- ular, not to adopt the more uncertain course of abolishing the monarchy.
I suspect that Mr Blair will be the Dis- raeli to Prince Charles's Victoria. She too was unpopular before Disraeli got to work on her. Apart from the question of who would be Prince Charles's John Brown presumably a Ms Brown rather than a Mr, and an organic farmer rather than a ghillie — this raises the issue of why it is in Mr Blair's interests to help the Prince. It is because much of the Labour party is repub- lican, and Mr Blair only prospers when he defies his party. The only people who now vote at elections — the middle classes become frightened of Labour if its leader is not attacking the party, or distancing him- self from it. Mr Kinnock's only period of broad popularity was when he attacked the Militant Tendency man, Mr Derek Hatton. That rescuing the monarchy will also help the Tories is an unintended and unavoid- able consequence of Mr Blair's helping himself.
Previous page
