Another Voice | 11 April 2009

What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years become.

But it was with two other editors of this magazine very present in my imagination, that my (to me) astonishing moment of criminal madness occurred.

I was coming back from dinner in Chelsea with Virginia Johnson, Frank Johnson’s widow. I loved Frank, the last-but-one editor of this magazine. It was he who wrote, early in 1979 after one of my more spectacular political misjudgments as a putative MP, that ‘one thing is certain: Matthew Parris will never be heard of again’; he who hired me 14 years ago to write these columns; and he who (though he would be irritated to hear me say so) had stood for me as a shining example in the craft of political sketchwriting into which I had followed him. In uneasy contention within Frank’s breast were a sometimes reactionary Conservatism, and a chippy subversiveness, and the tussle made for journalism of the sharpest and funniest sort.

I’d had a lovely evening with Virginia; time flew; and, later than I’d planned and after perhaps one glass of wine too many, set out by public transport for my London Docklands flat. Virginia and her guests had been talking about an anthology of Frank’s writing on which she’s working, to be published later this year, and I was thinking about him and his two-fingers-up to the insolence of public office, as my District Line tube train pulled into Monument station.