Paul Johnson’s great mind

Obituaries of Paul Johnson, who died last week, have captured his prodigious gifts of exposition, wide range of knowledge and formidable power of attack. All true, but there are good things to be added, which I saw as his editor at this paper in the 1980s, and as a friend. Despite his reputation for uncertain temper – Jonathan Miller said he ‘looked like an explosion in a pubic hair factory’ – Paul was a most reliable and easy contributor. His copy was self-starting, to length, on time. It hardly needed editing (except that he was, like Evelyn Waugh, surprisingly bad at spelling). Given that he lived entirely on what he wrote, I was touched that he never once complained about The Spectator’s fee for his weekly contribution, which was tiny (£90, I think). At that time, his column was about the press. It was, of course, fearless, and made trouble for many mighty media moguls but, for us in the office, Paul made no trouble at all. He was also very funny. In conversation, he was good at guying his own grand manner. ‘I get on very well with the Pope,’ he would say, laughing. ‘He reads my books and I read his encyclicals.’ He knew how to turn his gift for exaggeration to comic effect. He talked boldly to the great, sometimes affecting not to know who they were, sometimes genuinely not knowing. On one occasion, Paul was holding forth to a knot of admirers about modern Greece. A young man at the edge of the group ventured to disagree. ‘Young man,’ said Paul, with the mock disdain in which he specialised. ‘What do you know about Greece?’ ‘I am the King of Greece,’ said Constantine II (who, as it happens, also died last week). Paul was unabashed: I suspect he had known this all along.

Certainly Paul could be alarming.