The smart boy thrilled by the story

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch

‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank.

First, it places him in his social milieu. He was an upper-working-class East End boy born during the war. He remembered the present Queen’s Coronation, with everyone crowding into his parents’ front-room to join in the first mass televisual occasion in British history. This was the last age of working-class respectability: Frank had such a fear of debt that, he told me, he had never had a mortgage. His parents were Labour voters but they thought that most bad things could be blamed on the unions. A ‘smart boy’ was still a good thing to be.

Second, the joke hints at Frank’s ambition.