MY FATHER ALWAYS LIVED DANGEROUSLY. His first memory, aged three, was of “the anxious, terrified face of my mother” as she coaxed him down from a high wall onto which he had climbed. “Little Paul” was a late child; Nana had lost one child in infancy and was not going to lose him too.
Later he recalled an incident at the railway station when he was rescued from falling under a train. Amid the hullabaloo, the stationmaster was summoned, top hat and all. “My mother was no fool,” he recalled. She chided her son: “You have a disconcerting habit of drawing attention to yourself.” Nine decades and millions of words later, it is clear Nana was right. Paul Johnson’s ability to hold the attention of his readers for long enough to infect them with his passions and enthusiasms was indeed disconcerting. In fact, it was a kind of genius.
In his most personal book, The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries, he confessed that “I always found school a worrying place; indeed, I find life a worrying state.” He never doubted that his soul was in peril, and probably western civilisation too.
As editor of the , he took what was then perhaps the world’s leading political weekly to greater heights than ever before or since. His first, anticipated the British disillusionment with Europe by several decades: in him, Brexit found its prophet. He fought hard to save the Labour Party from union militancy and when that failed, he threw his weight behind Margaret Thatcher, heralding a seismic shift in British politics. A year in America in 1980 enabled him to do the same for Ronald Reagan: his provided the historical rationale for the transatlantic revolution that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War.
