Paul Johnson's farewell to trendiness

Mary Kenny discovers how the darling of the literate left forsook the ideals of his ),outh.
PAUL JOHNSON is one of the most respected and interesting historians writing in England today. He is also one of the most colourful and controversial media characters. With Norman St John Stevas, Shirley Williams, William Rees-Mogg and Lord Rawlinson, Paul Johnson must qualify as one of the leading Roman Catholic public figures in Britain today.
In what the Russians like to call "ruling circles" in Britain, Paul Johnson is enormously influential.
Some years ago, I approached Lady Pamela Hartwell for an interview. (Lady Hartwell, the wife of the proprietor of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, died just a few months
ago). She interested me principally because she was the daughter of the Earl of Birkenhead — the extraordinary F. E. Smith.
I was taught, at one stage in my youth that F. E. Smith practically single-handedly divided Ireland — which was not quite true but he certainly played a vital part in the conviction of Roger Casement and was an eloquent opponent of home rule.
Lady Hartwell was very pleasant to me but, she said, before she would agree to do an interview with a journalist, she must consult her friend Paul Johnson; she usually consulted Paul Johnson on such matters. He must have advised her against it, because, after some reflection, she declined.
A pity for me, because I lost the historical link with F. E. Smith that interested me.
But I already knew that Paul Johnson acted as a sort of secular father-confessor to several grand and powerful London ladies, and that as a consequence they seldoni went against his advice.
I had, as a matter of a fact, run into this problem before. During the later 1970s, I had been interviewing the wife of the chairman of a nationalised industry. They were labour party stalwarts, but worried about the Trotskyist drift in the party.
The lady's troubled conscience was being helped by long, fatherconfessor talks with Paul Johnson. (After a deep crisis of political faith, she has, I believe, now joined the SDP).
Paul was educated at Stonyhurst, and if he hadn't been by inclination very much a family man, he should certainly have been an excellent Jesuit.
He has the brains, the polemical flair, the ability to influence the clever and powerful, and the faith.
His critics say that he also has what they call the traditional Jesuitical flaw — that he can, with ease, win an argument with the proposition that black is white.
His convictions are considered, by some, to be doctrinal: once he was a passionate leftwinger; now he is an equally committed Conservative. As Editor of the New Statesman, he was a Troops-Out-of-Ireland supporter. Today, he praises the role of the British Army in the six counties.
In the 1960s he was what was then considered a progressive, even dissident Catholic.
Paul Johnson had little time for Paul VI, whom he considers to have been a dithering sort of chap who allowed the worst sort of trendy abuses that now abound in the church — folk masses, Communion in the hand, alterations in the liturgy, etc.
But the present Holy Father has the moral character that Paul Johnson wholeheartedly approves.
He hopes very much that the Pope will "call the English bishops to heel" when he visits Britain. "These fellows are a cowardly lot on the whole," he says of the English hierarchy. They always go along with the prevailing fashion."
He feels especially scornful because he considers that the English bishops have now embraced the leftish-liberal ideas that he, Johnson, held in the 1960s, and later discarded.
And these are the very fellows who excoriated me when I was writing all these things. Now they've got all these ideas themselves."
His fear about the Papal visit is that it will be overlaid with too much ballyhoo, and that the Holy Father will be manipulated for "fashionable" religio-political reasons: that the only Catholics the Pope will actually meet will be deprived, inner city black social workers.
Paul Johnson was born in Lancashire. His family is Catholic because they were among that group of Lancashire Catholics who had always kept the faith.
There is also an Irish side of the famik — they were called Hynes, from around Co. Wicklow. None
theless. his sense of Englishness runs wry deep — he has always had tremendous respect for the sovereignty of "the offshore island".
Like Chestenm, he is quite simply an English patriot; and with this English patriotism goes a deep sense of what the English Catholic had endured, historically.
"The English Catholics have stood by their faith for centuries. often in the face of great difficulties and sacrifice. Naturally, they are going to feel betrayed if that faith is taken away from them by trendy changes."
The youngest child in the family, Paul was doted upon by his mother and sisters — brilliant little boy (tom the start.
In this, he conforms to Adler's theory that character is often defined by one's place in the family. The eldest child is very often responsible and anxious; the youngest child frequently has the added bonus of emotional and intellectual confidence because of being doted upon.
Perhaps in consequence of this background, Paul Johnson has generally got on very well with women; he has always been a feminist, promoted women and encouraged them.
His wife, Marigold, was one of the cleverest and prettiest girls in her year at Oxford (she was also the closest chum of Lady Antonia Pakenham, who, as Antonia Fraser was to become perhaps the best-known popular historian of her time.)
From Stonyhurst, Paul went to Magdalen College, Oxford. He started his journalistic career in Paris, on the magazine Realitie.v.. -in 1955, at the age of 27, he joined the staff of the New Statesman. and in 1965, became its Editor.
It was an exciting period for the NS — the first Labour administration of Harold Wilson, the turbulant period of social change that characterised the 1960s.
But soon after he quit as Editor, Johnson began writing articles for The Statesman that showed his growing suspicions of what was happening to the Labour party.
The titles of the pieces he wrote give a guide to the evolution of his thinking. The Rise of the Know-Nothing Left." "The Brotherhood of National Misery." "Towards a Parasite State". "Why Labour Betrays Socialism."
When he left the Labour party in 1977, it was a high talking point both in the Party and among the literati. He published, during the Seventies, among others a history of the British (The Offshore Islanders), biographies of Elizabeth the First and of Pope John XXIII, and a muchacclaimed History of Christianity.
Being a full-time historian made him reflect a great deal on the plight of man, and having examined the picture very thoroughly, he concluded that there was no Utopia here on this earth — that we were stuck with a flawed man (original sin) and a flawed system (capitalism).
"The consolation that man finds in religion can never be replaced by politics." He is fond of quoting Dr Johnson's couplet: "How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure."
One of the most attractive aspects of Paul Johnson is that he is an honest man.
As a historian, he believes that you are absolutely bound to face facts and to tell the truth. This was why his History of Christianity was determinedly a "warts and all" picture. Yet he came through that experience of looking boldly at Christianity's history (bloody battles, sectarianism, the Inquisition) with his faith intact. Everything always comes out right if you face the truth.
What is most impressive about his new book on the Pope is that it is impressive in a wholly trustworthy way. Although Paul Johnson greatly admires the Pope, his biography is not merely a panegyric: it is a professional biographical analysis.
Still, how brilliantly Paul can still. put the cat among the pigeons: John Paul II is morally a conservative Pope — nobody has
any doubt about that. Yet, in certain areas he is a very progressive Pope: — in labour relations, for example, he has shown an understanding of the alienation of the modern worker that is better than that of Marcuse. (Helped, of course, by the fact, that he has actually been a worker himself).
Having suffered from state control, the Pope is a passionate opponent of censorship and a passionate advocate of freedom of speech. And he does understand Marxism, right from its Hegelian roots. as well as from its grass roots.
Paul Johnson points out, (not without a soupcon of pleasure that journalistic pleasure at upsetting all predictable thinking) the radical and progressive will find it difficult to oppose a Pope like John Paul II. Because in so many social matters Pope John Paul is a radical himself.