"Odi et amo”, whispered the late Frank Johnson one January morning in 1987
before the Editor’s daily leader writers’ conference at The Times. “I loathe
and I love”, he translated for himself, sounding immediately as though he
had something serious and sinister to say – about the influence of the Poll
Tax on Margaret Thatcher’s re-election prospects perhaps, or about the
simmering newspaper war between The Times, for which he then worked as the
greatest parliamentary writer of his age, and the Daily Telegraph, where his
national career had begun. Was he saying to his colleagues that he loved the
Conservative Party and loathed what it had to do to get elected? Did he
loathe the party and love only a few selected principles? Perhaps he loved
being one of our Times leader writers but hated having to write the leaders?
As was often the case when listening to this master of English paradox,
epigram and ambiguity, the intention of his quoting from the ancients was
not fully clear.
Possibly he was merely practising his Latin: there was a lengthy period in the
1980s when this proudly self-educated, permanently self-educating
journalist, whose finest columns and sketches have now been republished
three years after his death, could regularly be seen with a Kennedy’s Latin
Primer in his pocket. As Simon Hoggart of the Guardian recalls in his
introduction to Best Seat in the House, when Johnson was in the press
gallery awaiting the drama of Prime Minister’s Questions or some other great
contest, the man who had missed a university education “saw no point in
wasting time listening to boring speeches or vacuous answers”. He often read
some “battered volume published many years previously which might fill a gap
in his voluminous knowledge”. This was one of those habits which, like the
wiles of Catullus’ mistress, brought irritation and admiration in equal
measure.
Johnson always loved newspapers; he was not so enthusiastic about the places
in which they were made. As parliamentary sketch writer, the holder of a
peculiarly British journalistic role, he had no more need, for practical
purposes, to come to the office than did the football correspondent or film
critic. He could be aloof as long as he was entertaining. It is in the best
interests of an artist to retain an air of mystery, letting it be known that
his day begins with a little light Latin at home, continues on to a classic
restaurant for lunch, peaks in the House of Commons with a paradoxical
parallel between the Home Secretary and the hoodlum who has just gatecrashed
a royal birthday party, before ending in a Tosca at Covent Garden and a
Pepysian “and so to bed”.
A newspaper office can, indeed, be a place of fear for a meticulous writer,
room after room of “benches” at which crimes can be committed against his
copy. On the Daily Telegraph, where Johnson had started his career of
political wit in 1972, his words were routinely butchered by subeditors who
fundamentally disapproved of there being anything called “writing” in the
newspaper at all. For a century the machinery of Fleet Street had operated
on the principle of a two-stroke engine, the main fuel of facts being
provided by reporters and the minimal oil of syntax added by the subs.
Johnson’s earliest sketch writing struggles were on behalf of the idea that
his kind of reporter, if necessary he alone, should be permitted to care
which of his paragraphs were printed and in what order they appeared. It was
only when he reached The Times, under the editorship of Harold Evans in
1981, that he won the clearly expressed right for his words, in theory at
least, to be changed only by the Editor himself. When he showed me Horace’s
classic line of special pleading, “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo”, it seemed
the highlight of his time as a Latin enthusiast.
Johnson was grateful to Evans for his freedom from subeditors, even though he
deeply disapproved of the investigative journalism that the former Editor of
The Sunday Times inspired. Too many journalists, Johnson argued, had since
come to see their duty as that of knowing more than ordinary people about
events or, even worse, pretending that they did so. His own sketch writer’s
style came instead from what he once called “the outside track”, the
superior interpretation of what was visible on the surface. The
parliamentary press gallery was the perfect place for the fulfilment of that
ideal; the newspaper office was generally not. Johnson loved to plot as well
as to talk about plots. He was an enthusiastic, if never less than wholly
transparent, machinator for people and causes. He often talked of keeping
his own Times Diary, a work in which, to use the French resistance language
of which he was so fond, his colleagues might appear as “a Laval or a
Moulin”, depending on whether we were betrayers that day or the betrayed. He
deserved to have his own personal sketch writer.
His political sympathies were with those at the edges of the great stage at
which he stared so long. He had a respectful sympathy with those on the Left
like the mining MP Dennis Skinner, “the Beast of Bolsover”; and a steely
conviction shared with those on the Right, like Thatcher herself. His
opposition to the Prime Minister’s chief Conservative opponent, Michael
Heseltine, was particularly effective from the press gallery. Johnson’s
obituary in The Times cited a notable occasion in 1983 when Thatcher was
riding high after the Falklands conflict, a campaign that had accustomed the
House to hearing much of the doings of the Royal Navy on stormy seas.
Johnson chose suitably nautical imagery: “The Government’s controversial new
Heseltine went on its first sea trials. Scores of Conservative backbenchers
lined the shore. All of them were conscious that Mr Heseltine might never
see a home ministry again. Many of them were worried that he might”. “In
that one paragraph”, the obituarist observed, Johnson was conjuring up “the
atmosphere of the Westminster village of the 1980s: a Tory party deeply
suspicious and frightened of an ambitious non-Thatcherite who could pack the
House; an uneasy party that sensed how much trouble could lie ahead for any
Cabinet containing both Thatcher and Heseltine”.
Johnson had shown no more empathy with Labour’s own centrist rebels when they
hived off, during the same period, to form the Social Democratic Party: “Mrs
Shirley Williams, who is regarded by some of the more primitive followers of
the SDP as possessing divine status and miraculous powers, unsuccessfully
applied to the Speaker for an emergency debate on the water dispute. At
first, one assumed this was because the dispute was beginning to threaten
supplies of the only water used by the SDP: Perrier water”.
At the time of his whispered “Odi et amo” a few years later, Johnson was
spending more of his time writing leaders at The Times, attempting, as he
saw it, to bolster Margaret Thatcher against the hostility felt towards her
by both the newspaper’s readers and the electorate at large. No politician,
however, ever felt as threatened by a Johnson leader as by a Johnson sketch.
He considered that personal attacks were vulgar (which may have been
virtuous) and that political positions should be adamantine (which was often
neither possible nor wise). Leader writing was one of a number of determined
distractions that he chose from the path of work that is so brightly
illuminated in this book. He had even successfully urged for a while that he
be sent as a correspondent to Bonn, telling colleagues that no civilized
person could be without fluency in German. If ancient Rome had been an
available posting, he would certainly have chosen that too. He was fearful
of “bores”, a breed that bred all too well, he thought: and Horace’s ninth
satire on an unwanted companion on the Sacred Way became another favourite
when he found it. Johnson could frequently be exasperating on “foreign
desks” and in leader departments, those many parts of a newspaper where men
and women have to cooperate for ends not held individually by any of them.
The delight of this collection, for those of us who like to remember him
fondly, is that there is little sign here of his work in those places and
much of his majestic skill elsewhere.
In the sketches, published almost every day when parliament was sitting, were
wit, truth and the highest political intelligence. Even in 1974, Mrs
Thatcher had “dimples of iron”. Even in 1976, the Foreign Office was falling
below the status of the Treasury to become “just a superior sort of
dentist’s waiting room – whose inmate leafs through briefs about, say,
Ethiopian Cabinet reshuffles instead of copies of Punch”. In 1981 “if the
Russians overran Western Europe, it did not necessarily follow that things
would go badly for Christianity”. And while it was wise “to be mighty
careful when attributing practically any opinion to a mighty academic, as
the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement proves”, Lord Dacre, in
his disagreement with Mrs Thatcher, on this point was surely right.
Only late in his life did he marry, to Virginia Fraser, who has done an artful
and scrupulous job of editing. Certain of Johnson’s subjects were asked by
her to comment with hindsight on how they had been seen and described. It
seems generally to have been an honour to be depicted in a Johnson sketch,
however potent the sound of his mockery. And she includes one of his
greatest non-parliamentary reporting triumphs too, his account of the IRA’s
attempt to kill as many as possible of Margaret Thatcher and her ministers
at the Conservative Party conference in 1984.
Before that bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel, Johnson and I had both been
together at the same parties, he “with eyes ever watchful for bores”, as he
put it. We had both seen the MP Sir Anthony Berry taking his dogs down the
staircase for what would be the last time. The leader writer and the sketch
writer were both sleeping “the sleep of the well victualled” at the same
Wheelers Hotel a few hundred yards away when the explosion came. But as he
described next day, he was woken by the “woman at the switchboard” and was
able to see for himself, and describe for readers of The Times, the
stumbling in the dark, the dragging of deckchairs from the beach, the “chic
cream pyjama legs” of the Prime Minister’s intellectual mentor, Sir Keith
Joseph, sitting “on an upturned red dispatch box on the promenade”. I later
told him how much I had envied that wake-up call. He then said how much he
envied me the Latin.
Frank Johnson
BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
The wit and Parliamentary chronicles of Frank Johnson
340pp. JR Books. £18.99.
978 1 9067 79337
Peter Stothard is Editor of the TLS. He was Editor of The Times from
1992 to 2002 and Deputy Editor from 1986 to 1989. His book On the Spartacus
Road: A spectacular journey through ancient Italy will be published in
January
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