Paul Johnson, prolific journalist and historian who started on the Left but became a champion of the Right – obituary

Paul Johnson, who has died aged 94 was one of the most prolific writers, and for many the most powerfully provoking journalist, of his age; he is most easily remembered for his conversion from Left to Right in the 1970s, but he would have made his mark in any case, if not as a polemicist then as a popular historian.

While editor of the New Statesman in the 1960s he eloquently preached socialism’s cause. Ten years after leaving that chair he had gone over to the Tories and became a confidant of Margaret Thatcher – a change of heart (it was not to be his last) that might not have attracted so much notice if he had not proclaimed it with such passionate vigour.

Paul Bede Johnson was born into a Catholic family on November 2 1928, and grew up in the Potteries. His father, William Aloysius Johnson, was head of Burslem Art School; he died when Paul (who was to become an accomplished watercolourist himself) was a boy. From Stonyhurst he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where AJP Taylor encouraged his love of history.

After National Service as a subaltern in the Army Education Corps he worked for two years on the Paris glossy Réalité. He returned to London in 1955 to become a leader-writer and reporter on the New Statesman, succeeding John Freeman as editor five years later. He had that comparatively rare gift that only good editors have, of making people want to write well for him and of giving them the confidence to do it. The paper flourished and circulation rose to just short of 100,000, its highest ever. He left it in 1970 and remained a freelance for the rest of his life.

The period of his editorship coincided with the first premiership of Harold Wilson, to whom he gave his enthusiastic support. Johnson was then quite far on the Left. Years earlier he had advocated the abolition of public schools, the Brigade of Guards, the House of Lords and various other bodies whose qualities he later came to appreciate (though he was never to send his children to public schools).

His disenchantment with the Labour Party took two or three years: there was nothing Pauline about this conversion, though his enemies said it had certainly struck him blind. In 1975 he outraged the readers of the New Statesman with an article describing the trade unions as “gangsters … powerful men who conspire together to squeeze the community”. The last straw came in 1977, the year of the Grunwick picket-lines, where non-union workers had been violently impeded from entering the printing firm where they were employed.

The closed shop, he wrote, was the turning point for him; it was “the mark of Cain, blazed on the party’s forehead”. It reversed socialism’s commitment to individual liberties and was therefore immoral. The movement had turned its back on its own history: having begun by fighting against the “mass anonymity of industrialism, the intrinsic inhumanity of drumming thousands of individuals into vast factories”, it now embraced the new tyranny of collectivism – and “in a system of belief where conscience is collectivised, there is no barrier along the highway which ultimately may lead to Auschwitz and Gulag.”

From then on, in article after article (notably in the Telegraph and the Mail) he was to conduct an unremitting campaign against the unions – and, indeed, against the whole machinery of the party which he had once loved and which had so cruelly betrayed his love: against its arrogance and jobbery; against its mediocre, uncreative bureaucracy (“Labour’s mercenary army”) and the multiplication of “so-called social workers with their glib pseudo-solutions to non-problems” and other such servants of the State.

His former allies shook their heads over this intemperate language, which was to become more intemperate with the years. He had accused the Labour Left of “furious emotion and boiling determination”, yet it could be said that his own pot boiled, in its way, as furiously as did their kettle.

In the 1990s, for example, he turned his attention to modern art, beginning as far back as Cezanne, in whom he saw no merit, though it was he who in the 1970s had called Labour the philistine party. In a 1996 article in The Spectator (for which he wrote a column from 1981 to 2009) he wrote of Cezanne’s famous bathers that “these monsters have a certain relevance to an age of transvestites, shemales, sex-ops, transsexuals and gender-bending.” But by then his earnest hatred had extended to almost any trend which might be described as modern, including the decline, as he saw it, of grammar.

Johnson’s facility as a daily journalist was summed up in the story the author and sometime literary editor A N Wilson told, of having commissioned Paul Johnson to assess a massive work on the American civil war: the result was “800 perfectly tuned words” – though Wilson’s assistant had forgotten to send the book.

He reserved fiercest scorn for what he called “moral relativism”. For him there was no conflict between competing principles, no shades between good and bad. Right was right and wrong was wrong, and this applied to English grammar as it did to everything else.

His 1988 book The Intellectuals was a somewhat curious corollary to this philosophy. In it he described, with much indignation, the unconventional lives of such as Rousseau, Marx, Bertrand Russell and Brecht, the suggestion being that if their personal morals were suspect their works must be impious also: “Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire.”

It was perhaps not too surprising that, after he saw the Labour movement defecting from his own strongly held principles, he should have found in Margaret Thatcher a kindred spirit. It was not only her determination to subjugate the unions that attracted him to her.

She, too, was certain of her opinions, and firm in her belief that what she did was right. She, too, wanted to roll back the frontiers of the State. So close were they after her accession to power that it was sometimes hard to guess which had more influence over the other. However, his loyalty to her was not to be transferred to her successor, John Major.

There is an interesting pre-echo, in that New Statesman article of 1975, of the vocabulary which Tony Blair was to be using 20 years later. “The essence of socialism,” he had written then, “is … that every one of us, men, women and children, has an equal stake in our society, an equal duty to it.” Blair could not have put it better.

Johnson himself would have argued that he abandoned Labour only when he found that Labour had abandoned his belief in individualism; and that later, when he half-turned to Tony Blair, it was only because he thought Blair embodied his own ideals – of the stakeholder society, of mutual dependence and neighbourliness – better than John Major did.

He became convinced that Blair was “a very good man with good instincts and very nice manners – rare at the top nowadays”. (It was somewhat cruelly said that his primary objection to Major was simply that he was not Lady Thatcher, and it is true that Major’s pragmatism struck him as a poor substitute for her certainties, but it was an unfair jibe.)

Throughout his tergiversations, moreover, there was something that never altered: his Catholic faith. It was against this that he measured all other loyalties, discarding them when they failed its test, taking them up when they passed it. His attachment to Conservatism would have been untenable without its sanction.

In a notable speech delivered in Virginia, USA, in 1977 he argued that capitalism, far from being the oppressive system he had once thought it to be, was a liberating force compatible with Christianity. True Christianity accorded to every individual an absolute freehold in his or her own soul, just as capitalism believed in an absolute right to hold and dispose of property under laws which guaranteed its precedence over the demands of the State.

If he did not exactly cry plague on all their houses, it was clear by the 1990s that politics, in the Bismarckian, art-of-the-possible sense, no longer engaged him as it had in his New Statesman days. “It’s very wicked when Labour or Tories say they’re the Christian party,” he told Frances Welch in a Sunday Telegraph interview in 1996. “I hope all parties support the idea of absolute morality.” It was as though he had come home at last: finding no more princes to put his trust in, he was able to subsume everything under the will of God.

Before starting work each morning he kissed Christ’s feet on the large crucifix he kept in his study. In London he went to pray every day in his local Catholic church, invoking not only the saints but also secular figures whose saintliness he admired, among them Samuel Johnson (no relation) and Jane Austen.

In 1998, however, he was confronted by a reporter from a tabloid newspaper with evidence of an 11-year extramarital affair with a writer called Gloria Stewart who, reportedly angered by an article by her lover celebrating his 40th wedding anniversary, had recorded one of their encounters; suggesting, as one wag put it, that he enjoyed purging his sins “with mortification of the flesh while he is still in the middle of them”.

Faced with claims that his trysts with Ms Stewart had involved “spanking”, Johnson, with magnificent insouciance, responded: “We are all sinners. Well, I am. That’s why I go to church every day.”

Years later, in a long interview with the writer at the age of 81, the Daily Telegraph’s Elizabeth Grice asked him about the painful episode, commenting that it had not been good “for a man who had written about the anchor of marriage in the public prints”. After a moment of “diplomatic amnesia”, he replied: “If you acquire any kind of fame, that’s the kind of thing that’s liable to happen. You just put it out of your mind. It’s what Shakespeare called ‘the dark backward and abysm’ of the past.”

Johnson was often mocked for bigotry and dottiness. (“Overexcited opinions,” wrote Ian Buruma in the New Yorker, “fleck his prose like spittle round a fanatic’s mouth.”) Private Eye called him Paul “Loonybins” Johnson. At parties, though genial and polite, he managed to give the impression that there was a high-efficiency racing engine in his head which was unhappy at idling speed. His occasional lapses into drunkenness, before he gave up drinking altogether, were said by some of his friends to be the result of boredom with small talk, by others merely another aspect of a personality which found it difficult to do anything by halves.

Yet he was a brilliant writer who, unlike his many critics on the Left, was usually able to weight his arguments with historical parallels. His history of England, The Offshore Islanders (1972), was the first of a number of such works which showed the huge range of his reading. It was grand-sweep history at its best, its epilogue carrying a warning against Britain’s involvement in Europe and an attack on the revolutionary student movement quite unlike the rhapsodic hymn to the students at les évènements which he had written four years earlier.

He had already, before 1972, produced a handful of books – including an argued tirade against the Suez War and two works of fiction, Left of Centre, about an English journalist working for a fashion magazine in Paris, and a satirical novel called Merrie England. Altogether, he would write more than 50 books. His big History of Christianity appeared in 1976, followed by a number of what he himself regarded as potboilers – on British castles, cathedrals, the Irish Troubles, Pope John Paul II.

It was in his 1983 A History of the Modern World from 1917 to the 1980s that he developed the theme, of moral relativism as the root of the world’s ills, which informed so much of his later writing. His next serious work, A History of the Jews (1987, revised 2001), encompassed 4,000 years, combining again the broad sweep with much compelling detail, again the fruit of an heroic reading programme.

It was followed in 1991 by the 1,000-page blockbuster The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830, a gripping survey of the 15 years after the Napoleonic Wars during which, Johnson argued, the modern world order was formed; and in The Quest for God: a Personal Pilgrimage (1996), he looked forward to the conversion of the world.

He loved America, where he was among the most feted of British writers, revered by American conservatives such as Henry Kissinger, for whom Johnson’s last big book, A History of the American People (1997), was “as majestic in scope as the country it celebrates”, though reviewers pointed to some factual errors.

In 2006 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W Bush and in 2016 appointed CBE.

In his later years Johnson wrote a number of short and punchy profiles of great men. These included, in 2012, a provocative mini-biography of Charles Darwin, in which he argued that Darwin laid the ground for 20th-century eugenics. It was a good finish to a career of campaigning.

“Laughs are so important in life, you know,” he told Elizabeth Grice. “As the Bible says, we live in a vale of tears and life is hard for most people. The more laughs you get the better.”

He married Marigold Hunt in 1957. Their friends liked to compare Marigold, who worked as an NHS psychotherapist and was appointed MBE, with the still centre of a cyclone. When Paul fretted about what God would think of the article he was writing, Marigold, he wrote in The Quest for God, would be quick to remind him that “God has better things to do than to worry about that!”

He is survived by Marigold and by a daughter and three sons, of whom one is the leading entrepreneur Luke Johnson and another, Daniel, is a former Daily Telegraph journalist.

Paul Johnson, born November 2 1928, died January 12 2023