The last time I talked with The Spectator columnist Jonathan Miller was perhaps ten days ago, just before his unexpected death this week.
He had a pre-digital habit, very 1980s, of ringing you up to chat, moan, laugh, explain, badmouth and joke for over an hour at a time. When he rang it always took me a couple of minutes to get reaccustomed to the colder waters of analogue conversation; but then we would have these long rambling discussions that don’t much happen anymore. He’d sent me successive manuscripts of his book, Shock of the News: Confessions of Troublemaker, which he polished and repolished into the version coming out in three weeks’ time .
We’d unknowingly worked for the same Murdoch outfits over the years, coming from radically different places, he from Saskatchewan by way of Bedales, Cincinnati, Detroit and Washington; myself having escaped the obsequious, stultifying Parisian press to grab at the lowest rung at the newly Andrew Neil-edited Sunday Times. Down the line, Jonathan always sounded like the surdoué child of Damon Runyon and David English.
His Spectator pieces annoyed many Parisian readers, because French political journalism doesn’t prize either humour or forthrightness
Some two decades ago, he’d settled with his wife Terry in a beautiful small Languedoc village between Montpellier and Béziers, the Roman university city and the rugby-mad Cathar fortress. It may not have been the reason why he chose the place, but it was inspired: you understand a lot more about France west of Marseille than in the Parisian-colonised Luberon or Var. As a European national, he became a conseiller municipal (alderman) until Brexit ended his tangle with French village administration.
His Spectator pieces annoyed many Parisian readers, because French political journalism doesn’t prize either humour or forthrightness. You have to be convoluted to impress your Sciences-Po classmates who made it into politics or the upper reaches of the civil service. Jonathan neither cared nor feared shocking the citoyens respectables – in Paris or even in his own village. One of his amusing pieces for the French conservative magazine Causeur accused some of his all-too-recognisable neighbours of doing DIY restoration in the village. The article included pictures of cinder block walls and vinyl double-glazed verandas taken metres from his home. He enjoyed the subsequent brouhaha immensely.
We met on what was then known as Twitter, around 2017 or 2018, and then progressed through private messages, emails and WhatsApps, which I have been trawling through today. Eventually we met in person at my Paris New Year party. The Millers then invited me down south last May Day bank holiday, so that Jonathan and I could attend Marine Le Pen’s first rally, a week after she was handed down a sentence which barred her from standing as president.
We arrived three hours early to bag good seats in the public bleachers, not the press division, where all we could hope to get would be French colleagues rehashing the French bubble’s accepted views of Le Pen (bad), her voters (Neanderthals) and the fate of French democracy (dire). ‘Je suis Anglais’, Jonathan would say to people at the rally: to shoe shop assistants; National Rally security guards; twentysomething waitresses coming to get a selfie with Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s deputy; pensioners moved to tears by the presence of a friendly television presenter from CNEWS, the French answer to GB News. That put him both outside people’s everyday experience-based prejudices and made his genuine interest acceptable enough to get them talking. It was beautiful to watch. I bet that’s the effect he had on cops in Minnesota and congressional aides in Washington DC, when he was reporting there years ago. I will miss him horribly.
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