Frank Johnson, the finest and funniest parliamentary sketch-writer of his generation died, too young, in late 2006. His widow, Virginia Fraser, has now compiled and edited a selection of his writings. It is mostly about domestic politics as seen from his seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, interspersed with expeditions to by-elections and general elections. There are also pieces on his early life in Shoreditch, his lifelong enthusiasms — opera, ballet, warfare, diplomacy — and at the end of his life, his newly acquired house near Montpellier.
In a work of this kind it is a temptation to review the man and not the book. I shall not resist it altogether. However, it is worth trying to recapture something of Frank’s style by means of quotation. One of his favourites was Lord Goodman, now largely forgotten, but once a character — both comic and threatening — who bulked huge in the affairs of the nation. He described Goodman as ‘the greatest solicitor since Cicero’. Here he is descending, on the Croydon by-election, in October 1981, legally to menace one of the candidates:
Furthermore, there is not a jot or tittle of any suggestion to the contrary — or jit or tottle, tittle or bottle. There is not a scintilla, whatever that may mean, of evidence. It is all a farrago of untruths, and indeed a fandango if required. (Lord Goodman’s prose style is infectious on these occasions).
Frank’s best-loved line came from Sir Denis (as he later became) during the general election campaign of May 1979. Margaret Thatcher had ‘clasped a fragile, newly-born calf to her bosom as determinedly as if she were Cleopatra with an asp’. Her husband remarked: ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’
Frank hated the post-war consensus as it had developed between 1945 and, I suppose, the mid-1970s. He and I often discussed the pernicious influence of television programmes such as Hancock and Steptoe & Son. The supreme crime for these script-writers was pretension, getting above yourself, thinking you were better than you were. He thought the trade unions, above all, had held the working classes back. It was a specifically English — perhaps more specifically still, East London — characteristic, rather than Scottish or Welsh.
We would sometimes discuss the great editors or other journalists who had flourished at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Britain’s golden age of meritocracy came later. It came in with the wartime generation, continued with the post-war period and ended at some time in the late 1970s. Frank would have been 18 in 1961. He would certainly have benefitted from the educational expansion of the last century, as later generations were not to do in succeeding decades. But somehow he managed to slip through the eductional net. He left his secondary school in Shoreditch with one O-level in ‘commercial subjects’. He had a lucky escape.
He was introduced to the opera when he was a member of the chorus of Urchins (so designated in the programme) from his school engaged by Covent Garden. In Norma he was clasped to her breast by Maria Callas, and lived to tell the tale. He early embarked on a fierce course of self-improvement. For that reason he determined to become a journalist. To this end, he took a job as a tea-boy (or copy-boy or messenger: the term varied) on the Sunday Express in Fleet Street, up the road and not far from his home. It was at the paper that we first met, though we did not realise it till later, 15 years afterwards, when we were both working at the House of Commons.
The messenger boys would sit on a bench, jostling and provoking one another. It was a Dickensian scene. When we came to know each other in later life I asked him:
‘What did you think of me at the time?’
He said: ‘We didn’t think you were a proper journalist at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘You didn’t use a typewriter, but wrote with a pen, with your eyes very close to the paper, and you had very odd trousers.’
‘What sort of trousers?’
‘Army surplus trousers.’
The chief topic of conversation among the messenger boys was whether they would prefer to go to bed with Susan Barnes (later Susan Crosland) or Dee Wells (later Lady Ayer), both American beauties who stood out from their dingier colleagues at the Express.
These exchanges occurrred when, completely by chance, we shared a house in Islington. For a decade we occupied adjoining flats, Frank downstairs, with myself on the first floor. It was here that I first heard him use the phrase ‘the chattering classes’. Subsequently I used it several times myself in the Observer. But the source and originator was undoubtedly Frank. I think it was probably in the Daily Telegraph but I never managed to track it down. Virginia Fraser, in her compilation, does not include the phrase, as far as I can see. In all other respects, it is a model of its kind.
Comments