Sun Myung Moon among the stars

Where would the popes, presidents and princesses of the world be without Paul Johnson, the former editor of the New Statesman, and much loved columnist in this and other periodicals? As his latest book shows, he is an all but indispensable asset, a social equivalent of the Admirable Crichton.

Take Kenneth Kaunda, for example, President of what was Northern Rhodesia. Paul writes: ‘I came across [him] at Salisbury Airport, where he was in difficulties with the authorities. I managed to extricate him and we flew to Lusaka together’. Phew! Stephen Spender was distressed by some remarks made about him in an American publication:

I wrote a piece in The Spectator, expressing the book’s faults, and as a result the plan for an English edition was dropped. Stephen was always profoundly grateful.

Nikita Khrushchev had pretty similar feelings when Paul printed his letter in the New Statesman. Indeed, ‘it did the paper’s prestige a lot of good and helped to start CND’.

Not that everyone involved in CND matched Paul’s own high personal qualities. Canon Collins, for example (‘I used to meet him at Kingsley Martin’s flat in the Aldwych and later at J. B. Priestley’s for weekends’), ‘was a striking example of the total lack of spirituality one finds in prominent Anglican divines.’

Paul, as readers will quickly become aware, is an excellent judge of character. General Pinochet, who entertained Paul and Marigold Johnson to tea (‘tea is the most important meal in Chile’), is ‘perhaps the single most misjudged figure of the 20th century’. His help to Britain during the Falklands War ‘saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of British lives’. As the Johnsons tucked into peach ice-cream, croque monsieur and seafood salad, there was evidently no time to discuss the victims of torture in the General’s life-enhancing regime, nor the hundreds of people he had bumped off, but perhaps Paul was able to share with the General his view that Picasso was ‘probably the most evil man I ever actually came across’.