Perfectly Frank: a fitting memorial to a man of words

Rupert Wright

• Last Updated: November 21. 2009 7:20PM UAE / November 21. 2009 3:20PM GMT

The fate of a political columnist is generally not a happy one. Lionised in their lifetimes, feared in government circles, their wit quoted at dinner parties, they are the object of much envy while they command the column. But once they lose their space they are rapidly forgotten.

Take Bernard Levin. He churned out two exquisite weekly columns for The Times in London for a quarter of a century, but who remembers him five years after his death? In the US, William Safire thundered away for 30 years, but when he died a couple of months ago all most people could say was that he was a stickler for syntax.

However, one columnist has managed to live on after his death, and if anything his influence has increased. It may be because he inspired so many fellow spirits or it could just be that he was so much better and funnier than anybody else, but Frank Johnson continues to entertain.

If you are under 40 or have never lived in Britain, you may wonder what all the fuss was about. Fortunately, the collected works of the great man have been published in a volume put together by his widow, Virginia.

I was lucky enough to call Frank a friend. We met in the last five years of his life, when he already had the cancer that would kill him. We first encountered each other at the house of a mutual friend. Also there was Niall Ferguson, the TV history don who has since become a big cheese telling Wall Street how to behave.

Frank, it turned out, was a professor of French history, though he received barely any formal education after the age of 15. He and Ferguson discussed French history. While Frank was suitably deferential to the academic’s formal learning, it quickly became clear that the man who failed his 11-plus knew a lot more about the subject. Ferguson was doing what I was doing; bluffing.

The subject then turned to rugby. Frank, I learnt, was a man of strange and varied passions. He had just decided that because he was living in a part of France where rugby was a religion, he would become a convert. He talked about the game at length, without a single clue as to what he was talking about, although it sounded good.

And that probably was the key to Frank. He was brilliant even when he was wrong. The last time I met him was the day of the Kerry/Bush election. Frank had decided that Kerry would win, even though it was obvious that no one with such a hairstyle could ever be elected. Frank was undaunted. Together we zigzagged up and down to every bookmakers in the King’s Road in west London, placing bets that would never pay out.

But that was not the point. He was eyewitness to many of the major events of his time, invented the phrase “the chattering classes”, dubbed Margaret Thatcher “the woman with the iron dimple” and could do the best imitation of Ronald Reagan you would ever want to hear.

What he did so cleverly was to expose the stupidity of politicians, but so astutely that they were not even aware that they were being pilloried. He did not rant, or stoop to abuse.

Some argue that his earliest years were his best, when as a British parliamentary sketchwriter he skewered the rich and famous and made them look ridiculous. That may well be, but for me his finest hour came on September 18, 2003, at the Hutton Inquiry into the death of a scientist who questioned the accuracy of the reasons given for Britain going to war in Iraq.

The inquiry was designed to humiliate Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter, and exonerate the British government. The government hired the “famously expensive” Jonathon Sumption QC, whose job it was to point out the small mistakes made by Mr Gilligan. Frank’s report neatly points out that Mr Sumption himself makes a series of small errors during the day.

“In due course, Mr Sumption mentioned a BBC official named Stephen Mitchell. ‘Stephen Whittle,’ Gilligan courteously corrected him. ‘Stephen Whittle,’ Mr Sumption replied, almost as if he were correcting Gilligan.” Frank keeps this refrain going, almost like a riff. “So, then, it is not easy getting every detail right is it, Mr Scrumptious? ‘Sumption, actually’. Sumption, exactly. Now if I may move on, Mr Assumption.”

Frank’s point was that a series of small slips do not amount to a gross error. There were no weapons of mass destruction; the dodgy dossier was “sexed up”. Nobody had apologised, except Mr Gilligan. “But we all make mistakes – as Mr Suction knows.”

It is our loss that we no longer have him to prick the pomposity of Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, even Barack Obama. We are left with a reminder of how journalism can be – and how rare it is to find such good writing.


Best Seat in the House: The Wit and Parliamentary Chronicles of Frank Johnson is published by MPG Books

rwright@thenational.ae