Brace of Johnsons
Michael Vestey
Two of the journalistic Johnsons graced the airwaves last month — Frank, the former editor of this magazine, and Boris, the present incumbent: Frank on Radio Three’s Private Passions three weeks ago (Sunday), followed this week by Boris on Desert Island Discs (Sunday, repeated Friday), both providing glimpses into their hugely contrasting personalities. They couldn’t be more different. Frank is selfeffacing and the finest journalistic stylist of his generation, and Boris, as we all know, is an immensely popular extrovert who somehow manages to attract warmth and fame without even trying. Interestingly, you don’t have to be one or other to edit The Spectator: under both the circulation rose, and now, as Sue Lawley of Desert Island Discs pointed out, it’s at a record level.
The two programmes are pretty different, too. Befitting Radio Three, the pre senter of Private Passions, Michael Berkeley, is more interested in his guests’ choice of classical music than he is in their private lives, and there is none of the prurience of Desert Island Discs, which is more focused on the person. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and indeed both approaches revealed insights into the respective natures of their subjects: Frank, the self-educated boy from a London working-class background, and Boris, the classicist with a brain like blotting paper who sped effortlessly through Eton, Oxford and what were then the upper echelons of Fleet Street. I’d long admired both without knowing either of them: Frank for his witty parliamentary sketches and Boris for his reporting from Brussels as the Telegraph correspondent there, one of the few who didn’t go native and become EU toadies — most of them are, you know. As I wrote long before I knew Boris would be the editor of this magazine, I tried to be the first to put him on the air as a Brussels pundit. On the World Tonight programme on Radio Four, I was fed up with the same old Euro-fanatics being interviewed about Brussels as if they were impartial observers — John Palmer of the Guardian was the BBC’s main favourite. I tried to balance him with Boris, but unfortunately — he has no recollection of this — he showed a Frank Johnson-type reticence about being interviewed, even down the line from our Brussels studio. He certainly made up for it later!
Lawley concentrated on the Boris image: was the charm a bit of a ruse? Is it done in a calculating way? Boris wasn’t sure. I suspect introspection of that kind isn’t him. He’d been deaf as a child and developed an evasiveness to disguise the fact that he didn’t know what people around him were saying. His serious side is there, evidenced by the fact that he’s writing a book about nationhood. Could he be both politician and journalist? His departure from the front bench of the Tory party suggested he couldn’t. The magazine published an editorial about Liverpudlian sentimentality which I and everyone I knew heartily agreed with, but it caused a furore in the aftermath of the dreadful Ken Bigley murder in Iraq and he was forced to make what he called a ‘pilgrimage of penitence’ to Merseyside; later he resigned over an affair. He will, as he admitted, be forced to choose between politics and journalism. His choice of music was eclectic: pop and classical. His book? Homer in Greek so he could translate it into English.
Frank was asked mostly about his love of opera and ballet and his technical knowledge of both is deep. He noted that it was crucial for a composer to have a melodic gift; some, such as Wagner, were more concerned about writing drama; others, Gluck, for example, could do both. Frank described how as a 13-year-old at school he acquired his taste for opera: Covent Garden, looking for urchins for its produc tions, asked his headmaster if he had any. Plenty, came the reply, and so he found himself appearing on stage, an escape from maths, which he hated. Berkeley asked him about his Maria Callas story: Callas had been in the news for her mercurial temperament and she was appearing for two nights at Covent Garden in Norma. Frank the urchin was summoned. Having read in the Daily Mirror that this ‘tempestuous tigress’ was starring in Bellini’s opera, the cast waited apprehensively for her arrival. She immediately pronounced that Frank was too big and it had to be pointed out to her that these were the smallest boys they could find and that, in any case, no one under 11 was allowed on stage. During the first production, Callas, who’d lost weight, had to advance on the children and hold them to her breast. Frank found the stiff bra of her right breast poking into his eye, painful pressure that only increased as her voice soared. ‘It was absolute agony,’ he said. In later performances the other boy got the right breast. At the end Berkeley thanked him for his appearance and choice of music, and typically Frank replied, ‘I was flattered.’
Previous page
