Paul Johnson and the Cultural Logic of the British Hard Right

Abstract

Within the British conservative movement, the hard right is identifiable and significant. The hard right tends to believe that Britain’s cultural institutions, such as the BBC, have an embedded anti-conservative bias. For them, the Corporation represents everything that is wrong with the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ that, they believe, controls key institutions. This article explores the contribution to this narrative made by the popular historian and combative political commentator Paul Johnson, a prominent public figure in the UK and USA for many decades. Johnson’s potent melding of social, political, and economic critiques of the Corporation represented a significant deepening of an ‘anti-BBC mood’ on the British right. This article contextualises the cultural logic explicit in Johnson’s critique of the BBC and the wider ‘liberal establishment’. It does so by contrasting Johnson with the influential cultural theorist Richard Hoggart, who shared Johnson’s view that, during the latter part of the twentieth century, the original mission of the BBC was severely eroded. Examining Johnson’s thought provides important insights into the character, strengths, and weaknesses of the hard right view. What emerges is a profound disjunction between the certainty and forcefulness with which hard right narratives are put forward and their deep contestability.