The Daily Mail has been printing extracts from the latest volume of memoirs by the journalist Paul Johnson, who twenty or thirty years ago had a very high profile as a Thatcherite and moralist. Of one of his Oxford contemporaries over sixty years ago, Johnson writes:
[Kenneth] Tynan was not homosexual, as many surmised. Far from it. He was keen on girls - very keen - but his interest was spanking and caning. He told me: 'You'd be surprised how many girls are willing to be spanked.'
He told me he regularly got a journal called the Spanking Times, and liked to open it up and read it during a train journey. 'How the other passengers stare, especially the women.'"Johnson never confesses to his shared sexual taste, but goes on anyway:
The trouble was he lacked any religious impulse whatsoever, and felt he had no need of spiritual and moral guidance.
All he had in life was the make-believe of the London theatre and the Hollywood movie. Its stars were his angels, good and bad. When I think of him, I shiver, slightly.But what "moral guidance" has Johnson's Catholicism given him? The urge to be write hypocritically perhaps. In May 1998, the Daily Express exposed Johnson's eleven year extra-marital affair with Gloria Stewart, of which Stewart said at the time:
"Paul loved to be spanked and it was a big part of our relationship. I had to tell him he was a very naughty boy."Christopher Hitchens took the opportunity to detail Johnson's secret history at some length.
The other two extracts of Johnson's memoir, published by the Mail, are here and here.
