In 1980, he spent a year at the American Enterprise Institute, the rightwing thinktank in Washington, and he increasingly became a hero to the American right. He attached himself to her as a mentor, saying later that she was “very ignorant in many ways” when she became prime minister, and needed to be taught, presumably by him.
Johnson was soon writing as violently against Labour as he once had in its interest, and before long, the devotion he had once shown toward Bevan and then Harold Wilson had been transferred to Thatcher.
Like other defectors, he said he was dismayed by the power of the unions, and claimed, with characteristic hyperbole, that Labour was espousing a “corporatist” policy close to fascism. In 1975, he marked his dramatic break with the left and Labour by writing for the New Statesman a denunciation of a party at the mercy of the “know-nothing left” and the “fascist” anti-intellectualism of the unions, a theme on which he would expatiate with his usual eloquence and intemperance in Enemies of Society (1977). It was followed at the rate of one a year by The Highland Jaunt, a journey in the footsteps of Johnson and Boswell written with George Gale, Elizabeth I, Pope John XXIII, and A History of Christianity (1976), a bestseller in several languages. The first of his popular histories was The Offshore Islanders (1972), a history of English people starting from the Roman occupation.
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