Frank Robert Johnson

Frank Johnson, who died in 2006, aged 63, was one of the most remarkable talents in British journalism over the last 30 years. Although he was born with few advantages and received little formal education, Johnson's natural gifts enabled him to forge a successful career as a reporter, columnist and foreign correspondent; a dazzling writer, he was in particular a master of the parliamentary sketch. He harboured the ambition to become editor of one of the great Fleet Street newspapers; and while this ambition was never fulfilled, he served as deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph and, from 1995 to 1999, editor of The Spectator.