Making of a monster

People will think what I tell them to think," thundered fictional newspaper proprietor Citizen Kane when succumbing to megalomania at the breakfast table. But real-life Citizen JJ, aka Sir John Junor, always claimed to know what his Sunday Express readers were thinking over their bacon and eggs. After the editor's "golden crown" was placed on his head in 1954, JJ served up a continuous diet of old-fashioned values, appealing strongly to the fixed prejudices of Middle Britain.

During his 32-year reign, the newspaper's ethos reflected his own respectable, inherently conservative attitudes, most especially in the current events column, "a brilliant blend of rage, indignation, prejudice and sentimentality", which he wrote from 1974.

JJ, like his readers, was a man frightened of change. The SE's wholesome editorial, set off by a pretty girl on the front page, retained its pre-permissive 1950s format. For many years, this was its greatest strength. Circulation reached four million. But ultimately, the failure to evolve became its undoing as readers moved elsewhere or moved on for good. Five years after his death, JJ's journalist daughter Penny has produced what she calls a "brutally honest" biography of "a brilliant newspaperman". Her claim is fully justified.

As the recent author of a " brutally honest" filial biography myself, I found remarkable parallels in Penny's book between JJ and my father, the successful libel lawyer, George Carman QC. Many of her one-liners on JJ could have been written of GC: "He was a charming, charismatic man; he was also a bully." "The only certainty was that his foul moods cast a blight on the entire household." "He sacrificed his family for the sake of his career." "He liked to be in control of everything and everyone." "He enjoyed being seen with glamorous women - it boosted his ego - but I think that secretly he rather despised them."

The product of an ambitious mother, JJ progressed from tough Glasgow tenement to Fleet Street institution, via Scottish University and wartime RNVR, largely thanks to Lord Beaverbrook, who recognised his talent early. As mentor and paymaster, the Beaver provided him with a house on his Cherkely Estate and a fund of good advice: "If you walk over a man once, you can walk over him again any time you want to." It became his adopted motto.

Penny's voyage around her father (including the discovery of JJ's secret confessional novel) forms an intriguing backdrop to the narrative leading her to conclude that he was once a kind and loving husband to her mother Pam. But comfortable in the power of the editor's chair and fuelled by drink, his progression as a monster was guaranteed. When he began the first of many affairs, with a 19-year-old blonde, JJ was 42. Meanwhile, his cruelty towards Pam - "the unkindness, the insults, the taunts, the unreasonable behaviour, the verbal battering" - had become a way of life.

Penny's privileged childhood - Benenden education, her own pony and a new car at 17 - gave way to a difficult adult relationship with JJ. Alienated by his cruelty and extreme heavy-handedness, Penny was still "bound to him by an invisible length of tungsten - I loved him but couldn't let him into my heart." Her 1970 marriage was a turning point: "The more unkind he was to James (her husband), the more I turned against him." JJ's subsequent spoiling of her four children could never compensate for his "daily intrusion" and "bad manners" in their home.

Fame and the famous were important to JJ. "He loved mixing with the great and the good and adored being flattered by them." Baroness Thatcher, who knighted him in 1980, was a close friend. When he retired as editor, she wrote a tribute headed "Is it the end of civilisation?" JJ's weekly column found a new home at the Mail on Sunday, where he continued to fulminate up to the week before his death. As an editor, Tom Utley concludes that JJ was both "tyrannical and paternal at the same time."

Penny Junor succeeds in reconciling the good with the bad in her father's life, sympathising but not forgiving, explaining but not condemning. It is a journey I understand very well.

No Ordinary Man, by Dominic Carman, is published by Hodder at £18.99.