John Knight was in the front row for the Pope’s
weekly audience at the Vatican. As John Paul II approached, Knight let out an
audible sigh and appeared to stumble. The Holy Father grabbed him by the
shoulders to prevent him from falling. In return Knight grabbed the papal
shoulders and clung on.
“Are you all right, my child?” inquired the Pope. “Yes, thank you, your
holiness, but . . .” replied Knight.
“Yes, my son?”
“You will come to England, Holy Father, won’t you?”
The Pope beamed and replied: “Yes, my son. I will come to England.”
Within an hour pictures began to drop in London
of the Pope and Knight, hands on each other’s shoulders, in earnest
conversation. The rest of Fleet Street was in uproar. How had John Knight of
the Sunday Mirror — was he even a Catholic? — landed the exclusive story of the
first visit to Protestant Britain by a reigning pope?
(…)
Knight
belonged to Fleet Street’s finest tradition of bons vivants. Once he
disappeared for lunch for three days. Upon his return he was asked where he had
been. “On the piss,” he said. “Oh, thank goodness,” replied his editor. “We
were worried in case you were ill.”
(…) He
danced the pavane with Cecil Beaton at a nightclub in St Tropez, befriended
John Ward, whose daughter, Julie, was killed in Kenya in 1988, and checked into
the Betty Ford Clinic under a pseudonym to write a series of exposés.
While
covering the Cyprus emergency in the late 1950s Knight woke to find that his
breakfast had not been delivered and set forth in his pyjamas to investigate.
The housemaid’s room was empty and the lift was not working, so he walked
downstairs to reception where he was met by a squaddie who asked: “What the
hell are you doing here?” “I’m looking for my newspapers,” Knight replied. “You
can’t be,” said the soldier. “The place was evacuated at five o’clock and it
blew up at six!”
(…)
An
enthusiastic curator of his own mythology, Knight recalled how on one occasion
he was in South Africa to write a feature on the Mandelas and was staying with
Winnie, who was an outrageous flirt. Admiring the Evelyn Waugh novels in her
library, he asked which was her favourite. “Black Mischief, of course,” came
the reply.
From The Times, 06/05/2019: John Knight – a
Fleet Street character who danced with Cecil Beaton and claimed to be
responsible for John Paul II’s historic visit to Britain in 1982
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