In memoriam
Alan Clark left this world with alarming speed. No public funeral; no books of remembrance; certainly no tribute songs. While Clark was meeting his maker, we were digesting the details of Michael Portillo's liberal Cambridge education.
This was a pity, not only for Clark himself, but also for those of us hoping to be bombarded for days by choice nuggets from his diaries. It's therefore time to pay proper tribute to this self-confessed "maelstrom of egocentricity and self-indulgence."
Few politicians are able to match Alan Clark's popularity across the political spectrum. Even my mother (who believes anyone to the right of John Prescott is the Great Satan) admitted that she couldn't help liking him.
The reason for this popularity is abundantly clear throughout the diaries. It's Clark's honesty about everything which is so appealing. Whether referring to his adultery (he admits to being "culpably weak in sexual matters"), his views on "Bongo Bongo land" or his lusting after Margaret Thatcher's ankles, he can't help but tell the truth.
Kenneth Clarke is "a pudgy puffball"; John Gummer, "a poxy little runt." Peter Bottomley is so odd that it grates", while Douglas Hurd "might as well have a corncob up his arse." Particularly charming is his brutally honest description of two strangers he encounters travelling to a funeral:
I cannot adequately record how ugly these people were. The man squat, paunchy, resentful in his horn rims; the woman gross, varicose veins ... we had a brilliant idea ... that we should kill them, leaving the wreath which we were taking over for Ian.
Offensive (you might say), but Clark is equally amusing when describing his own misfortunes. A speech on equal pay, made after attending a wine-tasting session, is recorded in gruesome detail:
As I started, the sheer odiousness of the text sank in. I found myself sneering at the more unintelligible passages ... I sped up. I gabbled. Helter-skelter I galloped through the text. Sometimes I turned over two pages at once. What did it matter? How the hell did I know what it meant?
On top of all this, of course, are the women. And although the diaries are enlivened by the presence of the mother and two daughters known to Clark as "the coven", it is Margaret Thatcher who dominates the entries. Indeed, Clark remains intensely loyal to the woman he describes as "dear good kind sweet Lady", making his account of her downfall gripping reading.
Ultimately, Clark's entertaining and endearing style make it easy to ignore his less palatable opinions. You don't have to agree with him that "human beings are vermin" to recognise that "Virginia Bottomley lost her looks even quicker than I did when I entered Parliament." Alan Clark might not mean everything that he says - but he says it brilliantly. Anyone approaching the diaries with a sense of humour, a realisation that Clark may not be as politically correct as your average JCR committee member, and an aversion to Michael Heseltine, will be most richly rewarded.
tjd
14th Oct 1999