It’s close but no cigar, Kenneth
KIND OF BLUE: A Political Memoir by Kenneth Clarke Macmillan, £25
THE night before Kenneth Clarke was due to attend a final meeting to select the Conservative candidate for the Nottinghamshire seat of Rushcliffe in 1966, he received a call from the chairman of the local party.
“He assured me that he was almost certain that he had arranged for me to win,” writes Clarke in his new memoir.
“However, he solemnly advised me that I must change my opinion on two important subjects: Europe and capital punishment.”
An ardent pro-European and committed abolitionist, Clarke naturally refused but was selected nonetheless.
He was duly elected to Parliament in 1970 at the age of 29 and three years later, much to Clarke’s delight, Britain joined the Common Market.
When Harold Wilson held a referendum on British membership in 1975, Clarke was one of a handful of Tory backbenchers to take an active part in the successful campaign to keep us in Europe.
But, as the world knows, all political careers end in failure.
By his final chapters, Clarke is railing against David Cameron’s “catastrophic decision” to hold another referendum on EU membership, which he describes as “reckless and irresponsible” and later on as “foolish and extremely risky”.
He did his best to turn the tide by chatting to his “old friend” Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission.
“The fact that he chain-smoked and ignored the ban on smoking indoors also meant he always conducted political discussions in the smoke-filled atmosphere which I have always believed leads to better political decisions,” writes Clarke, a cigar-smoker.
It was to no avail, of course. With the Brexiteers’ victory, Clarke concludes that Cameron’s move was “the worst political mistake made by any British prime minister in my lifetime”.
Kenneth Harry Clarke was born “impeccably working class” in a Derbyshire pit village and knew where he wanted to end up from a very young age. As a schoolboy he was one of three pupils called to the front of the class to say what he wanted to be when he grew up.
The other two wanted to be a coal miner and a train driver.
“I announced to an astonished teacher and classmates that I intended to be a Member of Parliament,” writes Clarke.
He went on to occupy two of the great offices of state – Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary – and stood for the leadership of his party three times.
With his Hush Puppies, love of jazz and cigars and draggedthrough-a-hedge-backwards chic, Clarke had an appeal that transcended political barriers.
However, his memoirs are something of a disappointment.
He had a ringside seat at some of the most dramatic events of the 20th and 21st centuries but his recollections and judgments (on issues other than Europe) are delivered with such a lack of passion that he gives the impression he became a politician out of a calling to a trade rather than a burning commitment to a cause.
Even when an MP collapses and dies at the Despatch Box, Clarke’s deadpan delivery robs it of any drama. “I was genuinely very upset by this terrible event, as were his many friends on the Labour back benches,” he writes.
Whatever the reason for this lacklustre memoir, it reads like the story of a pilot flying over a jungle rather than a latter-day Dr Livingstone slashing his way through the thicket.