Why Alan Clark’s racy diaries will never gather dust
FIFTY years ago today, a newly elected MP took his place in the House of Commons. He arrived in a state of euphoria and, by his own admission, ended up ‘monstrously drunk’.
Had he not kept a diary, Alan Clark (below) would barely rate a footnote in the history of the Conservative Party. He never became a Cabinet minister, even though he spent an inordinate amount of time plotting for promotion, and was furious at being overlooked. ‘Am I always to be thwarted? Surrounded by nincompoops and inadequates?’
In the 1980s, he dreamt that the then Secretary of State for Health, Kenneth Clarke, would be forced out, resulting in his own elevation. ‘But that could only happen if Clarke e has a nervous s breakdown — unlikely in one e so fat — or — perfectly possible at any time, he must make the Norwich Union wince — something “happens” to him. one mustn’t be uncharitable le (why not?) but this after all is the roughest game, at the roughest table.’
Alan Clark’s relative failure never stopped him from fantasising about becoming Prime Minister. In 1985, in the lowly position of Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Employment, he was approached by a comical, selfaggrandising figure called Sir Alfred Sherman, who boasted he could ‘steer him into’ Number 10 once Mrs Thatcher had left.
Clark toyed with the idea — ‘I could hardly not have been flattered.’ But all his scheming came to nothing: his two Prime Ministers, Mrs Thatcher and John Major, both considered him too unreliable for high office.
And with good reason: his hilarious diaries show him always acting on impulse. Not long after the death of his distinguished father, he informs a gathering that he died falling out of a tree.
‘ What mischievous impulse made me do this? . . . I did just manage to keep a straight face.’ In 1996, he tells a journalist he is travelling to Mexico ‘on behalf of the Prime Minister’, even though it isn’t true. ‘Extraordinary this weakness of mine — just as I thought I had it under control.’
Having just been appointed a junior minister, in 1983, he knocked back a series of expensive wines before being handed the text of a dreary speech to read out to the House.
‘As I started, the sheer odiousness of the text sank in.’
Sozzled, he began to read it in a satirical fashion, emphasising its cliches and clunky language, and whizzing through the boring parts. ‘Helter-skelter I galloped through the text. Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter?’
Before long, the opposition scented blood. one Labour MP asked him what the last paragraph meant. Then another, Clare Short (‘dark-haired and serious, with a lovely Brummie accent’), said that though MPs are not permitted to accuse fellow members of drunkenness, she believed he was incapable.
More and more MPs stood up to condemn him. It’s the stuff of other MPs’ MPs nightmares. nightm At this point, it dawned on Clark C that his ministerial career was set to t go down the pan, p almost before it got off the ground. MPs on his own side si sat in horrified ri silence, refusing re to help him, him while opp opposition MPs continued to voice their fury. ‘I sat, smiling weakly, my lips as dry as sandpaper.’
He was reckless in other areas, too, particularly extramarital affairs, notably with the wife of a South African judge and both of her daughters. Bored by a debate in the House of Commons, he spots an attractive blonde in the public gallery and goes upstairs to proposition her.
Even as his father was dying, he chatted up his carer: ‘She’s not pretty but is sexual.’
His comments on his fellow MPs — William Hague is ‘a shifty little bureaucrat’ and ‘jarringly ghastly’, Michael Heseltine ‘loathsome’ — reveal him as almost manically bitchy. ‘ There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water,’ he writes.
At one point, he even complains that Queen Elizabeth has ‘frumpish and ill-natured features’.
Hundreds of politicians, infinitely more solemn, more guarded, and more respectable, have published diaries.
But while theirs gather cobwebs in charity shops, Alan Clark’s continue to be read. And quite right, too: respectability is the scourge of art.