I’ve lost the love of my life
In a deeply moving interview, Ken Clarke talks for the first time about the death of his wife Gillian, their 51 years of blissful marriage – and how he’s coping with being on his own
EVERYONE — apart, perhaps, from spin doctors and the bolshy British Medical Association — seems to love Ken ‘the Big Beast’ Clarke. He is the arch-lord of misrule, the untameable king of brown- suede shoes, red wine, cigars and gigantic lunches — and he was the first man brave enough to tell Margaret Thatcher it was time to step down.
His political career spans more than half a century — including 46 years as Conservative MP for Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire — and will end when he steps down after the next general election.
As Chancellor, Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor, Justice Secretary, Education Secretary, Health Secretary and latterly, Minister without Portfolio, he’s had his fingers in more political pies than anyone else in government in modern times.
All of which explains why, earlier this year, he was paid £430,000 (a record for a politician who hasn’t been PM) for his ‘Great Gatsby’ political memoirs, dictated daily, late at night, over the years, at his Nottingham home. Done so, he tells me, in a brandy and cigar-fugged stream of consciousness.
They include lots about the Thatcher Years and how she wept when she lost power. And about the rows behind the scenes on Black Wednesday, when sterling’s collapse bumped the UK out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism, fore-runner of the euro. About his three failed bids to become Conservative leader (‘no one can accuse me of not trying’) and David Cameron’s bizarre control-freakish behaviour. But surprisingly little about Ken himself.
‘I’m the least clammed-up person you could meet when it comes to confrontation and promulgating my view,’ he says. ‘But despite all the efforts of my literary agent and publishers, I’m the most clammed up about my private life — I just don’t discuss it.’
Then Ken, 76, proceeds to chat for an hour and a half about everything and anything: mostly how he has coped with becoming a widower last summer after 51 years of marriage, but also his burning passions for jazz, birdwatching, football and Romanesque church architecture.
We touch on his worries about impending retirement (‘you’ve got to plan it, you can’t just suddenly retire or you’ll end up just watching ridiculous amounts of cricket’); the inevitability of death (‘when you’re my age, you’re practically doomed’); his worrying tendency to make decisions too quickly; and the vast quantities of food and booze it takes to maintain his wonderfully florid face and comfortable girth.
‘I’m not nearly as fat in person as I appear in the cartoons, but I can’t remember how much I weigh,’ he says. ‘And I’m a great believer that if you’re going to get overweight, you should do it on decent quality food.’
Which, for him, involves eating out most days — three-course lunches, gastronomic feasts hosted by the many dining clubs of which he’s a member, chicken kormas in his local curry house, pig-outs at the Garrick Club in London (‘I just don’t get to the Garrick enough!’).
And, when he’s at home in Nottingham, pub lunches and pork pies from the local delicatessen (‘I try to avoid bad stuff’).
Not forgetting the booze, of course: red wine, ideally a robust Malbec or Rioja (‘As I’m getting older, the nuances of the finest claret are quite lost on me’), white wine, pints and calvados brandy.
‘Alcohol’s always been a pleasure for me,’ he says.
‘I know that if you live alone, you have to be careful about not drinking on your own, but I’m a gregarious person and it livens up chatting with friends.’ He doesn’t give a fig about the health risks.
‘The dangers for me from alcohol are now nil. I think by now I know how to reap the benefits,’ he says. ‘I’ve been drinking ever since I was at school and looked old enough to fool a blind barman.’
He says that he has not had a day without a drink since.
‘Not ever, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘I don’t drink as much as I did, but I don’t follow the limits laid down by these ever more puritanical health advisers any more than anyone else does.’ He also smokes cigars enthusiastically; little ones during the day ‘to keep the cost down’, topped off by ‘one decent one’ late at night, with a glass of brandy.
The irony is not lost on him that he outlived his clean-living and devoutly religious (‘Anglican high church — all smells and bells’) wife.
‘I never even saw her remotely tipsy, let alone drunk,’ he says. ‘If there was any justice in this world, she would obviously have outlived me.’
Ken and Gillian met as Cambridge undergraduates in the early Sixties. She was an academic; he a very bright, working-class ex-grammarschool boy from Nottinghamshire who’d wanted to be Prime Minister since he was seven and hung out with fellow students Norman Fowler, Michael Howard and Norman Lamont, who all went on to become Tory ministers.
‘She was the love of my life and kept me in touch with reality. She gave me security, a home, a life away from politics,’ he says. Her death left him reeling and he has been searching for what he calls ‘my normality’ ever since. Not, he insists, by weeping, or ‘sitting at home just festering and gazing out of the window’, but by keeping busy.
‘Losing Gillian was the biggest, most dramatic thing in my life — outside politics, that is — but I long ago came to terms with the fact that death is one of those things that just happens. You have to somehow get on with your life, knowing perfectly well that eventually you’re going to fall off your perch yourself.’
While she took comfort from her faith, he doesn’t share it. So it was work that saved him.
He nearly didn’t stand for his Rushcliffe seat in the last general election because Gillian was so ill at the time — after a ten-year, on-andoff battle with cancer, her lymphoma had reappeared with a vengeance.
‘Gillian gave me security, a home, a life away from politics’
In the event, their trip to the polling booth in June 2015 was their last. She was gravely ill and, when he got home early from the count, he had to rush her into hospital.
‘She never came out,’ he says, all quiet and pink and muttery. ‘She’s gone. There’s no sense she’s still around. None. But I’ve got lots of photos and fond memories. She was always there for me.’
It can’t have been easy for her being married to a politician, constantly hurtling between Nottingham and London, living in the public eye, and subject to endless scrutiny — particularly an MP who exhibited such extraordinary joie de vivre.
Her answer was to immerse herself in her children, quilting and charity work.
Politics dominated everything. Their wedding, in 1964, was scheduled to fit around his failed candidacy for Mansfield in Nottinghamshire, their honeymoon (a weekend in Paris) was delayed for six months due to work.
‘She made everything possible,’ he says quietly. ‘ But she wasn’t a swooning, adoring fan. She’d tick me off if anything went wrong, though she gave up on my lifestyle a long time ago!’
He admits he was no great romantic hero.
He never bought flowers and instead wooed her with trips to the pub and the occasional disco, but at least he had the grace to be irritated when Norman Fowler flirted constantly with her at his 21st birthday party. ‘He didn’t get anywhere!’ Ken didn’t even propose — ‘ we just sort of went on until we got married’ — and can’t remember an engagement ring.
‘I think she eventually wore her mother’s, or something . . .’ As his career took off — first as a barrister and then, from 1970, as MP for Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire and eternal Cabinet member and Europhile — she abandoned academia to support him and raise their two children, Susan and Ken.
‘I don’t know why I named him Ken — it was after my father, who’s also Ken, but it’s a bit of a nuisance to have the same name — so we’re ‘Young Ken’ and ‘Old Ken’.
Meanwhile, ‘Old Ken’ and Gillian couldn’t have been more different.
Whereas he was always calm, thick- skinned and dogged in his determination not to toe the party (or indeed any) line, his wife was private, loyal, protective and ‘somewhat oversensitive’.
She once phoned the BBC to complain when comedian Jeremy Hardy made a particularly nasty joke at Ken’s expense.
And she was outraged when the Blairs’ lackeys hounded her out of No. 11 Downing Street (where Clarke had lived as Tory Chancellor) the morning after the 1997 election so Cherie Blair could inspect it in case she preferred it to Number 10. ‘Gillian couldn’t believe they ripped out a perfectly good kitchen.’ But she and Ken adored one another, drove all over the country together to her quilting exhibitions, had long phone conversations whenever they were apart and delighted in vanishing for a month at a time to pursue their tandem hobbies — he scouring the skies for eagles and she ‘upside down in a ditch looking for wild flowers’.
They really did vanish. Ken favoured hotels without phones, so that no one could bother them.
Even today he hates to be bothered — at home, work or the Garrick, especially when he’s listening to his jazz albums.
‘It is extremely rare for me to pick a phone up at all,’ he says. ‘Unlike most people, if a phone is ringing, I don’t feel the need to answer it.
‘It always stops after a minute or so anyway.’
He has no computer, iPad or smartphone — just a small Nokia phone which he never turns on because whenever he does, ‘people keep ringing’.
He doesn’t use an alarm clock, either, just waking up naturally.
‘I did briefly have a laptop about five or six years ago,’ he says. ‘I even had a BlackBerry when David [Cameron] got me back on the front bench.’ But he handed them back after about six months.
‘They were very useful for the cricket scores but I couldn’t really
‘I’ve not gone a single day without a drink since school’
see any other serious purpose.’ But what about all the documents he has to read, the emails, the letters?
‘Oh, someone downloads thousands of emails, works out which ones I’d want to read — which are generally all my constituents’ ones and anything from anyone I know — prints them off and brings them round,’ he says.
He must be drowning in paper. ‘I do run my desks on a deep litter system,’ he says cheerily, and adds that he also dictates all his correspondence to two secretaries who take everything down in shorthand.
‘They’re old-fashioned methods, but if you’ve got the right people, you can run an office very efficiently using them,’ he insists. ‘It’s too late to change the habits of a life-time and be bothered with all this technology. I’m a public relations man’s nightmare. I don’t do scripted nonsense. I won’t repeat the same slogans over and over. I’m not a wind-up, little talking clock.’
MANY say a recent major gaffe gave Theresa May the boost she needed to become Tory leader. The clip of him on Sky News caught off-air this summer, gossiping with colleague Sir Malcolm Rifkind about the Tory leadership ‘fiasco’ after David Cameron had resigned, went viral.
Unaware he was being filmed, Clarke dismissed Michael Gove as a warmonger, Boris Johnson as ‘ ridiculous’ and described May ‘ a bloody difficult woman . . . but good’.
‘Malcolm and I are a couple of old sweats and to be caught out like that . . . ’ he says today. ‘My office was mortified. How stupid.’ Was it deliberate?
‘No . . . I’d have combed my hair first if I’d done it on purpose.’
He did look fantastically dishevelled, though. Almost as if . . .
‘ . . . I’d come out of the pub late at night? Yes, I was assured I did!’ he says.
And then he launches into a lot of detail about how it was early in the morning, he was late, he couldn’t run because he’s lame from an arthritic ankle (‘a damn nuisance’), and so he missed hair and makeup, which is why he looked so red and blotchy. ‘ That is my explanation,’ he insists firmly. He’s always looked a bit of a friendly shambles with his big, pink, round face, crumpled suit and scuffed brown shoes, made by Northampton firm Crockett & Jones — that is, they are not, as usually claimed, Hush Puppies.
‘I am advised that wearing brown shoes with a suit is not in the finest of taste, but I imitated [former Chancellor] Geoffrey Howe when he had a brief phase of wearing them, and I decided to carry on when people were rude.’
Back in the Thatcher days, one brave (or foolish) adviser suggested he should have ‘a bit of a make-over’.
‘I could have wound up with a Grecian hairstyle!’ he squawks. ‘You’ll not be surprised to know I treated the whole thing with total derision. I mean, what the hell was the point? We all know politicians who suddenly start wandering around like juvenile film leads . . . ’
Could he be thinking of George Osborne, who, after piling on weight, then embraced the 5:2 diet and got himself a new eyecatching haircut?
‘Ha ha ha! I wasn’t going to mention that. George obviously took the whole thing frightfully seriously,’ he says. But Ken points out that Osborne wasn’t the only Chancellor to balloon on the job.
‘It’s all lunches and dinners,’ he says happily. ‘Nigel Lawson, Norman Lamont and I all became grotesquely fat during our time.’
Today, he’s plump rather than fat and rather rheumy-eyed, but still looks amazing for 76 — and the fact he’s never exercised or dieted. ‘The amount I eat has always depended on the quality — and Gillian was an exceptional cook. She would make meals at home at least as good as any London restaurant.’ Sadly, no longer.
The span of Ken’s political career is extraordinary.
He went into politics campaigning for Britain to join the EU, and as Britain exits, so will he from public life.
Not because he thinks he’s remotely past it or has lost any enthusiasm, but because he wants to go before friends ‘start dropping hints’.
Wonderful, wonderful Ken Clarke. What a treat. When he does eventually retire, the political world will be paler, blander, slighter — and much, much less fun.
Kind Of Blue, A Political Memoir, by Ken Clarke is published by Macmillan, price £25.