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Last Diaries

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The first volume of Alan Clark's `Diaries' got him a lot of notice and publicity through their candour about his extra-marital affairs and their liberal use of four-letter words and longer words derived from them. He just lapped up publicity. He looked an utter spiv, and he remained to the end of his days, despite the most expensive English education, despite his brains and sensibility and despite his restless and hunted hyperactivity, an out-and-out vulgarian. He had what passed for ideas in the Conservative party of his time, and the second volume of his journal records what seems to have been for him the most significant event of his thwarted career, the downfall of his revered Margaret Thatcher. When it comes to this third and final volume what seemed to most of us a lot more significant than that, namely the apparent downfall of the Conservative party itself, rates barely a mention. Behind his disgusted and semi-despairing withdrawal from politics, and then the late against-the-odds revival of his career with its attendant illusory hopes and voices of encouragement, he was hearing from early in his seventh decade the sound of scything, until the shades of night, for years mocking and teasing, fell on him with one fast swoop. And that closing sequence is what this book is mainly about, not affairs either public or private.

As regards dalliances, there is only the tail-end (so to speak) of his final fling at the start of this book, his paramour's name disguised this time as `x'. The politics is largely a matter of selection-meetings and House of Commons small talk - as I've said the real tectonic shift (apparently, so far) in British politics represented by the landslide Labour victory in 1997 is passed over in a summary fashion. Clark himself had foreseen it. He even wished for it, seduced in the familiar way with the ambitious notion that the Tory edifice had to be rased in order to be raised again, and that he might be the man of the hour. The hour was already too late and he wasn't the man. His most attractive trait (for me anyway) as a public figure was his iconoclastic tendency to open his big mouth and say what might come into it in a fit of annoyance or just for the sake of seeing what might happen if he said it. At one point he said on the airwaves that the way to deal with insurrection in Ulster was to kill a few hundred people in one night, and that would put paid to the matter for 20 years, let the US or the UN say what they liked. I would not wish to be understood as thinking this opinion attractive in any way: Clark himself quietly refers later to its utter stupidity. However it gives some sort of idea of what made him an appealing figure to many, including those like myself whose opinions had little in common with his, who shared his frustration and disgust with machine politics and with mechanised thoughts and utterances on the part of politicians of any stripe.

To this extent the third volume of his journal would be unlikely to attract much notice, and indeed it is already obtainable at remaindered rates. It is a diary quite simply, not memoirs. However a real writer of real quality would write better than Clark does even under such restrictions. There are very few phrases that are particularly memorable. And there are some clangers too - he uses `passim' in what seems to be the sense of `pace' (sc `with the greatest respect to' or simply `despite'), and he uses it passim, sc repeatedly: the so-called second half of a pentameter has a syllable too many; and `coup royal' does not have a final `e'. What gives this book its fascination is the honest and touching account of a man's dying, recorded first by himself and later by his wife when he could no longer write over the final few days of his transition. In the earlier chapters he passes through the age I am now, and nobody will be surprised to learn that I compared notes to some extent, although I do not inflict the irrelevant details of my own status on readers of this notice. What I do suggest however is that younger purchasers of this book should retain it and reread it when they reach in their own lives the age it records.

As for the man himself, it was hard not to like him from a distance, although I suspect I might have found him a bore at close quarters. He only seemed radical or individualistic in the context of the dreary party he belonged to. His views were pretty run-of-the-mill among those of his economic background - no patience with issues such as education or hospitals, exasperation at maundering sermons on social conditions (I'll go along with him on that), grandiose perceptions about Britain's role, opposition to the European Union as being a `betrayal of our nationhood', a routine fascination with Churchill - I sense nothing much of interest or illumination in any of it. I also have no sympathy whatsoever for his feeble-minded moaning about a tide of scum rising, the law being structured against his like, and `class loathing'. This is just whinging, and not very percipient whinging either. The class loathing actually comes from his own side and the `class' he and his parvenu like don't really belong to. They represent indeed something that can coherently be called a `class', but what he is complaining about doesn't. On the one hand it is a culture of playing the system to obtain benefits; on the other it is a panem-et-circenses culture of football, unhealthy diets and binge-drinking; on neither showing do the participants have any interest in Clark's sidelined and passé class. The `modish sympathisers' may be modish and may indeed be a pain in the neck or elsewhere, but they are not really sympathisers, only a loose coalition of anti-conservatives. What I treasure his memory for is his large and occasionally over-active mouth, and far and away the most entertaining snippet in this book comes when he defends English yobs abroad taking up broken bottles and half-bricks in defence of the honour of the nation's football team and other aspects of our upstanding Britishness against the forces of European darkness represented by the police who try to keep them under control. He was a bit different, but the nation's destiny lost nothing through our failing to turn to him.