The PM made a point of seeking me out in the pre-drinks throng before the meal. She thanked me for my help, said she was going to press ahead with the Bruges notes virtually unchanged, in spite of FCO complaints. [...] ‘You and I agree on this, but Douglas Hurd is completely committed.’
‘Bugger Douglas Hurd,’ I said. ‘He’s only the Home Secretary.’
She looked away with that lovely, distant smile she puts on when I ‘go too far’. (16 September 1988)
Perhaps you may remember Alan Clark, son of the art historian Sir Kenneth. Conservative MP for Plymouth (Sutton), for whose inhabitants he reveals a deep loathing, he served in Mrs Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. These Diaries cover that period, from his promotion to ‘Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Employment’, in June 1983, via three years as Minister of Trade, to his apotheosis as Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence. I have had this copy of his Diaries since shortly after their publication in 1993 but it’s only really now, as Britain faces an ever-longer stint of Tory government, that I have felt the urge to read it.
(AC in 1993; from here)
Clark, or AC as he refers to himself, is less than overjoyed by his first appointment in the Department of Employment and he is poorly suited to it. He is contemptuous of the unemployed and indeed struggles to imagine the lives of those below him on the social scale:
I went on a ministerial visit to Wrexham. A pretty, peaceful town, with the sun shining. How fortunate are the contented bourgeoisie in such places – or are they too racked by pressures and frustrations? They certainly didn’t look it. (24 April 1985)
His work (the ‘boxes’) is boring and voluminous. His personal private secretary, Jenny, hates him. Almost his first duty in the Commons is to put through an Order on Equal Pay. Alas! The Order is to be put through after ten o’clock in the evening, and AC pops out for a wine-tasting beforehand and gets sozzled. He stands up in the Commons with the text of his Order in hand:
As I started, the sheer odiousness of the text sank in.[...] I found myself dwelling on, implicitly, it could be said, sneering at, the more cumbrous and unintelligible passages. Elaine Keller-Bowman, who has a very squeaky voice, squeaked, kept squeaking at me, ‘Speed up!’ [...] I did speed up. I gabbled. [...] Sometimes I turned over two pages at once, sometimes three. What did it matter? There was no shape to it.
Challenged over what the last paragraph ‘means’ (‘How the hell did I know what it meant?’ complains AC to his diary), things quickly fall apart. It seems that one MP may not accuse another of being drunk, but Clare Short accuses him of disrespect to the House. AC isn’t sacked over this and is careful not to repeat his mistake, but although he does go on to become a minister he never really achieves the heights that he at least considers himself capable of reaching. Perhaps, if he had, we might not be reading his diaries. In any case, it’s an incident that encapsulates a lot about AC: his appreciation of the fine things in life, his refusal to kowtow and his staggering arrogance.
The entries included in this volume are mainly, of course, concerned with politics. AC is on the right wing of the party; he is gossipy, ambitious, intermittently deceitful and back-stabbing.
One should not take pleasure in the discomfiture of colleagues, I suppose. But without question it is one of the more agreeable bonuses of the sport of politics. (1 February 1990)
He complains and complains about his ministerial work and yet he cannot resist the lure of power. He characterises Tories as ‘mulishly vindictive’ (19 September 1990) and the party that we see through his eyes is factional, power-hungry and treacherous. Mrs T’s greatest threat was always from her colleagues rather than from the Opposition, and of course they do get her in the end. The section of the Diaries that covers her fall from power is pretty exciting, even when you know what’s coming. AC sees himself and a few friends as her ‘Praetorian Guard’; he refers to her occasionally as the PM but mostly as The Lady. He seeks her attention and favour; he deplores her rages and indecisiveness; he notes how she wept when the first casualties of the Falklands were announced. There is a quantity of plotting and lamenting and hating of Michael Heseltine. How AC hated Heseltine!
The cod-chivalry of calling Mrs T ‘The Lady’ is very much of a piece with a rather romantic and nostalgic outlook on life which regrets the decline of the upper classes. How few of them now walk the corridors of power! How poorly educated most people are! How expensive ‘staff’ are these days! AC was a multi-millionaire who lived in a castle (Saltwood, in Kent), yet he constantly moans about his poor finances. In May 1990 he writes:
Poor darling Jane drained and cleaned the pool herself yesterday. Of course she felt utterly exhausted.
I am afraid at this point (as at others) I guffawed unfeelingly. The reason his wife had to clean their own swimming pool is because their 78-year-old man William was too ill to do it for her. Only a couple of weeks earlier AC had noted that he had won £1000 off someone at backgammon...
(AC was a collector of cars; from here)
Of course it is easy to sneer at elements of AC’s character and it’s to his credit that he retained unflattering whinges like this in the published version of his diaries. (If, of course, he recognised them as unflattering whinges...) The flip side, the attractive side, of his romanticism is his love of nature and beauty. He writes an amazing piece about how he becomes enraged by the repeated theft of his fish by a heron, runs out one day and shoots the bird, and then weeps with remorse at having destroyed something so wild and lovely.
He includes an anecdote about a charitable evening to support the Friends of Charleston:
Bloomsbury evening at Saltwood. We entertained the ‘Friends of Charleston’. I don’t know what they charged for tickets, but I hope they made money. [...]
I made a little speech of welcome, fraudulently and bogusly referring to my father’s death as ‘falling from a tree’. What mischievous impulse made me do this? [...]
Olivier Popham [mistress of the artist Graham Bell] materialised; benign and knowledgeable. I remember her, just, at Portland Place. Very sleek and dark like a young seal. She asked to see Graham’s pictures, and chided me gently for selling her portrait which he had painted in 1939, in the great Death Duties sale. I could hardly say, ‘I thought you were dead.’ (21 October 1990)
It’s an interesting experience, reading the diaries of someone who is so utterly alien to oneself in terms of outlook and experience. I finished them aware of AC’s good qualities as I had not been before, but not wildly fond of him. He could be downright nasty (and why did he hate overweight people so much?). Still, politics can be stodgy fare and bitchy as his diaries often may be, there is no denying that they are generally perceptive and entertaining, very much worth reading for a glimpse of government behind the scenes.