Supercad rides once again

Buy this book online at Amazon.co.uk

All memorial services are economical with the truth, but Alan Clark's attained a magnificent level of parsimony. The hymns, the readings, the noble words "... loyal ... committed ... devoted ... service..." echoed through the packed congregation of St Margaret's as the great statesman was celebrated in terms so fantastically deceitful as to suggest parody. As Wilde said of the death of Little Nell, one would have needed a heart of stone not to laugh.

A former Tory minister in the pew in front of mine leaned round and whispered: "I'm remembering a day I was ushering with Alan at some memorial bash here. Just before the service started, he bellowed in a voice that could be heard at the altar: "Tell me, old boy, have you ever f***ed a girl in a church?"

The consistent strands in Clark's life were that he added hugely to the gaiety of the nation, and sooner or later shafted everyone and every cause with which he was associated. Archie Hamilton, chairman of the 1922 Committee, observed furiously in the wake of some Clark outrage: "Why don't people understand that Alan's not pretending to be a shit? He's a real shit".

But he was also a vastly entertaining writer. His diaries of his years as a junior minister have granted him a kind of immortality. His contempt for the public, his colleagues, the jobs he was given, most of his friends and acquaintances inspired coruscating prose, along with his brilliant impersonation of Mr Toad as motorist and adulterer. Many of us suffer delusions of grandeur, but Alan's belief that he was about to be made Defence Secretary, even in a Thatcher government, was pretty special.

Yet once the Clark persona is established, as it was to such effect in the original Diaries, it becomes debatable how much further volumes can add to the effect. The latest instalment covers his years as a backbench MP. All the familiar ingredients are here - disdain for his constituents and the lower orders generally; alternate cynicism about the House of Commons and ecstasy when he got to hear the sound of his own voice, which he did as a super-jingo during the Falklands War; together with yearnings, often frustrated at this period apparently, for more sex.

Aficionados of Clark infidelities will relish such morsels as the tale of his paying off a threatening ex-mistress for £5,000. The diarist's scorn for the girl in the case seems to have been increased when he found that she could be dismissed so cheaply. There is lots of pitterpatter about expensive cars, meals, holidays, and of course a deluge of withering comments about colleagues. The weight of words devoted to the state of his own body argues a high narcissism. But he had no access to the corridors of power. He was merely an outsider occasionally peering hungrily into the Whitehall tent. His narrative tells us a lot about the boredom and frustration of being a backbench MP, but if we know these things already, precious little about government in general or that of Thatcher in particular. So beyond a certain point, why go on reading? Harold Nicolson's diaries are superb, because not only did he write wonderfully, his judgments on people were often very shrewd. Clark, like Chips Channon, possesses the narrative gift, but his judgment was dreadful, on small things as in great.

With Clark as with Chips, one is chiefly awed by the relentless revelations of the diarist's own awfulness. AC was a militant shop steward for the millionaires' union, devoted to keeping the world a safe place for rich four-letter men to live in. He possessed not the slightest grasp of real life in the late 20th century. Regret about the abolition of droit de seigneur and the right of feudal overlords to flog peasants may be comic, but it is hardly an interesting political philosophy.

Alan's foremost delusion was that he himself was a gent. He was happiest in the company of supercads like Jonathan Aitken or John Aspinall. There was no charity in him. He pronounced with peerless arrogance on matters of style and etiquette when he believed he saw others getting them wrong, yet he himself blundered across the social stage like a rhino on coke.

I love the passage in these Diaries describing an encounter with Tory MP Richard Needham: "... absolutely odious. He is really the Earl of Kilmorey, but so anxious to appear proletarian that he affects not to use his title and I actually heard him in the Tea Room boasting of having shot '18 pheasant', when even the most parvenu stockbroker is, or should be, taught at his first shoot to score the birds in brace".

Yes, well, quite. Good old Alan's obviously the man to know. The problem is that he doesn't. Even the most parvenu journalist is, or should be, taught at his first shoot that grouse and partridges are counted in brace, pheasants singly. Needham was right. Clark as usual was gloriously, serenely wrong. Who's the parvenu now, Alan?

Alan Clark's Diaries: Into Politics will also be available as an Orion audio book of four tapes, read by his son, James Clark, later this month.