The Last Diaries (Tape): In and Out of the Wilderness

Such is the sheer vigour and perception on display here (not to mention the disarming candour--none of that famous "economy with the truth" in these unbuttoned pieces), that it's a considerable cause for regret that this is the last we will have from the late politician. In the great tradition of such diarists as Pepys, Clark delivers a fascinating picture of an era and his place in it. Just a few words of Clark on (for instance) Tony Benn displays Clark's from-the-hip observations: "His mind is so quick and versatile--but the loony prejudice just beneath the surface... the motivation that keeps him active." All those anodyne politicians' memoirs, which strove to be as unrevealing as possible, look even paler next to a document as forceful as this. Whether or not your name is in the index, this is absolutely fascinating reading from a flawed politician who nevertheless makes most of his colleagues--in and out of the Tory party--look uninspiring figures indeed. --Barry Forshaw

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.


Compelling reading and a tragic end   January 23, 2003
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

The wilderness years, with AC regretting his decision to leave parliament, and becoming an 'Outsider'
Then as he puts it "A right winger with a reputation for indiscretion and a lurid private life" returns triumphant to the house as MP for Kensington and Chelsea. Sadly cut off in his prime by his fatal illness, AC (and Jane's) journals for the period May to September 1999 are gut-wrenching.
A great book, even for those without a great interest in politics. Also interesting to read with the benefit of hindsight, with the current state of the Tory party.


A moving conclusion to an extraordinary series   October 28, 2002
N. H. Richardson
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

The third and final volume of the Clark diaries opens with Clark on the verge of standing down as an M.P., a decision he characteristically keeps from his local constituency until some three weeks before the general election. Almost immediately he regrets no longer being on the inside of politics - the delights of Saltwood, Eriboll and the "big book" (finally published as The Tories) are not enough, not does he seem able to find the time for themselves he has been promising Jane Clark for years - and he begins to plan his return. Calling on God, whom Clark acknowledges has been more than generous already, to assist, he is, despite the publication of the first volume of the Diaries and the fury of the Coven, Matrix Churchill and the Scott enquiry, returned at the age of 69 as the member for Kensington & Chelsea,that most desirable of seats. Encouraged by what Clark considers to have been nothing short of divine intervention, Clark wonders whether it might not be his final calling to assume the leadership and save the Tory party.

Readers of the earlier volumes will not be disappointed - the fast cars, the women, the money worries, the political gossip and insight are all here. And yet this is, perhaps, a more intimate and revealing volume. Clark's relationship with God and his sense of his own mortality (and Clark did not until the very end realise how little time he had) are much more evident. Indeed it is as if Clark was consciously bringing the reader more into his confidence. The entries for the summer of 1999 when Clark's illness is finally diagnosed, are genuinely moving and, when Clark is too ill to continue, Jane Clark provides her own diary of the final few weeks of his life.

Whatever may be remembered of Clark the historian and Clark the politician, Clark the diarist has provided an unforgettable contribution to our literature.