Diary – 10 October 2009

Alan Clark will always have a special place in my heart. He remains the only person ever to sue me for libel. I still occasionally have a nightmare in which he is personally cross-examining me in the witness box and the court is erupting in laughter at his sneering sallies and my flustered answers. What happened was that, in the course of a rather turgid article in the TLS about the Tories’ prospects (it was 1996 and they were dismal), I remarked that Mr Alan Clark was ‘colourful certainly, endearing possibly but not exactly a man of bottom’. Alan erupted, claiming that I had accused him of financial dishonesty and linked him to the Tory MPs who were being skewered for sleaze at the time. I pointed out that he himself was not then an MP and that ‘lacking bottom’ meant every sort of unreliability except financial. I grovelled to him in print, I grovelled over the telephone. No good. ‘See you in court’, he drawled — his last words to me, and a fitting epitaph for someone so incurably litigious.

In the event he wearied of the sport — he was just about to land the nomination for Kensington and Chelsea to everyone’s shock. We paid a modest sum to the charity of his choice, and the nation was denied the snorter of a libel case — ‘Clark says “I am man of bottom”.’ Soon after his death, the final volume of his diaries came out, and I scurried to the index. Not a mention, not even a footnote. Last week, when Ion Trewin’s life of Clark appeared in our Waterstone’s, I scurried once more. Again, not a word. The case of Rt Hon Alan Clark vs Times Newspapers and Another might never have been. The episode which had caused me so much anguish was no more than a speck on his lapel.