Faithful after his fashion

There is doubtless some passing pleasure to be had in making it into the Royal Enclosure or, failing that, the ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. But for those in political and media circles the last opportunity has passed for gaining immortality in the pages of the Pepys of our times now that the final volume of the Alan Clark diaries has been published. Part of the pleasure was the risk that inclusion entailed. A mention in the Alan Clark diaries is like playing Russian roulette with posterity.

One need only think of the late Peter Morrison who, thanks to Clark’s account, is now remembered as the man who slept when he was supposed to be running Margaret Thatcher’s leadership campaign. Ken Clarke is, it seems, destined to share a sentence with ‘pudgy puff-ball’. Other colleagues have suffered greater indignities. Such has Alan Clark’s reputation for quotability become that he has joined the likes of Oscar Wilde, F. E. Smith and Winston Churchill as a historical figure to whom aphorisms are attributed, even when they were uttered by someone else.

The tone of these final diaries, covering the last eight years of Clark’s life, is more introverted than past offerings, not least because between his departure from the government in 1992 and his triumphant return as the member for Kensington and Chelsea in 1997 he was unable to pass through the Pugin-designed doors marked ‘members only’. But the pen portraits, the quips, the appalling acts of rudeness, continue to sing from the page whenever an opportunity arises.

I saw a good deal of him during these last years. When I arrived as his research assistant in 1995, ‘AC’ not only let me live in the Garden House in the grounds of his castle but generously allowed me to stay on there afterwards when I was writing my own book.