The reactionary bohemian: Jeremy Clarke was one of a kind

A world without Jeremy Clarke is a glummer place. The author of this magazine’s Low Life column for 23 years, who died on Sunday morning, was a spirited writer of the old school. He loved a rollicking good time, a beautifully turned phrase, a good gossip, casting an observant eye over life’s absurdities, and England. He despised the hypocrisy of the progressive middle classes, big egos and TV boxsets.

He had quirkily conservative views, but friends of all classes and races, a deep knowledge of an unusual range of subjects, including rural matters, and a cheerful modesty that belied his talent as a writer.

I played a small part in his becoming a professional writer when I saw a hilarious piece he wrote in a London student magazine about a trip to Africa and gave him his first regular writing job as the Modern Manners columnist for Prospect magazine in 1995. That led to a column in the Independent on Sunday,and in 2000 he was pinched by Stuart Reid, deputy to Boris Johnson at The Spectator, to write Low Life, after the death of Jeffrey Bernard. (Sweetly, he always felt guilty about leaving me for the brighter lights of the Spec.) But, along with travel writing in the Telegraph, and later the Mail, and pieces in the Sunday Times, he briefly achieved his dream of earning a comfortable living as a writer.

It was a dream that began in the library of Jeremy’s sixth-form college in Southend. He had always been a bright boy with a love of words but neither Benfleet primary school nor his grammar school near Epping had inspired him academically. But that evening in the library a favourite English teacher, a raffish ex-journalist, happened to be standing behind him as he was surveying the books.