The Alan Clark Diaries by Alan Clark

I don’t know where to begin describing Alan Clark’s diaries except to say that the three volumes of them, spanning 1977 to 1999, kept me utterly absorbed for a couple of weeks. Alan Clark was the son of Kenneth Clark the historian who wrote Civilisation. He graduated from the bar and was a historian himself, with a dozen or more books to his credit, but he is best known as the flamboyant member of parliament for the Conservative party in England. He was ego-centric, selfish, colourful, charming, highly intelligent, a spendthrift, a pants man and extremely right wing. At the same time, he has a certain charm about him that I imagine made him irresistible to a certain kind of woman. The diaries are a fascinating and compelling account of both his lurid private life and his years as a parliamentarian. There were slabs of the politics that I simply didn’t understand, being both too young and an Australian, but there were many references and people I did recognize. Most of his service was under Thatcher, whom he adored, and later John Major. The Falklands and Gulf Wars are discussed, but most of the political talk is about the back room deals, old boys clubs, betrayals and secret agreements that are the staples of political life. Watching the Tories collapse through Clark’s eyes is absolutely fascinating. He adores his family and the diaries also give an insight into the life of the British upper classes, not titled, but loaded – he was worth something like twenty million but always broke because of his obsessive car collecting and the properties he had to maintain: Saltwood Castle in Kent, an estate in Scotland, a chalet in Switzerland and his digs in London. His uncensored commentary on the royal family had me in stitches – he loathed them! Despite the fact that he was an unabashed philanderer – he maintained relations with two daughters and a mother, seemingly all at the one time – he is devoted to his long suffering wife Jane, whom he wooed from the age of fourteen and married at the age of sixteen (he was thirty!!!) He is also devoted to his animals, who figure larger than human beings in the diaries and whom he makes no bones about preferring to people. I knew of course that he had died but wasn’t expecting to be so affected by his last diary entries, written on his death bed, which had me sobbing. I suppose that’s because it was real: this is no piece of fiction, it’s the innermost thoughts of a real person and when you read that he’s dying, he actually is. These diaries had me frantically fact checking and googling more and more information about the people and events and places that I came across as I read. Reading them has been an incredible experience and I’ve come away feeling that, love him or hate him or just watching him with a mixture of shock and admiration, I’ve been invited into this man’s life.