The Alan Clark Diaries

[PeterUK]

I'm currently reading the volume covering Clark's years in power in the Thatcher and John Major governments from 1983 to 1992. He stares out from the cover looking like the classic bounder. The diaries are very non-PC and very funny. He has the true diarist's gift of writing candidly and unselfconsciously. He also writes with surprising lyricism about the countryside. Here is a brief extract which made me laugh out loud. In October 1986 he went as Trade minister on a trip to Budapest and met a banker called Fekete at an embassy dinner. He writes:

'Fekete told me a wry tale of when (Janos) Kadar had invited him to join the Government as Finance Minister.
"Janos, you ought to know that I played a part, as a boy, in the '56 uprising. There may be papers on file, photographs."
"My dear fellow - what does that matter these days?"
"And also that my mother has Jewish blood..."
"Quite unimportant. Quite unimportant."
Kadar paused for a little while, stroking his chin, then, "What was that you were telling me about the '56?"'

I wonder why it is that the life of "a classic bounder" is so attractive when he is well-known (and dead) yet when confronted personally by the same behaviour in life, or on Forums such as this, the perpetrator is excoriated? Alan Clark's biography was reviewed in a recent New Statesman magazine (the sort of publication I imagine to be PeterUK's staple reading matter) and I quote one rather telling paragraph:

The author is helped by the man he is writing about being all of a piece. The politician who was "economical with the actualit├й" over arms in Iraq is recognisably the same character who invented a bit of dialogue in order to justify the title of his first (and best) work of non-fiction, The Donkeys (1961).

Come to think of it, the title The Donkeys sounds like the sort of book that could be written about PeterUK.

[piston10]

Gosh, the Colonel/Homintern is getting a bit clumsy and heavy-handed in second/third incarnation, isn't he? I reckon the last line of the post is what it is all really about.