I’m spending this evening at a book reading with Ion Trewin, author of Alan Clark, The Biography, and wondered if you had read it and recommended it.
I did enjoy Edwina Currie’s review in The Times:
Alan Clark never stopped himself doing something stupid if he felt like it. Broke, but he fancied another classic Bentley? He bought it, even though that risked losing his beloved castle. A pretty girl returns his leer with a smile? He’d go trotting after, even though Jane would be in tears when the quarry started phoning home. Gossip about his boss? Chatter to the press when sworn to secrecy? Criticise the Government in public? Clark would commit all these sins, the flow almost unstoppable. Indeed, he ruefully quoted a fellow MP: “Don’t people understand that Alan’s not pretending to be a s***? He really is one.”
As a minister he was a disaster, both in public — he was famously accused by Clare Short of being drunk at the dispatch box; I was there, he was, and it was very funny — and in private, freely granting export licences for weapons to Iraq in contravention of UN and government embargoes and good sense. Clark blithely lied about his role to the Prime Minister, John Major, who was furious. That led to innocent businessmen finding themselves on trial in the Matrix Churchill affair. In so many ways Clark was a nasty piece of work.
I suspect I shall be unable to resist buying a copy at the excellent bookstore Topping’s in Ely.
I wonder what Alan would have made of today’s MPs’ expenses scandal and, if still an MP today, what he would have claimed for. He would have enjoyed a titter about Jacqui Smith’s husband and the porno video, that’s for sure.
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our Conservative MEPs at the Conservative Party Conference and picked up a new set of playing cards featuring members of the recently formed ECR group?