Mrs, Thatcher's Minister (Alan Clark)

...Clark tends to imbue the physical world with all manner of mystical attributes...

...Like most satyriacs, Clark is sensitive to the point of neurasthenia and valetudinarian to the point of hypochondria—he has never smoked a cigarette and suffers, for some deep-seated psychological reason, from a sort of urological impotence that makes it impossible for The American Spectator October 1994 79 him to urinate in public restrooms...

...Clark's animosity toward the United States—and Americans of all stripes—seems profound...

...During a boating accident on the Danube, he writes, "I did manage a 'formal' thompson, one ranking for the extremis star along with the all time winner—under the trucks at Ascension Island...

...Icily I asked in what other Departments of State "is this kind of budgetary practice prevalent...

...Here is a Public Expenditure Survey in September 1983—the high tide of Thatcherism: Was finally goaded by Fred Bayliss, the Under Secretary, who appears to be our resident Chief Accountant...

...and some of his fellow cabinet ministers raise their worries about there being so many "jewboys" in the cabinet...

...She pursued me, screeching the revs to ignition cut-out, but locked brakes and overshot the right turn to the Albert Hall...

...And Clark's keen championing of the prerogatives of government in general—he criticizes Thatcher's most market-oriented adviser, David (Lord) Young, for being "a little too ready to 'devolve' to the private sector...

...She has very small feet and attractive—not bony—ankles in the 1940 style...

...Ah no, don't you see—"It's important to get as close as possible to last year's provision in order to have a firm base from which to argue for increases this year...

...Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...

...I was near a nervous breakdown...

...Or have I changed too much...

...One assumes that the English reviewers who have acclaimed this book an instant classic have done so for this kind of elegiac grace, far more than the cloakroom gossip or the dirty bits...

...But the footnotes are helpful...

...To which Steven Glover replied in the Evening Standard, "Who is she to speak this way...

...This is more an inference than an observation: it merely seems odd that Clark should so fastidiously record the minutiae of Bogota's airport or a dinner party in British Columbia and have so little to say about, for instance, Presidents Carter and Reagan, aside from gleefully recounting that Margaret Thatcher "was astonished at how stupid they were...

...For me, girls have to be succulent, and that really means under twenty-five...

...CI 80 The American Spectator October 1994...

...But . . . what is my life expectancy...

...She, and a tall, albino official at the State Department called Enders (whom Willie used to call "the White Rabbit") were adamantly, subversively pro-Galtieri during the Falklands crisis...

...He and some of his fellow Etonians speak explicitly and often about the need to get more people "of our sort" into positions of power...

...After a decade in Parliament, he joined Margaret Thatcher's government, first as minister of trade, later as minister of state for defense...

...Not surprisingly in a man of Clark's faith, timor mortis pounds through the narrative like the drums of Bongo-Bongo Land: In summer and late spring it becomes oppressive and fetid...

...While Clark's friends were quick to dismiss the blackmail element Armstrong raised, one of the daughters now lives with Sergei Kauzov, the former KGB agent who was married to the late Christina Onassis...

...The worst tears he weeps in the whole book come not when his father dies or after a particularly egregious betrayal of his wife, but when he shoots a heron that has been poaching fish from his castle moat: I cursed and blubbed up in my bedroom, as I changed into jeans and a T-shirt...

...At the end, as Clark goes gamely down with the Thatcherite ship, loneliness, bitterness, and political cynicism combine in pages and pages of eloquent political narrative, a tour de force to which no quoting could do justice...

...loathsome...

...the 1986 Westland military procurement scandal...

...They are fun to sit next to at dinner, but 1 don't want to get any closer...

...Trotted out the Party line, consequential sentences, no rationale at all...

...Thatcher's Minister...

...At the Princes Gate traffic lights out of Hyde Park I drew up beside a black BMW, driven by a blonde, registered ANY 1. I looked sideways and saw browner, thinner in the face, but still with "something," Andy Colquhoun...

...He was dry enough to refer to the Third World as "Bongo-Bongo Land," and wet enough to risk his entire political future to author a bill protecting baby seals...

...But if there is an impenetrability to Clark's book for Americans, it has less to do with his vocabulary or ethnic preferences than with something in the English national character...

...Clark also distinguished himself as a defender of British sovereignty against the encroachments of the European Community: The Lady is going to make a speech at Bruges on the occasion of some Euro-anniversary or other...

...Haldeman's diaries...

...If I spend two-thirds of that in London, or in the Constituency . . . what have I got left...

...He is, in fact, very fond of the word...

...Fifteen years...

...For lack of a better term, one could call it an unreconstructed ruralism, which in Clark's case is so pronounced as to verge on paganism...

...But the book is chock full of insights into the bureaucratic Darwinism of modern government...

...That's not a f---ing "shortfall" I thought, or at least not my idea of one...

...He mumbled along...

...All well and good, but there were apparently few women who were not in Clark's sights while he was minister...

...Yet if it had been a burglar or a vandal I wouldn't have given a toss...

...They even managed to delete a ritual obeisance to Churchill, his ideals, all that and substituted the name of [EC founding father Robert] Schuman...

...Odious, totally stalinist, humourless...

...Yesterday, at lunch time, I drove the [Rolls Royce] SS 100 still, forty years on, getting that wonderful evocative thrill as I settle into the driving seat and look down the long louvered bonnet...

...Really...

...Clark is better thought of as part of the High Tory contingent that rode like a remora on the liberal shark of Thatcherism...

...looks as if there is going to 78 The American Spectator October 1994 be a shortfall as our overall provision is £408 million and at present we are going to be [hard-pressed] to get expenditure over £335-360 million...

...He is obsessed with the physical world, above all with his physical performance, timing himself against other climbers when walking up a hill, figuring out how much sleep he can dispense with, counting the number of lovers he can have in a day...

...Of his first meeting with Margaret Thatcher, he writes, "I radiated protective feelings—and, indeed, feelings of another kind(s...

...the Gulf War...

...THATCHER'S MINISTER: THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF ALAN CLARK Alan Clark Farrar, Straus & Giroux/421 pages/ $35 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL A lan Clark is the son of the British art historian Kenneth Clark (author of Civilisation), heir to a nine-figure textile fortune that dates to the last century, and author of several well-received military histories, chief among them Barbarossa, an account of the Russo-German conflict in World War II...

...not seeing that this can cheapen the responsibilities of Government in more than one sense"—will be anathema to the American right...

...Last May, News of the World broke the story that three of the women Clark boasts of bedding in this volume—"the coven," he calls them—were actually the wife of an expatriate English judge, and her two daughters...

...It's human beings that are the vermin...

...These are areas where high Toryism is at one with the sensible classical liberalism that passes for American conservatism...

...His biggest fright in the book comes not on any of the numerous occasions when he fears he has lost his job, but on one when he fears he has lost his dog...

...He not only makes loving reference to his bowel movements (in family slang, as "thompsons") but actually ranks them...

...That Clark is, to say the least, more inclined than Haldeman to filter public events through the lens of personal interest causes more trouble, and the hermetic dialect of Clark's own class, combined with a blizzard of terms of art from British parliamentary politics, will ultimately bury the American reader...

...Look, Fred, Ministers in this Department are members of a Government which is dedicated to—whose raison d'être, you could say, is—the reduction of public expenditure...

...That Clark was able to deflect the inquiry with an off-the-cuff remark about all of them having married into grand Scottish families does not change the fact that of all the dozens of ministers who moved in and out of the endlessly reshuffled Thatcher governments, Clark is by far the one whose intimate thoughts one would most like to read...

...But that was nothing as compared to the miniature class war that was launched when Clark's long-suffering wife told a journalist: "Quite frankly, if you bed people I call 'below-stairs class' they go to the papers, don't they...

...Can they really dispose of all that power?'" And here is Clark describing a meeting with U.S...

...But where was she...

...Immediately began "putting it away...

...I spring in my step, look at girls, like laughs and fresh ideas...

...I am not in the slightest degree aroused by 'the older woman,'" he writes, drifting toward his seventieth birthday...

...Finally she appeared, a mixture between Irene Worth and Eleanor Roosevelt...

...At what stage does one's reserve of years change from being inexhaustible—of no concern or consequence—into a rapidly diminishing triangle of sand at the neck of the glass, which is scrutinised obsessively...

...On the contrary, he quickly established himself as a sort of Westminster wildman...

...ambassadors Jeane Kirkpatrick and Thomas Enders in the aftermath of the Falklands War: I was curious to meet this Anglophobe harridan...

...MRS...

...Had Andy recognised me...

...She is the daughter of a Colonel Beuttler, whose name does not figure in any edition of Burke's Landed Gentry that I can find...

...The line is, she's so clever, she's an academic really, all that s...

...He presented himself blind drunk at his first ministerial appearance before Parliament, and played a still-not-fully-divulged role in the Matrix Churchill affair, which involved the connivance of British government officials in selling a "supergun" to Saddam Hussein...

...Even those who have watched British politics closely for the past decade will find it hard to make sense of Clark's clipped descriptions, which make the same assumption of readerly omniscience as H.R...

...While he could lay claim for a while to being one of Thatcher's mid-level favorites, Clark was hardly—as the bizarre title for the American edition of his diaries would have it—"Mrs...

...S hould Clark be applauded for his indomitability or rebuked for his turpitude...

...Surely it's a matter for congratulation...

...Clark complains on more than one occasion about "the democratic overhead," which, if I'm not mistranslating, is a reference to the cost of underwriting the public's belief that they have a say in their government, to the end of making certain they have none...

...the 1990 abandonment of Thatcher by her own party...

...But they are only chance affinities, and conditional ones at that...

...All of them," they shouted triumphantly...

...I get sudden, intermittent—like twinges of pain—realisations of how old I am becoming...

...In Clark's first days in the Thatcher government, cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong called him into his office to ask about "certain matters of personal conduct that could leave you open to blackmail...

...The Eurocreeps have written for her a really loathsome text, wallowing in rejection of our own national identity...

...General laughter, of a tee-hee kind...

...As the lights went amber the faithful SS, always unbeatable for the first fifty feet of a standing start, yelped the racing diamond tread of its 18-inch wheels, and was off—the BM [sic] was nowhere...

...Clark claims to have twenty-eight/ n the time he was able to spare from his amorous adventures, Clark had a ringside seat at all of the British political milestones of the last decade: the 1984 miners' strike...

...Effectively—five...

...Of the photos he reproduces in the book, two are of his dog, and most of the remainder of his various houses, castles, and cars...