DIARIES: Into Politics

Alan Clark

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, #20

BY the time of his death in 1999, Alan Clark had been keeping diaries for almost five decades. The first volume was not published until 1993, but when it arrived it did so on the dessert trolley.

After the stale fare of umpteen dull political memoirs came this mouth-watering concoction of sex and sniping which exposed Westminster, during 1983-1991, at its glorious worst.

Now, after a seven-year wait, the second helping of Clark flambe, covering 1972-82, has arrived. Those who dig in their spoons will find all the familiar ingredients of the first volume - hypochondria, backgammon, girls, dogs, fast cars, and insults - yet somehow it is not as satisfying, and parts of it even leave a nasty aftertaste.

Clark was born into money - the family wealth came from Clark's Cotton Thread in Paisley - and he followed the trail of privilege into Eton, Oxford, the RAF, and on to the Bar. He had been trying for a safe seat from the late 1960s but didn't land one until 1972, the same year in which his father, Lord Clark, gave him Saltwood Castle in Kent.

By the time this volume begins

he is a man with everything - wealth, two sons, a devoted wife, and ambition.

Gaining office should have been a walk in St James's Park, but he wasn't to become a minister until 1986. Before then, as these diaries reveal, he was frequently in despair, wondering if the game was worth it. His constituency association in Plymouth Sutton irritate him with their demands for visits, elections are a gut-wrenching chore, and constituents waiting to see him are ''mendicants''. Thoughts of resigning begin to surface by 1975.

It is around this time that he begins to flirt with standing for the National Front. Of two NF members who visit his surgery, he writes: ''I thought how good they were, and how brave is the minority, in a once great country, who still keep alive the tribal essence.'' At one point he watches the film Cabaret before going to bed, enjoying ''that wonderful uplifting scene in the beer garden when the young SA boy leads the singing of Tomorrow Belongs to Me''.

One might laugh at such outrageousness, just as many gasped and smiled guiltily at his description of an African country in the first volume as Bongo Bongo Land, and yet, in these post-Stephen Lawrence days, I don't imagine many readers finding this racist bilge amusing

any more.

If he is a man out of time on race, he is antediluvian when it comes to ''birds and birdettes''. It is difficult to read about his visit to a girls' school, after which he confesses to nearly having a wet dream about a pupil, ''playing around with her and get-ting increasingly 'hot''', without wanting to have a shower - hot, not cold - afterwards.

He loved Jane, his ''sweet, loyal'' wife, and he adored girls. Other women - such as the journalist who skewered his vanity by asking how old he was - were not so lovable.

And then there was ''The Lady'', Margaret Thatcher, a different breed altogether. She bewitches him with her ''Eva Peron'' beauty, but he was not above disloyalty to his queen, pondering, in his darkest hours, whether he wouldn't progress further if she were evicted.

The ''coven'' - the judge's wife and two daughters with whom he had an on-off relationship - make their debut here, but anyone looking for a boy's own tale of rumpy-pumpy

with the below-stairs classes will

be disappointed. ''I do not under

any circumstances discuss my relations with the ladies,'' Clark tells

his diary. ''I am a gentleman, not

a hairdresser.''

For a gossip, his lack of candour can be infuriating at times. One girlfriend - unnamed, of course - puts the squeeze on him for #5000. There's a panic to pay her off, during which he is ably assisted by a certain Jonathan Aitken, but almost as soon as the drama begins the curtain falls and we are none the wiser as to what it was all about.

It is the same with the fall of Heath and the rise of Thatcher, of which there are no mentions. Clark is too busy with his own history to bother with anyone else's. He lives for the Commons, padding elegantly through its corridors, taking verbal swipes at the big beasts and purring over others.

Thus John Major is a ''toad''; Margaret Beckett is ''sexy little Miss Horseface''; Leon Brittan is ''loathsome, oily'', Scotland and Wales are ''wanky little principalities'', etc, etc.

It's all diverting stuff, but we have been here before in much more interesting times. Clark's diaries as

a Minister are unmissable; these frustrated musings of a playboy backbencher are not. Every old

dog has his day, and Mr Clark,

and his diaries, appear to have

had theirs.

Alison Rowat