IF I’m honest, I’m not sure I much liked George Leo John Lucas, the subject of Radio 4’s Archive on 4 last Saturday night. A civil servant who died at the age of 88 in 2014, he kept diaries (some 60 volumes) from 1948 through to the 21st century. The man who emerged from their pages was rather stuffy, quite snobbish and very conservative.

And yet this was a fascinating slice of social history. Because Lucas was a gay man in whose obsessively honest writing one can see the story of queer Britain in the years between the Second World War and the hopefully more enlightened present. Mark Gatiss was our guide through the diaries which recorded Mr Lucas’s quest for companionship and sexual fulfilment in public toilets and parks late at night. For those who consider the subject sordid, well, so, quite often, did Mr Lucas. But he felt compelled to record his encounters and thoughts anyway.

The result was a self-portrait of a man who could be easily dismissed as “Pooterish”. (When the Beatles emerge in the early 1960s it’s quickly clear he’s not a fan: “There’s little good in all this adolescent nonsense.”)

And yet there was a deep stain of melancholy here too. Brought up in the Catholic faith, Lucas was a man who clearly struggled with his sexuality, not helped in his younger years by the taunts of his viciously homophobic parents: “My mother in a savage humour and, asking me as I shaved, why I didn’t draw the razor across my throat and end it.”

Mr Lucas’s diaries are an archive of desire but also a timeline of social change, some of which he wasn’t able to partake in. Writing in 1969 about the legalisation of homosexuality two years before he presents an image of a man locked out in the cold.

“I am like someone who has longed to taste the sweet fruits of some orchard but found the gates locked and keepers patrolling so it was only windfalls that came his way, so delicious sweet that he would sometimes dare dogs and keepers and poised perilously on the orchard wall reach in and grasp some apple or plum from the nearest trees.

But at last after years of squabble and contention the orchard is thrown open and he passes through the gates to find the trees dying, strangled in mistletoe and ivy, the fruits few, crabbed and sour, or else succulent enough, ripe and exuding juice but almost tasteless. All the old remembered tang and sweetness gone.”

Beautiful writing. And as read by Gatiss over a soundbed of Marmalade’s Reflections of My Life, beautiful radio too.

In other news it’s the last days of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. We are well rid of the lying incompetent charlatan. Not that his lying incompetence was given much time in Boris, Radio 4’s summary of his political life broadcast last Saturday. Not so surprising given that two of the three voices judging him were a journalist from the Spectator and Jacob Rees-Mogg. He got Brexit done, they kept saying. Really? Tell the people of Northern Ireland that.

Former Tory MP Rory Stewart had a more reliable verdict on Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday morning. “He has an extraordinary ego and he believes he was badly treated,” Stewart said of Johnson. “He doesn’t see the reality, which is that he was a terrible Prime Minister and that he lost his job because of deep flaws of character.”

Oh, say what you mean, Rory.

Listen Out For: The News Quiz, Radio 4, Friday, 6.30pm. A new series of the topical comedy hosted by Andy Zaltzman. Boris might get a mention.