Diaries: Into Politics
Alan Clark, ed Ion Trewin
452pp, Weidenfeld
£20
Buy it at BOL

It is Tuesday June 15, 1982. The Prime Minister has just made a statement to a jubilant House of Commons announcing the Argentine "surrender", and the word electrifies that slender and ambitious Conservative of 56 summers, Alan Clark. He is a man convinced that, though still mystifyingly without office of state, his robust backbench contributions have very materially contributed to Britain's greatest victory since 1945. This is what he writes: "I rose rapidly, pushed my way through the crowd at the bar of the House and shot round through the 'Aye' Lobby to catch the Prime Minister as she emerged at the back of the Speaker's Chair to get to her room. No one else had the idea and I had a completely clear run . . . I rushed up and said to her: 'Prime Minister, only you could have done this; you did it alone, and your place in history is assured.' She looked a little startled. Had she heard properly?"

Oh, I think she had. And she was possibly startled at his appearance, which I like to think was that of a man transfigured in this euphoric moment into a 13-year-old Etonian, apple-cheeked, fleet of foot, high and light of voice, running as if along the rugger touchline to congratulate some older boy, on whom he has long nursed a crush, for a sporting triumph. Only Clark could have made the speech and written it up like this, at once proud of his extempore flourish, heedless of its sycophancy, awestruck at his own participation in history and twinklingly acknowledging a topnote of camp. Nothing in our post-May 1997 lexicon is quite like it: a man who takes his politics more seriously, and less seriously, than anyone else.

Here is the second (posthumous) volume of the Clark Diaries, of whose impending publication I was first informed by the author himself, in a chilly telephone call three years ago to complain about the weekly Clark spoof-cum-hommage I was then writing for the London Evening Standard. "This will damage the sales of the succeeding volume of my diaries, Peter," he said. It is a prequel: Clark from '72 to '82, running loosely from his selection to contest Plymouth Sutton to the Falklands, the entries being selected by Ion Trewin, Mrs Jane Clark having apparently allowed him unmediated access to the MS. All the signature tics are there: the cattiness, the wit, the lechery, the self-pity, the political landscape judged through the prism of his own ambition and amour propre. There are girls chatted up, and one vengeful mistress airily paid off with five grand. Understandably, perhaps, there is much less high politics than the first time around - Clark being further from the action - and more homely cares about health and money. Not Pooterish exactly, but more domestic.

The Falklands moment quoted above is a rare example of Clark responding directly to a big event. On Thatcher's accession to the leadership in 1975 he is silent, and silent, too, for Harold Wilson's resignation in '76. But Trewin does not indicate where he is making omissions, so we can never be sure of these silences. For example, I turned eagerly to see what Clark would make of the Lord Lucan disappearance of 1974. Clark was a close friend of John Aspinall and Jimmy Goldsmith and a connoisseur of the class war - surely he would have something acute and indiscreet to say? Weirdly, not a word. Have the lawyers been breathing down Mr Trewin's neck?

For so much of the time, the author exhibits an unaccustomed spectacle: Clark at bay. It is difficult to remember what it was like for the pre-Falklands Tory party when Thatcher's position was far from secure, and Clark is often seen running about like a headless chicken, unsure of who will be leader and where future patronage will lie. And then there is the seediness, dullness and nastiness of the 1970s political scene, best exemplified in Clark's tongue-out-of-cheek infatuation with the extreme right. You have to laugh when he tosses off asides like "obsessed with the fall of the Reich". Pertly, he praises the Führer in a lunch with the Telegraph 's Frank Johnson, but elsewhere writes: "Earlier, at my surgery, two real NF members had come in, for a chat. And I thought how good they were, and how brave is the minority . . ." Just a pose still, perhaps, but how amusing?

It would be a cliche for the pasticheur to claim that Clark is beyond parody, and then quote the riper bits in support of the thesis that you couldn't make it up. This is only partly true. These diaries are in some ways duller, more muted and less distinctive than the first volume; for another vintage year, maybe we must wait for a third tranche, covering Major to Blair. But there are stabs of something really arresting, namely Clark's passionate love for his children. In a passage from 1980, he muses on the "last time" for all life experiences, and how you never really know when it is the last time. He began by telling his sons a nightly bedtime story; then it became occasional; finally the boys were too sternly grown-up to allow it at all. Here we have love, sadness and mortality in one exquisitely judged vignette. Again, the Diaries have conferred on Clark what no prime minister, no chief whip have in their gift: political immortality.