Once upon a kindlier time, my oldest neighbour gave me a dozen thick volumes of diaries he'd found in his loft. Interesting, Edwina? How could they fail to be? The keeper of the log - a rich and adventurous English gent - had roamed the unknown world almost a century before. Across China and India and deepest Siberia; through Africa from the Cape to the Sahara; around uncharted lands between the Nile and Niagara where men in white-collared shirts seldom trod.
Each day of journeying was faithfully recorded; every experience detailed. My voyager had bought himself a front seat in the stalls of history. And what, over the decades, had he made of all his diligent scribbling? Nothing worth the ink expended. Nothing betraying individuality or perception. Nothing vivid or illuminating. Just nothing much ... Just hundreds of thousands of words of droning dross.
There is (I thought then and thought again this weekend as we began sampling Mrs Currie's nights of reheated passion with her poppadum PM) something odd about people who keep diaries. They are a breed apart. And the further apart they stay from the rest of us, the better.
Sometimes they have the urge but no talent (my world traveller). Sometimes they have talent to spare, but the urge betrays them. Their evening recourse to the scribbling room marks them out as dreamers, grudge-bearers, pedants or pompous introverts. One quill short of the full pen set.
Who, after all, after 14 hours or so allegedly guiding the nation's destiny, has the energy to sit and chronicle the deeds, slights and indignities of the past day as though they were more relevant than a decent kip? Only, perhaps, somebody who doesn't quite see things or himself (or herself) straight. Only somebody who belongs irredeemably in the second division of life.
The great diarists, of course, were precisely that: bystanders, runners-up. Pepys had a wonderful eye and ear, but not a wonderful career. And the closer you get to modern times - and modern serialisation advances from Mr Murdoch - the more tainted the waters become.
This isn't the standard view. We are used to exalting the contemporaneous account over memory because barristers like to wave scraps of paper, as though something written in heat was reflective of a higher truth. We are required (by a leader writer in the Times) to believe that "whether it be the diaries of Chips Channon, Harold Nicolson or Alan Clark, the truth of how our masters have operated, manoeuvred and agonised throughout the 20th century has been captured most honestly in these accounts, free from the varnish which vanity applies, stripped of retrospective self-justification".
In other words, this is politics without spin: the full Monty, the right stuff. And that, as generalisation, is a ludicrous claim, because the congenital midnight scribblers are themselves a ludicrous tribe. What did Sir Henry Channon amount to, after all? He was a backbench MP for Southend-on-Sea for more than a quarter of a century and a bit of an ass. ("I want to be a peer," he wrote in November 1942. "There are many ways of becoming one and the quickest would be for Leslie Hore-Belisha to become prime minister, and to do that he would first have to be a Conservative. So I had a confidential chat with him ...")
Six years on, though, there was still no Lord Channon. He never had his chips. And the inveterate wasp was watching Harold Nicolson's performance in the Croydon byelection. "Of course that nice silly Nicolson was the worst candidate within human memory ... What can he think? He must hide his bald pink head in shame."
You may hear here the distinctive diarist's voice - bilious and gossipy - which echoes, in turn, through the jottings of Alan Clark. Entertaining, of course; as far from the collected speeches of John Major as it is possible to go. But history, from a proper historian (which Clark really was in his early day job)? Nobody who stands back and considers can properly think so.
Alan Clark was a randy, often ridiculous, political buffoon. His ambitions for higher office, in turn, were ridiculous. His diaries' most solemn truth is to reveal that profound foolishness and to set his brief ministerial career in a context which tells us something about the boys Mrs T gave a chance to. The rest is a terrific read; but it is not serious. It cannot be serious because it was written in his diary by Alan Clark.
Which is what, alas, we shall shortly be saying about Edwina (who, with her sparky way, I always thought better of). It isn't the four years of grey fumblings that portend the worst. That's a relatively harmless piece of gore-blimey. No, it's her shock when the new PM Major doesn't summon her back from the Sahara of salmonella to a seat in his cabinet, nor even give her a mention, not even a little bit on the side, in his diary-devoid autobiography.
There is the black spot of the congenital diarist. There's the obsession with self and justification which flows instantaneously. There's the therapy of a solitary nocturnal monologue co-joined with the belief that this political life has such moment that it's worth the chronicling in the midst of battle (and perhaps, later, the betrayal to a publisher).
Such things set the diarist apart. If you were prime minister, would you have wanted to look around and see Edwina making notes on her blotter? No more, I guess, than you'd have warmed to Tony Benn denouncing "the people who destroyed the party I loved" in this morning's Daily Mail. Give me men and women around me who say what they think, then shut up and get a good night's sleep. Give me team players who show two fingers to posterity.
