"So few of the upper classes go into politics these days, you've all got to stick together."

I read Alan Clark's Diaries (1993; surprisingly in its twenty-sixth impression by 2001) on the recommendation of my esteemed brother-in-law. In fairness to him, I did ask for a book that described the political process in Britain (as quasi-research for a piece of fiction that I'm writing). It's a pretty entertaining read. Clark's funny and he's a kind of a horrible person, which can make it more interesting to know what he thinks about other people.

Alan Clark was a member of the British Parliament who lived in a house/castle with a moat around it. He's a super duper snob (see the title quote, actually uttered to him by his wife but quoted approvingly in his diary) and generally hilariously arrogant politician, who was in government under Margaret Thatcher, who he refers to as the Lady, reverentially. One way in which this book offers great insight into what goes on in Parliament is that he's generally frank about the kinds of jobs that people usually act polite about, for instance he writes about being a Minister:

As for the Dept, I never want to go through its doors again. Total shit-heap, bored blue. Strained and befuddled by all the paper work. Fuck them. 

That's when he's at the Department of Employment. While he's there, one gets the impression he might just be in politics for the glory. All he wants is to be Secretary of State, the big leagues. Though when he gets transferred to the Ministry of Defence he's actually quite passionate and knowledgeable about the material. He's still incredibly pissed that he's not Secretary of State for Defence and spends a lot of time trying to undermine the guy who is.

With all of his personal and unidealistic ambitions, he does give an interesting view of how intensely petty big-time politics is, really. Here's a pretty good summation of the world at least as Clark describes it:

[P]olicies are neither determined or evolved on a simple assessment of National, or even Party, interest. Personal motives -- ambition, mischief making, a view to possible obligations and opportunities in the future, sometimes raw vindictiveness -- all come into it.

Some of this may be his own outlook, but he makes a pretty strong case that this is true for almost everyone in the Conservative Party (he doesn't talk about the Opposition much). I shouldn't be surprised, I realize. I knew it was all cynical positioning that drove politics, but I guess I thought it would be more on the level of trying to get power for one's own party. But no, it's all just about vanity and revenge. On the vanity front, Clark excels. Maybe many people's diaries reveal them to be more smug than they'd have admitted in public (though of course he oversaw the publication of these documents, as is clear from the absolutely idiotic footnotes explaining about family dogs and cars owned by his father etc). He really just loves himself. A lot of it is about how he's getting old but is still so athletic and amazing and everyone else his age looks at least thirty years older than him. He is unabashedly lecherous with twenty-year-old girls and at some point makes some remark to the effect that if he were poor, he'd probably have been arrested for harassment or rape long before.

Even though he comes off as funny and smart, I wouldn't even want to have a beer with this guy, is how gross he is. He bemoans the degradation of the class system. I'm trying to figure out on what earthly basis one could lament that other than self-interest? He writes this, which seems like a lame non-excuse:

I fear that the police have abandoned their old class allegiances. Indeed many of them seem to carry monstrous chips, and actually to enjoy harassing soft targets. And where has it got them? Simply widened the circle of those who resent and mistrust the police. Two or three stabbed every day and the assailants usually discharged by the Magistrates.

Is he saying that because the police no longer love rich people, they're being killed on the job more often? Because that would lead right to the conclusion that it's the rich people doing the stabbing. Which would speak against them being "soft targets". Perhaps the police wouldn't feel so bad about being stabbed if only they had their love of the upper classes to cling to. But this is the kind of thinking you have to resort to when you're trying to argue for better treatment for certain individuals based on birth.

He's writing in the 1990s so it seems unlikely to me that he would believe in a genetic superiority -- or maybe he does! Some of his negative comments about Churchill made me wonder if he wasn't a Nazi sympathizer. He's definitely ambivalent about Churchill having become Prime Minister -- speaks wistfully of a coalition that failed, and wasn't the whole thing that Churchill was the one who said fight when the others said give in a la Vichy France? Mind you, he also speaks excitedly about the military victories: "showed we were going to fight, and fight rough." But in that same passage he writes, "We could have made peace at the time of the Hess mission and the world would have been completely different." Now, I'm not going to say that we could have is equivalent to I wish we had, but it sounds like the kind of statement that is at least open to positive outcomes from that world being completely different. I had no idea what the Hess mission was, so I looked it up. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy, flew to Scotland in 1941 to (apparently; but there's some controversy about all of this) broker a peace with England under which Euro countries would return to own governments, with German police presence to remain, in exchange for England helping the Germans fight the Soviet Union. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia Hitler ordered planes to stop Hess on his way to Scotland, so it's not clear that Clark is correct in thinking that they could have made peace at all. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it all seems highly suspicious to me.

Conclusion: evil makes for interesting reading. Especially towards the end of the volume when there's a leadership race and Thatcher gets voted out. It's all very high drama. And despite only caring about himself, he actually really adores Thatcher, even disagrees with people who criticize her for not being of the right class. That's love, right there.