It has seemed in recent months as though the Conservative Party’s energy has been directed not into governing, but into the public staging of a series of thinly-conceived morality tales about the comeuppance awaiting naughty parliamentarians — stories about the profane activities of an MP named Parish and an alleged sex-pest named Pincher. That is, at least, until the writing at last appeared on the artisanal Wallpaper.
All the same, it is a serious question: which vices should we want our politicians to have? The normative demands of politics are significantly different from those of everyday life, and this fact rubs up uncomfortably against the misguided, but popular, expectation that our politicians should not merely represent us, but resemble us too. This places MPs, especially senior ones, in something of a predicament: they must dissimulate so as to appear less exceptional, but at the same time prove themselves the only person fit for the job. The simulation of normality is something of a high-wire act not least because, as the current Tory leadership race is illustrating in real time, the imperative to present oneself as ordinary can take on a crazed, desperate quality, a neediness which strikes the rest of us as, well, slightly weird.
If readers want to be freed from the expectation that their politicians should be remotely like them and — even more so in this direction — vice versa, they might try reading Alan Clark’s Diaries.
Perhaps no one did more to reveal the deformations inherent in the political psyche. Entering the Commons in 1974, Clark must at first have seemed an archetype of the kind of wayward backbencher the Conservatives are generally better at producing then their opponents: unruly, temperamental, little-concerned for party discipline, more interested in being admired by a selective group of colleagues than liked by the elective public. He longed, however, for government position and the first volume of his Diaries, a bestseller in 1993, records his years spent as a Minister under Margaret Thatcher, first at the desultory Department of Employment (re-christened, by Clark, the “Department of Un-employment”), and later (much more to his taste) at the Ministry of Defence.
Diaries often provide a much more direct form of psychological access to their subjects than memoirs, and Clark’s are wildly unguarded. Take this entry, from 23rd June 1983, a mere ten days after Clark had first entered government. Surveying the street below his office balcony, he writes: “Sometimes I get a wild urge to relieve my bladder over it, splattinlgy on the ant-like crowds. Would this get one the sack? Probably not. It would have to be hushed up. Trivial, but at the same time bizarre… I might do it on my last day.”
The whimsical delight in a mad fantasy of pointless transgression is Clark to a tee; not just the offence itself, but the school-boy glee at the thought of dower-faced officials, poor squares, frantically trying to keep up political appearances. As is often the case with Clark, the puzzle is not so much that he has these thoughts, but that he thinks it a good idea to write them down and collect them between hardcovers so that other people can read them. Still more, that he could do all this and then spend the next few years wondering self-pityingly why John Major hasn’t put him in the House of Lords yet.
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