Political soaks
Drinking on the benches
Sion Simon
MY favourite anecdote concerning a politi- cian and wine is from the Alan Clark's Diaries. I was going to open this article by quoting it. It had the advantage of featur- ing a politician in the leading role — and thus satisfying my brief: of being contained within a famous political book, of having a universal rather than narrowly political res- onance, and of being rarely, indeed never, referred to in articles such as this.
I was defeated, however, by looking it up. Last Sunday evening I scoured the great tome — without pause save to dis- patch my daughters to their beds — from seven o'clock until one-thirty in the morn- ing. I cannot find said anecdote. So I offer the following recollection. It hardly justifies the long and creaking introduction and does not appear to be from the Alan Clark Diaries, but someone must at some point have claimed it to be true because it is not the sort of thing I would have dreamt.
Having been invited for dinner at the house of an old friend who was either impoverished or in some other way cast down, the Alan Clark-like protagonist decided, in a rare flash of extravagant gen- erosity, to take a bottle of unusually good wine from his cellar as a gift. A 1910s Château d'Yquem was selected. On arrival, servants ushered our hero and his wife into an empty room to wait. They left the bottle on a sideboard, never to hear of it again. Whether the precious nectar was ever received by the host and, if so, whether properly appreciated, is not known. This question gnaws at the benefactor for the rest of his life.
If not that Château d'Yquem, the Clark diaries contain a lot of other wine, much of which is drunk by this magazine's political columnist, Bruce Anderson. He seems always to be popping down to Saltwood to tell Clark that things do not look good for him, which sessions are generally lubricat- ed, at least, with Chateau Palmer 1961. When A.C. is finally sent to the MoD, though, a celebratory bottle of 1916 Latour is cracked 'as an aperitif. Clark doesn't record what they drank with the food. I only hope that Bruce's own memoirs will include equally precise details of the wines he has consumed, preferably indexed by name along with the humans. Now that would be a tome to read.
It would be wrong to leave Alan Clark, though, before noting what he had been drinking before the famous 1980s occasion when he caused uproar in the House of Commons by being incapably drunk at the Despatch Box, eventually being accused of such, in defiance of Commons convention, by Clare Short. At the house of his friend Christopher Selme, Clark had 'tasted, first a bottle of '61 Palmer [an odd choice, because at his own home Clark had the stuff coming out of his ears], then 'for com- parison, a bottle of '75 Palmer then, switch- ing back to '61, a really delicious Pichon Longueville. Geoffrey Roberts was the only other guest.' If you are going to befuddle your senses on an evening when you need some of them, then this, at least, was a pretty good way to do it.
It was rum, though, that Ms Short should have been the one to call a drunk a drunk. Alan Clark was rather a dilettante bibber, never touching anything but the good stuff, yet spending far more concern on his health and beauty than on actually ingest- ing. Any man who complains that he hates to drink alcohol after 9 p.m. has what might, at best, be described as a suspiciously equivocal attitude to the quaff. Clare Short, on the other hand, is virtually the only member of the current Cabinet capa- ble of holding her own in company with proper boozers (such, for instance, as those one might find in the Strangers' Bar or on the terrace of the House of Commons).
She is as nothing, though, compared with the prince of the political soaks, Winston Churchill. If Alan Clark was a bit of a liquor lightweight in all but the wallet department, Churchill was as heavy as they come. Like so many politicians, he was nn alcoholic. C.P. Snow famously, but ironically, denied this, claiming that no alcoholic could possibly drink that much, and Churchill himself used to insist that `my father taught me to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk'. But humour can only soften, not obliterate, the truth. What distinguished Churchill from other drunk politicians, though, was that he seemed to function perfectly well, succeed- ing at the substance of his job while avoid- ing the degenerate appearance and unpleasant odour which typifies the breed (as put-downs go, the phrase 'he stinks of whisky and piss', applied to a once dandyish Scottish lawyer gone to seed, sticks in my mind as particularly damning).
As the alcoholic who carried it off, Churchill is the hero of all the modern House of Commons alcoholics who do not carry it off. Give me a pound for every time I've heard him prayed in aid by a pissed politician. And the great man conspired in the prolongation of this aspect of his mythology by waxing epigrammatic on the subject at the drop of a hat. Some of his bons mots are simply amusing CI have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me'); others are defiantly eulogistic (`Champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration: the nerves are braced; the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble.'). But in saying (of champagne), 'In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it', I think he said more about the nature of alcoholism than he might have intended.
His drinking habits were admirably fetishistic — preferably Pol Roger, served at precisely the right temperature (he was delighted when the gift of a refrigerator from Beaverbrook in 1926 obviated the need to dilute it with ice) and interspersed with much brandy and port. The papers of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's lend-lease administrator, contain several good exam- ples of the war leader's zealous interest in his own consumption. For instance, Hop- kins describes finding Churchill in January 1943 'in bed in his customary pink robe, and having, of all things, a bottle of wine for breakfast'. Viscount Alanbrooke made the same observation, and Eden's diary mentions Churchill taking a 'stiff whiskey and soda, at 8.45 a.m'. A Foreign Office ' official described a dinner with Churchill as `a varied and noble procession of wines with which I could not keep pace — cham- pagne, port, brandy, Cointreau: Winston drank a good deal of all, and ended with two glasses of whisky and soda.'
I doubt that Churchill would have agreed with Alan Clark's absurd boast (more than ten years ago) that you couldn't get a decent bottle of claret for less than £100. For one thing, Churchill was much posher, and therefore less prone to self-parodic snobbery. But, for another, he was enough of a boozer to know the truth about wine: that the taste is a very ancillary part of the point.
Sion Simon writes a weekly column in the Daily Telegraph.
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