PATRIOT'S PROGRESS

of Alan Clark whose death could signal the end of William Hague

I HAVE long thought that the hollowest lines in the English language are '0 death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, where is thy victory?' Often the sting and the victory are only too apparent: never more so than this week. Alan Clark may have been a year older than three score and ten, but until the onslaught of his final illness, he never felt his age — and would not have dreamt of acting it. 'How old is x?' I would inquire. 'Oh, our age' he would say. I am 21 years younger (though I do not look it), but I saw what Alan meant.

Words like 'irreplaceable' and 'unique' are worn tawdry by over-use. In this case, they are inadequate. All Alan's friends would agree that he was simply the most life-enhancing character they had ever met. However dull-witted one felt oneself, the sight of Alan entering the room with that loose-limbed, loping swagger raised the spirits. Whatever might now be on the agenda, it would not include tedium.

Alan was one of the few people who talked as well as he wrote. There was a constant play of wit, anecdote, malice, his- torical reference, gossip, perceptiveness. He was fascinated by the theatre of the human condition and drawn to politics, partly because of the high quality of the drama it offered. He used humour to shock; from his earliest days, his motto could have been `epater les bourgeois'. At Eton — during the war — he kept a poster of Hitler in his room and sometimes told the sons of fallen soldiers that their fathers had been fighting on the wrong side. Not long after the war, when the focus of threat had switched to Russia, Alan was dining with his parents. His mother was exercised by fears of a Russian invasion. `Alan, darling, you're the expert; if the Russians came to London, what should one do?"Well, Mummy, I think there's only one thing you can do. Try to get your- self reserved for the officers.' Kenneth Clark ordered him from the house.

Like a lot of thoughtful men, Alan used humour to approach topics and ideas that he had not yet fully thought through, to arrive at playful conclusions, which would later be followed by serious ones. His jokes were always anarcho-subversive: oral hand-

grenades. As Alan knew that anti-Semitic remarks were guaranteed to cause outrage, and as he enjoyed doing that, he sometimes made them. When he first met Michael Howard, he disliked him, so I asked him what apart from anti-Semitism made him so agin Michael. 'Anti-Semitism,' he replied. But I do not believe that Alan was anti-Semitic. This is not merely because some of his good friends were Jews, includ- ing Michael Howard, whom he later came to like and respect. His anti-Semitic sallies need to be understood in context. Au fond, they were nothing more than a cutting edge of his campaign to assail the conventional wisdom and the conventional pieties, all of which he despised.

Here, however, he suffered from the deficits of his qualities. Because he was so funny and so outrageous, many people did not realise that he was also deeply serious. Nobody had thought more profoundly or more astringently about 20th-century British history. He believed that the best account of that history had been written before the century had begun, by Kipling.

Far-called our navies melt away - On dune and headland sinks the fire - Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre!

In 1900, Britain was an imperial power. In 1999, we are struggling to retain our unity and our independence. It has been a century of national decline, a theme which obsessed and oppressed Alan throughout his career as an historian and a politician. He tried to work out why this had hap- pened and what could be saved from the wreckage; sometimes, indeed, one felt that he was writing history in the hope of reversing it.

Decline is, of course, inextricably bound up with war; a country of Britain's size cannot hope to win two world wars and still remain a superpower. Alan believed that we should not have fought either of them. He regarded the first world war as a second fall of man, in that it shattered old Europe while exacting a terrible price from Britain in both gold and blood. The Donkeys, Alan's first historical work, was a venomous prosecution indictment of the generals who squandered the Old Con- temptibles and then Kitchener's volun- teers — and, with them, national morale. The pathos of all that volunteering: the pals' battalions, the bantam battalions, whole streets joining up together and then dying together — Alan found that unbear- able to contemplate. He believed that society was best held together by a cross- class alliance which could sustain the mar- tial spirit. The upper classes should not only do their duty by ensuring that the lower orders had plenty of beef and beer; they should also not send British troops to unnecessary deaths. So The Donkeys was also a condemnation of a breach of the social contract by a ruling elite which ought to have known better.

As for the second world war, Alan was the precursor of the John Charmley school of revisionists who argue that Chamberlain should have avoided war in 1939 and that Churchill should have made peace in 1940. These propositions have one basic flaw, in that they pay insufficient attention to high politics. It would have been politically impossible to avoid war in September 1939, and even more so to make peace after the fall of France. But other aspects of the revisionist critique remain unanswered. Those who know nothing else about history believe that of all wars the last one was much the most moral, in that it was fought for freedom and to save the Jews: a wholly unhistorical view. As A.J.P. Taylor always reminded us, we abandoned the Czechs; 100,000 of them died and Prague survived. We fought for Poland; six million Poles died, Warsaw was flattened and Stalin took possession. As for the Jews, Hitler always had evil intentions towards them, but with- out the Nacht and Nebel of total war, there might not have been a Holocaust.

Alan can be criticised for being far too affectionate towards Hitler, whom he referred to as `Wolf — Alan admired wolves — and correspondingly cold about Churchill. For all the defects of Churchill's victory, it was better to be British in 1945 than to be German. But even those of us who accept that we had to fight the last war in our own interests and that we were justified not only in allying ourselves with Stalin but in rewarding him with vast tracts of Eastern Europe ought to admit that the i

moral audit of the second world war s 3 much more complex business than the

popular Panglossian versions would admit. Alan was a patriot, but there was nothing comfortable or complacent about his patriotism. The average Tory constituent, happy to applaud commonplace patriotic sentiments, would have found Alan's raw, frontier, warrior creed deeply unsettling. Shortly after Liverpool fans ran amok in the Heysel stadium, Alan was giving a talk to a private gathering. 'Which of us read about the so-called Heysel stadium incident', he asked, 'in which 38 Italians died but only one Englishman — which of us read about that exploit by our fellow countrymen without a fierce pride swelling in our breast?' He did have a point. There have been moments in our history when the recruiting sergeants would have been glad of those Liver- pudlians. Like Kipling, Alan believed that the 'Island Devil' was part of our national character. Like Kipling, he knew that plaster saints were of little use in barrack rooms, and that the glories of British his- tory and civilisation had always depended on rough men doing dirty work. Alan detested the bourgeois order. He loathed the idea that the travails of our proud and angry dust over many millennia would reach their consummation in semi- detached houses, singing madrigals and shopping on the Internet. But, as he knew, he need not fear such an outcome. This has been Thomas Hobbes's century, not J. S. Mill's, and there is a lot more Hobbe- sianism to come.

Given his disdain for the bourgeoisie, it might seem paradoxical that Alan should have felt such allegiance to Margaret Thatcher, the woman who made the future safe for the British middle classes. But that was not the aspect of Thatcherism which thrilled him. He was drawn to her by her femininity and by her Power of national revival. She may have felt a profound affinity with the small businessman struggling with VAT forms while worrying about his mortgage. For Alan, her real quality was the ability to re- animate the animal spirits of the British nation.

As the Diaries make clear, he was in thrall to the lady. Her response was never as warm as he would have wished it to be, but she did appoint him to her govern- ment and then promote him, as well as resisting the regular calls for his dismissal — something few prime ministers would have had the courage to do. Charles Pow- ell believes that she never saw him as Cab- inet material, but who can blame her? There would have been too much excite- ment, and too much risk.

Alan could never have won enduring fame as a politician, and his historical writing, good as it is, will eventually fade from memory, as most history books do. But he has produced his monumentum aere perennius: the Diaries. The current published version is only a small propor- tion of the whole, selected to gratify a sen-

sation-seeking readership and therefore concentrating on political ambition, and on sex. When the full diaries are pub- lished, they will not only guarantee me immortality, captured in the footnotes as a grub in amber; 'Anderson, Bruce: Tory journalist fl.c. 2000, occasional drinking- companion of AC's'. They will also estab- lish Alan as one of the three greatest diarists in the language.

Like Pcpys and Boswell, Alan had one asset indispensable to the diarist; he had no fear of shame. He was happy to depict himself in situations which the rest of us would do anything to conceal. He was even ready to inflict grave embarrassment on his wife, Jane, whom he adored. Alan drove Jane to exasperation, tears, fury but never to boredom. For more than 40 years she was the ground of his being, and though he may have committed shallow adulteries, in any profound sense he was never unfaithful to her.

On Tuesday, it took about five minutes for most of Alan's friends to put their grief on one side and start on their political cal- culations — knowing, of course, that he would have done exactly the same if a close friend of his had been the newly deceased Member for Kensington and Chelsea. Fill- ing his boots with Portillo, shorting Hague, perhaps even buying Tories to win the next election; the moment he heard of the death, Alan would have been straight into the political market.

Alan Clark's death has come at a bad moment for Mr Hague, for confidence in his leadership has rarely been lower. Most Tories who support him do so less for pos- itive reasons than because they can see no alternative. But there may now be an alter- native. If Michael Portillo is a serious politician, he will have to let his name go forward. If that happens, and if Mr Hague wishes to remain Tory leader, he will have to raise his game. Austen Chamberlain, the last Tory leader never to become pre- mier, did not even fight a general election as leader. Mr Hague should beware of emulating him.

The Kensington and Chelsea by-election may well be the last of this century, and one of the more important ones. The thought that he could not even die without creating a political crisis would give Alan Clark's shade some wry amusement.