Alan Clark: The Biography

Alan Clark: The BiographyBy Ion TrewinWeidenfeld & Nicolson £25, 552 pagesFT Bookshop price: £20

Is there anything you feel you do not know about Alan Clark? His Diaries held little back: in them, Clark laid bare the vanity, lechery, self-delusion and hopeless romanticism that turned him from a relatively minor politician into a national treasure. Published in 1993, the Diaries established Clark as a Mr Toad figure, a caddish lover of fast cars. A conservative MP who never made the cabinet, he nevertheless plotted his unlikely ascent to prime minister from his castle in Kent.

Ion Trewin, Clark's editor, has had to dig deep to find new material. Much of this biography's pre-publicity has been based around Clark's relationship with his secretary, Alison Young, supposedly his last mistress - a detail that, amazingly, he omitted from his Diaries.

I knew Young when I was a lobby reporter for the Western Morning News (Clark's local paper when he was MP for Plymouth Sutton) and was struck by her deferential manner to her boss, whom she always dutifully referred to as "Mr Clark". Indeed we learn that in their intimate correspondence, she called him "Dearest MC".

Given that Clark himself wrote about his relationship with a brace of young women whom he dubbed the "coven", Trewin's revelations are hardly a surprise. Indeed, readers hoping for salacious detail will be disappointed. The biggest shock is that Young insists the relationship was never physical, just an intense friendship that sometimes involved being chased around the filing cabinets.

Young, we learn gratifyingly, gave as good as she got, summarising neatly the needy side to Clark's nature: "I don't want to see you because basically I am sick of those pathetic scenes - schoolboy gloating, crude mishandling, the simpering and begging which is all an act."

Readers will form their own view about the 60-year-old Clark's treatment of his wife, whom he admitted was "looking a bit strained" at the time of this liaison, though it was not a novel experience for her.

But Trewin's book does capture the undeniably romantic nature of Clark's relationship with Jane, once memorably described by Simon Hoggart as that of "a philanderer obsessed with his wife".

Nowhere is this more movingly described than in the way Jane cared for Clark as his life was slowly extinguished by a brain tumour - a cruelly ironic way for him to die: the hypochondriac Clark had for years (wrongly) believed he was dying of cancer.

Trewin also reveals details of Clark's sometimes unhappy childhood, his successful life as a military historian, his fascination with fascism and suggestions that he may have done a bit of spying in his youth - you would expect nothing less. What the book lacks in sparkle, it partly makes up for in its breadth.

Everyone has a favourite Clark story. Mine is the time the police tried to stop him speeding on a motorway: Clark stormed out of his car and lambasted them, claiming he thought they had recognised him and were providing him with an escort.

George Parker is the FT's political editor

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