Elephantine Shit (Diaries - Alan Clark)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Diaries - Alan Clark
Date:	19/10/00 (302 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Insights into the psychology of Thatcherism.

Disadvantages: Praise for its prose and wit will puzzle you.

I never found the hysteria surrounding the death of Diana very interesting or significant and think now what I thought at the time: that it merely another proof of the number of stupid, shallow, and gullible people in the world.

Perhaps I’m wrong, at least in part. It might prove that, but have greater significance too. The much smaller but in some ways remarkably similar hysteria that has recently surrounded the death of Donald† suggests that it does have greater significance. Or perhaps Di's death awakened a morbid taste for mawkish sentiment in many of us that we are now looking for any excuse to indulge.

Well, almost any excuse. The death of Alan Clark produced some remarkable silliness too, but mawkish sentimentality was thankfully not among it. After all, it would have been very difficult to be sentimental, mawkishly or otherwise, about a man as determinedly and deliberately shitty as Clark. Then again, I would have thought it would have been very difficult to praise his wit or writing ability either, and people certainly did that.

As they had been doing for years before his death. I watched his performances in the media spotlight for a long time now, and in some ways the reaction to him was almost as breathtaking as he is. To some people, Alan Clark was a loveable, philandering old rogue, a dashing bounder in the best tradition of Surtees and Dornford Yates. Quite calmly and deliberately, he took the camouflage off the remorselessly immoral, death-dealing, stinking big-government and big-business machine he worked so heartily for, and people were tut-tutting, shaking their heads, and saying you can't help but admire the fellow. He all but admitted he is a Nazi, and Anne Robinson, Jewish minor media celebrity, was choosing him as her hero in a national newspaper for his rakish good looks, sardonic wit, and honesty. He replied, "Funnily enough, no", when asked by John Pilger whether the killing of foreign
ers with British-made weapons did not concern him, and people were rocking with laughter at his (feeble) repartee on Clive Anderson Talks Back. What did Clark have to do? Strangle babies? Bugger the Queen Mother live on breakfast TV? Sell weapons-grade plutonium to the IRA and set up a chain of factory farms on the proceeds?

Sorry, that last one was a bit below the belt. The IRA are left-wing, after all, or at least claim to be, and the second-to-last thing Clark would ever have done was support left-wingers, even fake ones. The very last thing he'd ever have done was promote cruelty to animals. He was a vegetarian, after all. Like Hitler. Exactly like Hitler. Because Clark, like Hitler, is a very good example of the close links between fascism and sentimentality about animals. Except he wouldn't have called his politics fascist, and he once told a reporter called Christopher Hitchens so. He also explained why. Fascism is the politics of middle-class thugs anxious to protect their dividends. Clark, who comes from a stratum of society where "middle-class" is a pejorative term, is much more comfortable with the term National Socialism.

But how seriously can one take him when he said such infantilely outrageous things? Was he perhaps, like the free-thinking historian David Irving, out to épater les bleeding-hearts? Or, again like the free-thinking historian David Irving, was he out to do that as well? My own answer to those questions comes from the Clark Diaries, a selection of the diary entries Clark made as an MP and minister during Margaret Thatcher's time as Prime Minister. Although ludicrously over-praised, the Diaries are indeed very interesting -- though hardly in the ways they are said to be. Take, for example, the constant unironic comparisons Clark drew between the Thatcher government and the Third Reich. Yes, he was a military historian and yes, he had made a particular study of the Second World War, but would many
military historians who have made a particular study of the Second World War have been comfortable enough with the following thought to consign it to their diaries? And then have it published?

"2nd Oct, 1984 [Reflections on the Brighton bomb]: Mrs T had been saved by good fortune (von Stauffenberg's briefcase!) as she was in the bathroom."

And how about his impressions of Maggie on being appointed Minister for Trade on 31st Jan, 1986?

"At the end, when she spoke of her determination to go on, and her blue eyes flashed, I got a full dose of personality compulsion, something of the Führer Kontakt."

These and other more or less gratuitous references to Adolf H. and the rest of the gang seemed to be turning into something like a dance of the seven veils as I read on, and I was very interested to see Clark's impressions of a visit to the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's headquarters during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. What on earth would Clark say of something having a direct connexion to Nazism? Would the final veil fall away? Alas, he tantalizes

"[20th July, 1989] Today we are driving to the Wolfschanze [Wolf's Lair, at Rastenberg]. Stauffenberg's bomb exploded, forty-four years ago [to the day], just after two o'clock. I hope we get there in time. No one will know what is going through my mind -- except possibly [Sir Alan] Glyn [Conservative MP for Windsor since 1970]. And he will only know half."

but he grows coy at the last moment, and gives no entry for the actual visit, which may have been responsible for the timing, at least, of an entire trade mission to Poland, if not quite for the trade mission itself.

So there are, apparently, things even Clark wanted to keep quiet about, but even without the more or less direct hints he drops, news of his probable political leanings shouldn't come as very much of a surprise to anyone who knows abo
ut his concern for the welfare of animals. The association between extreme right-wing politics and callousness about human suffering is clear and widely recognized; almost as clear, but not so widely recognized, is the association between extreme right-wing politics and concern about animal suffering. Many people -- the Dowager Lady Birdwood and Arnold Leese of the British Imperial Party are two good examples -- were drawn first into anti-Semitism and then into extreme right-wing politics because of their concern about the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals, and pre-war Nazi propaganda made much of the cruelty of this practice and the disgust it aroused in the naturally caring breasts of true Aryans. The Nazis, in fact, were very proud of the legislation they introduced to protect the welfare of animals, and Hitler, a vegetarian on moral, not medical or dietary grounds, disapproved strongly of Goering's love of hunting. The British National Party today bases some of its propaganda on Jewish and Muslim methods of ritual slaughter, contrasting this in the Nazi fashion with the traditional British love of animals.

That Clark should be both deeply concerned about animal suffering and have pronounced Nazi leanings is therefore perfectly natural, and the esteem in which, on the evidence of the diaries, he holds Hitler can hardly have been weakened by Hitler's similar concerns. And there is evidence that Clark did more than lean in the direction of Nazism. Did you know, for example, that he once had lunch in a "third-rate Italian restaurant" with John Tyndall, leader of the British National Party? You won't learn this from his diaries, but you will from another book that is interesting in ways quite other than those its author may have intended. I'm still not quite sure what point the anti-Nazi mole Ray Hill was making in one anecdote from his autobiographical The Other Face of Terror, but if Searchlight employees, like God, move in mys
terious ways, Searchlight employees, like God, do not tell stories simply for the sake of it.

"Tyndall had been writing a regular series of articles in Spearhead [the BNP magazine] about the defence of Britain, and had contacted Clark to suggest that they meet to discuss matters of common interest. Somewhat intrigued by the idea of meeting the leader of a self-proclaimed nazi sect, Clark agreed. They met once, in a third-rate Italian restaurant selected by Tyndall, and Clark quickly concluded that his dinner companion was 'a bit of a blockhead'."

This assessment of the lower-class Tyndall by Clark rings true, but doesn't necessarily contradict Tyndall's assertion that the two of them "shared common views on many subjects". Undoubtedly they do. Views on the liberal newspapers and their readers, for example. In 1990, Clark's impressions of the Poll Tax Riots ran thus:

"[2nd April] Last night there were riots in London. All the anarchist scum, class-war [sic], random drop-outs and trouble seekers. ... There is this strain in most Western countries, but it is particularly prevalent in Britain, where this rabble have -- confirming their middle-class social origins -- their own press in The Grauniad [sic] and The Independent."

Clark's contempt for and hatred of this group and its propaganda organs were immeasurable, and are aired repeatedly in the diaries. And yet, and yet...

At the end of the 1980's, at the same time as he worked hard to ease the sale of arms to non-Guardian-readers like Saddam Hussein, Clark worked even harder to introduce legislation against the practice of catching animals in "leg-hold" traps for their fur. A footnote in his diaries for the 8th January, 1988 reads like this:

"Singlehandedly, against massive opposition from civil servants in several Departments of State, AC [Alan Clark] had drawn up an Order which would forc
e fur traders to label garments made of the skins of animals that had been caught in leg-hold traps."

But alas, Margaret Thatcher, for all her blue eyes and possession of the Führer Kontakt, was not sound on what Clark once described to her as "man's sense of responsibility to the animal kingdom". He was called in to see her and abandoned the legislation at her personal request -- with deep regret, and all the while

"thinking of all those nice sincere young people in Lynx [an anti-fur trade organization] whom I was letting down."

Does anyone else detect a teensy-weensy contradiction here between his views on Guardian readers and his views on members of Lynx? It was reinforced a little later when Clark, with Brigitte Bardot, attended the funeral of Jill Phipps, a young woman who was killed by a lorry while protesting against the export of British calves for the continental veal trade. Clark had nothing but contempt for people like her and the "nice sincere young people in Lynx" when they were protesting on behalf of rights for the disabled or against the arms trade, and yet had nothing but admiration for them when they were protesting on behalf of something to which he himself was emotionally attached. As is evident from his diaries, no-one had a higher regard for Alan Clark's intellectual powers than Alan Clark; as is equally evident from his diaries, those intellectual powers were never applied to some of his most important beliefs. There was something very wrong with the rational, not to say the emotional, balance of a man capable of writing things like these:

"[8th January, 1988. Studying material relevant to his anti-fur-trade legislation.] Horrific illustrations. Worst was a great circular crater, some 16-foot in diameter, dug out of the frozen earth by a poor badger, just using one hand, as he went round and round; caught by a steel jaw on the other leg, chain to a post in th
e centre, trying (for how long must it have taken him?) to escape, he dug that great pit. ... There's stacks of stuff about the Inuits, who make their money out of these barbarities, and among whom 'the incidence of alcoholism has risen sharply in recent years' (so what?) ...

"[14th April, 1987] Earlier today a creepy official, who is "in charge" (heaven help us) of South America, came over to brief me ahead of my trip to Chile. All crap about Human Rights. Not one word about the U.K. interest.

"[17 June, 1990] This morning I killed the heron. ... He had been raiding the moat, starting in the early hours, then getting bolder and bolder, taking eight or nine fish, carp, nishikoi, exotica, every day. ... I closed the range to about twenty feet and took aim. I did not want to mutilate the beautiful head, so took a bead on his shoulder. ... I was already sobbing as I went back up the steps: 'Sodding fish, why should I kill that beautiful creature just for the sodding fish...' I cursed and blubbed up in my bedroom ... I was near a nervous breakdown. Yet if it had been a burglar or a vandal I wouldn't have given a toss. It's human beings that are vermin.

"[31 August, 1984. Reminded by a visit to Seend parish church of the changes in the Anglican liturgy.] All too well I understood the rage of the Inquisitadores. I would gladly burn them, those trendy clerics, at the stake. What fun to hear them pinkly squealing. Or perhaps as the faggots kindled, they would "come out" and call upon the Devil to succour them.

"[22 July, 1983. AC's first Question on the floor of the House of Commons.] [A]n awful lot of Labour people seemed to be in as well. Including, it seemed, every female in their parliamentary strength. I recognised many of the tricoteuses who kept us up night after night in the summer of 1976 filibustering (successfully) the committee stage of Bill Benyon'
;s Bill to reduce the age at which babies can legally be murdered from six months to three."

It seems easy, nonetheless, to understand why he is able to write such contradictory and, apart from his opposition to abortion and the abuse of animals, revolting things. Alan Clark did a great deal to promote the rights of animals and to destroy the rights of human beings because Alan Clark loved animals and hated human beings. It also seems easy to understand why he did so. Animals are not moral agents; human beings are. Human beings can choose between right and wrong, good and bad; animals can't. More pertinently, human beings could and often did choose to do bad things to Alan Clark; animals never did and never would. In other words, Clark's complete indifference to the suffering of human beings and passionate concern for the suffering of animals seemed to be based above all else on a deep and abiding self-pity.

He was not unique in this: I suspect that many (if not most) active supporters of "animal rights" are motivated in exactly the same way. Helping human beings is a messy and emotionally and intellectually complicated business. Its rewards are uncertain and it entails the unpleasant risk of ingratitude from and rejection by those one is trying to help. Helping animals, on the other hand, is very easy, the rewards are far more certain, and there are no emotional or intellectual risks. Animal-lovers are really in love not with animals but with the pleasure animals give them, and who is not prepared to work heartily for his own pleasure?

There is no possible way, for example, that Canadian beavers or badgers could have been grateful to Alan Clark for his efforts to protect them from leg-hold traps, but there is also no possible way that he could have claimed any gratitude from them. He was satisfied merely by the contemplation of their ability to live out natural lives and avoid an artificial, unnecessarily painful d
eath. Intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally, animals and work on their behalf offer very direct and simple rewards.

An equivalent effort to protect the people of, say, East Timor from the effects of British-made weapons of mass destruction did not offer Clark any reward in the same simple, direct way, and that is why he was not interested in making any such effort. Had he done so, he would have had a claim on the gratitude of the East Timorese, but they, with the perversity of human beings, might not have wished to extend it to him. Nor was there any satisfaction to be had from a simple contemplation of their ability to live out natural lives and die in a natural way: the East Timorese are complicated human beings, not simple animals, and cannot be viewed like that. Indeed, very few human beings, and certainly not the East Timorese, live "natural" lives, and the intellectual and imaginative effort of understanding and learning to appreciate the lives they do live is great. That is why it is so easy for someone like Clark to dismiss foreigners with contempt and with no attempt at sympathy. When those foreigners are poor and have dark skins, it is even easier, and Clark did it even more often.

In fact, away from his own family and members of his own political and social elite in this country, there are only two groups of human being one could conceive Clark showing any concern for. One would be a hypothetical tribe of noble savages, living entirely as nature intended with the exception of their being vegetarian and having an exaggerated sentimental concern for all animal life. The other would be the equivalent of Clark's own elite overseas, and even here his sympathy would be in inverse proportion to the racial and cultural distance between them and him (in fact, this assessment was wrong: Clark displayed what might be described as a feudal concern for the lower orders in his defence of English football fans during the 1998 W
orld Cup). Again, though, he was not unique in this. Many personalities and intellects are warped in the way that his are. Why then is he worthy of attention? For this reason: Clark's motives and personality type were not rare, but his readiness to expose both of them in what he said and wrote certainly was, as, to a lesser extent, was his ability to exercise power in accordance with them. There are still many people like Alan Clark in the British establishment exercising power in the same damaging ways, but they, with better instincts of self-preservation and smaller private incomes, have kept their masks on. He took his off. And everybody laughed, and said what a rogue he was. And I'm still asking myself the same question. What did Alan Clark have to do?

AFTERWORD

The reaction to Clark's death continued this strange trend, with journalists and fellow politicians falling over themselves to praise his wit, intelligence, maverick spirit, womanizing, prose-style, etc., etc. His "wit" seems to have been remarkable only for its uncouthness: one oft-repeated example was his remark on being told that the American gangster John Paul Gotti wore $2000 suits: "I didn't know it was possible to buy suits for so little." On another occasion he compared Norman Lamont, the former chancellor of the exchequer, to a wine-waiter.

In other words, Clark was not a great wit, a great writer, or a great intellect, but he was very interesting as a study in the psychology of power, egocentrism, and self-pity, and that is what makes his *Diaries* worth reading. Nothing else.

†Donald Dewar, that is.

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