Chris Gray reviews The Lost Diaries: In and Out of the Wilderness by Alan Clark

'He does have taste, Jeffrey," writes Alan Clark of his pal 'Lord' Archer after attending (in company with most of the Tory High Command) the crooked peer's preposterous Krug and shepherd's pie Christmas party of 1998. The remark indicates that in questions of aesthetics, as in so much else (including arms to Iraq), the Satyr of Saltwood Castle showed judgement considerably wide of the mark.

But, of course, Clark himself was vulgarity writ large - much more of a modern day Mr Toad than even Archer, on whom the soubriquet is often bestowed. He is a vain show-off convinced of his own brilliance. For half these pathetic diaries he is found, pride wounded to the core, wondering why he has not been given a peerage or, failing that, a knighthood, not realising that, for all his welcome with the voters of Kensington and Chelsea, he was a political anachronism and a liability to his party.

Then there are the cars - the Porsche, the Jaguar, the Rolls-Royce, the Bentleys in which he races round ("my foot absolutely flat down 95-100 in pretty thick traffic"). As Toad says: "The real way to travel. O bliss! O poop-poop!"

Sadly, poop-poop of another sort begins to loom large later in this book. Stricken by the illness that would eventually kill him, Clark becomes more than usually concerned with 'Thompson' (his curious name for defecation, which has its place in the book's very necessary glossary of his private slang). Towards the end, in more detail than many will feel strictly tasteful, we learn much of what his long-suffering wife Jane was obliged to do to cope with matters in this area.

We feel sorry, as we must, for her, and at times for him. But even as we find in his luxurious, self-gratifying life some redeeming feature - his powerful love of animals, for instance - we remember other bad-hats who were similarly devoted to their dogs. And similarly appalling about some humans, including the "loathsome, verminous gypsies" as Clark calls them in a diary entry on the Kosovo conflict in April, 1999.

Published in The Oxford Times on October 25