Five volumes full of wit, cattiness and insight into the workings of power
, both Conservative MPs, once sat down in the House of Commons tearoom to draw up a list of ingredients essential for a compelling political diary. They called the rules they came up with the “four I’s”. A journal should benothing is duller than a diary that dutifully keeps secrets. It should be, exposing the diarist’s quirks and habits to foster a close relationship with the reader. Finally it should be madeto the diarist’s contemporaries, perhaps with bad handwriting or codenames.
Dalton greatly admired Churchill, his political foe, and recorded his thrilling peroration that evening: “We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”Gladstone excepted, no diarist was more prolific than Anthony Wedgwood Benn. The former Lord Stansgate started keeping a diary at the age of 15 during the second world war.
, Mr Blair’s spin doctor, captures its epic bitterness. Mr Campbell had been a tabloid journalist . Because of his role at Number 10 he was uniquely placed to observe the rivalry, scheming and mistrust at the heart of the New Labour project.
Publishing a diary is a “baring, if not a flaunting, of the ego”, Clark asserted. He was happy to lay bare his snobbery, his lechery, his disasters as well as his triumphs. On the plus side of the ledger, his passionate campaigning for animal rights shines through.W&N; 640 pages. Out of print