Before and After Midnight and View were
designed to show the unfettered discussions
which occurred in the average Soviet apart-
ment. When broadcast in the 1980s, they
addressed
previously unmentionable topics, such as mass
repressions under Stalin, the human and eco-
nomic costs of the war in Afghanistan, living
and working conditions of striking Soviet min-
ers, and even the possibility of at last burying
Lenin’s preserved body.But Evans shows that both, though cre-
ated at pace in 1986, directly copied rejected
proposals from the 1970s — found stashed
in a senior editor’s desk. Through her
impeccable study of primary sources, Evans
demonstrates how the censored creativity of
the Brezhnev era laid the groundwork for
television which would catalyse perestroika
— and ultimately change the world.
A big beast
in Hush Puppies
Philip Hensher
Kind of Blue
By Ken Clarke
Macmillan, £25, pp. 528
It always used to be said that, if it had been
up to Guardian readers, Ken Clarke would
certainly have been leader of the Conserva-
tive party. It might have gone beyond that.
Some politicians are much loved by the gen-
eral public, who never have to meet them,
and loathed by their colleagues and unfor-
tunate underlings — one thinks of Greville
Janner or Alf Morris, who once pushed his
fist into my face when I was refusing to do
his bidding. That doesn’t seem to be true of
Clarke, who is popular pretty much across
the board, his instincts for decency and scep-
tical intelligence ensuring that. Although
his Europhile commitments effectively
barred him from the party leadership on the
occasions when he might have stood a
chance, his qualities have always been
recognised.
The memoir has a beautiful and ingen-
ious title from this aficionado of jazz, but
is a slightly patchy piece of work. Clarke’s
appeal is largely personal, but he is not
going to open his life up to readers. He has
taken the honourable decision not to write
about family matters, and his wife, children
and grandchildren only appear in small
roles. It is sad and touching to hear that
Clarke’s wife Gillian, a highly intelligent
woman, was so upset by one BBC come-
dian saying that ‘the prospect of seeing
Kenneth Clarke go to his grave’ cheered
him up that she phoned the corporation in
anger and distress. Much more than that,
Clarke will not share with readers.
More disappointingly, his very interest-
ing journey is only lightly sketched in: we
are very swiftly past his childhood and the
colliery-electrician father. The family back-
ground promises glorious material. There
is a probably bigamous Suffolk grand-
father who ran away to sea ‘because he
could not bear... topping turnips in the rain’,
and was deserted by his first wife on their
wedding night; the other was a dedicated
Stalinist, who made his money from winning
newspaper competitions; while a great-
grandfather drank and gambled away the
family fortune at Doncaster races. Sadly,
we are through all this excellent material in
four pages. It would have kept V.S. Pritch-
ett occupied for many chapters.
The memoir, then, is confessedly a
political account of Clarke’s career, and,
fairly clearly, has been based on recollec-
tion rather than the long hours in govern-
ment files to which politician-memoirists
are entitled. It grows markedly more vivid
and detailed as it comes closer to the pre-
sent. In the first half, we are quite often
told that an acquaintance proved them-
selves ‘delightful’ company or became a
good friend without the specifics com-
ing to mind. Even Mrs Thatcher fails to
emerge freshly. Perhaps Clarke is bored
with the whole subject by now, but he
doesn’t supply much solid material to
recount what must have been a relation-
ship full of detailed disagreement.
The career and the development of pol-
icy, nevertheless, is worth examining, and
Clarke comes out with much credit. Inter-
estingly, he was involved with the very
first privatisations of the Thatcher govern-
ment. (It is not quite true that, as he says,
they were the first privatisations of post-
war British history. Heath had privatised
Thomas Cook and the pubs of Carlisle in
the early 1970s.) Clarke, under Norman
Fowler at the Department of Transport,
was tasked with privatising the Nation-
al Bus Company, the ports and Nation-al Freight which owned about a third of
the country’s lorries, including Pickford’s.
If you now goggle with amazement that,
less than 40 years ago, the state thought
it made sense to own a removal company,
you will read Clarke’s account with some
amusement. One of the arguments that the
department put forward against privatising
Pickford’s was that it might actually come
to make a profit.
The detail starts to become more
impressive in accounts of recent years, and
Clarke’s personal charm emerges in some
silkily bitchy comments: ‘All three of my
principal challengers on the subject of “lawand order” were eventually arrested and
committed for criminal trial themselves.’
Blair and Brown’s years of increased pub-
lic expenditure
certainly produced a good climate of opin-
ion for the government as... public-sector
pay and pensions in particular were raised
to new heroic levels. Inevitably, there were
also some improvements in the levels of ser-
vice to the public.There is, too, a keen sense of the com-
edy of public life. When, in 2010, he was
appointed Justice Secretary, he discovered
that nobody at No.10 knew where the min-
istry was; when he finally turned up, after
a good lunch, he found that he had been
expected for some time, the full comple-
ment of officials having reassembled to
greet him four times. Clarke has a vivid
turn of phrase: he is widely thought to have
swung the leadership election in Theresa
May’s favour with his overheard descrip-
tion of her as a ‘bloody difficult woman’,
an observation which had the same effect
as Pravda describing Mrs Thatcher as an
‘iron lady’ in 1976. I’m sorry his injunc-
tion in 1993 to the officious, interfering
party chairman, Brian Mawhinney, to ‘tell
your kids to get their scooters off my lawn’
hasn’t made it in.
He has been far too important to be
described as a ‘national treasure’, but
as one of the best, and most effectively
reforming, postwar home secretaries and
chancellors of the exchequer, he will cer-
tainly be remembered. Like all political
careers, this one ended in failure; a bigger
one than most for this most Europhile of
Tories, but a much less personal one.
This book has its thin passages,
and the project of self-justification is the
same as any other political memoir; but it
is hard not to finish it with a sense that
Clarke had the unusual quality of mostly
having been right about anything he set
his mind to.Introducing our newBOOKS PODCAST
http://www.spectator.co.uk/bookspodcastSam Leith speaks to Andrew Solomon
about his new book Far and Away.Clarke’s description of Theresa May
as a ‘bloody difficult woman’ swung
the leadership election in her favour