Alan Clark

Alan Clark in 1993

Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (April 13, 1928 – September 5, 1999) was a British Conservative politician, historian and diarist. The son of art historian Kenneth Clark, he read modern history at Oxford and qualified as a Barrister, but never practiced. His book "The Donkeys" (1961) argued that British troops were poorly led in the First World War. Clark became Conservative Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton in 1974, and served in the government of Margaret Thatcher. After standing down from Parliament in 1992, his diaries (covering his ministerial career) were published the following year and became an instant classic for their combination of political intrigue, high living, and Clark's many sexual exploits with women. He was elected to Parliament again in 1997.

Quotes

• You cannot come here because you are not white.
  • Quoted in his obituary in The Guardian, 8 September 1999.
  • In 1971 Clark said this should be the message given to refugees expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda who held residence rights in the UK.

• John Pilger: I read that you were a vegetarian and you are seriously concerned about the way animals are killed.
  Alan Clark: Yeah.
  John Pilger: Doesn’t that concern extend to the way humans, albeit foreigners, are killed?
  Alan Clark: Curiously not.
  • Interviewed by John Pilger in the documentary Death of a Nation, broadcast on ITV February 22, 1994.
  • The interview was transcribed in New Statesman and Society, February 18, 1994.

• The only solution for dealing with the IRA is to kill 600 people in one night.
  • Spoken at a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference, October 7, 1997. Reported in The Guardian, October 8, 1997

• I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers, I am a Nazi.
  • William Donaldson (ed.), Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (London 2002), p. 152.
  • Letter to The Guardian.

Diaries: In Power (1993)

Originally published without sub-title as Diaries, they cover the years 1983 to 1991. ISBN 1857991427.

• So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it'd been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted.
  • May 15, 1983; p. 5
  • On the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War.

• I only can properly enjoy carol services if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this? Perhaps because they are essentially pagan, not Christian, celebrations.
  • December 17, 1985; p. 125

• "The trouble with [Michael] Heseltine is that he had to buy all his furniture." Snobby, but cutting.
  • 17 June 1987. Quoting Michael Jopling.

• I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded.
  • January 29, 1988; p. 198

• I want to fire the whole lot. Instantly. Out, out. No "District" commands, no golden bowlers, nothing. Out … If I could, I'd do what Stalin did to Tukhachevsky.
  • April 3, 1990; p. 291
  • On reform of the General Staff, while he was Minister of Defence Procurement.

• Pinkish toffs like Ian [Gilmour] and Charlie [Morrison], having suffered, for ten years, submission to their social inferior see in Michael [Heseltine] an arriviste, certainly, who can't shoot straight and in Jopling's damning phrase 'bought all his own furniture', but one who at any rate seeks the cachet. While all the nouves in the party think he (Michael) is the real thing.
  • 17 November 1990

• I am confirmed in my opinion that it is hopeless here. All we can do is arm the Orangemen – to the teeth – and get out.
  • January 30, 1991; p. 395
  • On the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Quotes about Clark

• A few attempts have been made to argue that a Nazi victory over the Soviet Union might not have been wholly disadvantageous to the Western powers, and that therefore a second phase of appeasement after 1941 might have been preferable to continued war. Some British Tories, notably the late Alan Clark, have suggested that the British Empire might have been spared ignominious bankruptcy, decline and fall, had a separate peace been made along the lines Rudolf Hess seems to have envisaged and Hitler repeatedly mused about in his evening monologues; in a similar vein, some American conservatives argue that the Cold War might have been avoided had Roosevelt kept the United States out of the shooting war in Europe. On the whole, however, most writers have tended to take the view that a Nazi victory would have been a worse outcome than that of 1945. Even if a victorious Third Reich had opted for peace with Britain and America - which cannot be regarded as very probable - the price would have been horrendously high for the millions of people left under Nazi rule. All nine million of the Jews of Europe might have been murdered, rather than the nearly six million who actually were, to say nothing of the vast human suffering that would have been inflicted on other ethnic groups by the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged deporting around fifty million East Europeans to Siberia.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 470