Mrs. Thatcher's Minister: The Private Diaries of Alan Clark.

If a man lies to his diary, as Lyn Nofziger remarked during Josh Steiner's Whitewater testimony, it's not a diary, it's a liary.

If he is as truthful as both nature and nurture allow, like H.R. Haldeman, it is a revelation.

And if, standing equally close to the throne, he writes with total candor, indiscretion, and relish--not only about the mighty who surround him, but of his own ambition, posturing, malice, irrationality, lust, snobbery, power struggles, and pleasure in the discomfiture of rivals; and if he is a gentleman and a scholar to boot, an engaging and rounded man devoid of hypocrisy, one who rejoices in his possessions and sexuality, yet is keenly attuned to the brevity of life, the joy of family, the beauty of nature, and the fun of politics--well, to start with, you can bet that he's not in Washington.

Mrs. Thatcher's Minister: The Private Diaries of Alan Clark is, of course, British. Part Pepys, part Trollope, part Yes, Minister, part Tome Jones, it is

the juiciest socio-political read of the nineties.

Alan Clark, son of the late Sir Kenneth Clark of Civilisation fame, kept these vivid diaries during his eight years in three successive Tory administrations in Britain.

The very first entry braces you for the ride ahead. Here's a walk around the lush grounds of Saltwood, Clark's castle in Kent; a confrontation with a trespasser ("I cursed him, and he crumpled disarmingly"); Clark's firm conviction that his stepmother, Nolwyn, Comtesse de Janze, had poisoned his dying father; his poignant regret that he had failed to enter fully into his father's aesthetic world; his expectations of an upcoming political campaign ("Wotya going to do for me then, guv?"); a speech he made in the House; a fellow M.P.'s wager that he'll get a government appointment from Mrs. Thatcher; and his lust for a busty new au pair in one of the cottages on his estate.

This last is to be a recurring note. Despite what is evidently a happy marriage to a woman who delights him, women of all conditions occupy Clark's reveries and his diaries.

"I'm madly in love with Francis Holland [his 22-year-old Labour Party opponent]," he writes. "I suspect she's not as thin and gawky as she seems, her hair is always lovely and shiny. Perhaps I can distract her at the count on Thursday and kiss her in one of those big janitor's cupboards off the Lower Guildhall..."

"I can only properly enjoy a carol service," he observes one Christmas, "if I am having an illicit affair with someone in the congregation. Why is this? Perhaps because they are essentially pagan, not Christian, celebrations."

Other objects of his desire range from a plump young shopgirl on a train "whose delightful globes bounced prominently, but happily, under a rope-knitted jersey," to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

"She sat next to me (first time ever) and...I radiated a protective feeling--and, indeed, feelings of another kind. She has very small feet and attractive--not bony--ankles in the 1940 style. The Prime Minister's foot twisted and turned the entire time although her eyes were closed, and her head nodded at intervals. The back of her hair is perfect, almost identical to previous days. It can't be a full wig, the front is clearly her own. I suspect it is a 'chignon.'"

He worries constantly about falling out of favor with "the Lady." He languishes when she is distant. He jumps for joy when she doesn't sack him for one notable failure to defend her government--"Dear, good, kind, sweet Lady."

Not all members of the tender gender rate either his lust or his loyalty, by the way. He condemns a certain type of overdressed and selfregarding female as "oopsie-la," and finds our own Jeane Kirkpatrick "odious...Stalinist...humorless... loathsome"--an "Anglophobe harridan, and a mixture between Irene Worth and Eleanor Roosevelt" who reminds him of a hated governess of his youth.

The British press, during Clark's years as Minister of Trade, Minister of State, and Minister of Defense, 1983 to 1991, described him as "laid-back but cerebral" and "one of the most attractive as well as one of the cleverest of Mrs. Thatcher's ministers." He agrees: "My paper, it is clear, is the lead document," he gloats over one success. "How shrewd and good I was to get it in first!" Or, "By sheer energy and clarity of thought, I put together the deal..." He cannot wait to take his new haircut to the Party Conference in Blackpool, "to swagger and ponce." He understands why he is forbidden to go on TV to discuss the deadline for Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait--because "they recognize that I am more glamorous and have a quicker mind than the other ministers, who mustn't be 'outshone.'"

And yet, despite his overweening vanity and an occasional case of testosterone poisoning, you really can't help liking the man. Clark lays out his political disasters as lipsmackingly as his triumphs: The time he got completely blotto at a wine-tasting just before reading his first ministerial speech on equal pay to the House of Commons is a superb example--an agonizing, maundering, gabbling humiliation. Afterward, he writes, "that little garden gnome Peter Rost sidled up and said, 'After a performance like that, I almost considered voting against.' Poxy little runt, what's he ever done?"

He announces to a sour and distant Prince Charles at a dinner with businessmen that in 30 years' time, Japan will dominate the world and English will merely be the tongue of the global peasantry. He tells Margaret Thatcher, on German reunification, "You're wrong, you're just wrong." (John Major, then just a young-man-on-the-make, was moved to slink up and remark, "You're a military strategist. Oughtn't you to be sending your tanks around the flank, rather than attacking head-on?")

Besides slipperiness, there's much among the political machinations he outlines here that will seem eerily familiar to denizens of Washington: the budgetary trickery used to repeatedly over-finance government departments; the sad spectacles presented by men robbed of their power in cabinet re-shuffles; meetings that must be held closed "so no press, no posturing"; the perils of juggling bills and proposals to please too many, with the resulting hodge-podge earning nothing but disdain from those it hoped to placate.

Most politicians regard the drudgery, compromise, and mediocrity that make up their days as necessary sacrifices at the altar of ambition. For Clark, who has everything a man could possibly want waiting for him at home, they are hell.

His insider's view of the coup that brought down Margaret Thatcher--"changing the Prime Minister without any electoral authority to do so"--is riveting. He tries to console her as the dark clouds menace in early November of 1990, presaging "the urgent and unanimous abandonment of the Lady."

"I don't think she realizes what a jam she's in. It's the Bunker syndrome. Everyone around you is clicking their heels. The saluting sentries have highly polished boots and beautifully creased uniforms. But out there at the Front it's all disintegrating. The soldiers are starving in tatters and makeshift bandages. Whole units are mutinous and in flight...."

As it looked as though the despised Michael Heseltine could take over, he notes, people began to "come out--'Oh, I don't think he's so bad, really,' 'He's got such wide appeal!' 'My people love him, I must say...'"--all phrases that have been uttered tens of thousands of times in Washington, D.C. In fact, the biggest gulf between Capitol Hill and Westminster today seems to be one of booze: Here, a Perrier or prayer breakfast followed by a game of racquetball or a roll around the House or Senate gym keep pols in touch; there, gallons of wine, whiskey, brandy, port, champagne, and Black Velvets lubricate the daily and nightly give-and-take.

Clark, though plainly a fit man, frets because he can no longer perform a single pull-up on the bar at the top of the castle tower at around sixty; his own mortality haunts him constantly. What is his life expectancy? "Fifteen years? ... At what stage does one's reserve of years change from being inexhaustible--of no concern or consequence--into a rapidly diminishing triangle of sand at the neck of the glass, which is scrutinized obsessively?"

Much of his bracing sense of self rests on the noblesse oblige that comes with being, well, Alan Clark. As his wife Jane told him when he complained about Nicholas Soames going into politics, "Don't be beastly, so few of the upper classes go into politics today, you've all got to stick together." He plays his preordained role to the hilt. He writes of going into his "Emergency-Unctuous Mode" when constituents come in to grumble. (The Clarks, a footnote tells us, believe that constantly and inaudibly repeating the word "brush" composes one's features into an expression of benign concern for such occasions.) He shamelessly hams up a wreath-laying.

Clark is, of course, a snob, unavoidable perhaps in a man whose life unfolded surrounded by his family's exquisite possessions in Saltwood Castle, at Briboll, his Scottish Estate, and in Chalet Caroline, his Swiss retreat. He is in love with his houses, his cars, his treasures. He twice quotes a colleague's remark about Heseltine--"the trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture"--and he occasionally whines about the Servant Problem. It's because of death duties, he writes, and the "levelling up" of standards of the lower classes. Why, poor Jane had to drain and clean the swimming pool herself. They are always too exhausted to entertain--and besides, it's so expensive, with good claret at a hundred pounds minimum per bottle.

While he is tolerant and kind to his own plainly incompetent chauffeur and past-it butler, he hates the "slobs, yobs, junkies, freeloaders, claimants and criminals on day-leave who make their living by exploitation of the benefits system."

His heart really belongs to the animal kingdom. He's always ready, he writes, to while away half an hour or so reading Beatrix Potter's tales of Squirrel Nutkin or Johnny Townmouse, "and feel calmer as a result." Here he is tenderly rescuing a wounded baby jackdaw, or taking the castle's tortoises out of hibernation, or watching Jane "hood" the peafowl needed to replenish the stock at a friend's castle, or missing a meeting to tend a wounded badger caught in a snare. ("Good! What are they beside the saving of a beautiful and independent creature of the wild?") Here he is sobbing inconsolably after shooting a heron that was eating all the fish in the castle moat--"I cursed and blubbed up in my bedroom ... I was near a nervous breakdown."

The barbarities of fur-trapping upset him terribly. As Minister of Trade, he managed to integrate heart and mind, introducing legislation called the Fur Labeling Order. It dictated the labeling of all furs taken from animals caught in traps.

After months of passionate work, victory was in sight. Only the Canadians objected. He was summoned to Mrs. Thatcher's office.

'Alan, how are you?'

I ignored this: 'I'm so sorry that you should

be getting all this trouble from the

Canadians.'

'Oh, it's not trouble, I think there's more to

it...'

She asks him, 'Why not labeling of battery

hens, of veal who never see daylight, of

fish which had a hook in their mouth?

What about foxes? Do you hunt?'

'Certainly not. Nor do I allow it on my

land. And as for veal, I'm a vegetarian.'

'What about your shoes?...'

'I don't think you would want your

ministers to wear plastic shoes.'

'It's not you, Alan. It's just so unlike you to

respond to pressure.'

'I'm not 'responding to pressure.' I'm

generating it. I believe in it.'

It was, he writes, "a prototypical example of an argument with a woman--no rational sequence, associative, lateral thinking, jumping rails the whole time," and it lasted for 55 minutes. Miserably, inevitably, and with grace, he surrendered.

The grace, perhaps, is something he inherited from Papa--along with his gimlet eye. For despite his plaint that he had neglected to evolve artistically, Kenneth Clark's sensibilities are his, too. He notes a colleague reading over his text, "lips moving occasionally--like my father's description of Picasso when first confronted with a portfolio of [Henry] Moore's drawings." He rejoices in arranging flowers from Saltwood in his office. Visiting the extravagant marble palace of the Emir in Abu Dhabi, he finds the staircase is out of scale. At Althorpe for Earl Spencer's birthday party, he notes the poorly restored paintings, vulgar reupholstery, and tacky new veneers and inlays on the fine old furniture of Princess Di's dad. He deplores the lack of objets d'art scattered around Highgrove, Prince Charles' house.

His ambition throughout the diaries is to be named a Privy Councilor. When he finally achieves it, he arrives at the Cabinet office late with a full bladder and shoe-polish on his hands, and goes to Buckingham Palace. He is greeted by Palace staffers with "that shallow courtesy, smooth complexion, and careful coiffure of the Establishment homosexual." When they take him in to meet the Queen, he cannot help noticing the "indifferent pictures" on her wall.

"Is she really rather dull and stupid?" he wonders. "Or is she thinking 'How do people as dull and stupid as this ever get to be ministers?'"

Rash, maybe. Politically incorrect, definitely. Egotistical and wildly tactless, yes. But never stupid. And never, ever dull.