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On the whole, the combative style is necessary when ministers lie so easily on the radio and television. Sometimes, though, politicians are stating the facts as they see them and they should be allowed to explain themselves. BBC executives like Allen should stop spinning like government ministers when they give interviews and be more frank with listeners.
Gyles Brandreth’s three-part series, How to Write a Political Diary on Radio Four (Sundays, repeated Wednesdays), is typically entertaining. A published diarist himself, Brandreth passed on the late Alan Clark’s advice: ‘Remember the four Is. A diary should be immediate, intimate, indiscreet and indecipherable.’ The publisher Ion Trewin believed that Clark’s diary included the definitive account of the fall of Margaret Thatcher because he knew the people involved and carried his diary around with him, making notes all the time. It was also beautifully written. The historian Andrew Roberts thought you needed the key qualities that are essential for a successful diary — access to the right people and a strange sexuality with a high libido. Brandreth said the better diarists of the 20th century, James Lees-Milne, Chips Channon and Harold Nicolson, were bisexual or, in Clark’s case, oversexed. We all know from the Samuel Pepys diaries that he never missed an opportunity to have it off with the nearest female servant he came across. Brandreth pointed to Duff Cooper, the 1930s MP, wartime minister and later an ambassador, as being an insatiable ladies man and added, ‘Sadly, no one is going to read the Brandreth diaries for the rumpy-pumpy.’
The Wilson years produced many diaries, of course, but not yet one from his secretary and assistant Marcia Williams, now Lady Falkender. A former Wilson aide, Bernard Donoghue, also a diarist, believed Williams had a hold over the prime minister: ‘He was frightened she would reveal something…Was it something sexual, was it something financial? …But his fear was so deep that obviously there was some basis on which she could control him. Once she said to me, “I can destroy him,” and she patted the handbag she was carrying. I don’t think it was a gun.’ The gruesome Edwina Currie cheerfully admitted that revenge was the motive for revealing her affair with John Major in her absurdly vain diaries: ‘The main target was John Major, and I thought, you’ve got it coming…and you are going to get what you deserve.’ I don’t think Norma Major deserved it, though.
For the past fortnight on Radio Four the Book at Bedtime has been Storm in June, the first of Irene Nemirovsky’s two 1940 novels Suite Fran
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