Alan Clark
Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark was a British Conservative Member of Parliament, author and diarist. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade and Defence. He became a member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in 1991.
He was the author of several books of military history, including his controversial work The Donkeys, which inspired the musical satire Oh, What a Lovely War!
Clark became known for his flamboyance, wit, irreverence and keen support of animal rights. Norman Lamont called him "the most politically incorrect, outspoken, iconoclastic and reckless politician of our times". His three-volume Alan Clark Diaries contains a candid account of political life under Thatcher and a description of the weeks preceding his death, which he continued to write until he could no longer focus on the page.
Early life
Alan Clark was born at 55 Lancaster Gate, London, the elder son of art historian Kenneth Clark, who was of Scottish parentage, and his wife Elizabeth Winifred Clark, who was Irish. His sister and brother, fraternal twins Colette and Colin, were born in 1932. At the age of six he began as a day boy at Egerton House, a preparatory school in Marylebone, and from there at the age of nine went on as a boarder to St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne. Clark was one of the seventy boys rescued when the school building was destroyed by fire in May 1939. He was relocated with the school to Midhurst.In September 1940, with the Luftwaffe threatening south-east England, the Clarks moved their son to a safer location at Cheltenham College Junior School. From there he went to Eton in January 1942. In February 1946 while at Eton he joined the training regiment of the Household Cavalry based at Combermere Barracks, Windsor. He transferred to the regiment's Territorial unit the same day, but was discharged in August when he had left Eton. Later that year, he was called up for national service in the Royal Air Force Education Branch, but was exempted after citing his experience in the Household Cavalry while at Eton, which his biographer Ion Trewin described as "a bit like doing Officer Training Corps", but which Clark would later again embellish as prior military service in a CV for a possible parliamentary candidacy.
He then went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read Modern History under Hugh Trevor-Roper, obtaining a third-class honours degree. As an undergraduate he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, a private all-male dining club known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, and bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students' rooms. The club selects its members not only on the grounds of wealth and willingness to participate but also by means of education. After Oxford he wrote articles for the motoring press before he went on to read for the bar. He was called to the bar in 1955 but did not practise law. Instead, he began privately studying military history with a view to professional writing on the topic.
Military history
Clark's first book, The Donkeys, was a revisionist history of the British Expeditionary Force's campaigns at the beginning of the First World War. The book covers Western Front operations during 1915, including the offensives at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge and Loos, and ending with the enforced resignation of Sir John French as commander-in-chief of the BEF, and his replacement by Douglas Haig. Clark describes the battle scenes, and criticises the actions of several of the generals involved in the heavy loss of life that occurred. Much of the book is based on the political manoeuvres behind the scenes as commanders jostled for influence, and John French's difficulties dealing with his French allies and with Lord Kitchener. Haig's own diaries are used to demonstrate how Haig positioned himself to take over command. The publication sold well, and is still in print 50 years after its first print run, being regarded as an important work on the British experience of the World War.The book's title was drawn from the expression "Lions led by donkeys" which has been widely used to compare British soldiers with their commanders. In 1921 Princess Evelyn Blücher published her memoirs, which attributed the phrase to OHL in 1918. Clark was unable to find the origin of the expression. He prefaced the book with a supposed dialogue between two generals and attributed the dialogue to the memoirs of German general Erich von Falkenhayn. Clark was equivocal about the source for the dialogue for many years, but in 2007, his friend Euan Graham recalled a conversation in the mid-1960s when Clark, on being challenged as to the dialogue's provenance, looked sheepish and said, "Well I invented it." This supposed invention emboldened critics of The Donkeys to condemn the work.
Clark's choice of subject was strongly influenced by Lord Lee of Fareham, a family friend who had never forgotten what he saw as the shambles of the BEF. In developing his work, Clark became close friends with historian Basil Liddell Hart, who acted as his mentor. Liddell Hart read the drafts and was concerned by Clark's "intermittent carelessness". He produced several lists of corrections, which were incorporated, and wrote "It is a fine piece of writing, and often brilliantly penetrating."
Even before publication, Clark's work came under attack from supporters of Haig, including the field marshal's son and historians John Terraine, Robert Blake and Hugh Trevor-Roper, former tutor to Clark, who was married to Haig's daughter. On publication, The Donkeys received very supportive comments from Lord Beaverbrook, who recommended the work to Winston Churchill, and The Times printed a positive review. However, John Terraine and A. J. P. Taylor wrote damning reviews and historian Michael Howard wrote "As history, it is worthless", criticising its "slovenly scholarship". Howard nonetheless commended its readability and noted that descriptions of battles and battlefields are "sometimes masterly". Field Marshal Montgomery later told Clark it was "A Dreadful Tale: You have done a good job in exposing the total failure of the generalship".
In more recent years, the work has been criticised by some historians for being one-sided in its treatment of World War One generals. Brian Bond, in editing a 1991 collection of essays on First World War history, expressed the collective desire of the authors to move beyond "popular stereotypes of The Donkeys" while also acknowledging that serious leadership mistakes were made and that the authors would do little to rehabilitate the reputations of, for instance, the senior commanders on The Somme.
The historian Peter Simkins complained that it was frustratingly difficult to counter Clark's prevailing view. Professor Richard Holmes made a similar complaint, writing that "Alan Clark's The Donkeys, for all its verve and amusing narrative, added a streak of pure deception to the writings of the First World War. Its title is based on 'Lions led by Donkeys'. Sadly for historical accuracy, there is no evidence whatever for this; none. Not a jot or scintilla. The real problem is that such histories have sold well and continue to do so. They reinforce historical myth by delivering to the reader exactly what they expect to read". Clark's work was described as "contemptible" by Henry Paget, 7th Marquess of Anglesey who regarded Clark as the most arrogant and least respectable writer on the War, but the impartiality of this view may have been overshadowed by the fact that Anglesey's own history of the British Cavalry had been reviewed by Clark with the comments "cavalry are nearly always a disaster, a waste of space and resources." Graham Stewart, Clark's researcher for a later political history that he would write entitled The Tories, noted: "Alan wasn't beyond quoting people selectively to make them look bad".
Clark went on to publish several more works of military history through the 1960s, including Barbarossa in 1965 examining the Operation Barbarossa offensive of the Second World War; he also tried his hand at novel writing, but none of the subsequent books were as commercially successful or drew the same attention as The Donkeys had achieved, and he abandoned the path of military history in the mid-1970s to pursue a professional career in national politics.
Political career
Clark's first foray into politics was on the issue of the Common Market, which he opposed. With those beliefs, he joined the Conservative Monday Club in 1968, and was soon chairman of its Wiltshire branch. In 1971 he was blacklisted by Conservative Party Central Office for being too right-wing, but after representations by him, and others, he was removed from the blacklist.He unsuccessfully sought the Conservative selection for Weston super-Mare in 1970, missing out to Jerry Wiggin. He subsequently became MP for Plymouth Sutton at the February 1974 general election with a majority of 8,104, when Harold Wilson took over from Edward Heath as prime minister of a minority Labour government. At the General Election in October 1974, when Labour gained a small overall majority, Clark's vote fell by 1,192 votes, but he still had a comfortable majority with 5,188. His first five years in parliament were spent on the Conservative opposition benches. He was still a member of the Monday Club in May 1975. It is unclear when he let his membership of the club lapse, but possibly it was upon becoming a government minister. He continued to address Club events until 1992.
During the subsequent Party leadership contest he was urged by Airey Neave to vote for Margaret Thatcher, but he is thought to have favoured Willie Whitelaw. The following year came the free vote on the Common Market and Clark, praising Enoch Powell's speech, voted against. The next day he told the socialist MP Dennis Skinner that "I'd rather live in a socialist Britain than one ruled by a lot of fucking foreigners." Although he was personally liked by Margaret Thatcher, for whom he had great admiration, and the columnist George Hutchinson, Clark was never promoted to the cabinet, remaining in mid-ranking ministerial positions during the 1980s.