A memory of Alan Clark, who has died aged 71, is of a lean figure standing just below the government side gangway in the Commons, legs apart, arms folded, head tilted back, asking a question - so very often a question disagreeable to his party, the Conservatives. And until 1983, and appointment to a junior post in employment, he was seen as pure backbencher - eccentric, clever, no doubt, but not imaginable in office. He was rude, outrageous, on certain issues very right wing.
In fact, he would hold office until 1992 - at employment, trade and defence, where he wrote amusingly about thoughts on the mortality of his superior, Tom King. King was involved in a minor car crash and slightly injured. "No hope of it being serious?" Clark's wife, Jane, commented, the sort of thing cheerfully said in the Clark circle.
Such indulgence was part of a wider contempt for political correctness before the phrase was invented.
With the publication of his candid diaries, he became something of a national treasure. For a man of 67, who had left parliament at short notice four years earlier, to win the plum seat of Kensington and Chelsea in 1997 is pretty eloquent.
But then he was eloquent - literate, astringent and insolent. His manner, languorous and throwaway, and his accent, ostentatious old upper-class, suggested a gent chippily entertained by the resentful rest of us. He served briefly in the Household Cavalry (Training Regiment) as a teenager, and in the Royal Auxilary Air Force in the early 1950s, and was called to the Bar in 1955. Despite an education at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he was new money. The ancestors were trade - Paisley cotton-thread spinners, upon whose factories the whole beautiful edifice rested.
He came to the Commons first in the February election of 1974, as MP for Plymouth Sutton, and remained there until that short-notice resignation in 1992. Fascinated by war, he wrote The Fall Of Crete (1963) and Barbarossa; The Russo-German Conflict 1941- 45 (1965), both classics. But the paradox of his scholarship, and also the paradox of his political life, was contained in his first book, The Donkeys (1961), a savage assault on the British military caste of the first World War, the "red-faced majors at the base".
Orthodox military historians hated it. Joan Littlewood, of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, loved it and created Oh! What A Lovely War, a smash hit, leftwing, anti-war pierrot show with death and military stupidity in the main roles. A multi-millionaire, lordly Tory, who was mindful of racial distinction, and who gloried in being rich and clever, he was not flattered by Littlewood's adaptation. In him, English nationalism of the sort which dislikes Europe and the United States in roughly equal proportions, combined with serious feeling for the poor bloody infantry, military and civil.
Calling him rightwing is to beg questions. He disliked spotty working-class youths, and yet had a sincere impulse for poor people, and rather liked bloody-minded leftwingers. His regard for Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with her Manchester school economics, still less her lurking dislike of workers. She was asserting the country, fighting in the Falklands, being gutsy in ways startling but agreeable to a notable non-feminist. She also offended prim liberals, and, as he cheerfully told diary and friends, had given him one job and might give him another. However, he came to see Thatcher as a class warrior with a stack of resentment, petty bourgeois, in fact.
Money and intelligence gave Clark a freedom denied even to the very gifted, aspiring politician. He ached to be a cabinet minister for the vanity and panache of it. But nothing would make him trim, amend, dilute, tack or muffle the glorious freedom with which he actually enjoyed politics. As minister of state at defence, his greatest contempt was for military politicians. He was a romantic - hence the nationalism. There was always an anterior glance towards an age more golden (or better gilded). He was a free spirit, yet he could be gratuitously spiteful. The freedom included plenty of role-playing and attitude-striking. He was a genuinely loving husband to Jane, with whom he had eloped, yet sexually he hovered between clipboard operator and bore. The race and class remarks could bring out the snivelling lower-middle class in most of us.
But he was different, and the diaries, for all the media concentration on sex, are about politics as it is - chummy, acquisitive, antagonistic, funny, full of not quite consummated hatreds and swings of mood. And their author, in his damn-you-all way, was not a representative minister of state.
He married Jane in 1958. She and his two sons, James and Andrew, survive him.
Alan Kenneth McKenzie Clark: born 1928; died September, 1999