redemption. no 53 alan Clark

THIS week we salute the most politically incorrect, outspoken and reckless politician of recent times, who died two years ago this week.

He was, of course, a monster, referring to Africa as "Bongo Bongo Land". He was also a notorious philanderer who showed little respect for his wife, Jane, and his numerous conquests included the infamous "coven" of Judge James Harkess's wife and two daughters. When they told the press, Jane remarked that this was what happened if you bedded "people of below-stairs class".

Clark's racy diaries, the first volume of which was published in 1993, recorded his obsession with sex while in high office ("girls have to be succulent, ie under 25") and also revealed that he was a pro-hanging vegetarian. But his worst fault in most eyes would be his confession to finding Margaret Thatcher attractive.

Still, he is not the only flawed character in the history of British politics. And he was his own man, unaffected by spin- doctors. He may have been to the right of Norman Tebbit but he was free-thinking and intellectual, an accusation you couldn't lay at the door of too many of today's MPs. He admired the IRA for their bravado in bombing the Grand Hotel, Brighton, but thought they missed a trick by not finishing off ministers with a single marksman as they were stretchered out of the ruins.

He was a snob but he carried it off with style, ridiculing Michael Heseltine as the kind of person who "bought his own furniture" and asking Geoffrey Howe - who was attired in a white dinner-jacket at the time - to "bring three bucks fizz and keep the change". When he learned that Mafia boss John Gotti's suits cost $2000, his response was: "I didn't know you could buy one so cheaply." And ultimately he was the one who told Thatcher she had to go, which earned him the undying gratitude of a nation.

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