The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt: v.3: Vol 3 Book

Whether coincidence or otherwise, most of the best political diarists seem to have been of a Tory bent. The 1930s saw Chips Channon, and of recent times the people's favourite, in Blair-speak, has been the late Alan Clark. However, a richer palate might feast on the musings of former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, the self-appointed Voice of Reason, who facilitated the posthumous vanity publication of his diaries as a pension for his surviving family. Covering the Major years (though perhaps beyond his own peak), from the general election in 1992 until three months before his death in December 1997, aged 79, Wyatt's self-referential intimacies present brown-nosing of the highest order in his obsessive quest to keep the Chairmanship of the Tote and his newspaper columns, which netted him over £250,000 a year. An endless barrage of dinner parties, ingratiating conversations and geriatric leching occupied Wyatt's leisure hours when not fretting over money, with a primary concern of reconciling Major--"You are a great man", he told him, noting without discernible irony that "history will see him as such"--with his increasingly eccentric predecessor. The presiding deity, though, is Rupert Murdoch, to whom Wyatt desperately toadies, and who brings the diaries to a catastrophic (for Wyatt) climax, when he switches his allegiance to Blair.Editor Sarah Curtis should be applauded for making a molehill out of a mountain, in reducing the original three million words by a factor of 10. Indiscreet, yet chiding indiscretion in others (Beryl Bainbridge alone is exempt from criticism), the main amusement from these latter journals comes from the buffet of inadvertent humour and pathos arising from his resolute lack of introspection. Wyatt thought Alan Clark was "mad as a hatter", while the predatory Clark disingenuously scorned the Voice of Reason as "gaga". This was unfair. As charming in cigar-puffing person as his ilk so often are, these silly snobberies, never knowingly understated, serve to expose the serious absence of a genuine British political class, a sourly lingering aftertaste to such frippery. --David VincentRead More