Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a politician, immensely rich and good-looking, he might have achieved more

were it not for what he describes as a devil or a demon in me that wants to shock people I despise.

He began his career as a historian and didn't end a parliament until 1974 when he was 45.

He served as a minister in three government departments, but even Mrs Thatcher, who otherwise admired him, seems to have balked at

elevating him to the cabinet.

He's now best known as an observer of the times in which he's lived.

In his diaries, published in in 1993 he is frank about everything from his

views on his colleagues to his frequent marital infidelities. He is Alan Clark.

How much of a disappointment is it to you Alan that you're better known as

I say as a diarist than for any political achievement? Well it ought not to be because

a diaries in the written word last longer and outlive their authors to

far greater extent than the transient fame that attaches to people who just blunder

about in politics. But it is a disappointment. Some of my friends have

said offered me a kind of fais-gen bargain. I mean would you if you could just do a

deal with the devil and get into the cabinet and dump the diaries which would you do and I can't really decide

but I suspect that I'd make the wrong decision as I have on many previous occasions.

How close do you think you came to that cabinet seat? Do you believe that Mrs. Thatcher would eventually have delivered it if you had a

last her own?

I was going to be Secretary of State for Defence, but in 1990, but two things got in the way.

First of all, Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait and that meant

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