The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State, 1922-97 (Hardcover)

Fortunately, Alan Clark was also an historian of the first rank and a politician of considerable ability, who became a member of the House of Commons in 1974 and rose, despite his many indiscretions, to become a junior Minister in the Thatcher Government. (It was no doubt those indiscretions which held him back from Cabinet rank. Yet they did not always stand in his way. When he sought preselection for Kensington & Chelsea, the bluest of blue ribbon seats, not long after one of his more flamboyant love affairs had become the talk of London, he was asked by a prim elderly lady whether he had any more skeletons in his closet. "Probably many hundreds! he relied. He won hands down.)

The problem with political history is that it is usually written either by historians who do not understand politics, or by politicians who have no sense of history. Clark was that seldom seen creature: a capable politician who is also a sound scholar. His history of the Conservative Party, from the end of the Lloyd George coalition in 1922 until its vanquishment in 1997, does more than narrate the events of the period; he captures, as only a true political animal could, the feel of the politics of the day. This is the Conservative Party not just of the House of Commons, but of the Mayfair clubs and the country houses; not just of the noble speeches, but also of the dirty deals. It is the history of the Conservative Party as Francis Urquhart would have written it.

Clark has no reverence for famous men. We see, for instance, Churchill in the 1930s not as the noble statesman of popular legend warning an unseeing world against Hitler, but as an outcast politician, manoeuvring for position and making trouble for all he was worth. Harold Macmillan, far from the image of the foppish country gentleman he cultivated with such care, emerges as a particularly chilling figure; I know no political thriller as gripping as Clark's account of Macmillan's relentless and singleminded destruction of Anthony Eden (his predecessor at 10 Downing Street) and Rab Butler (his principal rival for the succession). The only major figure for whom Clark has almost unqualified respect is Margaret Thatcher.

The book is full of delicious anecdotes: Macmillan's sang froid when the Lord Chancellor he had removed in a Cabinet reshuffle protested that he had been sacked with less notice than a gentleman would give to his cook: "it is easier to find a Lord Chancellor than a good cook"; John Major's less than comforting gesture when Michael Heseltine suffered a career-crippling heart attack: "Major sent flowers to Horton Hospital. Curious, that. Men seldom send flowers to each other when they are ill. Although it is of course usual to place them at a grave"; Stanley Baldwin's reflection that leading the Conservative Party was "like driving pigs to market".

Clark writes in an idiosyncratic, gnomic style; indeed, many passages of the book have the feel of having been dictated by the author after a rather good dinner. (Not that there is anything wrong with that - it was, after all, the way Churchill wrote "The History of the English Speaking Peoples".) The treatment of the material is in many respects uneven, as Clark indulges his taste for the foibles of his subjects - for instance, we hear more about Lord Birkenhead's mistress than we do about his career. And I even discovered one outrageous plagiarism: whole passages about the General Strike have been lifted almost verbatim from Chapter 7 of AJP Taylor's "English History 1914-1945".

But these belmishes aside, no one who loves politics, or who has an interest in modern British history, could fail to be entrhalled by "The Tories". It reminds us that ambition is the motor of politics; that behind the noble visage of every statesman there lies a ruthless and cunning mind; that successful parties are always arenas in which the leading figures compete in a relentless struggle for office; and that their rivalries, triumphs and defeats are the stuff of which history is made.

George Brandis South Peregian Australia