The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, volume 2
ed Sarah Curtis
Macmillan £25 pp734
Let us start on Saturday 17 June, 1989, when our hero has been watching Ivan Lendl play tennis at London's Queen's Club. 'I then went into a tube station for the first time, I suppose, in about 20 years. I found the escalators absolutely filthy... I had a little panic moment, thinking there might be a black man behind me when I was alone on the escalator about to hit me on the head... There were a number of black people and elderly whites, some much older than myself, on the tube trains who didn't seem frightened.'
Woodrow Wyatt's second volume of journals are conclusive proof, if anyone is still looking for it, that the most readable diaries can be written by the silliest fools. Utterly out of touch with modern Britain, a grovelling snob and wrong on most things that matter (but not everything), Wyatt has the capacity from beyond the grave to make the reader dream of a chance of standing behind him on a deserted escalator. A man more in need of a good clonk it is hard to imagine.
But who can claim that Samuel Pepys would have been a nice man to know? The great Boswell was in many ways an infuriating buffoon. In general, virtue and the enjoyable tingle of a good journal do not go together. In diarists, we look not to calm, well-behaved observers, but to lechers, toadies, snobs and hypocrites. Had Alan Clark not been a bounder, his diaries would not have been the great entertainments they are.
Wyatt is not quite in that class. His observational skills are second-rate. He does not have the eye. He was not as substantial a political figure as Crossman or Clark, indeed a negligible one, so we get prejudice-confirming detail about how tycoons and Thatcherite politicians dealt with one another, rather than fresh meaty detail about the politics of the time. His own self-assessment at one point in this volume is pretty accurate: 'I have got nowhere in politics. I am just a journalist who sometimes writes goodish stuff but sometimes not.' Well, mostly not, actually. And, as for his ambitions to be a playwright, which occupy him greatly at this period, 'I don't really think I have a got a talent for writing plays.'
But he did have a monumental talent for sycophancy. The range of rich and powerful people he finds delightful, talented, sweet, charming, and so on is at first irritating and finally hilarious. He operated on the simple basis of getting alongside the most powerful and poshest people available and then telling them what they wanted to hear, shovelling on the flattery like a demented stoker. He did, no doubt, genuinely adore Margaret Thatcher, the Queen Mother, Rupert Murdoch and the rest; his blubbing distress at Thatcher's fall and glee at the smallest sign of the Queen Mother's favour are too vivid to be feigned. But he never makes it off bended knee with either. The objects of his admiration do not skip in full colour from the page.
There are no Dr Johnsons for a Boswell in this lot. Rupert Murdoch comes across as a remarkably dull man, lugubriously interested in his companies' performance, reliably shelling out for Wyatt's services as hack and go-between, while uttering exactly the political views any third-rate scriptwriter would put in his mouth. The least convincing sentence in this book, and there are many contenders, must be the one which reads: 'Rupert was very sweet.'
Thatcher's voice he gets well, her rattling on and her salty directness about colleagues. But there is little analysis of this remarkable woman: Wyatt was too dazzled by her patriotism, humanity, courage and brains to make unexpected observations. He was quite deeply, if platonically, in love with her. The same is true of the Queen Mother, very pro-Thatcher herself.
In general, though, as a procession of minor royals, aristocrats, business tycoons and politicians trek across his pages, one feels almost sad at the social dullness of the London life Wyatt lived. The most vivid language is reserved for the rolling, juicy syllables of the fine wines he consumes almost every day; but the world he inhabits seems to lack honest laughter and genuine love of life.
So what, the reader might wonder, makes him a good diarist at all? The answer is simple. Wyatt is honest. He is candid as few of us can bear to be, even when addressing a mirror. He records every morsel of flattery he utters, with as much solemn care as Boswell himself. He ruthlessly enters the thousand petty betrayals of confidence around him, and the minor treacheries of social London, and people will be embarrassed at the result.
He itemises his self-doubts, his worries about money, his jealousies and greed, his huge misjudgments (the poll tax is no big problem, Nigel Lawson's resignation will 'lance the boil' and help Thatcher) and his snobbish excitements. No merely careful, proud man would do that.
As a result, we see him as he was, a very foolish, second-rate fellow. But we believe him. This is an authentic account of his times, and useful and readable because of it. Querulous and vain it may be - but Woodrow Wyatt's voice will never now be entirely forgotten.