Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a politician. The son of a Nottinghamshire miner, he told his history master at grammar school that he would be an MP before he was thirty. He was right. He won a Midlands seat for the Conservatives in nineteen seventy.

Presenter0:43

Admired for his quick brain and combative style, his brand of Toryism kept him from high office under Margaret Thatcher for some time. By nineteen eighty five, however, he'd battled his way into the Cabinet, and since then he's held six senior posts.

Presenter0:58

Having no regard for the reputations of others, it's been said, he has made an immense one of his own. At the moment he is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but many predict he'll have the top job before long. He is Kenneth Clarke.

Presenter1:10

Your image, Ken Clark, is that of a bruiser, a man who's unafraid of the heat in uh any political kitchen. Does that come naturally to you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP1:19

Well, I don't think so. Uh it's always rather surprised me that I've acquired that. I I think in politics you get a a cut-out cardboard image. After a bit the people who write about politics have got to fit you in into this sort of great soap opera uh that it's become. And if you'd asked me when I started in politics that I was getting regarded as combative, you've just described me, or robust as I've often described, I would have been very, very surprised.

Presenter1:43

You seem to relish, nevertheless, getting out there and being competitive.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP1:46

Well, I enjoy politics and one of the things is that it gets the adrenaline going. And so in the middle of a crisis, it's very odd. Even if the crisis is a very sad one, very bad one, you've suddenly got yourself into some position you didn't ever intend to get into, there's no doubt there's a certain excitement about it and it gets the adrenaline going. And I've been now long in politics. I've been in so many battles really that I suppose I come out looking like a slightly battle-scarred veteran and so I've always enjoyed the process. So the fact that I'm never despaired, never sort of eased off, always thought if things are going badly, well the only thing to do is to pick yourself up, dust yourself down, come out again, try and win the argument the next time this reputation.

Presenter2:33

And try and win the argument by plain speaking, which on occasions has got you into trouble, because sometimes, as you say, if the adrenaline is pumping, maybe you say things, for example, that the government is in a hole that you wished you hadn't said.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP2:47

Well, I never regretted saying that. It seemed to me a plain and obvious statement of the truth. But again, that's not cultivated. I mean, I it gets uh described at times as if I'm sort of uh consciously trying to be a kind of bluff North Country lad, that kind of thing. That's not my style at all. I I regard myself as uh quite a complicated character. I regard myself as someone deeply immersed in politics and very clear views of what I want.

Presenter3:11

Let's turn to music. Um and as far as I can see from your list it's kind of jazz, jazz and jazz, really, isn't it?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP3:17

Well, my wife told me that if I went on one of her favourite programmes I was not to give everybody an undiluted diet of jazz tenor saxophone, which I could quite uh cheerily do. It's almost all jazz and a modicum of tenor saxophones, but I've tried to bear in mind uh that some people listening to the programme might want to hear another instrument, and I I do listen to a lot.

Presenter3:40

And this is what you'd play on your desert ion. So let's have the first one. What is it?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP3:44

Well, the first one is the one non-jazz record, just to show, you know, I'm an all-round man, I listen to all types of music, but none of them matter as much as jazz to me, but just to show I had a genuine youth and that in Nottingham in the fifties I coincided with the emergence of rock and roll, I decided to start with Litter Richard and Long Tall Sally.

Speaker 44:04

Uncle John with Ball at Sally. He saw him marry coming and he got like an annual baby. Yes, baby. Woo, baby. Having me some fun tonight. Yeah.

Speaker 44:21

Uh my phone

Presenter4:36

Little Richard and long tall Sally, of course.

Presenter4:38

So you were born, Ken Clark, in in D H Lawrence country, what, ten months into the war?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP4:43

Ah yes, I was born in Nottingham, but my family actually lived in a place called Langley Mill, where I spent the first ten years of my life, which is right on the Knots-Derby border, bottom of the hill from Eastwood, where DH Lawrence came from. My father, when he he left the mine, uh actually opened up a shop in Eastwood and he had the shop in Eastwood till he died.

Presenter5:00

What did you do down the mine?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP5:02

He was a colliery electrician. He worked down Moorgreen Colliery. I eventually found it was very near my constituency. Indeed, the owner of the old company he used to work for became a constituent of mine and I used to go to conservative gatherings at his house, which features in some of the D. H. Lawrence novels.

Presenter5:20

What did people think of D. H. Lawrence then when you were a lad? I mean, were they proud of him or were they?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP5:24

Well they weren't at all. They weren't at all. My father knew a lot of people who'd known the family and Eastwood really refused to acknowledge this man for years and years. They liked his father who was regarded as a great character and they thought his mother and D. H. Lawrence himself were a stuck-up pair who never really settled down there and then he brought shame on the village by writing all those dirty books. And I went to the same school as him. Later on when I moved to Nottingham I went to Nottingham High School and when I first went to Nottingham High School here was the the most famous old boy of the school and nobody would acknowledge his existence for exactly the same reason. But you all read his books. We all read his books.

Presenter6:03

Um and your father, you said, opened a a shop, a a jewellers and watchmaker's shop.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP6:08

That's right.

Presenter6:08

Did you help?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP6:09

I d I did, uh yes. We lived at the back of the shop in Nottingham, so one of the things I'm afraid I rather hated doing was occasionally going behind the counter in the shop, and uh I never really got into the shop, but but you know

Presenter6:20

But you had the deep understanding of trade and profit and loss, obviously.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP6:24

I am not sure I acquired that at my father's knee, but uh he he was into this shop.

Presenter6:31

And you had apparently a strong local accent.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP6:35

I did when I left Langley Mill. I always say my background's exactly the same as Dennis Skinner's. Grammar school and Oxford in his case, Grammar School and Cambridge in mine. And Dennis, I think, defiantly keeps his Derbyshire accent, whereas I lost it in Nottinghamshire. But yes, when I went to Nottingham, which has a strong local accent, my accent used to amuse people because I had a very strong accent, you know. But those are the days when you lost your acc accent as you became educated going through the process that I did.

Presenter6:59

But those were the

Presenter7:04

Indeed. I mean, did you take a conscious decision to flatten it out?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:08

I don't think so. No. You know, and I think I probably got teased a bit about it, although people had a strong Nottingham accent at the first schools I went to, and it it steadily went.

Presenter7:18

Do you think you slip back into it from time to time? I mean, when you're angry or feel passionate about something.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:18

Yeah.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:22

No, I don't think so. Uh uh my wife says I have flat vowels occasionally, you know, and there's some words she says I pronounce in the way uh other people don't. And the word one I always describe it as one and um she thinks that's rather funny. But uh uh I uh I just found that I acquired the accent of most of the other boys at Nottingham High School.

Presenter7:44

So it wasn't that you felt you couldn't get on in life without flattening it out.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:47

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:49

done anything like that at any stage of my life, not not consciously, and I don't think

Presenter7:50

Absolutely.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:53

Subconsciously either.

Presenter7:55

Let's have record number two.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP7:56

Well record number two is tennis saxophone. It's the great modern tennis saxophone. It's John Coltrane from I think a really seminal LP. It's called Giant Steps.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:07

I was told by a friend recently that one thing I have in common with the player of that, which I didn't previously know, is he always wore hush poppies.

Presenter9:13

Do you still always wear hushbracks?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:14

I wear suede shoes. A lot of them are hush puppies, but I do it defiantly nowadays since people started making rude remarks about them. Even I am determined not to change.

Presenter9:20

Indetermines.

Presenter9:22

Even with your dinner jacket.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:24

Only once with a dinner jacket, and that's because I found myself in London with no black shoes, and it was a constituency party for Geoffrey Howe's constituents, and his as he always used to wear suede shoes, I decided that they wouldn't notice under the table.

Presenter9:36

Tell me about the family politics. Um what were they? Were they anything specific?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:40

I think my father probably spent most of his life voting Conservative. I'm not sure my mother ever did. But my own interest in politics was was kind of one of those things that I got into my head.

Presenter9:49

How early on did it develop?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:50

Oh, and I was in short trousers.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP9:52

I just started following politics'cause I used to read the newspaper every morning and I used to read the sports page, but I also used to read all about the politics, so I followed the Attlee Government when I was at primary school.

Presenter10:03

But when but when you got to Cambridge, apparently, you didn't know which political party to join, or you joined a lot of them, did you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP10:09

Well, a lot of people joined all of them, and I certainly

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP10:11

I went to Cambridge intending to be very political, intending to get into politics, wanting to be a politician. But I think until the end of my first year I wasn't entirely sure that I was going to be a Conservative. For a time I carried on being in what was the Gates Galite campaign for democratic socialism, when at the same time I joined the Bow Group, the Conservative Bow Group, but it was the Conservative Association that I held office in.

Presenter10:35

So what was it that made you choose the Conservative Party in the end? I mean, again, as you say, one would have thought you were naturally more attracted to Gateskill than you would have been to Macmillan at the time.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP10:43

Well, the reason a lot of my friends became Conservatives, a great raft of them in the Government now, I think was we were genuinely inspired by Ian MacLeod above all, but people like Rap Butler, the great figures in the Macmillan Government. I identified with them because I thought they were modernising the country, which is one of the themes that I've always been rather keen on throughout my political life.

Presenter11:05

You set out reading history, but you changed the law. Now why did you do that?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP11:09

It was fairly utilitarian, I think. I wanted to earn my living, not to go into politics. I had a slightly old-fashioned view that the law was easy to combine with politics, that a lot of lawyers became politicians, which I think was easier in the 1930s than it is now. I have to say I thought the law was a fairly easy tripos. It would give me lots of time for all the other things I wanted to do.

Presenter11:30

Rulga

Presenter11:31

More of a doddle is the quote I've heard.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP11:34

Well, it wasn't it wasn't quite the dawdle I thought it was going to be because I used to try and get through the exams at the end of the year and I never quite got the first, which except in my first year, which I I thought I would get.

Presenter11:35

I think too much.

Presenter11:47

Does it rankle that you miss the first?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP11:49

Not really, not really. Uh it was probably good for me. It uh first time I began to realize that you could not just assume that all these things were going to happen and that I g I really realized looking back that if I'd only could found the time I should have put a bit more work in and that you do have occasionally to put some work in to be able to get these uh these things.

Presenter12:12

Record number three.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP12:14

Record number three is uh from a rather famous film which happened to emerge at about the time I was at Cambridge. I remember taking my then girlfriend, now my wife, to see it at a cinema in Cambridge, Jazz on a Summer's Day, the film was called, Jimmy Goofery Trio and the Train on the River.

Speaker 412:34

Okay, thank you, okay, thank you.

Speaker 413:05

No.

Presenter13:29

There was the Jimmy Goofrey trio and the Train on the River.

Presenter13:33

So as you said, Kenneth Clark, you also met your wife, Gillian Jill, at Cambridge, and married her in'sixty four. We we see and hear very little of her in comparison with many Cabinet wives. Has she resisted becoming the political wife?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP13:47

Well, she is rather political in and around my constituency. I sometimes think she makes more speeches in Nottinghamshire than I do. And she's always got very heavily engaged in politics, but not not high profile nationally.

Presenter13:57

Does she feel the pressure to be seen alongside you nationally more? And is that a pressure that you really don't like? Well, we resist.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP14:05

I missed it in the sense that she's seen alongside me nationally, people, you know, want to see her there, but she's certainly no intention of sort of giving up her privacy and altering our family life and sort of emerging as a personality in her own right. I mean, my family's always been a area of stability in my life. It's something I retreat into and I I try to keep my own family life fairly private as well.

Presenter14:29

Hmm but you

Presenter14:31

She certainly would have to give up that kind of semi anonymity if you were promoted again, wouldn't she?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP14:38

Well, in the sense that uh she'd get ridden up, but I mean let's think of recent ones. Dennis Thatcher never gave an interview in his entire time when he was there. I thought Dennis was uh lampooned unkindly. Uh the it's one thing to have a go at the politician. It is quite ridiculous to have all these snide things written about your family. It's one of the things you have to put up with.

Presenter14:54

How about

Presenter14:57

But it would happen, wouldn't it? I mean, being a woman, her she would be talked about, her appearance would be talked about, I mean, as Norma Majors has been.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP15:04

Well, it does now, but she had a bit of the norm of major treatment from the media. I mean, all all the sort of gossip side of politics does tend to be rather snasty and snide. So you uh one or two of my my friends have got uh wives who are models, so they tend to juxtapose pictures of my friends' wives walking down catwalks, modelling, alongside pictures of Gillian out on a country walk with me. Uh th this is this is all slightly silly.

Presenter15:28

But is it something that you do talk about? I mean, it's an important consideration, really, isn't it? If if you were to get the top job. I mean, it would be a major decision for her were you to go for it.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP15:38

We don't talk about my going for the top job. She's always known from the day she married me,'cause she first knew me as a student when I was very political, that I was going to go into politics. And it I enjoy it like mad. She enjoys some of it. Uh but we do try to keep our privacy.

Presenter15:54

Next record.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP15:55

The next record is I thought I'd better have one British player, and he's the best British player in my opinion, a man called Stan Tracy. This is a live performance when I was there. I was actually in a club called the Bass Clef and the night this was being recorded Stan Tracy had a visiting saxophonist from North America called Sal Nysticoe who I very much liked and Sal Nysticoe's a man who made me look svelte and he was a big man and a saxophone and sort of way of life I followed then. As a junior minister I could get into the club still and I could still stand the pace when I was that young. And I remember Sal Nysticoe in an interview I once heard saying of London very regretfully when he came, there ain't no late night people any more. Well there were a few and in the applause at the end of this track there is I think probably the Minister of Health applauding at the time.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP17:44

The only thing I cheered, but that was uh two in the morning in the middle of the health reforms.

Presenter17:48

Stan Tracy Quintet and Straight No Chaser. You won a seat in Parliament, as I said, in the Heath victory of nineteen seventy, and you were a Heath supporter in the leadership race against Mrs. Thatcher. And then, of course, fifteen years later, you played a significant part in her going, because you were the first one in to that room of hers in the House of Commons, weren't you, when she was contemplating whether to stay or whether to go? You were brutally frank, weren't you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP18:12

I wasn't brutally frank, though. That's a colour that's been put on it. I had spent my time campaigning for her and voting for her in the first round, and I was convinced that she'd failed to get through the first round. 170 people, I think, had voted against her, and there was no way she could carry on. So I went in, sort of blooded with battle, as it were, and sought to persuade her that she had lost. and that it was no good going on, she was going to be defeated, that in my opinion the party wanted to have some more candidates, particularly John Major and Douglas Heard. I was doing what I usually did, which was give my genuine advice.

Presenter18:52

But did you tell her that if she ignored that advice and pressed on that you would resign?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP18:58

I didn't tell her, but I told others I would. As the night went on, I could not believe that there was any serious intention to fight on. I really did think it would have been a disaster.

Presenter19:09

But the man that you backed to follow her, Douglas heard, didn't win the leadership John Major did.

Presenter19:15

You argued, I think, at the time, that he was too inexperienced for the job.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP19:19

I don't think I put it quite like that. When asked what the merits of Douglas Heard were against John Major, I did say that John had not held as many posts as Douglas. I deliberately we all avoided, as it were, knocking copy, and we stopped the whole thing turning into any kind of bitter contest.

Presenter19:37

But do you think, in a sense, what you implied in saying that mister Heard had held more posts than John Major

Presenter19:43

Was correct, that in has been proved to be correct, that John Major has lacked experience.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP19:48

I don't agree with that at all. What happened was that John won quite convincingly and we all rode in behind John. Which for an inexperienced Prime Minister was a fairly spectacular example of leading the country through an extremely serious crisis.

Presenter19:57

So what's gone wrong?

Presenter20:10

But a lot has happened since then, and the Government has been in a hole, as you said, and um many would say it's still in that hole. Um what's the problem? Has the has this government been in power for too long?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP20:21

No, I don't think it has. I think if you ask me why have we got in such serious problems since the last election, it really all stems from Black Wednesday, I think, and the fact that we came out of the ERM in the way we did. I personally think we put back together our economic policy remarkably rapidly with the guidelines we've followed since, carried on reducing interest rates, carried on getting inflation down. But it undoubtedly rocked our authority and since that time and we've gone through one of those patches which I've been in government long enough now to remember we've been through many times before. I reckon the end of 1981 in Margaret's first term was worse than the situation we're in now.

Presenter20:58

Yes, but the patch has never been as long as this one. This has gone on for some eighteen months or more now, hasn't it?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP21:02

And it's no, well, let's not argue history about 1981. That was uh pretty bad, actually. Uh Margaret certainly, all the way through nineteen eighty and all the way through nineteen eighty one, had a f fairly permanent crisis inside her party. We were in a deep recession. Amongst other things, we had a big borrowing requirement. Uh I remember thinking of the winter of nineteen eighty one, we had no chance at all of winning another election, and I began to wonder whether the Conservative Party as a whole was going to stay in one piece. Uh I still reckon I rate that higher on the Richter scale.

Presenter21:33

More jazz.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP21:34

Well, this is probably my favourite jazz track of all, if I was driven to it. It's got all the sort of great bebop players, and bebop is actually my favourite music of all. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell. And I suppose talking about good things coming out of crisis, this was actually played in a half-deserted hall. They clashed with a heavyweight fight where Jergio Joe Walcott was fighting. They all were falling out amongst themselves. The bass player recorded it, Charlie Mingus, and he hadn't told the others he was going to. He dubbed his part afterwards. The whole thing was by all accounts chaotic. And they must have been so worked up with each other. The adrenaline was going. They produced great music.

Speaker 422:28

I'm not sure.

Presenter23:11

Charlie Parker Quintet and Night in Tunisia.

Presenter23:14

Um it's fair to say, Ken Clark, isn't it, that you're a broad brush man. You don't care much for detail.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP23:19

That's not true at all, actually, but that's uh my opponents have been trying that attack on me for some time, ever since that silly spat with Norman Tebbitt over uh whether or not I'd uh read the particular HMSO text of the Maastricht Treatise. They'd been trying that. Uh in politics the devil's in the detail, and I do more paperwork in the average day than most people do in a month.

Presenter23:21

Remember that?

Presenter23:41

For one minister who inherited a department from you re was reported to say it was all a bit of a shambles and there were some piles of unanswered correspondence about the place.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP23:48

That was Barney Hayhoe who found that I was behind in the correspondence, but he found as well that I was very much on top of the Health Service. That was when I was Minister of Health. Because Norman Fowler was doing a Social Security review, I was doing the first managerial changes in the Health Service and at the same time doing all the casework, what hospitals were closed where and so on. And I have to say, keeping up to date the correspondence was about number ten on my list of priorities.

Presenter24:14

So you would refute the suggestion that there's a lazy streak in you, like the one that didn't quite get the first at university?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP24:14

Yeah.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP24:20

I d I refute it very strongly. You you can't be a politician, a British politician, and be lazy. That is, you I can find you quotes saying quite the reverse about me, if you want to look for them. What you do have to do, because the system is so extraordinary, the enormous uh amount of detail laid on to a British politician, God knows what you want to do.

Presenter24:40

How do you know what to do when you become Chancellor if you have no formal training in economics?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP24:45

I had an A-level in economics. I have, no doubt, a startled school teacher who remembers teaching it to me. But more seriously, I've been involved in arguing and debating economic policy for about thirty years. I've been in economic departments, used to speak in budget debates when I was at DTI and at employment. And indeed, people used to criticise me for doing interviews about economic policy at key moments, like Wednesday when I was there. So I don't think I had any difficulty moving into the Treasury.

Presenter25:15

How much sleep did you lose over that first budget last November?

Presenter25:19

I mean that must have been one of the hardest jobs.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP25:19

That must have been one of the hardest jobs. It was the hardest work I've ever done, actually. Because you had a political trip to pull off.

Presenter25:22

Because you had a political trick to pull off as well. I mean, you had certain sides of the party that had to be.

Presenter25:29

Calmed, didn't you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP25:30

Well, optically the sides of the party weren't calm all the time. The party isn't very calm at the moment in its public comments. I had lots of helpful contributions from backbenchers from time to time as I prepared it. I thought it was going to be very unpopular in my simple way. I thought if you put up taxation and cut public spending, you're going to offend a few sensibilities here and there. So I then had to turn it into my speech, my occasion, spend an hour and twenty minutes seeking to persuade people of what I was doing.

Presenter25:58

And it did seem at the time as if you'd done the trick. You got a good press, and as you say, people seem to be rather pleased. But did you know that ultimately the flack would fly, which it is now doing? As you say, if you put up taxes, that's what's got to happen.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP26:09

Uh well, I said so the following morning. I've always believed Ian MacLeod's adage that uh a popular budget on the day is always unpopular thereafter. But funnily enough, we're having the debate about it that I thought I'd be conducting between November and December. People seem a bit slow on the uptake.

Presenter26:24

But the fundamental point about the debate, as you well know, is that this Government came in on a ticket to reduce taxation and is in the process, with the help of your budget, of imposing the biggest tax increases in history.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP26:34

Well, we have got taxation down substantially throughout the 1980s. We never said we would never put up taxation on any occasion. The aim will be to get down taxation when it's prudent to do so, when the economy allows... What people rely on from a Chancellor, and what makes a Chancellor successful or unsuccessful, is whether over the course of the two, three, four years that follow, the economy does well or not. And at the moment, we're recovering faster than anybody else. We will be leading the rest of Europe out of recession.

Presenter26:39

We are really detecting.

Speaker 426:52

And what's that?

Presenter26:52

Just for the next election.

Presenter27:13

Record number six.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP27:14

Well record number six is just to show that I do listen to traditional jazz. I used to be very much in traditional jazz. I decided I'd better have a vocalist at uh some stage. There aren't that many vocalists I like. But Bessie Smith's Young Woman Blues is a blues and we must have a blues and it's a very moving one.

Speaker 427:44

Some people call me a hobo, some call me a bum. Nobody knows my name, nobody knows what I've done.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP27:51

Nobody

Speaker 427:59

Amen.

Speaker 428:01

As any woman in your day

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP28:06

Anyway, there we are.

Presenter28:08

Bessie Smith, Young Woman's Blues, are you regretting that choice now, Chancellor?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP28:13

No, I'm not. It's a great voice, actually. It's a great, uh, you know, defiance uh comes to that which you began by accusing me of showing on occasions to my critics as well.

Presenter28:23

So how often do you get to Ronnie Scotts these days?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP28:25

It's I haven't been for some time. I went to when I was Secretary of State for Health celebrating getting the a difficult bill over and uh I regret it. I I'd say it's because of the work. I uh just don't have the time. It's also because I'm getting older. I just cannot go to Ronney's till two, three in the morning and then go home do the red boxes, then go into the house the next day in the way I used to.

Presenter28:47

Does increasing age also mean that you can't drink as much beer as you used to?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP28:52

Well, I never would be able to drink as much beer as I drank as a student. I mean, nobody can. But I still have a pint of beer every now and again. I get my leg pulled about it, because it used to be regarded as sensational that a Conservative Member of Parliament might go into the Kremlin Bar in the House of Commons and drink beer, but I quite like going to a Parliament and having a pint of beer.

Presenter29:14

I didn't think it wasn't so much the drinking of beer or indeed the smoking of cigarettes, but you now smoke cigars, don't you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP29:20

I gave out cigarettes when I was in my early twenties. Yes, only the BMA used to accuse me of smoking cigarettes. I smoke rather filthy little cigars, yes. I think politics should be conducted in a smoke filled room.

Presenter29:27

I think pop

Presenter29:30

Do you? Still, even if you're Health Secretary, because that's been the point, hasn't it? And that's why those things were were made much of.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP29:36

Well when I was Health Secretary I certainly supported all the campaigning to warn people of the dangers of smoking. But I think if I never had a pint of beer, if I never smoked my cigars, everybody then would tell me I was suffering from stress. And I just think you've got to be able to keep a sense of perspective, be able to relax when you want to relax and keep on top of the job.

Presenter29:59

And relax how you want to relax, even if the problem is you may be called a hypocrite.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP30:01

Then

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP30:04

What, for smoking? No, I wonder there's no hypocrisy about it. I think people are free to make their own choice. I think there's a serious danger that all the health warnings about tobacco, which are right, are turned into a kind of zealot, self-righteous campaigning by too many people.

Presenter30:21

So it would obviously be impossible for the image makers to get their hands on you.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP30:25

Really nobody's going to tell me what sort of suits to wear, and I'm certainly not going to ever go to a theatrical barber's, and I'm not ever going to uh attempt to change things.

Presenter30:36

It's too late really, because we all know what you're like. I mean if you're on the video.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP30:38

Yes, I don't put it on. I mean, it gets exaggerated slightly in public. I I think I'm an altogether more sophisticated and I think I used the word earlier on complicated man than uh people think I am.

Presenter30:48

Why do you say, and you've now said it twice, that you're complicated. In what sense are you complicated?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP30:52

Well, I'm interested in things that people don't know about. I mean, I I get subjected to so many diary pieces that people have cottoned on to the fact that I'm mad keen on bird watching.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP31:03

Before I was in birds, I used to butterflies used to fascinate me more than that. Uh I do actually have a big interest in Romanesque architecture. Uh my favourite form of holiday is not that I'm always cartooned lounging on a beach somewhere. I haven't been on a beach since my children got old enough not to want to be taken there. And I go into mountains mainly. So I I I have a much wider range of interests than most people are aware, but I better not give too many of them away because I said earlier that a bit of privacy I quite enjoy.

Presenter31:33

Recovery.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP31:34

Record number seven is uh Thelonious Monk. If you have a modern jazz enthusiast, most people have heard of Thelonious Monk, unlike the other people I've been playing. And uh this is just uh the great ring uh monk tune which people who haven't heard him before will not believe you can actually whistle along to once you get used to the strange sound of it. It's called rhythm and

Speaker 432:43

Uh

Speaker 432:49

Uh

Presenter32:53

Thelonious Monk Quartet and Rhythma Ning. What are you going to do listening to all of this jazz on your desert island? Are you sort of stomping about on the beach?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP33:01

No, I d I don't tend to sort of leap about and uh you know, if I tap my feet a bit it's uh uh the most I do. You find most people listening to jazz actually don't uh sort of uh pound away and tap their hands.

Presenter33:12

They move much.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP33:13

Well, that's uh we move a little, but not not too much.

Presenter33:18

This Government has now been in the hole we've talked about for a very long time. It's inevitable that John Major's leadership is called into question, and it's inevitable that your name is mentioned as a possible, if not likely, successor. So will you stand if and when the time comes?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP33:33

Well, I've been mentioned as the next Prime Minister, but three, for about the last ten years. It's come a bit closer, no. That comes a bit closer. The odds have shortened, but I've always said the same thing whenever this question is asked. If any one of the 650 members of Parliament denies that he or she wants to be Prime Minister and don't believe him, because obviously if you go into politics, you wish to have very interesting jobs, you wish to actually see yourself the opportunity of doing things. But when John eventually retires, I have no doubt I shall hope to be a contender, as the saying goes, and no doubt by that time he'll be drawing his pension, and some young man or woman we've never heard of will pick me at the post. But I

Presenter33:37

Yeah, it's come a bit closer.

Presenter34:16

You can't deny that you must have thought about it a little more closely in recent times.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP34:20

I I have never gone through my political career plotting in that way.

Presenter34:25

But you've never been as close to that high office as you are today, have you?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP34:29

Well, every time I seem to have got a bit closer. Uh at the moment, it seems to me John Major and I are very close to each other. We're both in exactly the same position. People who criticise John Major plainly would criticise me even more. And the great thing is to actually get the party back in the position it ought to be so that we do win another election and keep going.

Presenter34:53

Mast record.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP34:55

Last record is a very good one to go out on. It's a good, lively, jazz club type record. George Adams, Dom Pull and Quartet. I've heard them at Ronnie's several times. On this they're playing Saturday Night at the Cosmos.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP35:58

Believe it or not, I wish I could do that to a tennis activity.

Presenter36:01

The George Adams, Don Pullen Quartet, and Saturday Night of the Cosmos. Which one of these eight records, if you could only take one of them?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP36:08

Well, if I was driven to take only one and abandon everything else, I think I'd probably take uh the Charlie Parker Quintet and the it's a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto that I took Night in Tunisia from.

Presenter36:20

And what about your book?

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP36:22

My book, well, uh I'd read incessantly political biography. Uh not just my contemporaries but nineteenth century and eighteenth century politicians as well. Uh so I probably take Cecil's Life of Melbourne, that I think is the best of its kind, uh rather than the sons and lovers that everybody always expects me to say, because uh

Presenter36:42

You're right. And um your luxury.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP36:45

My luxury? Well, I suppose we've covered most of the luxuries I have in life so far. Uh a box of decent cigars, I'd probably take.

Presenter36:53

Not a tennis axe.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP36:55

That that that actually can I instantly change my mind? Because my one unfulfilled ambition in life is to be able to play a tenor saxophone. If I could have become a tenor saxophone player like a few of those who've heard, who knows, I might never have taken up politics.

Presenter37:10

And you could do without the cigars.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP37:12

Well, I'll take your health advice. I'd at last have the time to learn the tenos saxophone that life has not given me so far.

Presenter37:20

Kenneth Clark, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke MP37:24

Pleasure.

Speaker 337:31

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio4.