Parris is candid, and has been through a few adventures, so this is always readable. But as a stern judge of his own.conduct, and unable to resist an archness towards many others, this near-500 page memoir leaves a slightly sour impression. Mostly his focus is gossip and career advancement, and it's entertaining stuff, but he does try hard to do the right thing on the few areas that really matter to him - like gay emancipation, a live and still contentious issue at this 80s and 90s point. Good pen portraits of Thatcher, Powell, Major, Mandelson, and more. Smart judgements too, often in a pithy aside: "the liberals peeled away, as liberals tend to" (in UDI Rhodesia); William Hague's mother was right (about his being just too young for the party leadership) "as mothers tend to be". ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/71616.html

I have a certain sense of loyalty to Clare College, Cambridge, where I spent five mostly happy years between 1986 and 1991, and part of that includes following the careers of my fellow alumni not just from my own year but those who attended after I left (like the sf writer China Miéville) and who graduated before me, or even those who, like the entertainer Richard Stilgoe, the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the mystic philosopher Thomas Merton, had attended for a few terms and got thrown out.

When I arrived, and challenged the Senior Tutor at one of those embarrassing get-to-know-you sherry parties to name someone famous in contemporary public life who had been at Clare, he named Matthew Parris, who had just a few months before resigned one of the safest Tory seats in the country to become presenter of ITV's best known current affairs program, Weekend World. I didn't know it at the time, but I encountered his legacy in the college when I served on the committee of the Clare College Students Association and became the resident wonk on constitutional issues; Parris had written the constitution and given the CCSA its name back in 1969. (The year after my term of office the name was again changed, to the Union of Clare Students.)

So I've followed his progress since. I've seen him in the flesh precisely once, at a Cambridge Union Society debate on the anti-homosexual Clause 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, where he made a moving and effective speech about being a lonely and shy gay undergraduate at the tail end of the swinging sixties. It went better than his first speech in the Union Society chamber, an embarrassing debacle which he describes in painful detail. In fact much of this autobiography is taken up with embarrassing events described in painful detail. He fails as a diplomat, fails as a politician, and fails as a TV presenter (Weekend World was axed, largely because of Parris' own lacklustre performance in the chair), before finding his element in written journalism.

As with a lot of autobiography, particularly if it's written in a confessional style, one has to be cautious about feeling that one has got to know the author; what is written is fascinating, especially about his colonial childhood in Africa and Cyprus, but presumably much is unwritten as well. But I feel I would like Matthew Parris if I were ever to meet him socially.

The other thing I take from the book is what a difference a split second decision can make. The most significant act of Parris' political career was to rescue a small dog which was drowning in the River Thames, shortly before the 1979 election. The resultant favourable publicity was enough to get him the nomination for West Derbyshire, beating out not only another Clare graduate, Peter Lilley, who later became deputy leader of the party under William Hague, but also a smart London lawyer called Michael Howard, who is now the party's leader. The most hilarious moment in the book is when a reluctant Mrs Thatcher is compelled to present Parris with an award for his bravery at a ceremony attended also by the dog and its owners. The dog, excited by the occasion, humps Mrs Thatcher's leg in front of the full scrutiny of the press. Alas, those days were more discreet, and nobody mentioned it at the time. But it gave me a good laugh. ( )

Another Tenerife attempt, this well written autobiography at least managed to perk up my reading interest. Determined to see himself as an outsider, Parris paints a picture of a solitary guy who took fifty years of his life in an effort to really begin living it and resultantly I found the book quite downbeat. There’s no doubt that self-effacement is an appealing trait, but here it becomes a sometimes irritating disguise and sometimes provoked a desire to shout “Oh for God’s Sake man, give yourself some credit for what you have achieved!!” The other alternative title I thought appropriate would have been “The Quiet Homosexual’s Guide to Life”, because there is no doubt that being gay in Thatcher’s Britain, not to mention political party, not to mention this day and age itself, must colour the whole way the world looks. But Parris insists that this is a minor, minor botheration which really isn’t relevant to his life all that much. Yeah, right.
I’m writing this three quarters of the way through the book, and I hope the tone picks up. ( )