Arise, Sir Alan Clark ...

The late Tory MP and lothario Alan Clark would have greeted Charles Moore’s authorised life of Margaret Thatcher with a wry smile. He often complained in his later diaries that he was the only Conservative Minister of his generation not rewarded with a title on retirement.

“I have simply been bypassed,” Clark wrote at the time of the 1995 New Year’s honours, blaming his exotic private life.

But where Lady Thatcher and John Major failed him, Charles Moore has triumphed. Like most politicians of the period, Clark would have looked himself up in the index. And that’s when the smile would have crossed his face. And there he is — listed as Sir Alan Clark.