How to hide your true self within a 500-page autobiography

It's fascinating if a friend writes an autobiography, almost as interesting as reading one's own. Matthew Parris has written Chance Witness, An Outsider's Life in Politics. I'm a friend of his, and an admirer, so I've been reading his 500-page life since it came out last week.

Matthew landed a brilliant first in law at Cambridge, was approached by MI5 and the Foreign Office, became one of Mrs Thatcher's personal assistants, talked his way into a safe Tory seat, and became a natural member of the Blue Chip Club (top Tories prior to the Major government). More latterly, he has won a permanent seat at The Times, is England's best essayist and has abandoned the most prestigious position Britain has to offer, that of parliamentary sketchwriter.

It's extraordinary, isn't it, what an insider this outsider has been. Why? What's he been doing outside? Ah, now, that's the question. He doesn't answer it himself, but it might be deduced that much – maybe most – of his public life has been driven by perversity.

When lectured about the evils of Barclays' involvement in South Africa, he immediately opened a bank account with it. "Out of similar perversity, and because something indefinably cool about public schoolboys set their clique apart, I fell in with a gang of grammar school boys at Clare. At least they weren't up their own arses." (Cries of Oh!)

Far from leading him to the left, this brought him to join the Conservative Party. But even that, he explains, was a reaction against "what appeared to me the shallowness and progressive pretensions of my privileged generation". Irritation, he says, not conviction, took him to the Conservatives.

But then, joining any political party was perversity itself for someone who hated cliques, their uniforms, their uniformity. That's what political parties are: elaborate cliques.

This is all interesting, that a man should be so windswept and yet blessed with such intelligence, gregariousness, bravery, integrity (continue ad lib from a thesaurus, for Matthew has most virtues, and as for those he lacks, he acts as though he has them). But we never get inside the outsider. Matthew has stuck by Max Hastings's dictum that grown-ups don't talk about their private lives (sex on Clapham Common doesn't quite count as private).

He has written a book which appears to be full of revelations. He has found the cleverest way to conceal himself, and he blends into his autobiography like an animal in the open veldt.

He is a first-rate observer both by eye and ear, his manner doesn't vary whether he's taking to an idiot or a cabinet minister, even when those groups coincide.

His account of life in the Foreign Office is a bravura indictment of civil service values. His command of significant detail is terrific. He gets the broad sweep of Britain's awfulness in the 1970s. He is frank and brave about his sex life, and convincing about the pathology of politicians and why they so often end up in sex scandals. His judgement is pretty good too. He spotted that Kinnock's triumphalism wasn't the most attractive thing at that fateful rally. And more recently he defused my own alarm after 11 September (I was buying tickets for my boys to go to live on the other side of the world).

Having said that, Matthew himself remains elusive. He records his flashes of anger ("I hated in my guts." Or, "May they rot in hell.") but the outbursts are mysterious. Why did he hate? Where did the feeling come from?

It's not just a sense of decorum that prevents him telling us (I'm guessing now), but active concealment is part of his character. This must be true: we see it in his persistent self-deprecation:

"I'm just a lightweight gadfly with a talent for after-dinner speeches." "I wasn't brave enough to be tragic." "No talent, darling, Peter Ackroyd said, and he was right." This can be annoying. At the end of a particularly accomplished deconstruction of Tony Blair's political habits he demolishes his own work with the words: "Rant over." It's an error. He shouldn't say things that aren't true. His self-criticism is frequently unfair. He observes himself unsparingly to get the criticism in before anyone else can. This deflects attention from actual faults, or absences or character blanks. Underneath the decorum you might sense some hectic activity.

Perhaps two different alienating forces are at work. His sexual preference was not something that could be expressed casually. This leads to a habit of concealment. We know, or think we know about this; we've been told about it by those who do.

The other is more tendentious. I have a suspicion that people of Matthew's generation who've been brought up abroad find it difficult and sometimes impossible to settle back in. English society is a mystery we never crack.

The more desperate among us are drawn towards the centre of the national life but find there is no centre there. England itself doesn't help us in this process of reintegration (see what satirists say about British class, cliques, clubs, weather, behaviour, men). You can't penetrate it; you can only grow into it, and that's something you have to want to do. Matthew didn't want to.

A deeper mystery is at work. The problem of love. He acknowledges glancingly, perhaps he doesn't want to go on about it, that he has not loved anyone outside his family. That sort of love, that which makes us suffer, is conspicuously absent from the book.

He describes looking at himself under the influence of LSD. "My eyes looked harsh. Harsh towards myself. He looked an unkind man, unforgiving." Compare and contrast with his valedictory words, how he wants to be remembered: That "I struggled to be honest, meant to be brave and want to be judged to have had a good heart." "Want to be judged to have had a good heart"? As a sketchwriter, Matthew would have been delighted to explore exactly what that meant.

Horrors of junk mail folder

An email from an economic intellectual was misrouted to my junk mail folder. We are in discussion on the Laffer Curve. This curve shows the area where tax revenues rise when tax rates are cut. It's horrible having to go into the junk folder for this pearl and see what swine are in there.

Pre-paid funeral plans. What do they know that I don't? An 82 per cent improvement in body fat loss. Are they mad? I'm devoted to my body fat. And a stark warning entitled "Safety for your Wife". But I'm not married and I cannot believe that candy9@citrus.zzn.co would be able to help me if I were. Zebra P Thompson has sent something on the subject of Horrible Fsckings, and bigbigbig is proposing to ADD UP TO 4 INCHES TO YOUR P****. What is he talking about? And why does he think my P**** needs 4 inches added to it? How do they know I haven't already had 4 inches added to it?

¿ I'm not supposed to write about politics on this page, but some figures have fallen my way (they're hardly secret) that deserve a wider audience.

Liam Fox's big idea for Tory health is to subsidise patients into the heart operation they want by giving them 60 per cent of the NHS tariff as a voucher, which they can top up and get their session privately.

The average cost of the NHS heart operation is a little more than £5,000. The patient would therefore get a £3,000 voucher to buy an operation in the private sector for which the Bupa tariff is £13,000.

Whatever the merits of the idea, it's not exactly a big one. Note, too, how very cheap NHS heart operations are.

Message from the Iron Duke

A modern resonance for Tony Blair and George Bush from the Battle of Waterloo: an officer of the artillery came up to the Duke of Wellington and stated that he had a distinct view of Napoleon, that he had his guns well pointed in that direction, and was prepared to fire. His Grace emphatically exclaimed, "No! No! I'll not allow it. It's not the business of commanders to be firing on each other."