AS these exuberant memoirs of an independent political insider abundantly demonstrate, for Alistair McAlpine the going has almost always been very smooth indeed. He is a great-grandson of Robert McAlpine, the tough Scottish Highlander who founded the great construction company that bears his name.
From the day in 1942 when Alistair was born in London's sumptuous (and avowedly bomb-proof) Dorchester Hotel, which his grandfather built and his father owned at the time, Alistair has enjoyed certain advantages. "My family," he writes, "was extremely wealthy, close knit and loving." He inherited the power of a family fortune, and has lived up to it. It gives him the freedom to say and write whatever he wishes, and to hell with anyone who doesn't like it. He is obviously tough, smart and gaudily self-indulgent.
One of the figures remembered fondly from his privileged childhood was one Slopper, the family's Rolls-Royce-trained chauffeur. "During the first World War he had lost an eardrum and entertained us children by blowing cigarette smoke out of his ear."
Alistair was not a scholarly child. He calls his public-school education, at Stowe, "a disaster However, this recollection gives him a pretext, the first of many, to jeer at the Prime Minister: "This failure has served me well as I am able to criticise John Major's total, lack of intellect with impunity . .
I was on building sites and drinking in pubs whilst Major was still at school trying to pass any sort of exam.
Twenty years after he left school, McAlpine discovered that he was dyslexic. He now regards this handicap as a blessing, "for what I lacked in my ability to read and spell, I made up for with an active imagination". It is a faculty that has served him well in recent years as an author, journalist and buyer and seller of modern art.
As a youth, he learned the family trade intimately, from the ground up. Navvies such as Horseface Toole and Bear O'Shea, immortalised in the famous ballad, taught him that "McAlpine's god is a well-filled hod". Lucky for him.
"The men were big men in every sense of the word," he recalls, "tough, hard, but emotional men, with names like Paddy Torpey, Andy Walsh and Hughie Dougherty; men with hands like shovels; all men from Donegal, Colchmuich and Kerry. I was told my grandfather beld that Irish men were the best workers. Scots the best supervisors and England the best place to work in.
He moved rapidly onward and upward, from Guinness to Chateau Latour and champagne. At the age of thirty-two, in 1975, he became the youngest-ever Treasurer of the Conservative Party. His fund-raising activities dramatically improved their finances.
"I did not know then that I was to work closely for fifteen years with a woman who was arguably the best peace-time prime minister that Britain has had this century." By the time Margaret Thatcher moved into Downing Street, McAlpine was one of her closest friends and most ardent supporters. The spirit of Thatcherism suffuses all of his memoirs.
He was with her in Brighton when the IRA bombed their hotel. During her regime, he was elevated to the peerage, as Lord McAlpine of West Green, which was his country seat until a premonition of danger impelled him to move out - shortly before the IRA destroyed the house with fifty pounds of Semtex.
Disillusioned by the coup that supplanted Thatcher, he now calls Britain "a country that delights in the second rate, promotes the flashy and fashionable and, without fail, continues to put in high office men with a record of continual failure". In McAlpine's opinion, national secondrateness is typically exemplified by Jeffrey Archer. "For the sake of Britain," McAlpine writes, "I only hope that no politician ... mistakenly gives him a job of any consequence.
McAlpine disapproves of the Lottery: "It is shaming that the arts in Britain can only be supported by the proceeds of gambling." He deplores the European Union. It is hardly surprising that he has resigned from the Conservatives to join Sir James Goldsmith's anti-federalist Referendum Party. Unfortunately, that defection occurred too late for discussion in this book.
Isn't "bagman" American slang for a runner who carries illicit funds from gamblers to his criminal boss? But, of course, McAlpine's title is just one of his little jokes. It's adapted from the jolly swagman of Waltzing Matilda. When McAlpine and his second wife are not in their new home in some undisclosed part of Continental Europe, they live on the beach in North-West Australia. Alistair is no longer a bagman, but he is still eminently jolly.