Matthew has stuck by Max Hastings’s dictum that grown-ups don’t talk

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.