Hurt lined up to play Alan Clark in diaries drama

Actor John Hurt is favourite to play Alan Clark in a drama based on the late Tory MP’s notorious, best-selling diaries, it was announced today.

The BBC series will feature the second edition of the diaries, In Power, covering Margaret Thatcher’s government in the eighties.

It is expected to be aired on BBC4 next year.

Mr Clark was 71 and MP for Kensington and Chelsea when he died in 1999.

He achieved notoriety for his scandalous diaries which included vicious descriptions of Conservative ministers and stories of his philandering lifestyle.

In one entry he described former Chancellor Kenneth Clarke as “a pudgy puffball”.

Another memorable scene described a chance encounter on a train with a “plump young lady” who got into his carriage at London’s Waterloo station and “was not wearing a bra”.

“Bonking on a train? I honestly don’t think the public would mind. I don’t see how it could,” his diary continued.

His loyal wife Jane remained a constant despite his wandering eye.

When he infamously bedded the wife and two daughters of a South African judge, she said: “If you bed people of below-stairs class, they will go to the papers.”

Another source of outrage was his ultra right-wing views.

He called himself a Nazi and said the Third Reich was “the ideal system... it was a disaster for the Anglo-Saxon races and for the world that it was extinguished.”

He wrote two other volumes of diaries covering the 1970s and 1990s which were published after his death.

A BBC spokeswoman said the diaries would make great TV as they were extraordinarily controversial and he was also an extraordinary man.

Jon Jones, who has also worked on Cold Feet, is said to be writing the script which follows the Tory Government from 1983 to 1991.

Scriptwriter Andrew Davies will be adding the finishing touches before production starts this autumn.