Just who was Alan Clark? STEPHEN LEWIS speaks to the North Yorkshire man who believes he knows.

ON May 16 1999, just three and a half months before he died, a despondent Alan Clark confided to his diary an outpouring of love for his wife. "Jane was so sweet...." he wrote. "My love for her, and a premonition of parting soon, made me terribly sad... I thought that I ought to 'go into' the question of how and where I am buried. It has got to be by the fig tree... I would so like to have her beside me, when the moment comes; the stretching out of the hand, or the foot. I am sure it is right for us to dig our grave there."

Perhaps the realisation that he was dying prompted such sentiment. And yet one of the many enigmas about this most enigmatic of men was how he could combine so obvious and genuine a love for his wife of 41 years with the endless affairs and betrayals which must have made her life a misery.

This is, after all, the man whose seduction of a judge's wife and of her two daughters - a threesome he branded 'the coven' - made him, when the story broke in 1994, a figure of fun. And who, in February 1991, began what was to become the first entry in his final volume of diaries by obsessing over the mysterious woman in a Dr Zhivago hat he refers to only as 'x'.

"Despite my resolve to keep 'x' out of this volume I find it practically impossible to concentrate effectively on anything else," he wrote. "She is in my thoughts the entire time... I'm actually ill, have been for a month, lovesick it's called."

There are many Alan Clarks that emerge from the pages of his diaries: the sneering aristocrat who referred to William Hague as "little Hague, in his 'Bruce Willis' haircut ...and his dreadful flat northern voice"; the womaniser who noted after the story of his affair with 'the coven' made headlines that "I may even have come out ahead, having sold at least another 20,000 paperbacks"; and the self-deluding schemer who as late as 1998 was still harbouring the ambition to "strike for the Leadership of the Tory Party".

For one North Yorkshire man who knew him for nearly 30 years, however, the real Alan Clark was none of these. He was someone quite different: a true, generous and loyal friend who shared a passion for vintage cars and was about as far from the stereotype of the aristocratic snob as it was possible to get.

It was a mutual love of vintage Rolls Royce cars that brought Alan Ridsdill and Alan Clark together. Mr Ridsdill, a scientific instrument maker and museum conservator who owned a 1934 Rolls Royce touring limousine, first dropped in to see him out of the blue when he was passing Saltwood Castle and recognised it as the home of a fellow member of the Rolls Royce Enthusiasts Club.

"I had no idea who he was - it was before he became an MP - except that he lived in a castle and he was a member of the club," he recalls. Mr Clark wasn't in: but his wife Jane said how sorry he would be to have missed Mr Ridsdill, and urged him to let them know next time he was coming down.

On his next visit, he was luckier, and found Mr Clark polishing his beloved Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. This time, Mr Ridsdill had been dropped off by a friend and didn't have his car with him. He opened the suitcase he was carrying to show his new-found friend some photos instead, and Mr Clark spotted the musical snuff-boxes he was carrying inside.

"I played one on the bonnet of his car, which acts as an amplifier, and he said 'We've got one that doesn't work'," Mr Ridsdill said. "Then he shouted for Jane." It must have been quite a bellow: at first Mr Ridsdill thought he was shouting for his dog. "But when someone is shouting in a castle, it is a long way to shout," he says, springing to his friend's defence.

Eventually, a beautiful singing bird was brought for Mr Ridsdill to look at. He repaired it, with the help of some white kid gloves and feathers from a stuffed bird - and a lasting friendship was born.

The friendship lasted for years and saw Mr Ridsdill - now 72 and living in a village near York - visit the Clarks regularly at Saltwood and stay at their exclusive London pad in Albany.

Among his proudest possessions are the many letters he received from Mr Clark down the years, some written in his spidery, scarcely-legible handwriting, others typed on House of Commons notepaper.

In one, dated November 16 1983, Mr Clark enquires solicitously about his health following an accident. In another, written on August 4 1984, he commiserates with Mr Ridsdill - who he addresses as 'My Dear Alan' - following a burglary. The note finishes: "Perhaps see you at Saltwood in early October, Alan."

Despite being surrounded by the trappings of wealth, Alan Clark was never a rich man, Mr Ridsdill insists - and he tells a story to demolish the idea of Clark the snob.

In 1974, on one of the many occasions when he dropped in to see his friend, he had a passenger in his car, an elderly man who had once been a village poacher. "A little ferret of a chap with a flat cap," Mr Ridsdill says. When they drove up into the grounds at Saltwood, his companion wouldn't get out of the car, insisting somebody like Alan Clark wouldn't want to talk to him.

"I went and climbed the steps," Mr Ridsdill recalls. "Alan said 'where's your car?' and I said 'I've got this old chap with me. He won't come in.'

"'Nonsense!' he bellowed, and went and dragged him out of the car into the library and started discussing politics with him!" Afterwards, as they drove away, the man said he "couldn't believe a gent like that, wanting to speak to me!" Mr Ridsdill recalls.

Gent he may have been, but there remains the problem of the way he treated his wife.

Jane, Mr Ridsdill says, is "an angel". Mr Clark, he admits, treated his wife like a doormat. "And yet he loved her immensely! He loved her, but I suppose he had his eye on..." He pauses. "All that business about his womanising, it was just a few hours of his life. He loved her and she loved him. She really loved him."

No one who reads her final entries in her husband's diary, about how she slept beside his body the night after he died, could ever doubt that. "It was lovely as I could talk to him still," she wrote. "Much nicer than an empty space, which will come tonight, perhaps?"

It did, as it will come to all of us. And yet the enigma of Alan Clark lives on.

Alan Clark: The Last Diaries is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, price £20

Updated: 10:54 Wednesday, November 06, 2002