Belatedly reading Alan Clark's diaries of the 1980's, when he was a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's government.
He revealingly describes arguing with Thatcher (about animal rights) where she flips laterally from topic to topic, never letting his rational intellect get purchase: like driving a car on an icy winding road. A classic instance of ENTP - ENFJ confrontation. It was good to get a nailed-down confirmation that conviction-politician Thatcher was actually an ENFJ.
Clark was likeable and ambitious, but lacked self-knowledge. His strategic extrapolations were plausible but frequently wrong (NATO has not been terminally irrelevant; the world's elites do not speak Japanese).
His high IQ was accompanied by a lack of the small-talking, glad-handing minutiae of the political game and he lacked common sense. As a fiercely-independent intellect, he deserved his maverick reputation; he was congenitally incapable of being a team-player.
Smart, duplicitous, honest, reckless and fun, he had no chance of top ministerial office, but what a diarist!
