Chance Witness: An Outsider's Life in Politics

by Matthew Parris

Hardcover, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

920

Genres

Biography & Memoir

Biography

Politics, Government, Law and Public Policy

All Topics

Nonfiction

History

Publication

Viking (2002), Hardcover, 528 pages

Description

A frank autobiography by The Times columnist and ex-politican Matthew Parris. His childhood was spent on a variety of different countries as his engineer father moved jobs; Rhodesia, Cyprus, the Middle East and Jamaica, After Cambridge and Yale, he joined the Conservative central office at roughly the same time (aged 26) he discovered he was gay. He worked for Michael Dobbs, Chris Patten, Mrs Thatcher (who famously fired him), before entering parliament himself. Part participant, part bystander, Matthew Parris describes what it was like to be so close to the centre and remain an outsider.

Media reviews

The Observer

Parris is a brilliant writer, his mischievous whisper a thrill, even when he is describing the kind of people - balding and sweaty MPs, usually - most of us would cross the street to avoid. Chance Witness, however, is quite bizarre. One minute, he comes over all confessional and bold, telling us

about the first time he went cruising for sex on Clapham Common; the next, he is huffing and puffing - Pooter-style - on the use and misuse of paperclips at the Foreign Office, where he once worked.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member uryjm

Another Tenerife attempt, this well written autobiography at least managed to perk up my reading interest. Determined to see himself as an outsider, Parris paints a picture of a solitary guy who took fifty years of his life in an effort to really begin living it and resultantly I found the book

quite downbeat. There’s no doubt that self-effacement is an appealing trait, but here it becomes a sometimes irritating disguise and sometimes provoked a desire to shout “Oh for God’s Sake man, give yourself some credit for what you have achieved!!” The other alternative title I thought appropriate would have been “The Quiet Homosexual’s Guide to Life”, because there is no doubt that being gay in Thatcher’s Britain, not to mention political party, not to mention this day and age itself, must colour the whole way the world looks. But Parris insists that this is a minor, minor botheration which really isn’t relevant to his life all that much. Yeah, right.
I’m writing this three quarters of the way through the book, and I hope the tone picks up.

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LibraryThing member eglinton

Parris is candid, and has been through a few adventures, so this is always readable. But as a stern judge of his own.conduct, and unable to resist an archness towards many others, this near-500 page memoir leaves a slightly sour impression. Mostly his focus is gossip and career advancement, and

it's entertaining stuff, but he does try hard to do the right thing on the few areas that really matter to him - like gay emancipation, a live and still contentious issue at this 80s and 90s point. Good pen portraits of Thatcher, Powell, Major, Mandelson, and more. Smart judgements too, often in a pithy aside: "the liberals peeled away, as liberals tend to" (in UDI Rhodesia); William Hague's mother was right (about his being just too young for the party leadership) "as mothers tend to be".

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