August 2005: ‘Once you’ve been doing it for a while, it’s not easy to stop being a low life. There’s nothing people enjoy more than watching someone going to hell on a poker, and they rather resent it if that person suddenly decides he wants to get off. No one objects in principle to an idle, self-centred, addicted life, as long as it ends prematurely in lonely and squalid circumstances and everyone can read about it in the papers. Renege on the deal, like a footballer in mid-contract, and people feel cheated.’ On drugs June 2022: ‘I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectatorfrom time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there. January 8, 2011: “Bed was fine. No complaints there. Well, there was one thing, actually. My kissing technique was rubbish. ‘No tongues!’ she’d exclaim crossly, even when she was tied up.” Cancer

There will be a memorial service for him, the details of which will be arranged in due course. The Spectator will be paying tribute to him in next week’s magazine. For now, we have his columns to treasure: a legacy that has enriched, and will continue to enrich, the lives of everyone who comes across them. His column was not a study in ‘low life’ drink and debauchery, although there was certainly plenty of that. The theme that I drew from them, especially in his references to Catriona, was about the role and power of love: its ability to magnify and transform the smallest, most seemingly insignificant parts of life. November 1, 2008: “The bottom half of the bed was sodden. Further investigation told me that, although the sheets were soaked, the duvet and the suit trousers I’d slept in were perfectly dry. Strange.” Short relationships January 2011:‘Bed was fine. No complaints there. Well, there was one thing, actually. My kissing technique was rubbish. “No tongues!” she’d exclaim crossly, even when she was tied up.’ (Credit: Carmen Fyfe) On cancerJeremy Clarke’s last Spectator column, on “the pros and cons of kissing”, appeared in the magazine’s issue of May 6.

He is survived by Catriona, his son Mark, grandsons Oscar and Klynton, to whom he was especially devoted, and three stepdaughters from Catriona’s first marriage. Jeremy Clarke, who chronicled his experiences of living a “low life” in the Spectator magazine for more than 20 years. We have a tribute from Eric Idle. July 2022: ‘And I think: is this how it ends? Lying in bed watching TikTok videos? At the weekend I had planned a retreat in a nunnery. Three days of silent prayer and contemplation. But two of the nuns have caught Covid and the technical nun thought it best that we postponed. And at the weekend the tumour pain in my armpit, shoulder and shoulder blade intensified alarmingly. For the first time, the usual dose of the usual painkillers didn’t touch it. An escalation. I have always imagined that when it was time for me to die,I would make a serious effort to prepare myself. And now that the warning light is flashing, what do I do? I tap the TikTok app and there’s Bernard Manning saying,“A man walks into a pub with a crocodile under his arm.”Shoot me.’ On Spectator readers Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’” TikTok If I’m honest with myself I’ve never completely known or understood what I was doing, or supposed to be doing, every week when writing this column AcidApril 2020:‘She reached down and slid open the bottom drawer of her desk, showing about 100 vodka miniatures. I nodded complicity. She emptied four into two plastic water cups. “Have you got anything to go withit?” I said, which wasn’t very Low Life-like of me. She reached down and pulled out the lower drawer of her neighbour’s desk and rummaged in it, emerging eventually with a medicine bottle of kaolin and morphine.’ Communists and fascists When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says: ‘Early doors yet, as they used to say.’” I read this review with utter disbelief having been a fan of Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column for some years. Unlike this review Jeremy Clarke’s columns are beautifully constructed, keenly observed in that unfettered way The Spectator does so well, utterly hilarious, intelligent and a joy to read. Many weeks they come about as close to perfection as an 800 word piece of this type can. The funniest I read and I’ve only been reading them for a few years - isn’t in the book which, from Lesley Mason’s point of view is just as well. It would probably send her into a dead faint of left-wing, feminist indignation. This morning I woke early paralysed with worse pain than ever and I said to Catriona that we couldn’t go on like this. So she trotted down early to discuss my future with Dr Biscarat. My future is this. I will be cared for at home until I die. France will supply nurses capable of hospital-level care. If the pain continues to overcome the oral morphine, I will be fitted with this fabled morphine ‘syringe driver’, which can be turned up to 11 and put an end to it whenever I like. Splendid.