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Mullin: a dollop of chutzpah |
Diary of a Blair regime nobody
Give Chris Mullin credit for voting against the war in Iraq, says Illtyd Harrington, but what else has he left for posterity?
A View From The Foothill.
By Chris Mullin.
Profile Books £20
MULLIN’S brazen, bare-faced, brass-necked, shameless Harpies’ voice with its dollop of unpardonable chutzpah has been favourably compared with Alan Clarke’s amusing, lecherous and historically deadly account of daily life with Mrs Thatcher.
But not a human footprint, let alone a carbon one, did Chris Mullin leave during his time in Blair’s years. True, he wrote A Very British Coup and the meticulous detail undid the injustice done to the alleged bombers, The Birmingham Six.
Praise him, too, for being the only one in the government to vote against the Bush-Blair war in Iraq.
What is inexplicable is how Blair seduced him, a one-time enthusiastic follower of the Tony Benn cause, into a junior job.
“Be Patient,” said The Man. “I will come back to you with the offer of higher office and status”. Satanic words, but oh how he yearned to be Minister Mullin, not a mere Under Secretary.
Let in by the back door to the establishment, he bemoans personal extravagance. He asks himself how on earth the government can afford to return the link between the cost of living and pensions, brutally ended by Margaret Thatcher. To increase the pension of 11 million people would be too expensive. Of course, the problem was never to be his.
So much for the former editor of Tribune, salving his conscience by saying the pensioners’ £200 heating allowance was very generous.
Vanessa Redgrave brings some relatives of Guantanamo prisoners to see him; he dismisses it all as Trotskyite trash.
The picture becomes grimier. He smarts with jealousy as Keith Vaz is preferred over him – “What has this man with the brains of a gnat to do with Labour’s masterplan?” he pleads.
Mandelson is, of course, below the salt.
John Prescott remains a school bully. A leading Blairite says of him: “He is insecure.” Not a qualification for a deputy prime minister.
Gordon Brown is constantly hissed about as either a psychotic or a paranoid.
They have the attraction of a nest of vipers.
Mullin seems to have an unnatural affinity for Alan Milburn and Steve Byers, two ardent right-wingers sent by Blair to constantly undermine Brown.
Tony Benn is saddened by Mullins’s presence in the government.
Earlier on, David Miliband, Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper all appear to him to show great promise. Oh dear. Who then, I wonder, is today holding up an open discussion on the causes and conducts of the Iraqi war? Can it be Blair from beyond the grave?
In 2001, Mullin was one of the candidates of the year in the Guardian’s “Turncoat of the Year”. (Peter Hain ended up winning it.) But Mullin being in the running was a strange accolade for a former editor of Tribune.
In spite of his sycophancy about Blair who, he claims, headed Labour’s greatest administration ever, the truth came the day after the general election of 2005. Blair is on the phone, the silky voice covering a veneer of ruthlessness comes through brutally and quickly: “Sorry Chris, got to let you go.” Thus are the almighty made to fall even lower.
A wide selection of this sad, unfulfilled man’s diary was published in the Mail on Sunday over four weeks.
In the autumn 1981, during the first six months of the turbulent Livingstone takeover of the GLC, I was offered £30,000 by that paper to rubbish him and the group in which I was his deputy. I asked Ken what he would have done. He grinned and maliciously answered: “I would have taken it.”
I doubt it.
What a pity George and Weedon Grossmith got there first with their Diary of a Nobody. It was one of the most brilliantly funny books on English humour. But that title would have been a great one for this diary – Mullin’s grey lament for a government which opened with sparkling optimism and is ending like comic opera.
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