It’s back. And I can’t believe I missed it the first time. Live Theatre’s dramatisation of Chris Mullin’s diaries has returned to Soho for a lap of honour. Richly deserved as well. The show moves unobtrusively between Mullin’s many spheres of interest. We see his home life as a father of two and as MP for Sunderland South. And we get an insider’s view of Westminster during the glory days of New Labour when parliament, and the entire country, was infatuated with its tooth-some superstar.
Some of Mullin’s recollections have already acquired the status of classics. The late Tony Banks confided to him that no one ever saw Peter Mandelson enter a room. ‘There’s just a chill in the air, and suddenly, he’s there.’
When she first arrived in Downing Street Cherie Blair liked to muse on her husband’s future. ‘I married an idealist. When Tony leaves office he’s going to teach in Africa.’ Clare Short’s name will for ever be associated with the moment when her pager beeped during an audience with the Queen. Short compounded her embarrassment by taking the device from her bag and reading the message. ‘Someone important?’ Her Majesty asked.
Mullin, a political innocent, accepted a junior government post but had no idea how to advance his career. After the 2001 election he told the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, that unless he became minister of state he’d prefer to return to the backbenches. Armstrong struck immediately. Eager to decapitate a troublesome and incorruptible colleague, she told Blair that Mullin had decided to quit. A complete fabrication. But Mullin survived her chicanery because he was motivated by principle rather than ambition and because he represented a strain of Old Labour — dissenting, puritanical, self-sacrificing but practical — that connected directly with the grassroots. He was invited to the Rose Garden at No. 10 for tea with Tony, à deux, where they sat ‘on rattan chairs among Leo’s scattered toys’. Mullin confessed to Blair that he had done more good as a backbencher than he ever had in office. No document marked ‘for decision’ had crossed his desk during two years in Whitehall. Blair was astonished. And this astonished Mullin. One of Blair’s weaknesses, he realised, was that the only ministerial rank he had ever held was First Lord.
The portrait of Blair is necessarily fragmented. He’s always brimming with glib and effusive eloquence and then dashing off to charm the next group of admirers. The most revealing moment is this snippet of advice, offered to David Miliband, about dealing with his constituency party. ‘Go round smiling at people,’ Blair told him. ‘Then get other people to shoot them.’
Mullin has Alan Clark’s knack of capturing and demolishing a personality in a few loaded phrases. He calls Hazel Blears a ‘shiny-faced New Labour automaton who’s gung-ho for anything No. 10 comes out with’. And he describes George Bush as ‘a morally and intellectually deficient serial-killer’ (referring to his stint as governor of Texas where he apparently signed death warrants like a chick-lit author at a book launch).
Mullin refrains, alas, from roasting Labour’s high command during the post-Blair years. He had no respect for John Prescott, whom he depicts as a vain, philandering oaf. His contact with Gordon Brown was minimal so we get a frustratingly chopped-up picture of a brooding psychopath, entirely out of his depth, running the country for three years with no mandate whatever.
He’s more at home with old-school Tories like Christopher Soames and Virginia Bottomley, whose distant-yet-cosy habit of addressing each other by surnames he relishes. Tory-philia is evident in his attitude to the current Conservative leadership. George Osborne he describes as ‘an obnoxious side-kick’ but when he turns to David Cameron he very nearly flowers into song. ‘Soft-skinned and rosy-cheeked,’ he writes when he encounters the newly elected Cameron at a select committee in 2005. ‘He’s bright, personable and open-minded …The more I see of him the more I like him.’
Live Theatre’s production boasts a great lead performance by John Hodgkinson as the shambolic, friar-like politician with a spine of steel. Michael Chaplin has condensed and adapted Mullin’s three volumes of memoirs with terrific dexterity. Putting any journal on stage is a perilous business. And Mullin’s diary is one of those hasty, late-night jobs full of short, punchy entries which are perfectly inimical to the theatre’s symphonic manner and its preference for uninterrupted streams of effects that accumulate towards grand climaxes.
Chaplin has overcome these difficulties and created a many-layered and beautifully paced show which delivers a huge impact with a minimal cast and very few furnishings. Being portable makes it durable too. Wherever the heady delusion of New Labour is studied (in bafflement and wonder), this production will have a central role.
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