‘John Smith is dead.’ These four blunt syllables, as elemental and atmospheric as the first line of a classic novel, form the opening of Chris Mullin’s new collection of diaries. This is a fascinating read, crammed with gossip, jokes, insights and anecdotes, not all of them political.
Mullin’s first disclosure is that the ‘decent interval’ between a leader’s death and the tussle to succeed him lasts about three seconds. The ‘Stop Blair Camp’ formed as soon as Smith was buried. They try to court Mullin and he brushes them off. ‘I’m in the Win the Next Election Camp.’ He considers backing John Prescott, but
‘I can’t bear the thought of another phoney-left leader. Give me an honest right-winger any day.’
Mullin’s esteem for Blair spills over into adoration after the 1997 landslide. ‘A superstar. One of the all-time greats.’ Blair is determined to stamp out division and he orders backbenchers to abandon the idea that their task is to make demands which the executive must deliver. ‘Your job is to explain,’ he says with dictatorial candour.
Cherie features only briefly in this volume. Mullin confirms that she loathed Humphrey, the Downing Street cat. ‘Give him a kick from me,’ she once airily ordered. He also records this oddity: one of Cherie’s colleagues, hearing her lamenting her poverty, encouraged her to think about the fat fees her husband would earn after leaving office. ‘But I married an idealist,’ she says, ‘When Tony retires he wants to go and teach in Africa.’
Mullin pours subtle but deadly scorn on Gordon Brown’s reputation. He repeats Robin Cook’s verdict that Brown was ‘intellectually lazy’ and he confirms all the mythic details of the former PM’s damaged psyche: shredded fingernails, obsession with spin, the arrogance and self-absorption. As early as 1997 Brown was completely out of touch. His future wife, Sarah, tells Mullin that while on holiday in Cape Cod that summer Brown had suggested a trip to a supermarket.
‘When they got there she asked what he wanted to buy and he replied that he didn’t want to buy anything. He just wanted to see what it was like. Something he can no longer do in England.’
To remedy Brown’s increasing detachment, she asked Mullin to get Brown’s assistant to ‘build more Tea Room time into his diary’. Mullin retorts, ‘more Tea Room time in his diary. Ugh!’
His loathing for artifice and pretence, along with his fundamental decency, make Mullin a captivating tour guide. He suffers bouts of prescient disgust at the venality of MPs. In 1996 he voted against a 26 per cent salary hike (the bill was carried anyway)and he vowed to give away his extra earnings. ‘It’s the only way I can retain my self-respect.’ He is astonished at the activities of the Liaison Committee which arranges summer jaunts for MPs. ‘Club class flights and the best hotels,’ are always booked in order to preserve ‘the reputation of Parliament’. That lofty notion turns out to mean ‘our reputation in the eyes of fat cats from other parliaments’.
He is equally contemptuous of his more shiftless constituents. One man, ‘deep in the benefit culture’, complained that the welfare agencies had obstructed his plan to retire at 42 on sickness benefit. Yet he claimed to be a socialist. ‘This definition of socialism never seems to place any burden on the person laying claim to it.’
Always we sense the tug of elsewhere. Mullin has a rich life beyond parliament and his mind is open to stories from any source. The Queen, he reminds us, does not merely sympathise with capital punishment, she practises it. An unnamed friend, a Privy Councillor, remembers attending her Majesty in the 1970s and finding her at work on an appeal from a prisoner convicted of gunning down the Governor-General of Bermuda. ‘He’s got a cheek asking me for clemency,’ said the Queen briskly, signing the letter of refusal. ‘He even shot the dog.’
Another Labour dissident, Tam Dalyell, has favoured posterity with a record of his parliamentary career. Where Mullin is humble and concise, Dalyell is vain and orotund. He tells us (twice) that he won the Fourth Form School Latin Prose Prize. He was taught the bagpipes by Pipe Major William Ross, ‘perhaps the greatest pipe major of his generation’. Every allusion to his parents includes a reminder that they spoke Arabic. Dalyell’s fluency in German gets three mentions, and he even records this aside from a pupil who witnessed his skills as a student teacher, ‘Mr Dalyell has a posh voice but a with-it sense of humour.’
Dalyell is a sucker for lost causes and his book will be read eagerly by students of alternative history. He claims that a pan-Arabic conference in Cairo could have prevented the Gulf War in 1991. He believes Lockerbie was arranged by Iran in retaliation for the destruction of an Iranian civil aircraft by the US Vincennes in 1988.
He may be right there, of course. Having twice visited Al Megrahi in prison he describes him as an ‘intelligent and charming engineer’ but no mass murderer. And he received confirmation of Megrahi’s innocence from Colonel Gadaffi, whom he met ‘in his tent outside Sirte in 2001’. They didn’t speak. As Dalyell puts it, ‘If I could have read his mind it would have said, “Mr Megrahi had nothing to do with Lockerbie.” ’
Telepathic too, apparently.
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