Hinterland review: the rise and fall of New Labour

To demonstrate they’re actually human, politicians must now have proper interests outside politics – a hinterland. Chris Mullin certainly has. By the time he entered parliament as the Labour MP for Sunderland South in 1987, he’d reported on the south-east Asian wars of the 1970s, written three novels including A Very British Coup, and campaigned to overturn the convictions of the six Irishmen wrongly convicted of the Birmingham pub bombings.

He arrived at Westminster aged 39 and, over the following 23 years, served twice as the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, and was a minister in three departments. Being a proper Grub Street irregular (he was the editor of the Tribune earlier in his life), he kept a diary while he was an MP and, when he left politics in 2010, he published these in three volumes. They are considerable works. Critics have compared them with Alan Clarke’s diaries but that’s not quite right. Clarke’s subject was himself and his neuroses: Mullin’s every bit as self-deprecating as Clarke but his subject is New Labour, its rise, its fall, its hubris.

The diaries come in at over 1,500 pages. You might want to read them but haven’t the time. Well, worry not, for Mullin has now written a memoir, Hinterland, which offers a nicely judged abridgement of the political stuff plus an engaging account of his life before and after Westminster, all delivered in his fluent, accessible, candid, likeable, literate and unpretentious style.

Mullin’s people were middle-class, prosperous and Catholic. He was privately educated with, a nice fact this, Brian Eno among others. Today many believe anyone who’s had even the lick of a silver spoon must be a wrong ’un. If you think this then please read Hinterland. As you’ll discover, the author had advantages but the humus from which he sprang also made him what he is: a man who has spent his whole life fearlessly challenging the strong who oppress and brutalise the weak.

Reviled

Naturally, it has not been easy: the British rightwing press reviled him, as did elements in the Labour Party, but he stuck to his principles (even when accused of being pro-IRA because of his campaign on behalf of the Birmingham Six) and he survived thanks to his charm and his willingness to talk to anyone, including his enemies.

When he arrived in the House of Commons he continued this policy and it paid dividends. Eventually he made minister and had an interesting and varied career in three departments. Once he got on the ministerial ladder, on advice from Sir Richard Mottram, rather than try to do everything, he “picked three modest aims: regulating the growth of leylandii trees, placing limits on night flights over London and making discretionary the payment of housing benefit to slum landlords”. He failed with the first two but he managed with the third: so, one out of three – not bad.

Naturally, like every ministerial career, his ended in failure. The reason – and he stresses this – wasn’t that he was an outlier and a member of the awkward squad who was sloughed off as punishment for past misdeeds. The reason, he tells us, was his own dereliction which obliged the then prime minister to conclude that he “wasn’t as capable as he Blair had once supposed”.

Furious

In December 2003, as Africa minister, he was volunteered to sit beside Blair when the prime minister reported to House of Commons on his recent trip to Africa. Mullin didn’t prepare and when Blair asked him for an answer to a nasty Tory question he didn’t have it. Blair was furious and left the chamber afterwards without saying a word. From then on his star waned and 18 months later Mullin was sacked from cabinet. It was “a massive blow to” his “fragile self-esteem” and, at the 2010 election, he stood down and retired to his cottage in Northumberland.

Hinterland ends with a chastening epilogue. Mullin voted against the Iraq war, though as he admits with the heaviest of hearts. Clearly, it was a close-run thing and Corbyn’s election, he knows, “is yet another of the bills coming in for Iraq”. He’s not a Corbynite, he voted against him in the leadership election “on the grounds that in a parliamentary democracy it is folly to elect a leader who enjoys the confidence of less than 10 per cent of his parliamentary colleagues” and he judges Corbyn’s “failure to throw himself wholeheartedly into the campaign to remain in the EU” as “arguably a decisive factor in the outcome” and a major contributor to Corbyn’s subsequent woes with his own MPs.

He believes Corbyn must go and if he does not the Labour Party will suffer not just “mere defeat, but annihilation”. He also knows that even with Corbyn gone there remain terrible problems, for with Scotland lost to Labour the future will be “an indefinite period of Tory rule” unless Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens make an electoral pact.

His argument has huge virtue but will the party heed his advice? Well, if a person’s decency, humanity and generosity were the criteria that determined whether or not they should at least get a fair hearing then Mullin, who has these virtues in abundance, should be listened to.

So: can the British Labour Party listen, at least? It is to be hoped but such is my pessimism I very much doubt it.

Carlo Gébler teaches at Hydebank College (formerly Hydebank Young Offenders’ Centre) in Belfast and the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in Trinity. His collection The Wing Orderly’s Tales is published by New Island.