SEÁN FLYNN reviews A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin. Edited by Ruth Winstone. Profile Books; pp 590; £20
CHRIS MULLIN will be best known to Irish readers as the tenacious campaigner who exposed the grave miscarriage of justice inflicted on the Birmingham Six.
During the campaign, Mullin exhibited a quiet but imposing moral authority. Eventually, his forensic investigation and steely resolve rocked the British legal establishment, forcing it to admit the error of its ways.
Readers would scarcely recognise this formidable figure in Mullin’s diaries. The same moral authority is there, but there is none of the fire and brimstone that marked the Birmingham
Six campaign. As the title acknowledges, this is a view from the foothills; a journey round the periphery of political power with our hero hankering after a substantial role and a real job.
It is not a promising pitch for a series of diaries (This 1999-2005 volume is likely to be the first of three). Mullin has none of the privileged access, not to mention hubris, which drives the narrative in Alistair Campbell’s diaries. There is none of the salaciousness which helped to make the Alan Clarke volumes so compelling.
Instead, what we have is a mild-manner diarist who describes himself as “Minister for Paper Clips” and a “glorified correspondence clerk” on the foothills of government.
Fortunately, our diarist is a former novelist (he wrote the novel-turned-TV drama A Very British Coup) with an entertaining, sardonic style.
The diary begins as the one-time Bennite comes to a junior post in transport and the environment with great reluctance. Before long, he is buried under “a mountain of tedium”. He rolls out speeches written by “some android” to bored delegates at conferences. And there are daily battles with a Private Secretary from Hell who pursues her errant ministerial pupil with relish.
Mullin’s bid to rise above the parapet – his campaign to control the spread of fast-growing leylandii hedges – is viewed as too dangerous for Middle England by the Blair regime. All of this is pure Yes Minister, and no less entertaining. But the whimsy works on another level: this is an astute commentary on the control freakery of the Blair regime and its penchant for style over substance.
Mullin is hysterical as he records the vanities of his boss, John Prescott. Working with JP, he says, is like working at the court of Boris Yeltsin.
Typically, this is intended as a good humoured barb rather than a cutting blow. Mullin is too much of a gentleman for vulgar abuse, and this decency gives the diaries their power. The reader comes to trust Mullin’s judgment as he moves through Clare Short’s international-development department, and returns to the home-affairs committee and a ministerial post (his last) on the Africa desk at the Foreign Office.
Unsurprisingly, the strongest section of the diaries feature the drift towards war in Iraq. Mullin is sceptical about it, and deeply suspicious of American motives.
He writes: “I want The Man (Blair) to be right. In the end that would be best for all of us.”
Eventually, he decides to vote against the war. But there is little self-serving stuff about how he got it right. Instead, Mullin dwells on the awkward predicament which confronted Blair.
With typical self-deprecation, he writes at one point how his existence has become “almost entirely pointless”.
Wrong. Mullin has written the most entertaining and perceptive account of the New Labour era.
It is a book which (gently) exposes the absurdities of political life. It will also stand the test of time long after other more trumpeted accounts have faded from view. Roll on Volume Two.
Seán Flynn is Education Editor of The Irish Times