No, prime minister
Chris Mullin’s diaries of a New Labour sceptic are a pleasure to read says Michael WhiteA View From the Foothillsby Chris Mullin590pp, Profile Books, £20Reading Chris Mullin’s diaries of the Blair years it is hard to imagine that the author was once a zealous, Bennite firebrand, editor of Tribune during the turbulent early 1980s and author of a handy guide on how to deselect your MP.As he observes the idiocies of contemporary political life, the little defeats and victories of the dogsbody in John Prescott’s ministerial team, the vanities of the trade (his own included) and the savage cynicism of the 24/7 media, Mullin’s tone is mild, ironical, even world-weary. Was this the campaigning journalist who sprang the Birmingham Six? Yet today’s Mullin is still discernibly the same man, his disdain for New Labour jargon and double-counting (”Gordon’s idea,” explains Jack Straw) matched by his contempt for Old Labour platitudes, a wry, humorous detachment sustaining him through perpetual doubt. It is a very attractive worm’s-eye view.The strong beliefs are still there, but Mullin does not wear them on his sleeve. He prefers bikes to Heathrow (expand it? “not if I can help it”) and has a comic, private battle with the government car pool over his refusal to have an official car. They get him for it. When in 2003 he votes against Tony Blair over Iraq (”the spooks are livid about the sixth-form essay on Saddam’s chemical arsenal cooked up by No 10″), he does so reluctantly: “I want The Man to be right. In the end that would be best for all of us.”Like many of Blair’s grand schemes, it doesn’t work out. So Mullin records an often-melancholy tale in which, so he notes, one well-publicised cock-up matters more than a dozen Labour successes. In the background are always his Sunderland South constituents, factories opening (and closing), sad refugees, harassed teachers driven mad by Blunkett’s targets, rising teen heroin abuse. …
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