Chris Mullin’s diaries trace the rise and fall of New Labour. He talks to Robert Philpot and Adam Harrison about the lessons he learned

On Thursday 12 May 1994, for the first time in his life, Chris Mullin began to keep a diary. His first entry – ‘John Smith is dead’ – gives a clue as to the reason. ‘I thought something interesting was afoot,’ the former MP for Sunderland South recalls. ‘If it hadn’t proved interesting, I’d have stopped keeping a diary, but it did prove interesting, so I kept it for 16 years.’

In his typically understated way, Mullin describes a decision which, as the preface to A Walk On Part, the final volume of the diaries to be published, suggests, has produced ‘a small industry’. That ‘small industry’ has seen one of the three volumes, A View From The Foothills, on its 14th reprint and two of the volumes picked as Radio 4’s Book Of The Week. The diaries have been turned into a stage play which has been performed across the country.

This success reflects not simply the self-deprecating wit, political insights and  revelations about the frustrations and, on occasions, humiliations of life on the lower rungs of the ministerial ladder which pepper Mullin’s books. It also indicates an ongoing public fascination with the subject which he so artfully chronicles: ‘I stopped the diary the day Gordon Brown walked out of No 10 and I started the day John Smith died. The whole rise and fall of New Labour from the first minute to the last minute is encompassed.’

The diaries also chart Mullin’s political journey. A supporter of Tony Benn in the early 1980s, Mullin was a leading figure in the Labour Coordinating Committee’s drive to shift the party to the left and he joined the Campaign group when he was elected to parliament in 1987. And, while his investigations for Granada’s World In Action were eventually to prove pivotal in helping overturn the wrongful conviction of the ‘Birmingham six’, they initially earned him the opprobrium of the tabloid press.

By May 1994, Mullin’s support for the ‘Birmingham six’ could hardly be said to denote an attachment to hard left causes. Nonetheless, his decision to vote for Tony Blair in the leadership election which followed Smith’s death – the only member of the Campaign group to do so – came as surprise to many. To one of his erstwhile comrade’s declaration that she is in the ‘stop Blair camp’, Mullin’s diary records him responding: ‘I am in the win the next election camp.’ Looking back on that contest, Mullin does, however, wish there had been another contender in the race: ‘If [Brown] had run against Blair in 1994, he would have been soundly defeated and then would not have been able to sulk for the subsequent decade on the grounds that he was robbed.’

If never quite a Blairite, neither does Mullin resile from his previous support for Benn. ‘I’m part of that very small club – I acknowledge it’s a small club – of people who believe that had Benn won [the leadership] in 1981 the Labour party would have been in a better position to take on Thatcher in the decade that followed.’ While accepting that Labour would still have been defeated in the 1983 and 1987 elections, he believes it would have done better in both of them under Benn who would have brought ‘greater ideological clarity from our side and a more effective opposition’ to Margaret Thatcher.

Despite his support for Benn, Blair regarded him, Mullin believes, as a member of the ‘sensible left’, appointing him as a minister in the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Department for International Development, before promoting him to minister of state at the Foreign Office in 2003. Mullin suspects, however, that his decision, when on the backbenches, to vote against the government in the final, crucial vote on Iraq in March 2003 cost him the chance to join the cabinet as international development secretary later that year. His diaries record Mullin’s indecision as the vote draws near, caught between his pledge not to support the war unless there was a second resolution at the United Nations and his desire, as the vote comes to be viewed as one of confidence, to support Blair.

While he does not regret the fact that his vote probably cost him a seat at the cabinet table, Mullin has revisited his decisions at the time: ‘I should have been clearer about [Iraq] from the outset and been totally against it … I thought it was a mistake, I didn’t think it was justified, but I thought it was an on-balance decision. I didn’t think it was – and some of my colleagues were very clear, and they were right – a complete mistake.’

Mullin agrees, however, that he can ‘see past Iraq’ when it comes to judging Blair, to whom he refers simply as ‘The Man’ throughout his diaries. On the day he leaves No 10, Mullin writes of the former prime minister: ‘At his best he was courageous, far-sighted, brilliant, idealistic, personally attractive but that his undoubted achievements are eclipsed by one massive folly: that he tied us umbilically to the worst American president of my lifetime with consequences that were not merely disastrous but catastrophic. The Man was touched by greatness but ultimately he blew it.’ Six years on, Mullin says, that assessment ‘seems to stand the test of time’.

Nonetheless, looking back on the early years of his leadership, Mullin wrote in 2011, he was struck by ‘how much Tony Blair got right’. Today, the former minister accepts that he was wrong to oppose Blair’s decision to rewrite Clause IV which, he feared, risked opening up ‘another great internal fissure as we had in the 1980s’. ‘I was wrong and … it worked out extremely well in retrospect because it did send a signal to the outside world that Labour had changed.’

While Ed Miliband’s plans to reform Labour’s links with the trade unions have been compared with Blair’s decision to scrap the old Clause IV, Mullin is unconvinced by them. ‘My view, and, who knows, I may turn out to be wrong again, is that it is a mistake to do what Ed has done because nobody was asking us to do it,’ he says. Mullin also fears that Miliband has ‘given away a negotiating card over the funding of political parties without getting anything in return’. ‘Trade union funding of the Labour party is really not that difficult to defend. It’s three million people paying £3 a year into our funds. That’s the nearest thing we have got to mass politics in this country,’ he argues.

Mullin, who presented a bill in 1994 that would have effectively broken up Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in the UK, is also wary of comparisons between Blair’s attempts to woo News International while he was opposition leader with Miliband’s attacks upon it. ‘Tony Blair took the view, and he may well have been right, that the best he could hope for was to neutralise the Murdoch press,’ he suggests. ‘You couldn’t ignore them because they had contributed to our defeat in three general elections and he didn’t even want to take – and I understand this and I agree with it – a little punt on the outcome of a fourth general election and so he set out to neutralise Murdoch and he did so successfully.’ Mullin is also dismissive of much of the current debate about media regulation. ‘Ownership is key,’ he believes. ‘It’s not having a complaints system – they’ll run circles around whatever complaints system is set up.’

Despite believing that Labour did ‘an awful lot of good’ during its time in power, Mullin argues that Miliband should learn from what he believes to be the party’s traditional timidity when it wins office. ‘If we do form a government after the next election, however tenuously, we should take a leaf out of the Tories’ book,’ he argues. ‘The Tories have not behaved as though they are a minority government since they were elected. When George Bush lost the election but became president in 2000, he didn’t act as a man who had to make a lot of compromises.’

Mullin applauds Miliband’s attacks on ‘predatory capitalism’ and urges him not to be distracted from them by Tory attempts to paint him as ‘a raving leftwinger’. But while he suggests the Labour leader’s analysis accords with public opinion – ‘I don’t think the British people are as mean and greedy as a casual reading of the Daily Telegraph would have you believe’ – he argues that the party faces a dilemma on tax. The British people have been led to believe, he says, that they can ‘have west European levels of public services at American rates of taxation’. He encourages the party not to repeat what he views as the mistakes of Brown’s chancellorship, when the basic rate of tax was repeatedly cut. ‘When Margaret Thatcher left office after nearly 11 years in power, the basic rate of tax was 26p in the pound. When Gordon Brown left office it was 20p,’ he argues. ‘He should never have got involved in this bidding war with the Tories over the basic rate of tax. You can never outbid the Tories on tax and it’s not worth trying.’

Mullin confesses that he approached retirement from parliament in 2010 with a degree of ‘trepidation’. Within a year, however, he wrote that it had all ‘worked out well’. His ‘small industry’ keeps him busy. ‘The political meeting is not dead, it has merely transferred to the literary festival,’ he says. But while his diaries have been compared to those of Chips Channon, Jock Colville and Alan Clark, Mullin believes that only if they are still being read in 20 or 30 years’ time will they truly deserve such accolades. He is also keen to point out that the parallels with Clark’s diaries can be overstretched. ‘What gave Clark’s diaries notoriety … was that he seduced three women from the same family,’ he argues. ‘I can’t compete on that.’

———————————————————

Photo: Maggie Hannan