A View From The Foothills Read online

  ‘The sharpest and most revealing political diaries since Alan Clark’ Simon Hoggart, Guardian

  ‘My favourite Labour MP is Chris Mullin … I enormously enjoyed A View From The Foothills’ William Hague

  ‘By far the most revealing and entertaining [diary] to have emerged from the now-dying era of new Labour … a diary that tells us as much about British politics as that great television series Yes Minister.’ Economist

  ‘Wickedly indiscreet and elegant’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘The best first-hand account of the Blair years so far’

  Andy McSmith, Independent

  ‘Because Chris Mullin is a writer who became an MP rather than an MP trying to write, there are real gems sprinkled across every page.’

  Peter Hain, Observer

  ‘Every once in a while, political diaries emerge that are so irreverent and insightful that they are destined to be handed out as leaving presents in offices across Whitehall for years to come. Chris Mullin’s A View from the Foothills is one such book. Its humour and self-deprecation more than make up for the nagging feeling it leaves behind that The Thick of It may not always be all that far from the truth.’ David Cameron, Observer Books of the Year

  ‘Perceptive, self-deprecating and honest’ Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Mullin inspires trust: one seldom, if ever, feels that material has been wilfully suppressed or distorted to serve the author. He is straight, decent, in an old fashioned way’ London Review of Books

  ‘As engaging as you would expect from a man with a writer’s gift and a reputation for fearless honesty’ Newcastle Journal

  ‘A real landmark … the first no-holds-barred account of life inside the Blair administration … I read it in a weekend and couldn’t put it down’ Paul Anderson, Tribune

  ‘The most valuable set of diaries to emanate from the now interred corpse of New Labour; the most revelatory and also, from time to time, the most entertaining’ Rod Liddle, Sunday Times

  ‘Very enlightening, immensely readable. The best diaries since Alan Clark and probably better ’ Bill Turnbull, BBC Breakfast TV

  ‘His quiet humour and intense personal integrity make this book compulsively readable … an important service to democracy’ Peter Oborne, Daily Mail

  ‘The most entertaining and perceptive account of the New Labour era … It will also stand the test of time long after other more trumpeted accounts have faded from view’ Sean Flynn, Irish Times

  ‘Deserves a warm welcome from those of us who believe that it is not a bad thing for politicians also to be fully-paid up members of the human race’ Anthony Howard, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘An account, both deeply hilarious and deeply depressing, of the futility of ministerial life’ Andrew Rawnsley, Observer

  ‘A minister answering parliamentary questions learns which backbenchers to fear … real danger comes from the quiet questioner who knows his subject. Such a one was Chris Mullin. I learned to respect him when he was on his feet … interesting and credible because, unlike [the diaries] of Alan Clark, they are not designed as a puff for himself.’ Douglas Hurd, Total Politics

  ‘Probably the most candid view of New Labour from the inside that we will ever get’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘It is hard to imagine any better account of the Blair years than this.’

  Scotsman

  CHRIS MULLIN has been the Labour MP for Sunderland South since 1987. He chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee and was a minister in three departments. He is the author of the bestselling novel A Very British Coup, soon to be re-published by Serpent’s Tail, which was turned into an award-winning television series.

  A VIEW FROM THE FOOTHILLS

  With love to Ngoc, Sarah and Emma;

  in memory of Leslie and Teresa Mullin

  and with gratitude to the people of Sunderland

  ALSO BY CHRIS MULLIN

  Novels

  A Very British Coup

  The Last Man Out of Saigon

  The Year of the Fire Monkey

  Non-fiction

  Error of Judgement: the truth about the Birmingham bombings

  A VIEW FROM THE FOOTHILLS

  The Diaries of Chris Mullin

  edited by Ruth Winstone

  This paperback edition published in 2010

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3a Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright Chris Mullin, 2009, 2010

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Text design by Sue Lamble

  Typeset in Stone Serif by MacGuru Ltd

  [email protected]

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978-1-84765-186-0

  CONTENTS

  Illustration Credits

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Cast

  CHAPTER ONE: 1999

  CHAPTER TWO: 2000

  CHAPTER THREE: 2001

  CHAPTER FOUR: 2002

  CHAPTER FIVE : 2003

  CHAPTER SIX : 2004

  CHAPTER SEVEN: 2005

  Illustration Credits

  The author and publisher would like to extend their thanks for permission to reproduce the photographs in this book: BBC, 8: Getty, 15; Nunn Syndication Ltd. 19; Parliamentary Recording Unit, 20, 21; Press Association, 1, 2, 3, 4, 22; Sunderland Echo, 11, 13, 26. All other photos are the author’s.

  Preface

  As the New Labour era draws to a close there will be no shortage of memoirs from those who have occupied the Olympian heights. This is a view from the foothills.

  I have occupied three vantage points: as chairman of one of the main select committees, as a junior minister in three departments and (when not in government) as a member of the parliamentary committee. This obscure body, which rarely leaked, was the means by which the backbenches and the government kept in touch; serving as a safety valve when times were hard. When Parliament was in session it met each Wednesday, usually in the Prime Minister’s room at the House of Commons and occasionally in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. Membership consisted of the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the House, Chief Whip, two other members of the Cabinet (appointed by the Prime Minister) and six backbenchers elected at the beginning of each parliamentary session, of whom I was one. Membership of the parliamentary committee gave one a privilege denied to all but the most senior members of the government – regular access to the Prime Minister and a mandate to pursue with him whatever was exercising the minds of our colleagues, ourselves or our constituents.

  I began keeping a diary in May 1994, on the day that John Smith died. I cannot now recall what prompted me. Probably a vague feeling that I was well placed to chart the rise – and perhaps the fall – of New Labour. The notes on which this diary are based are more or less contemporaneous, recorded in one of the red notebooks that I always carry in an inside pocket. Usually, I typed them up at home at the end of each week. I kept two manuscript copies. An uncorrected version stored in London and a master copy at home in Sunderland. For the first ten years o
r so no one but my wife, Ngoc, was aware of its existence. Later, I confided in my agent, the late Pat Kavanagh, and my friend of more than 30 years Ruth Winstone, who was in due course persuaded to edit them. Occasionally, I was on the receiving end of odd looks from colleagues who saw me furtively scribbling. My standard answer to frequent queries about whether or not I found time to write these days was, ‘I keep the occasional note.’

  This volume covers the period from July 1999 to May 2005. It includes both my visits to government and the period in between when I chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee for the second time. It begins and ends with a call from the Prime Minister – the first saying hello, the last saying goodbye – and amounts to nearly 200,000 words ruthlessly distilled from an original manuscript three times that length. Inevitably a great deal of worthwhile material has fallen on the cutting room floor. I hope one day to place a fuller version in the public domain for those with a more detailed interest. I also hope one day to publish an earlier volume, from 1994 to 1999, provisionally entitled A Walk-On Part, and perhaps a later one.

  Inevitably a work of this sort entails the breaching of confidences.

  In my defence I can only say that, where they are political rather than personal, I have taken the view that any duty of confidentiality has been nullified by the elapse of time. To those who feel let down, I can only apologise. I apologise, too, to those who feel they have been unfairly treated by some of the snap judgements recorded here. I am well aware that first impressions are frequently wrong and it may be that some of the views expressed here are more a reflection of my own shortcomings rather than those of anyone else.

  I cannot claim to have led a life as colourful as Alan Clark (how many of us can claim to have seduced three women from the same family?) or to be as well-connected as Chips Channon, Jock Colville or Alastair Campbell. Nor were the events to which I bore witness as momentous as the Abdication or the Second World War. My only claim is to have provided a snapshot of political life in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first as the grim certainties of the Cold War have given way to the mayhem of the failed state. And as we struggle to come to terms with the inexorable rise of the global market and a growing realisation that we cannot go on using up the resources of the planet as if there were no tomorrow.

  I have tried, too, to provide a flavour of life as a representative of a northern working-class city in the aftermath of the Thatcher decade which gave rise to the growth of a huge underclass of alienated people trapped in a benefit culture – ironically one of Mrs Thatcher’s most enduring legacies.

  Many colourful visitors flit across these pages. The great Mandela, the Dalai Lama of Tibet (whom I have known for more than 30 years), a clutch of African presidents, HM the Queen, George W. Bush. And some – successive heads of M15, for example – who rarely see the light of day. Not everyone is a politician or an apparatchik. True, there is a Sir Humphrey, or rather a Sir Humphry and he is no mandarin, but my friend Sir Humphry Wakefield, who rescued the magnificent castle at Chillingham from dereliction. Chillingham, in the north of Northumberland, is the most magical place in England. I had dreamed of spending my declining years there, presiding over the restoration of the walled garden, but alas it was not to be.

  I have wasted no time on feuds or vendettas, never having been angry with anyone for more than about half an hour. I have always known there is a life outside politics and tried to reflect it in the good times my family and I have enjoyed in the wonderful countryside of Northumberland and the Borders. One of the great advantages of living in the north-east is that it is rarely necessary to go on holiday more than about two hours’ drive from home.

  Above all, I have never lost sight of my enormous good fortune, a sentiment reinforced with every visit to Africa. The Aids orphans encountered at a sugar plantation near Beira in Mozambique; the tiny blind beggar glimpsed in the centre of Addis from the comfort of the British Ambassador’s land cruiser as we sped between engagements; Kathleen, a refugee girl about the same age as the older of my daughters, who lived with her family in the darkness of the derelict starch factory in Lira, northern Uganda – for all I know she is there still: these are the images that will live with me long after the encounters with the big men have faded.

  What kind of politician am I? Had I been asked when I first went into Parliament, I might glibly have replied that I saw it as my mission ‘to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable’. But over the years I have learned that there is more to politics than that. If you are to stand a chance of changing very much for the better, you have to be capable of forming a government and to do that you have to take with you a swathe of the comfortable. It follows, therefore, that in an age of majority affluence, any serious politician has to spend a fair amount of time attending to the needs of the comfortable. Today, if I were asked to define my politics, I would reply that I am ‘a socialist with a small “s”, a liberal with a small “1”, a green with a small “g”

  and a Democrat with a capital “D”‘. I hope that is apparent from these pages.

  As Enoch Powell once said, all political lives end in failure. Mine is no exception. In May 2005, after 18 years in Parliament, I suddenly found myself ejected from all the little vantage points that made political life worthwhile. I can only hope that I did something useful along the way.

  Anyway, here it is: my life and times as seen from the foothills. Whether it is of any lasting interest is for others to judge.

  Chris Mullin

  Spring 2009

  Acknowledgements

  My time in Parliament is drawing to a close. I would like to thank the many good friends I have made along the way – colleagues of all parties, officials great and small in the three government departments in which I have served, officers of the House (particularly those who serviced the Home Affairs Committee during my two periods as chairman), not forgetting Noeleen Delaney and her staff in the House of Commons Tea Room – the setting for many of the exchanges recorded here.

  My thanks to the people of the Sunderland South constituency who have allowed me to represent them in Parliament these past 22 years. Sunderland, which took quite a battering during the Thatcher decade, has, I am pleased to record, undergone something of a renaissance in recent years. While I would not want to make any too large claims, I firmly believe that the fact that this revival was accompanied by a sustained period of Labour government is not entirely a coincidence. There are others in Sunderland to whom I owe particular thanks, notably Kevin Marquis, my agent in each of the five general elections between 1987 and 2005, and those who staffed my constituency office: Sharon Spurling, the late Jacky Breach, Pat Aston, Graham March, Michael Mordey and Karen Timlin.

  My thanks, too, to Andrew Franklin and his colleagues at Profile for the faith they have placed in me, and to my literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who sadly did not live to see the finished work, for sticking with me through the long years of drought. Also, and above all, to my friend Ruth Winstone for her sensitive and skilful editing.

  Last but not least, I pay tribute to my wife, Ngoc, who over these many years has laboured unsung to bring up our two children and minister to the needs of an all-too-often absent husband without always receiving the appreciation she deserves.

  Cast

  (In approximate order of appearance)

  Listed according to responsibilities for the period of the diary, July 1999–May 2005

  Number 10

  Tony Blair MP, aka The Man, Prime Minister 1997–2007

  Parliamentary Private Secretaries to the Prime Minister

  Bruce Grocott MP

  David Hanson MP

  Officials and Advisers

  Alastair Campbell

  Kate Garvey

  Brian Hackland

  Robert Hill

  Anji Hunter

  Sally Morgan

  Jonathan Powell

  Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, July 1999�
�2001

  John Prescott MP, aka JP, Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister

  Joe Irvin, Special Adviser

  Ministers of State

  Hilary Armstrong MP

  Gus Macdonald (Lords)

  Michael Meacher MP

  Nick Raynsford MP

  Parliamentary Under-Secretaries

  Beverley Hughes MP

  Keith Hill MP

  Chris Mullin MP

  Larry Whitty (Lords)

  Officials

  Richard Mottram, Permanent Secretary

  Jessica Matthew and Chris Brain, Private Secretaries to CM; Shayne Coulson, Assistant Private Secretary

  Department of International Development, February–May 2001 Clare Short MP, Secretary of State

  Chris Mullin MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary

  Officials

  Sir John Vereker, Permanent Secretary

  Christine Atkinson, Private Secretary to CM

  Sanjib Baisya, Assistant Private Secretary

  David Mephan, Special Adviser to the Secretary of State

  Parliamentary Committee, July 2001–June 2003