A Review By Keith Smith
I reviewed this in hardback a few months ago and since then we have been lucky enough to have Chris Mullin as one of our visiting speakers in October 2009. What a charming man he is and of course what interesting tales he has to tell. I am a sucker for diaries and autobiographies in any case. I can’t get enough of them, whether it’s the splendid childhood memoirs of Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, or the letters of the Mitford sisters, or the Alan Clark diaries…they have such an immediacy, and force us to pass judgement all the time. Chris Mullin’s diaries have been so positively reviewed it must be embarrassing for him…to have the Leader of The Opposition say they are destined to be handed out as leaving presents in offices all over Whitehall for years to come is praise indeed, or is there a little double entendre?
What strikes me most in the diaries is what it reveals of the apparatus of government and how little one can influence it, especially from the position of Minister. This is an old refrain, and I think back to the Crossman Diaries where we see him becoming increasingly frustrated at his total inability to change events. With Chris Mullin it is almost a resigned acceptance of the lack of power and a fascination with watching the levers really being pulled at the top of the centrally-controlled machine. In fact Chris’s friends and colleagues couldn’t understand why he wanted to give up being a powerful Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee with regular and constant access to ‘the man’ for the veneer of a Ministerial desk. It certainly wasn’t the Ministerial car he wanted as he had to fight tooth and nail not to be driven in one!
Do the diaries tell us anything we don’t know about the Blair years? Possibly nothing spectacular, but they do tell us what it was like, how it all worked, how the personalities got on with each other (or didn’t), and indeed how it all looked from the inside or, as Chris modestly puts it, from the foothills. They also reveal much of the daily grind of being a constituency MP with all the responsibilities that involves (and which we almost always forget). If they move the chief political commentator for The Times to declare that “they deserve to become the central text for understanding the Blair years” then they deserve our attention. They are honest, critical, elegant, revealing, humorous and modest. To the apoplexy of the whips, Chris Mullin was for a time the only person appointed to government who voted against the Iraq War. That in itself tells us a lot (about him and his colleagues).
If you haven’t read them yet, the issue of the paperback is the ideal time. You won’t be disappointed.
