It’s always hard for a beloved actor to know when to leave the stage. So no wonder that political diarist Chris Mullin was tempted by one last encore, covering the dozen years from his leaving parliament in 2010. Three terrific previous volumes had already established this campaigning journalist turned Labour minister as one of the great political diarists, proof that it is not the big beasts but their wickedly observant juniors who often offer the most incisive take. Doubtless he was inspired, too, by his friend Tony Benn’s late memoir A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine, whose title he borrows to describe the bliss of semi-retired life.
The fourth instalment opens gently enough with Mullin living in rural Northumberland, still keeping up intermittently with old friends both Labour and Tory: a legal battle with the police, over his determination to protect the sources for his groundbreaking 1980s reporting on the wrongful convictions of the so-called Birmingham Six, adds a frisson of drama. But these days he observes politics from a distance, in between tending the garden. (“Theresa May has at last announced her intention to resign. This evening we harvested the first strawberries from the greenhouse,” reads a typical entry).
While the endearingly self-deprecatory tone remains, it’s hard to shake the sense that Mullin has finally ascended to the establishment, judging a literary prize with former MI5 boss Stella Rimington and regularly trotting off to supper with Dominic Cummings’s in-laws at their nearby ancestral seat (where he notes wryly that he’s invariably the only guest “who doesn’t live in a stately home or a castle”.)
Yet if you were hoping for some insider dirt on Cummings’s time in Downing Street, forget it: Mullin considers there were “obvious mitigating circumstances” for the latter’s decision to drive his family to County Durham in lockdown, just as Boris Johnson’s sharing of an illicit birthday cake with colleagues strikes him as something of a “confected hoo-ha”, for all that he deems the eventual fines an obviously bad look. Would he have written that were he still in parliament, hearing daily from furious constituents who had had stuck painfully to the rules? I wondered. But that’s not the most jarring moment in the book.
At 75, Mullin evidently has little time for what he calls “bonkers feminism”, or the modern lexicon of white privilege. Of George Floyd, the black American whose death at the hands of a police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests, he writes that “Floyd, though no one can excuse the manner of his death, is a dubious icon”, thanks to previous criminal convictions, and he feels uncomfortable with the ensuing “orgy of virtue signalling”. Were he still a Labour MP, such views could have got him cancelled overnight, as he recognises; he would, he writes, probably fail the tests now set by activists trawling Twitter for “anything that gives offence to the hypersensitive MeTooists or the Israel lobby”. But as those last two words indicate, it is in defence of his old friend Jeremy Corbyn over charges of antisemitism within Labour that he sails most painfully close to the wind.
Mullin is hardly alone in considering Corbyn unfairly traduced by the rightwing press: his old friend, he writes, “would have been a hopeless prime minister, but he is a thoroughly decent human being”. However, he doesn’t stop there. “Increasingly it seems many conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Lately, it’s become yet another stick with which to beat Corbyn,” he writes in February 2018, after receiving an email from a Jewish ex-neighbour challenging Mullin’s own description of Israel as constructing an apartheid state.
By that July – when Corbyn was forced to apologise for sharing a platform in 2010 with a Holocaust survivor who compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to the actions of the Nazis – he concludes that: “it’s true that the issue has been mishandled but it has also been blown out of all proportion by people who do not have Labour’s interests at heart. Poor Jeremy is just a rabbit in the headlights.” Later, when Corbyn loses the whip for claiming allegations of antisemitism were exaggerated, he writes that: “as it happens, I agree with Jeremy”. Even for a beloved actor, perhaps there may be such a thing as one encore too many.
