Straining for effect

A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office.

A saint of self-deprecation, Chris Mullin closed the first volume of his diaries A View from the Foothills ‘contemplating oblivion’ after his dismissal from ministerial office. This was plainly not the case, as the 443 pages of his second volume, Decline & Fall, demonstrate. Whatever the fate of those he writes about with such sardonic charm, obscurity is unlikely to overtake the former Member for Sunderland South, though he will be better remembered for what he wrote than for what he did.

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Politicians who thought they knew Mullin were surprised, shocked even, by his witty take on the shortcomings of life at Westminster. They reckoned without his ability to write, and his journalist’s eye for detail. What’s more, the former editor of Tribune has been inside his party’s skin for decades. Better than outsiders like Tom Bower or Andrew Rawlings, he has an instinctive feel for the denizens of the big Gothic shed by the river and never stoops to the Bennite drivel of writing about ‘ishoos’ rather than people. David Miliband is an ‘inhabitant of the stratosphere’ who doesn’t listen and whose eyes dart everywhere. Nick Clegg is ‘easily the biggest charlatan of the lot’. Tony Blair privately advised his ministers to lie. Frankness, I like.

Volume Two takes us from the general election of 2005 to Gordon Brown’s defeat in the polls only four months ago. This is an impressive piece of editing, second only to the publication record set by Milord Mandelson, who perhaps had more pressing motives for getting his retaliation in first. The Mandy memoirs were serialised in the Times, whereas Mullin was read as book of the week on Radio 4, an apt choice, since Decline & Fall feels very much like a daily personal narrative of events as they unfold.