Feature: Chris Mullin talks to Gerald Isaaman about life after Westminster
Published: 14 June, 2012
by GERALD ISAAMAN
Two events on Tuesday – one in Hampstead – will no doubt prove that there is life still for politicians who quit Parliament before being kicked out.
And that now seems to be an increasing danger for many as public distrust in general as well as faith in their actual competence engulfs the political stage.
Step forward smiling Chris Mullin, maverick Labour MP and junior minister, thorn in the side of Tony Blair as he opposed the war in Iraq, refused to ride in a ministerial car and spend endless weekend hours clearing his red box.
He preferred enjoying time with his Vietnamese wife and their two daughters instead of worrying 24/7 about being chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee.
And, equally, making a name for himself as a provocative and delightfully amusing diarist, a modern Pepys with three best-selling biographical volumes of A Walk-On Part, with the third and final paperback version published this month.
That gives him a link with Tory MP Alan Clark, whose diaries engulfed the Thatcher years, and who grew up in Hampstead, where Chris spent part of 1973 as a reporter on the Ham & High.
I know, I gave him the job.
“I have always loved Hampstead since then,” Chris, now 64, tells me as he prepares to appear at Waterstones in Hampstead High Street, on Tuesday to talk about – and debate – the diaries covering his time as MP for Sunderland South.
“Although I live in the north of England, I have good friends in Hampstead, who kindly allow me to stay with them when I am in London. “My two favourite spots are the garden at Fenton House and the pergola on the Heath extension. Whenever I have a spare hour I often go to one or other and read.”
On Tuesday too, Michael Chaplin’s acclaimed hilarious adaptation of Chris’s diaries transfers from the Soho Theatre across Charing Cross Road to the Arts Theatre, for a run before a bigger audience until July 14.
“Michael did a brilliant job adapting the diaries for the stage, likewise John Hodgkinson, the actor who plays me,” says Chris. “But seeing oneself played on stage or screen is always slightly unnerving.”
The fast and furious production also ran for two months at the Live Theatre in Newcastle and has had a one-off performance in the Speaker’s House at Westminster. “So who knows what comes next?” muses Chris, whose much earlier political novel, A Very British Coup, ended up on TV.
As a former editor of Tribune, he hasn’t exactly been surprised by the revelations of the Leveson inquiry, where his Commons contemporaries have been appearing this week.
“The media oligarchs – not only Murdoch – have been abusing their power for decades,” he declares. “The trouble with Murdoch is that he was allowed to grow so big that no government dared to take him on.
“Instead, successive governments tried to ride the tiger with consequences that we all know about. The interesting question is what, if anything, will charge after Leveson has reported.”
And although he is unaware whether his phone was ever hacked, Chris was a victim too of what he calls “the occasional tabloid hate campaign.”
It was more his dislike for New Labour and THAT man, as he refers to Tony Blair, that he eventually left the Westminster circus behind him in 2010.
“I had mixed feelings about retiring from Parliament,” he says. “But I thought it better to go while people were still asking ‘why?’ rather than ‘when?’ “Actually, it has worked out well. I am not short of things to do. And no, I don’t much miss the House of Commons, though I do miss some of my old friends.”
• Chris Mullin will be talking about A Walk-on Part: Diaries 1994-1999 (now in paperback from Profile Books, £9.99) at Waterstones Hampstead, 68-69 Hampstead High Street, NW3, on Tuesday June 19, 7-8pm, tickets £4, redeemable against the book on the evening and includes a glass of wine, 0843 290 8361.
• He will also be discussing his diaries at the Arts Theatre on June 30 between the matinée and evening performances of A Walk-On Part – The Fall of New Labour, which runs until July 14. The Arts Theatre box office, Great Newport Street, is open 10am-6pm Monday to Friday, 020 7836 8463.