‘Starmer’s use of union jack is ‘fatherlandism’ and phoney patriotism’

An MP for 23 years and minister in the Labour government of Tony Blair, Chris Mullin became a cherished political diarist thanks to his blend of candour and lack of interest in the pomp of high office.

In the Commons, he was a self-effacing junior minister best known for eschewing official chauffeur-driven cars and for representing Sunderland South, the solid Labour inner-city constituency whose result is almost always first to be declared on election night.

His first three diaries won praise from critics for being “wickedly indiscreet”, “a treat to be savoured” and being “the sharpest and most revealing political diaries since Alan Clark’s”. This fourth volume, serialised exclusively here, details life after retirement from Westminster in 2010.

“I have never been much more than a fleabite on the body politic,” he writes, recalling how a former colleague peered over his glasses and said: ‘Didn’t you use to be Chris Mullin?’ “‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘That will be the title of volume four’.”

2019

Thursday 12 December

General election day. Only the scale of (Labour’s) slaughter remains to be determined.

Friday 13 December

The carnage is considerable. Inevitably, many of The Fallen are blaming the debacle on Jeremy, and of course he and his blinkered supporters bear a heavy share of responsibility, but Brexit was a bigger factor. Whatever one thinks of Jeremy, he has behaved with dignity throughout, despite the extraordinary quantity of shite that has rained down upon him these past four years, much of it from people unworthy to tie his shoelaces

2020

Friday 30 October

Keir Starmer has withdrawn the whip from Jeremy Corbyn for suggesting that allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party have been exaggerated. As it happens, I agree with Jeremy. It upsets me to see him cynically thrown to the wolves. For the first time in more than 50 years, having stuck with the Labour Party through thick and thin, I begin to wonder if I still belong in it.

Wednesday 18 November

(Senior Labour MP) Margaret Hodge has tweeted: “I simply cannot comprehend why it is acceptable for Jeremy Corbyn to be a Labour MP if he thinks antisemitism is exaggerated...” I took a deep breath and responded as follows: “Dear Margaret, a question: how many of the people who featured in your famous dossier of alleged antisemites turned out to be members of the Labour Party?” The abuse started within minutes. A sample: “Complete scumbag”, “Were you always a deranged offensive shit...?”, “Chris Mullin has long been a cretinous, unpleasant, individual”. And so on. No one actually addressed the question. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has announced that Corbyn will not be readmitted to the Labour Party. It may appease the mob, but it is an act of moral cowardice.

2021

Monday 1 February

This evening, a Labour Party political broadcast. Keir Starmer in front of a Union Jack (ugh), which I gather is known in PR circles as “fatherlandism”. Why can’t we leave phoney patriotism to the Tories?

Back to 2016

Sunday 24 July

Poor Jeremy is coming under unrelenting attack. Yesterday a letter signed by 40 or so of his female “colleagues” (women Labour MPs) demanding that he do more to dissociate himself from alleged incidents of bullying and intimidation – many of which, I suspect, are wildly exaggerated. If the stakes weren’t so high, I would be tempted to vote for Jeremy regardless in the face of this avalanche of nonsense.

Monday 25 July

This evening, on Newsnight, an interview with Owen Smith, the fluent but slippery Welshman who is challenging Corbyn. Like many a Welsh politician on the make, he lays claim to the mantle of Nye Bevan, although it is far from clear that Nye would be keen on a former drug company lobbyist (Smith has worked for a number of pharmaceutical firms).

Sunday 31 July

A round robin email from Owen Smith promising an utterly incredible “£200bn New Deal”. The man’s a shyster.

Monday 1 August

Corbyn, not to be outdone, is promising a £500bn investment programme. From where is unspecified. The magic money tree, no doubt.

Thursday 4 August

John McDonnell (Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor) comes across as fluent, competent and good-humoured, although one suspects that behind that genial exterior he is quietly compiling a list of enemies to be summarily dispatched come the revolution.

Saturday 20 August

Hilary Benn calls in. He says Corbyn was useless in the Shadow Cabinet, offering no leadership, having little to say on anything and often deferring to John McDonnell. Remarkably, however, he has met people who genuinely believe that by some miracle Jeremy is going to lead us to victory. Like the Tory Party, we have been taken over by a cult.

Sunday 4 September

Keith Vaz has been outed for, apparently, entertaining two male prostitutes while posing as a washing machine salesman. I have long thought he would come to a sticky end.

Friday 17 February

The Man (Blair) has re-entered British politics with a powerful speech on Brexit. A glimpse of the Blair of old. Crystal clarity, common sense, making one nostalgic for the glory days. Problem is he’s a busted flush.

2017

Sunday 19 March

The Man, taut, tense, tanned, was interviewed on television this morning, making a thinly disguised argument for a second referendum. One yearns for the quality of leadership that he once provided.

Friday 5 May

Our beloved leader (Corbyn) has been addressing festivalgoers at Glastonbury, where he was received with rapture. Jeremy has become a cult figure, though the magic may in due course evaporate when they realise that he, too, is at heart a Brexiteer.

Monday 26 June

Far from damping down the tension over the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Labour’s new masters are ramping up the rhetoric. John McDonnell remarked that those who died were “murdered by political decisions”. Which tends to confirm suspicions that underneath that veneer of contrived affability he has developed lately there lurks the same irresponsible headbanger.

Monday 30 October

Yet another feeding frenzy under way at Westminster. A list is said to be circulating of MPs alleged to have engaged in – to use a word beloved of the politically correct – “inappropriate” behaviour. The charges vary from the serious (an allegation of rape) to the unspeakably trivial.

Thursday 2 November

Much talk of an “alcohol-fuelled toxic culture” at Westminster. Which only goes to show what a sheltered life I have led. In twenty-three years in the Commons no one ever made a pass at me, nor I at them. Nor was I aware of the debauched culture that, if our free press is to be believed, stalked the bars and private recesses. Believe it or not, however, before I was elected I was once stalked by a young woman with whom I was vaguely acquainted through the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

On one occasion she turned up at midnight on the doorstep of my flat with a long sob story about having missed the last bus home and demanding to stay the night. Unfortunately, a neighbour had already let her into the hall and short of physically evicting her there was no way of getting her out.

With a minimum of ceremony, I conducted her to the spare bedroom, although she barged into my room several times during the night. Next morning she departed, having sprayed the inside of my shoes with scent. Later, she wrote me a number of obscene letters which I hung onto for several years by way of evidence in case she ever went public with the (false) suggestion that we were in some kind of relationship. I heard later that she went off in pursuit of (ex-Labour culture secretary) Chris Smith, who she decided looked like me. Tony Benn had a woman who haunted him for years.

Sunday 12 November

Tapped out a review of Gordon Brown’s memoirs.

The centrepiece is a detailed account of his role in preventing the meltdown of the global financial system. His finest hour. As to his personal inadequacies, which became so obvious once he was prime minister, he acknowledges that he might not have been temperamentally suited to the top job. There is surely more to it than that. How does one explain the volcanic rages, the chronic indecision, the desperate, backfiring gimmicks? Gordon rarely acknowledged my existence. On the two or three occasions he visited Sunderland he appeared not even to notice my presence in the room. Weird or what?

2018

Tuesday 9 January

Dinner with Jon Lansman, the man in charge of Momentum, the Corbynite praetorian guard. I employed him in the Eighties and we were both involved in the Bennite uprising. In those days he was young and strikingly handsome, but he is now a slightly overweight, sixty-something Jewish gentleman with a white beard and a flat cap. Far from being a zealot, he is – unlike some of his flock – rational and sensible.

Thursday 25 January

A reporter has infiltrated a vulgar, men-only event at the Dorchester which, although it raised large amounts for charity, also appears to involve a good deal of misbehaviour towards young female hostesses. Result: an enormous hoo-ha. Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital announced it would be not only refusing £500,000 it was expecting to help fund a new intensive care ward for chronically sick children but also returning previous donations of £2m.

Friday 26 January

The Dorchester fallout continues. A huge bout of “virtue signalling” is under way. Politicians are jumping up and down; children’s charities due to benefit from the money raised are vying with each other to demonstrate feminist purity. I know I shall get into trouble for even thinking this aloud, but what sort of world are we living in when the interests of chronically sick and deprived children are swept aside in a tide of feminist outrage?

Monday 29 January

It never ceases to disappoint that so many people of Jewish origin, who on most issues tend to be liberal and left of centre, have a complete blind spot when it comes to Israel. I remember sitting next to (actor) Maureen Lipman at the Man Booker Prize dinner a few years ago and she was perfectly sensible until Israel came into the conversation.

Wednesday 28 February.

Coffee in Portcullis House in the Commons. Scarcely any MPs – at four o’clock on a Wednesday. Increasingly, so far as parliament is concerned, members are on a two-day week. They arrive lunchtime Monday and depart after Prime Minister’s Questions on a Wednesday. For the rest of the week the chamber is almost dead. If MPs don’t take parliament seriously, why should anyone else?

I meet Speaker John Bercow. He is also a closet admirer of Jeremy Corbyn, who, he thinks, will become prime minister.

Friday 30 March

Out of the blue an email from the journalist Tom Bower, enclosing an article in the Jewish Chronicle which cites a recent tweet of mine in defence of Corbyn. Bower, a dangerous man who specialises in hatchet-job biographies, is presently writing a book on Corbyn.

A month ago he asked me for an interview and I politely declined. Today’s exchange was as follows:

CM: Thanks for drawing this to my attention. Toxic subject. Wish I hadn’t got involved.

TB: The problem is you would not have said the same about Muslims or Blacks, therefore it is assumed you are an antisemite.

CM: Can’t stop people assuming whatever they want to assume, but I am content to be judged by those who know me.

TB: ...I have thought about your reply. The remarkable feature is that you do not deny you are an antisemite.

CM: Of course I am not an antisemite. What I am not keen on is the Tom Bower school of journalism – of which this appears to be an example. That’s why I declined to see you.

Sunday 20 May

To Heathrow, which I have managed to avoid for almost 10 years, for a flight to Lyon. At the security counter a woman tipped out the contents of my wash bag and put them in a transparent plastic bag. “Next time you’ll know what to do,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied, “not travel from Heathrow.” She looked hurt and I felt a bit of a cad. She had not been in the least officious.

Tuesday 24 July

An email from a Labour activist inviting me to add my name to a campaign for the abolition of the monarchy. I declined on the grounds that were Labour daft enough to adopt such a policy, it would be the one cast-iron way to ensure election defeat.

Tuesday 28 August

An email from the features desk of the Daily Mail: “Would you be up for heading to Venezuela tomorrow and doing a dispatch for us? We’re after a prominent lefty to visit the country and do something about how far it is from a left-wing utopia.” It promises “a nice fee” and concludes: “I realise it’s an absolutely bonkers proposal, but it could be a really fantastic, moving piece.” I replied: “Thanks for thinking of me, but as you say it is an absolutely bonkers proposal. I am proposing to mow my lawn instead.”

Friday 16 November

Unfashionable though it may be, I am developing a grudging respect for Theresa May. Despite being assailed from all sides, she ploughs on resolutely, calm, courteous, unruffled, refusing to be provoked or distracted.

Wednesday 19 December

An email from someone calling himself SirKidMarx: “No one will ever forget your despicable failure to publish the register of Freemasons as promised. You are a Blairite weasel.”

It is getting on for 20 years since I last had anything to say about Freemasonry and when I did it was the opposite of this deranged tweet. Yet more evidence that all over the country there are people in basements and bedsits raving away at ancient grievances, real or imagined. In years gone by it might have meant a letter scrawled in green ink, but usually the mood would have passed before they could summon the energy to get together a stamp and an envelope and walk to the postbox. Now you just press a button and whoosh...

2019

Sunday 10 February

Today’s Mail on Sunday devotes an incredible 30 pages to serialising Tom Bower’s book on Corbyn. So far over the top that it resembles a Private Eye spoof. Just as well I didn’t soil my hands by talking to the loathsome Bower, not that I was ever tempted.

Tuesday 4 June

To an Oldie magazine literary lunch. One of my fellow authors, who has just published a biography of (former Conservative foreign secretary) Peter Carrington, described how, when Lord Carrington was on his deathbed, his son went in to give him the news that Boris Johnson had resigned as Foreign Secretary. The old fellow was comatose and the news had to be repeated. When finally it registered, he suddenly came alive, raising his arm and punching the air. An hour later, he died.

Sunday 23 June

Among our visitors this morning, a man who had once been a neighbour of Boris Johnson’s in Islington, who said his abiding impression was one of chaos. Boris would emerge each morning looking scruffy, hair unkempt, stained suit. He had once owned a camper van which was frequently towed away because it lacked the necessary residents’ parking permit, for which he seemed incapable of applying.

Thursday 7 November

What a dismal game British politics has become. A constant stream of demands that X, Y, Z apologise, repent, resign for slights, real or imagined. The main political parties and various interest groups have taken to trawling through the Twitter accounts of their enemies in search of evidence of momentary foolishness or political incorrectness which can be used to fuel ever more intensive bouts of synthetic indignation. The slightest error of judgement, no matter how trivial or ancient, can be turned into a national scandal overnight. Thank goodness I am not a candidate today. I would surely fail the test.

Extracted from ‘Didn’t You Use to Be Chris Mullin? Diaries 2010–2022’ by Chris Mullin, published by Biteback on 11 May at £25. © Chris Mullin 2023. To order a copy for £20, visit www.bitebackpublishing.com