A leftwinger who wrote A Very British Coup and campaigned to free the Birmingham Six,Mullin also worked with Blair. This is another canny memoirChris Mullin is a bit of a mystery. A leftwing troublemaker who managed to serve in the Blair government; a weedy-looking operator who took on the police and the IRA to free the Birmingham Six; an idealistic socialist reporter who freelanced for the Sun and Telegraph; a committed parliamentarian who did not enter the Commons until he was 39; a writer of conspiratorial novels who reinvented himself as a self-deprecating, almost cosy political diarist – Mullin, or now 68,has folded together multiple careers more like a Victorian than a modern MP.
Hinterland is another canny, deceptively casual Mullin performance. Covering his whole life, or including phases already covered by his highly successful diaries,this slender book begins as a series of loosely connected anecdotes, after-dinner in tone, or apparently random in their chronology,approximately the Labour party in the 70s and 80s. Mullin describes a boisterous, off-duty union leader, and Norman Willis,a “long-winded” Neil Kinnock, and Tony Benn’s tumultuous 1981 challenge for the Labour deputy leadership. It’s all vivid stuff; but anyone who knows the party’s history will be familiar with most of it already.
His relationship with his wife in postwar Vietnam is recalled with a melodrama that could almost be Graham GreeneContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com