In 2017, seeking to explain his lack of writing output, Chris Mullin wrote the following: “When I was lean and hungry back in the 1980s I could tap out a novel in 30 or 40 days. Now that I live comfortably, my attempt to produce a sequel to my 1982 novel, A Very British Coup, has run into the sand after a mere 15,000 words. There are many distractions. Not least the garden.” Well, the novel is finally written – after a hiatus of 37 years – and, though it’s difficult to judge at the height of winter, the garden seems to be coming along nicely.
When Chris, 71, retired from politics in 2010, his dream was to move from his constituency in Sunderland City Centre to the wilds of Northumberland. In 2013, he found the perfect house – a spacious cottage set in just under an acre of land and surrounded, crucially, by a wall. “Privacy,” he explains. “And you get a slightly better climate.”
Having acquired his perfect plot, he set to work; his first task, to uproot the pine trees that crowded the upper section. He enlisted the services of Steve Bean, a landscape gardener from North Yorkshire, and ended up with a neatly-ordered arrangement of ten raised vegetable beds, fruit trees, rose beds and a wild flower area, with a glasshouse for tomatoes, peaches and nectarines. Now that most of the heavy work is done, he tends the garden almost entirely himself. The toil and sweat have paid off – it’s been featured in The Sunday Times and, more recently, on Gardeners’ World. Not bad for someone who claims he doesn’t know anything about gardening. If the project has kept him from his writing, Chris, whose work includes highly- acclaimed diaries covering the period of New Labour, is now firmly back on track. His latest novel, The Friends of Harry Perkins, out on March 28 – the day after Brexit – sounds well worth the wait. “It starts with Harry Perkins’ funeral,” he says. “The first line is, ‘Harry Perkins was buried on the day that America declared war on China.’ It’s got a strong Brexit theme. I set out to write a sequel involving the same characters as were in the original novel but the politics of Brexit have intervened and so I’ve incorporated that. It’s about the rise of English nationalism – it’s five years after Brexit. It’s not apocalyptic but it doesn’t end well.” Had Chris still been in politics, the 2016 referendum would have left him in an awkward position: he’s a Remainer; the clear majority of his former Labour constituency voted Leave.
This, of course, reflects the dilemma many MPs have found themselves facing, but what would he have done? “I’d have carried on saying that it was a bad deal for Sunderland and a big mistake,” he says unequivocally. “It wouldn’t have stopped me voting for another referendum, but one might have had to stand down. I think I’d have been faced with a choice – if I’d stood again, and I might not have done, I’d have said to the electorate, ‘My judgement is that this is a big mistake from Sunderland’s point of view and if that causes you to vote for some other party, so be it.’” In Chris’ view, the referendum was borne chiefly of a desire to reconcile Tory Europhiles and Eurosceptics – and having committed to it, David Cameron, in his “armour plated self-confidence” never for a moment anticipated the result.
Yet we are where we are and, according to Chris, we’re in a no-win situation. “I think the British people set the elected representatives a nearly impossible task,” he says. “The UK is divided roughly down the middle and there is no way of keeping both camps happy. I don’t think any but the purest form of Brexit would satisfy the hard-line Brexiteers and any form of Brexit is likely to upset the Remainers.
” How does he feel about Jeremy Corbyn, who has attracted criticism for his less than transparent role in the debacle? If not exactly against him, he’s not his biggest fan. “I’ve known him for 35 years – not well, but I’ve been acquainted with him,” says Chris. “He’s a modest, fundamentally decent human being, but he wouldn’t have been my choice for Labour leader. In a parliamentary democracy, you need to have party leaders who enjoy the support of most of their MPs and to elect a leader who probably had the support of only 15 per cent is risky.”
If the current incumbent is not exactly flavour of the month then Chris must sympathise, having been out of favour for much of his time as an MP. His famous campaign to free the Birmingham Six, though it secured their release, attracted censure from The Sun, which printed the headline, “Loony MP Backs Bomb Gang”.
He can laugh about it now – he still has the cutting, regarding the insult as a badge of honour – but it does have uncomfortable resonances with the current hostility towards MPs, notably Anna Soubry, who was called a Nazi, and Jo Cox, who was murdered by a right-wing extremist. Chris feels that while this has always been there, there’s been a rise fuelled by social media.
“Britain has always been, thus far, a liberal democracy where opposing views are tolerated and, of late, it’s got very much less tolerant, and that has quite a lot to do with the rise of digital media,” he says. “It makes it much easier to sit in your bedroom late at night, perhaps after a jar or two, and spew out fear and loathing. It’s a platform that was never there before.”
Perhaps partly for this reason, Chris is glad he got out of politics when he did – “It’s better to go when people are still asking why rather than when,” as he succinctly puts it. Does he miss the cut and thrust of Westminster life? Not a bit. “My great fear was that there would be nothing useful to do once I retired but actually, it’s turned out very well,” he reflects. “I’ve published three volumes of diaries – two of which made the bestseller list, two of which were BBC Books of the Week – I’ve published a volume of memoirs, and I’m about to publish The Friends of Harry Perkins.
“It would be wonderful, like John le Carré, to go on writing novels into my late 80s but I don’t think I’m capable of that – I’m not sure I have enough good ideas – so let’s see how this next one does. There’ll be another volume of diaries in due course, I think. I stopped when I retired, initially, because I didn’t think life would be interesting enough, but it was, so I’ve started again.”
And then, of course, there’s the garden. “It’s a great privilege to live here,” says Chris, gazing wistfully across the Vale of Whittingham. “They’ll have to carry me out in a box.”
The Friends of Harry Perkins by Chris Mullin, is out on March 28 (Simon & Schuster, £12)
“Britain has always been, thus far, a liberal democracy where opposing views are tolerated and, of late, it’s got very much less tolerant, and that has quite a lot to do with the rise of digital media,” he says. “It makes it much easier to sit in your bedroom late at night, perhaps after a jar or two, and spew out fear and loathing. It’s a platform that was never there before.”
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