Decline & Fall

by Chris Mullin

  This morning, in Committee Room 8, I presided over a conference on drug policy in Afghanistan, sponsored by the Senlis Council. It attracted very few Members, but a lot of interested officials and think-tankers. Their basic argument is that crop eradication and substitution isn’t working and that we ought instead to switch to allowing limited, licensed opium growing for medical purposes. As several people pointed out, there are serious practical difficulties with this approach. Not least the problem of diversion – how do you prevent legally grown opium finding its way onto the black market? Before long you are back to the old arguments about legalisation and regulation versus prohibition. Sir Keith Morris, a former ambassador in Colombia, said afterwards that a former Cabinet Secretary had told him that he was now a legaliser and that half the 1997 Cabinet were, too.

  John Biffen was in front of me in the queue at the cafeteria at lunchtime. ‘For how long,’ he inquired, ‘are they going to go on pretending that the recent bombings had nothing to do with Iraq?’

  Thursday, 21 July

  M called in. He says he has it on good authority that three of the four London bombers – and not the one so far conceded – were known to the police in advance of the bombings. Their names apparently surfaced in something called ‘Operation Crevice’.

  More bombs – at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush Underground and one on a bus in Hackney. Mercifully, they all failed to detonate, leaving the police with a wealth of clues, but travel in London is becoming scary.

  Friday, 22 July

  This morning the police chased a man into Stockwell tube station and shot him dead in front of terrified commuters. According to eyewitnesses he was more or less executed. Five bullets in the head. It turns out he was unarmed and is not suspected of having been one of yesterday’s bombers.

  Saturday, 23 July

  Sarah appeared in our room at 3am, having been woken by screaming and smoke from the top of the street. It turned out that a car belonging to a young German woman staying at Number 1 had been torched by a passing barbarian. The fire brigade arrived quickly and doused the blaze before it could spread to the nearby house. By the time we got up the car had been removed, leaving only burnt vegetation, a patch of blackened tarmac and a pool of glass which I later cleared.

  Prompted by yesterday’s bloodletting, the nastier tabloids are demanding more summary executions. ‘SHOOT ALL BOMBERS’, screams this morning’s Express. The trouble is that yesterday’s victim was not a bomber and it is beginning to look as if he may have been wholly innocent. Not that such namby-pamby considerations will be of any interest to most Express readers, let alone their odious proprietor. In fairness, it must be said the Great British Public are remaining remarkably calm, despite attempts by our unscrupulous tabloids to organise hysteria.

  Sarah has gone to France with the school. Having waved her off, I went with Emma to pick strawberries and raspberries at Plawsworth, in preparation for tomorrow’s party. Our exchanges included the following (apropos her long-running campaign to replace our M reg Volvo with a vehicle with air conditioning and a CD player):

  ‘Dad, you’re like Jesus.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Everyone expected Jesus to come on a chariot. And they expect their MP to drive a new car. Instead you’ve got an old one.’

  A crisis. Bruce our cat has disappeared. She was last seen on Friday and by this evening had been absent for an unprecedented 24 hours. We are haunted by visions that she may be trapped and starving in a neighbour’s outhouse. Or kidnapped and tortured by a gang of feral youths. Or perhaps she just felt unloved having been on the receiving end of one telling-off too many for leaving a trail of fluff around the house. Ngoc, the author of most of the tellings-off, is feeling particularly remorseful. Come back, Bruce, all is forgiven.

  Sunday, 24 July

  The man executed at Stockwell turns out to have been a wholly innocent Brazilian electrician, which only goes to show you can’t be too careful when it comes to hunting terrorists.

  Still no sign of Bruce. Emma printed out a poster which she and her friend Patricia pinned to trees in the terrace. Later we distributed copies through all the front doors in the vicinity. By evening there were several reported sightings, but still no Bruce. Then, just as we were retiring for the night, a slightly bedraggled cat appeared at the back door and with much purring and miaowing resumed her seat on the chair in the upstairs living room. Great relief all round. I was dreading having to break the news to Sarah, on her return from France, that Bruce had gone.

  Tuesday, 26 July

  Sunderland

  En route from my office to home, the following exchange with one of the new breed of privatised traffic wardens, a big bone-headed man in a bright yellow safety jacket, bristling with technology.

  ‘Afternoon, Councillor Mullin.’

  ‘I’m an MP, not a councillor.’

  ‘So you’re an MP now? Well done.’

  ‘I have never been a councillor. I have been in Parliament for nearly 20 years . . .’

  ‘So what do I call you now you’re an MP?’

  ‘Chris.’

  A huge famine in Niger. A third of the country is dying. It’s been going on for some time, but of course no one – not least the government of Niger – noticed until the television cameras arrived. On the BBC news this evening, heart-rending interviews with an extended family of nomads who hadn’t eaten for a fortnight. Three children and three adults already dead; emaciated grandma lying under a tree, close to death; livestock dead around them. One of the surviving children was stuffing handfuls of the rotting carcass into his mouth. We have the technology to beam these people instantly into our living rooms, but not to feed them . . . And after all this talk of saving Africa.

  Thursday, 28 July

  Sunderland

  Rain all day. By evening my beautiful purple phlox is bent double, a little pile of spent blossom on the lawn underneath.

  Among today’s visitors a delegation of Unison officials warning of a looming – and entirely self-inflicted – crisis over something called ‘single status’. In a nutshell, having used the Equal Pay Act to bludgeon the local authority into regrading its entire workforce and paying out the best part of £10 million by way of compensation to female employees for many years’ loss of earnings and ‘hurt feelings’, Unison now discover they have an uprising on their hands from their male members, bin-men and the like, who are facing cuts in salary of up to one-third. It seems only just to have dawned on Unison’s finest that there would be losers as well as winners in the course of creating a workers’ paradise. Their proposed solution? Four years’ ‘protection’. In other words the down-graded should continue to be paid at their old rate in the hope that their losses will gradually be eroded by inflation and increments. The cost? Another £8 million and since, by common consent, the local authority doesn’t have £8 million they propose that I and other MPs ask Gordon Brown to write out a cheque. Oh, and this must all be sorted by 1 October if the council is to avoid another round of litigation. I explained, as gently as I could, that this was cuckoo land. There is no way Gordon is going to write out a cheque. In which case, they said, they would have ‘no choice’ but to pursue industrial action. I asked if they remembered what happened last time they organised a strike by bin-men. They looked blank.

  ‘Eighteen years of Tory government.’

  Ah yes, that did ring a vague bell.

  Needless to say, this seems to be a northern problem. Unison has never been very brave when it comes to taking on Tory councils further south. ‘Is this an issue in Surrey or Sussex?’ I inquired.

  ‘No,’ they chorused.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They outsourced most of their services years ago.’

  Quite so.

  Friday, 29 July

  The evening news reported the arrest of the three remaining perpetrators of last week’s failed outrages – two in west London, one in Rome. Huge relief, but who knows what comes next?
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  Sunday, 31 July

  Sarah is back from the Ardeche, unfazed by the 27-hour coach journey, full of stories about camping, caving, canoeing and ‘gorgeous’ instructors. Dear Lord, please allow us to get through GCSE year without boys . . .

  Wednesday, 3 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage, Northchapel, West Sussex

  Today’s Sun is nastier than usual: ‘LAWLESS BRITAIN’, screams the splash headline over a catalogue of the country’s alleged ills – bombers, gypsies, illegal immigrants, paedophiles . . . you name it. And then the sly punchline: ‘meanwhile our MPs are on holiday’. When it comes to preaching hatred our odious tabloids could teach the mullahs a trick or two.

  Thursday, 4 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage

  Today’s tabloid headlines (glimpsed in the local supermarket) include: ‘Fury over BBC’s bias towards Muslims’ (Express); Joan Collins: ‘Why I despair as I watch my country destroying itself from within’ (Mail). The Sun, meanwhile, is ‘putting the Great back in Britain’ (one can almost hear the clip of jackboots). Only the Star has its feet firmly on the ground: ‘Sienna pregnant by “love cheat” Jude.’

  We went plum picking.

  Friday, 5 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage

  ‘What a useless creature I have become,’ remarked Granny as I helped her down the step into the living room. ‘To think, I used to work for Help the Aged.’ But she’s not at all useless. She has perfect hearing and eyesight and she’s good company, especially when talking of the past. And the longer she’s with us the more alert she is becoming. This evening she read the Guardian from cover to cover. I would have trouble remembering what day it was if I was condemned to sit staring at the wall all day in the company of people most of whom are more infirm than she is. What’s remarkable is that she has held up so well. Over and over, I have tried to persuade her to come to Sunderland. If not to live with us, then to a nursing home nearby, but she will have none of it, not wanting to be a ‘burden’.

  We spent the afternoon in the beautiful gardens at Parham.

  Sunday, 7 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage

  Robin Cook is dead. Yesterday afternoon, at the top of a Scottish mountain. Lucky man to go in a blinding flash like that. And at the peak of his reputation. The tributes all speak of his brilliance, but to be brilliant is not enough. There are plenty of brilliant people screwing up the world. Sound judgement and integrity are also required and, as he demonstrated so spectacularly, he had both. His weakness was that he relied too heavily on his razor-sharp wit and made little effort to cultivate a following. He wasn’t much liked at the Foreign Office. Someone (I can’t recall who) said he was hopeless at taking decisions and should have been an academic, but I don’t buy that. Frank Dobson is quoted as saying that he added lustre to the trade of politics. And so he did.

  Tuesday, 9 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage

  ‘How old is Robin Cook’s wife,’ asked Ngoc on our way back from a walk in Petworth Park this afternoon.

  ‘Forty-eight,’ I replied, ‘and he was 59.’

  ‘Eleven years – a big gap.’

  ‘The same as between me and Orlando Bloom,’ said Sarah wistfully.

  Wednesday, 10 August

  Gamekeeper’s Cottage

  Ngoc drew my attention to the following passage in Andrew Marr’s introduction to his book My Trade: ‘Despite having a first class degree and reading an unfeasibly large number of books, it began to dawn on me that I couldn’t actually do anything. I can’t sing, act, tell jokes, play any musical instrument, hit, kick or catch a ball, run for more than a few yards without panting, speak another language or assemble things without them falling apart immediately . . . journalism seemed the only option.’

  ‘That’s you,’ she said.

  And so it is, minus the first class degree.

  Tuesday, 16 August

  Montréal du Gers

  We are enjoying the hospitality of Ray and Luise Fitzwalter in this land of sunflowers, vines and medieval hill-top villages.

  After dark, a huge storm over the Pyrenees. Ray and I stood in the garden for over an hour watching the yellow flashes and occasional but massive forks of lightning. At first it was too far away for the thunder to be audible, but as the storm grew nearer there was a distant rumble, reminiscent of the guns at Sala Pak Oum. It went on late into the night, our bedroom illuminated by the lightning flashes.

  Friday, 19 August

  Awoke to grey skies, à la Sunderland. In the afternoon, drizzle. This is not how it is supposed to be in the south of France.

  Mo Mowlam is dead. A bright star who flashed across the firmament and was gone.

  Wednesday, 24 August

  In a back-copy of the Guardian, a warts and all obituary of Mo Mowlam by Julia Langdon, concluding that Mo was her own worst enemy. Not quite fair. Her achievements in Ireland were real enough and she brought a touch of colour to the otherwise bland world of New Labour.

  Friday, 26 August

  We drove to Clermont-Ferrand where we caught a train to Paris and from there to Waterloo on Eurostar. Emma extracted a promise from Sarah that she would give up eating meat, except free-range chicken, as soon as we reached British soil. She kept reminding Sarah throughout the journey and as the train emerged from the tunnel in Kent she remarked triumphantly, ‘Sarah’s a vegetarian now.’

  Thursday, 1 September

  A huge catastrophe in America in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans and much of the surrounding coastline is under water, thousands dead and tens of thousands (mainly poor blacks) trapped in 90-degree heat without food or water. The fault-lines in American society exposed as never before. When the order was given to evacuate, the middle classes loaded up their SUVs and drove away, leaving the urban poor to bear the brunt. Unlike the passive Third World refugees who normally fill our screens many of the American poor are aggressive and seriously overweight. It may just be me, but I find it harder to sympathise with a 20-stone woman bawling that she hasn’t eaten for five days than I do with a family of starving peasants in Niger. As for Bush, he’s completely impotent. All those crapulous slogans about waging war on terrorism and fighting for freedom aren’t much use to him now.

  Wednesday, 7 September

  I am reading a fascinating book, Against All Enemies, by Richard Clarke, a former national security adviser to three presidents. This is his account of life in the Bush White House on the morning after 9/11: ‘I had expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them. Instead I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al-Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq . . .’

  A few days after 9/11 he quotes Rumsfeld as ‘complaining that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious . . .’

  Nowhere is there any suggestion that we exercised the slightest influence in Washington. Indeed, The Man is only mentioned by name on page 273. It reads: ‘When prime ministers wonder in future if they should risk domestic opposition to support us they will reflect on Tony Blair in the UK and how he lost popularity and credibility by allying himself so closely with the US administration and its claims.’ Amen to that.

  Thursday, 8 September

  To my surprise, and slightly to my disgust, I still find myself moping over the loss of office. Not office per se, but the particular job that I had. Every time I hear Dave Triesman on the radio I find myself thinking, ‘That should have been me.’ I must have caught the bug that Kenneth Baker referred to when
I was first anointed, but which passed me by first time around. Pathetic really, after only two years. What must it be like after ten years – and at the top? Presumably, it all depends on the manner of your exit. If your tenure comes to a natural conclusion – courtesy of the electorate or by your own hand – you feel you’ve done your best and move on. But when it comes out of the blue and with the inevitable implication that you weren’t quite up to it, that’s what hurts. The feeling is compounded by the absence of any useful alternative and the resulting loss of self-confidence. It’s the lack of anything useful to do and the prospect that it might be like this for the rest of my days – the beckoning void – that is unsettling. In the past, I always knew where I was going. There was always something to aim for – an issue, a cause – but now I am lost.

  Friday, 16 September

  To Front Street, Sowerby, where I unveiled a plaque to Joan Maynard. On the way there I stopped at Thornton le Street and left a couple of pink roses, cut from our garden, on her grave.