Decline & Fall

by Chris Mullin

  Thursday, 26 January

  To a meeting on Africa in Acton organised by the local Labour Party. About 30 people showed up, half of them Somalis. For the most part, we had a sensible dialogue until one of the Somalis started ranting and when one of the others told him to behave he turned and slugged him in the face. Eventually the police were called, he was taken away and the meeting resumed.

  Tuesday, 31 January

  To the Methodist Central Hall to hear an address by Kofi Annan, commemorating the anniversary of the United Nations, which was founded in the very same hall 60 years ago this month. He spoke beautifully, in that soft, modest tone of his, and yet he was robust. Afterwards I ran into Michael Williams, who now works at the UN, and asked if there was any chance that The Man might succeed Kofi when his term ends in December? The answer was a firm ‘No’. Firstly, because there is an understanding that the job never goes to a member of the permanent five. Second, because under the inevitable UN system of Buggins’ Turn the job has to go to an Asian.

  Wednesday, 1 February

  A historic day. George Bush, in his State of the Union address, conceded that America is ‘addicted’ to oil.

  A chat with Jim Cousins re The Future. He shares my view that a Gordon leadership is potentially disastrous and that Hilary Benn is our best hope.

  Thursday, 2 February

  Shell have announced a £13 billion profit for last year, the largest ever recorded by a British company and at a time when energy prices are going through the roof. Dennis Skinner thinks Gordon should impose a windfall tax. I came across him bending the ear of Ann Keen (Gordon’s Parliamentary Private Secretary) in the Members’ Lobby this afternoon.

  Monday, 6 February

  Hosted a meeting in an upstairs committee room for a party of Afghan farmers, for whom I helped the Senlis Council obtain visas. They were hard, lean men whose sunken cheeks and unsmiling eyes reflected harsh lives. They had between eight and eleven children apiece, save for one who had lost all his to war and famine. The purpose of the meeting, a last-minute affair, was to tell us what it was like being on the receiving end of the ‘war on drugs’. Everyone in Afghanistan, they said, grew opium. It wasn’t possible to survive without doing so. Two said their crops had been aerially sprayed and that the sprayers made no distinction between wheat, fruit, vegetables and poppies. Result: hunger. One said that children in his village had died after eating poisoned fruit. Someone asked how much of the billions in foreign aid had reached them and their families: a kilo and a half of fertiliser, they said.

  To my pleasant surprise Home Secretary Charles Clarke remarked at this evening’s meeting of the parliamentary party that he had read my speech on the removal of children to countries like the Congo and Angola, he was thinking about it and would come back to me.

  Tuesday, 7 February

  Jack Straw joined me at lunch in the Tea Room and I took the opportunity to bend his ear about the handful of British residents stranded in Guantanamo. He used to argue that they were none of our business, but now seems receptive to doing something. ‘I know you think I’m a hard bastard,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t,’ said I. ‘I just think you need a prod from time to time.’

  Wednesday, 8 February

  A message from UK Visas saying that one of the Senlis Council’s Afghan farmers has done a runner. Apparently he went to the toilet as the party were departing Heathrow yesterday and hasn’t been seen since. A blow to my credibility since the visas were only granted reluctantly, on my recommendation. The first time I have ever been proved wrong in all my dealings with the immigration and visa departments.

  At close of business this evening we all filed into the chamber to have our photo taken to mark the centenary of the founding of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The Man, the entire Cabinet and just about every Labour Member turned out. A few Tories stayed to watch. It was dressed up as an Adjournment debate in the name of Ann Clwyd, whose seat was once represented by Keir Hardie. Ann made a speech extolling our achievements over the last hundred years, the mention of Ramsay MacDonald’s name provoking some good-natured cheers from the Tories and jeers from our side. Then the photographer, in the gallery above the Opposition benches, marshalled us for the historic photo and we ended with a chorus of the ‘Red Flag’.

  Friday, 10 February

  Against all odds, the Lib Dems have won the Dunfermline by-election. Bad news for us and for Gordon in particular since Dunfermline is his home ground.

  A group of A-level students from the college came to my surgery this evening to lobby against plans to abolish their cheap travel cards in order to fund free bus travel for pensioners. It will cost them another £30 a month and many of them are harder up than the pensioners. Needless to say they are mightily upset and, if this goes ahead, we can kiss goodbye to any prospect of winning their votes at the next election. Among the customers at my surgery this evening was a pensioner who had come to say he didn’t want free bus travel if it could only be delivered at the expense of young people and cuts in services. Other pensioners are quoted in the Echo expressing similar sentiments. Once again, it seems New Labour has devised a formula for upsetting everyone, victims and beneficiaries alike.

  Sunday, 12 February

  A big push is on to present Gordon as a prime minister in waiting. He’s taken to spouting populist claptrap about ‘Britishness’ and calling for a ‘Veterans’ Day’ public holiday. Today he made a speech promising to be tough on terrorists, even hinting that we might need to revisit the pre-trial 90 days’ detention, the folly that was so resoundingly rejected a few weeks ago. If this is all he has to offer, the cupboard is well and truly bare.

  Monday, 13 February

  ID cards went through this evening with little sign of the promised uprising. Personally I think it was a fuss about nothing very much. The main case against is that they will be very expensive.

  Tuesday, 14 February

  Along with several others, I went to see Margaret Beckett to discuss global warming and related matters. ‘The scientific argument is won,’ she said, ‘but the economic argument isn’t’. On nuclear power she said, ‘The Prime Minister says, in public and in private, that he has an open mind, but there is no doubt that some of those around him don’t.’ She added, ‘There is no question that last year, after the election, a blatant attempt was made to bounce the government into taking an immediate decision. The danger is that, once we opt for nuclear power, the pressure to develop sustainable alternatives will disappear.’ Kitty Ussher, a former special adviser at the DTI, recounted the struggle ministers had with pro-nuclear civil servants in the run-up to the 2003 Energy White Paper. It’s a straight replay of what happened in the seventies when both the departments of Energy and Trade and Industry were deeply in bed with the nuclear lobby. I later talked to Malcolm Wicks, the energy minister, who insisted that all concerned had open minds, but I reminded him that some of us were old enough to remember what happened last time around.

  ‘Were you part of that small elite who were invited to participate in a weekend school at an Oxford college when we were preparing for office in 1996?’ inquired Nick Raynsford, apropos our difficulties over the proposed trust schools. I wasn’t, but Nick was. He said, ‘We were treated to a brilliant lecture by a Financial Times journalist called Andrew Adonis on great policy disasters, with particular reference to the Poll Tax, which we were told had been pushed through by a small group around the prime minister, without any evidence of public support and against the grain of policy advice.’ Nick went on, ‘I recently reminded Andrew of it.’

  ‘I trust the colour drained from his face.’

  ‘He didn’t want to see the analogy.’

  This evening by a majority of more than 200 we voted through a ban on smoking in public places, the government having wisely, if belatedly, opted for a free vote. A landmark decision. The Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, who I had always understood to be on the side of the angels, behaved very oddly. This mornin
g she was on the radio implying that she intended to support a compromise that would have exempted working men’s clubs and other private institutions, but by nightfall she was back in the complete ban lobby.

  Wednesday, 15 February

  A chat with Keith Hill and Bob Ainsworth regarding yesterday’s smoking vote. It appears there was more to it than met the eye, Patricia Hewitt having been persuaded at the last moment, and against all medical advice, to support exemption for private clubs. The Man, who apparently was not bothered either way, promptly declared that he would back his Secretary of State, thereby raising the ghastly spectre of the prime minister being in the losing lobby and dissipating the enormous goodwill that might be expected to accrue from having, for once, done The Right Thing. This necessitated some deft footwork by Keith and the whips to persuade Patricia (who usually has an unerring instinct for the winning side) to re-defect and thereby ensure that The Man ended up among the righteous. Keith, as it happens, favoured the exemption but, in the interests of the greater good, nobly steered The Man into the Aye Lobby and then went off to vote the other way.

  A long talk with Alan Milburn, who shares my view that Gordon may not be a winner. He hinted that this is The Man’s view, too. However, Alan also reckons that in the short term there is no one to beat Gordon or even to raise the signatures required to trigger a contest, which means that we may be locked into a position which will inevitably end in defeat. Alan thinks (or rather hopes) that the longer Tony stays the more apparent Gordon’s shortcomings will become.

  Friday, 17 February

  Home, to find a winter gas bill of £534 (compared to £350 for this time last year) and a promise of more to come – British Gas have announced another 23 per cent increase. Much talk that the European energy companies are operating some sort of cartel, but maybe the global energy crisis is coming sooner than expected. Also, a report today that the Greenland icecap is melting faster than anyone has previously anticipated.

  Monday, 27 February

  Gulu, northern Uganda

  To the north to find out about the war against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Ben Shepherd, my Foreign Office minder, and I flew up early this morning in a small Cessna. Fine views of the Nile and Lake Kyoga. Everywhere clusters of round thatched Acholi huts, abandoned to the Great Terror. We spent the day visiting – the archbishop, the paramount chief, a reception centre for rescued children. The children spoke in whispers, avoiding eye contact. Only the younger boy, who had escaped from the LRA after two months, had any light in his face. Later, we visited a night shelter accommodating some of the hundreds of children who trek in from the villages and camps around the town to avoid being taken by the LRA.

  Main impressions: exhaustion, quiet desperation. Most Acholi, even the archbishop, speak in a slow whisper, pausing frequently to rub their eyes. This nightmare has been going on for 20 years; they feel abandoned by their government and, despite all the aid, by the international community. Also, ambiguity. The LRA fighters, for all their unspeakable brutality are, after all, kidnapped children – their children. Much talk of the need to negotiate, but what is there to negotiate about? The more I listened the more I felt that, as with Savimbi in Angola, one bullet – in the head of Joseph Kony – is all it would take to bring this madness to an end. But who is to administer the coup de grâce?

  Tuesday, 28 February

  Gulu

  A curious town, this. The focal point of Gulu is the Acholi Inn, owned by a Ugandan intelligence officer who has had a good war and who (according to those who know him) is in no hurry to see it come to an end. He is currently playing host to two big LRA defectors, Sam Kollo and Colonel Kamdulu. Kollo was rescued by helicopter after sending an SOS, saying that Kony was about to have him killed, but so far as can be determined he has said nothing of any significance to anyone since he arrived and there is a suspicion that he may be a plant. On most evenings Kollo and Kamdulu are to be found drinking in the garden of the Acholi Inn, alongside the very Ugandan army officers who until lately were trying to kill them, members of all the local political parties, and an assortment of UN officials and aid workers. The army apparently pays their bills. Meanwhile, in camps not five miles away, their erstwhile victims, in their tens of thousands, are crammed into encampments, too terrified to return to their homes in the bush for fear of what terrors the darkness holds. A bizarre scene; one which requires an Alan Bennett or a David Hare to do it justice. The only parallel I can think of is the bar of the Hotel Constellation in Vientiane, but in Laos, venal or incompetent though they may have been, neither side kidnapped children or chopped up civilians in cold blood.

  This morning we drove to a camp for displaced people about 12 miles out of town along a red, dusty road. The Acholi usually live not in villages but in family groups, a cluster of round, thatched tulkuls. Now, as a result of this nightmare, they are crammed into crowded encampments close to the road; the same round thatched houses, but only feet apart with only the crudest sanitary arrangements and children defecating openly. In the dry season fires break out and, when the rains come, cholera. Nearly two million people, 90 per cent of the rural population across three provinces, live like this. We talked to the chief, an elderly man in a technicolor shirt depicting stations on the New York underground. He was polite but weary, complaining of high blood pressure and diabetes. He had lived like this for ten years. Many white people had come to ask him questions, he said, but nothing ever seemed to change. ‘We are grateful to you for feeding us, but why can’t you help us to defeat Kony? In the 1940s we fought for the King, why can’t the Queen help us now?’

  Tuesday, 7 March

  At the behest of a little animal charity which has been put on to me by Tony Benn, I tabled an early-day motion calling on the Ministry of Defence to stop importing bearskins for use by the Guards regiments. This prompted a call from John Gilbert, who said that he had taken this up when he had been at the MOD, resulting in a letter of protest from the heir to the throne. It had gone unanswered because John was unwilling to agree a suitably reassuring reply. The official position is that the MOD is examining alternatives, but of course they are dragging their feet. Good to know that John is sound on bearskins – if not nuclear weapons.

  Wednesday, 8 March

  Lunch at the Commonwealth Club with the acting Ugandan High Commissioner, a very bright woman who used to work for Museveni, who lamented the absence of an Africa minister in the Commons. ‘Does the government care about Africa?’ she inquired.

  Thursday, 9 March

  A light week, not a single Division. I whiled away several hours in the library reading Traudl Junge’s absorbing account of the final days in the Führerbunker, Until the Final Hour, and wept over the fate of the six little Goebbels children.

  Friday, 10 March

  Emma has been learning about the Ten Commandments, but they have not had the desired effect. ‘I think God is very selfish,’ she remarked to Ngoc after school the other day.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Because he says, “Don’t listen to anyone except me”.’

  Yesterday she came home and pronounced firmly, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ So that’s God and Santa Claus disposed of in the space of 12 months.

  Monday, 13 March

  To the meeting of the parliamentary party to hear a final plea from Ruth Kelly for us all to get behind the Education Bill. She spoke well, but then she has had plenty of opportunity to hone her arguments. Never has a White Paper been more intensively consulted upon, albeit in retrospect. There is a curious ritual at meetings of the parliamentary party in times of crisis. No such occasion is complete without a heartfelt plea for loyalty from George Howarth. He is usually followed by Barry Sheerman, who concedes that he may once have entertained a scintilla of doubt, but now reveals that he is 1,000 per cent behind whatever the government is proposing. Finally, JP is wheeled in to rally the troops with his own unique brand of rhetoric, which on this occasion, as on others, skirted perilously close to several m
inefields (more than once I saw eyebrows raised on the top table), but managed to end up in just about the right place. Afterwards, I was subjected to a good-natured ear-bashing by David Miliband apropos my question to the Prime Minister the other day about Foundation schools. By an extraordinary coincidence, another opportunity for mischief has presented itself: I have been drawn second in the ballot for PM’s Questions on Wednesday immediately before the House is due to consider the Bill.

  Morale very low. Colin Burgon, once a teacher, believes the Education Bill will widen rather than narrow the attainment gap. He also complained about the lifestyle of some of the New Labour elite – Mandelson, Blunkett, Jowell and her husband, and the increasingly shameless correlation between big donations and peerages. ‘We’re all contaminated,’ he said to Ed Miliband, Helen Goodman and myself as we sat in the Members’ Lobby awaiting the outcome of the division.