Decline & Fall

by Chris Mullin

  Tuesday, 5 January

  To the Chamber to see Alistair Darling introduce the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which obliges the government to halve the deficit within four years. Surely the most pointless piece of legislation ever devised. Not least since it imposes no sanction if the target is not met. To be fair to Alistair, this is not his doing. It shows every sign of having been dreamed up in the fun factory at Number 10. He managed to keep a straight face throughout as George Osborne shredded it mercilessly. Osborne was followed by Frank Field, who made an apocalyptic speech comparing the current state of British politics with the phoney war of 1938–9 and predicting the imminent collapse of the currency. By way of evidence he cited (as did Osborne) an announcement by Pimco, a big player in the bond market, that it would not for the time being be purchasing any more gilts.

  ‘He’s losing it,’ whispered former Treasury minister Geoffrey Robinson as Frank sat down.

  ‘Is he? I rely on you for advice about the bond market.’

  ‘The government will get the money it needs, but it might be a quarter of a per cent more expensive, that’s all. Pimco’s statement is just a negotiating ploy.’

  Let’s hope so.

  Wednesday, 6 January

  Another coup attempt. Just before Prime Minister’s Questions, I was sitting in the atrium at Portcullis House when up came Barry Sheerman (who has been calling for Gordon’s head for months), saying that Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt were about to put out a statement demanding a vote of confidence in our beloved leader. Sure enough, we emerged from PMQs (at which Gordon did well) to find an email from Geoff and Patricia demanding a ballot. By evening it had become clear that this latest putsch had failed. Most senior members of the Cabinet put out statements saying they were content with present management, though several took their time and were suspiciously lukewarm. Among the ranks there is fury, particularly with Geoff, a former chief whip, that he and Patricia should choose to upset the applecart, just as the heat was going out of The Gordon Question. Now it’s back in the headlines again.

  Thursday, 7 January

  Much vitriolic email traffic re Hoon/Hewitt as colleagues vie to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. One can’t help noticing, however, that many waited until it was clear that the coup had failed before registering their upsetness. This morning’s crop of loyalist emails was brought to an end by Eric Joyce, who wrote: ‘Thanks, all. That’s enough expressions of outrage. Especially those with insane punctuation.’

  A scathing editorial in The Times headed ‘A Last Opportunity’: ‘Labour MPs must finally have the courage to act – or else the electorate may do it for them.’ The problem, as we all know, is that it is too late.

  Drove Sarah to Oxford, where the snow in the side roads was a foot deep, and then made my way north through a bleak winter landscape, arriving at 2 a.m.

  Friday, 8 January

  A note from Bruce Grocott re the diaries, which, he says, ‘reminded me why we have so enjoyed each other’s company over the years’. A relief. I feared Bruce might disapprove.

  Saturday, 9 January

  Sunderland

  The great freeze in its fourth week. A temperature of minus 18 was recorded in Oxfordshire the other day. The back lane a sheet of ice. Three weeks since I was able to put the car away. Ngoc has set to work plugging the many gaps in our leaky Victorian house, taking the old Brixton Road curtains out of storage. Mr Honeysett has been summoned to put up rails and the said curtains now hang across the front and back doors. We dwell in twilight. In the living room the shutters remain closed all day, curtains drawn. For the fourth time I cleared the steps and dug out paths to the front and back gates. The nearby main road eerily silent, even at midday.

  Sunday, 10 January

  Yet another assault on poor Gordon. This time from Peter Watt, the fresh-faced New Labour zealot who became General Secretary in the final years of The Man and who was unceremoniously dumped following the latest funding hoo-ha. With exquisite timing, Watt has chosen this moment to get his own back – across several pages of the Mail on Sunday. Among the damaging revelations, an inside account of the election-that-never-was. He quotes Douglas Alexander as saying of Gordon, ‘The truth is, we have spent ten years working with this guy and we don’t actually like him.’ Douglas is naturally denying all and Watts admits he is paraphrasing, but it all adds fuel to the fire.

  Monday, 11 January

  The latest uprising has fizzled out, but there is no rejoicing. We all know that we are badly – fatally – damaged. This evening’s jam-packed meeting of the parliamentary party was seething with anger towards the plotters.

  ‘No personal attacks,’ cautioned chairman Tony Lloyd, only to be greeted with cries of ‘Why not?’

  Gordon, flanked by the grim-faced Cabinet – Harriet Harman, Douglas Alexander and the Noble Lord Mandelson to the fore – attempted to raise morale and was warmly received by we who are about to die. ‘We can win. We will win. We must win,’ he concluded, but despite the applause and the table-thumping, no one believes him. The trouble is that nor do we believe that anyone else could lead us back to the promised land. It is too late for that. Actually, Gordon was on good form. As fluent and relaxed as I have seen him. If words any longer mattered, he would easily have passed the test, but we are beyond words now. He was followed by our election ‘co-ordinators’, Douglas, Peter and Harriet, each anxious to demonstrate (despite credible reports to the contrary) that they are working as a team and, just as important, that Gordon is no longer in sole charge. Indeed he may not be in charge at all. There was a clue, buried deep in his speech: ‘I am not a team of one. I am one of a team.’ Somewhere in the middle there was a nice little joke, hinting that Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt might be destined for a salt mine in Staffordshire, which, everyone said afterwards, someone must have scripted for him. That’s the problem – when Gordon cracks a joke no one believes that he could have thought of it by himself.

  Tuesday, 12 January

  Lunch with Kim Howells, late of the Foreign Office, now chairman of the Security and Intelligence Committee. We chuckled over the irony. His father was (until 1956) a Communist. Kim himself was in the CP for 18 months (until being politely asked to leave after exhibiting evidence of a capacity for independent thought). As a student at Hornsey College of Art he led a sit-in, not to mention that he was heavily involved in the miners’ strike. Somewhere in the bowels of the security service there is bound to be a nice fat file on him and yet here he is presiding over the very committee to which the secret services are obliged to account. How times change.

  Douglas Alexander, fresh from a meeting of the political Cabinet and armed with the latest focus group findings, attended the Northern Group. He spoke of an anti-politics mood in the country. A deep cynicism. ‘A desire for change so strong that anything we say that implies we are insiders can only do us damage.’ As if that wasn’t bad enough the recession has changed everything – ‘all the assumptions about growth have been torn up’. Even so, he added, people want a better future and somehow we have got to offer them one. But how, given that the public coffers are bare and the party just this side of bankruptcy?

  Wednesday, 13 January

  To a massive knees-up in Canary Wharf in aid of Jim Fitzpatrick’s reelection fund. I had the following exchange with a pleasant but vacuous young woman, active in Jim’s constituency party, who was seated on my left.

  She: ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I am a Member of Parliament.’

  ‘How long have you been an MP?’

  ‘Twenty-three years.’

  ‘That’s interesting. You should write a diary.’

  A huge earthquake in Haiti, casualties run to tens, maybe hundreds of thousands.

  Thursday, 14 January

  I have a split in my shoe, at the point where the leather joins the sole. My only other pair have a similar split in precisely the same place. I have tried getting them repaired, but no one wants to know. Actually, the s
plit appeared several weeks ago, but the recent snow has made it impossible to ignore any longer. This morning, upon reaching the office, I had to take off my sock and dry it on the radiator. It’s not that I’m too mean to replace them. I just can’t bear the waste. In Vietnam or India no one would dream of throwing away two pairs of otherwise good shoes. I would take them to a man at a little stall by the side of the road and he would repair them without fuss.

  This evening to Belfast for a book event at the arts festival tomorrow.

  Friday, 15 January

  Belfast

  A damp, dull, grey day, the city much changed since I was last this way. The barricades have gone, investment is flooding in and the city centre no longer closes down at 9 p.m. Some things, however, never change. The police HQ is still barricaded with steel and concrete, the politics deadlocked – and relentlessly introverted. The first half-dozen pages of this morning’s Belfast Telegraph are taken up with the crisis in the Democratic Unionist Party arising from the misdemeanours of Iris Robinson – the earthquake in Haiti is on pages 18 and 19.

  Sunday, 17 January

  Awful scenes from Haiti. An entire nation reduced to rubble. And this only the latest in a long series of catastrophes. Aid pouring in from all over the world, but the port has been destroyed and the airport capacity is limited, with the result that very little has yet reached the destitute.

  Monday, 18 January

  A depressing little discussion about electoral reform at this evening’s meeting of the parliamentary party. All we were being invited to discuss was whether to include a provision for a referendum on alternative voting in the Constitutional Reform Bill that is currently going through or leave it to the manifesto. This provoked a host of objections to any change whatever. The Parliamentary Labour Party is really a most conservative institution. In truth, however, it is all an irrelevance since, whatever we do, no Tory government is going to take the slightest notice. If tinkering with the electoral system is such a good idea, we should have done it years ago. Now it’s too late and stinks of desperation and self-interest.

  Wednesday, 20 January

  Awoke to the news that the Democrats have lost the by-election for Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, the equivalent of the Rhondda returning a Tory. A huge blow for Obama, since it means he loses control of the Senate. American voters are said to be ‘angry’, but if so their anger seems bizarrely irrational. It took the Republicans eight years to destroy the economy, organise two foreign wars and alienate just about the entire world. Surely they can’t have been expecting him to put everything right inside 12 months? Later, a quiet chat in the Tea Room with a Foreign Office minister who says HMG is privately disappointed with Obama for (a) not standing up to the Israelis re settlements (‘he blinked first’), (b) turning up empty-handed at the climate change conference in Copenhagen and (c) taking so long to make up his mind about deploying extra troops to Afghanistan.

  At PMQs I found myself sitting next to Tony Wright, who whispered that he had been on an overseas trip with one of the new, modern young Tories who had boasted of emailing a third of his constituents before breakfast. ‘That’s why the new intake are so keen on conducting phoney surveys. They aren’t interested in the opinions of their constituents. They just want to harvest email addresses.’ He added with a weary smile, ‘I am so glad I am going.’

  Thursday, 21 January

  Jack Straw gave evidence to the Iraq inquiry. Attention focused on a recently published ‘Secret and Personal’ memorandum that Jack addressed to The Man in March 2002 – a full year before the invasion – setting out with remarkable prescience the pitfalls and questioning the legality of the enterprise. Loyal courtier that he was, Jack wasn’t quite opposed, but he clearly wasn’t enthusiastic either. Jack is the one member of the War Cabinet who may emerge from this debacle with his reputation enhanced. The man who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.

  Tuesday, 26 January

  To Simpson’s-in-the-Strand for a slap-up lunch at which I – and four others – were presented with an ‘Oldie of the Year’ award. A dubious accolade since I had never previously thought of myself as old, but I guess I must get used to it. A huge cast of gracefully ageing glitterati, including Kate Adie, Anna Ford, Peter O’Toole, Moira Stuart and Terry Wogan. Most of the acclaim was for the dreadful Joanna Lumley for her Gurkha campaign, which is predictably proving to be a disaster, destitute Gurkhas arriving daily at Heathrow with a wholly unrealistic idea of the life that awaits them. Most of those at today’s event were blissfully unaware of the misery she has caused and she was duly fêted, whooping and hamming it up for all she was worth, a token Gurkha in tow. I steered well clear of La Lumley for fear that, if I got too close, I might not have been able to restrain myself from strangling her.

  The Iraq inquiry is hotting up. Today Sir John Chilcot took evidence from the Foreign Office lawyers Sir Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst (the one official who resigned), who both said, in terms, that they had advised Jack that the war was illegal and that he had discounted their advice, saying it was too dogmatic. Perhaps Jack isn’t going to come so well out of this after all.

  Wednesday, 27 January

  The first person I came across this morning was Ken Purchase, steam coming out of his ears. ‘Have you seen this report on inequality?’ A government-sponsored commission had reported that Britain was as class-ridden and unequal today as it had been in 1997. ‘What have we been doing all these years?’

  ‘Holding back the tide,’ I ventured.

  ‘The pivotal moment was when Peter Mandelson said we were utterly relaxed about people getting filthy rich.’

  Maybe, but I simply don’t buy the line that it has all been a waste of time. The minimum wage, tax credits, all those new schools (17 in Sunderland) have surely made an impact. To be sure, we have succeeded in raising the floor below which no one should be allowed to fall. The problem is all those bankers, hedge-funders, FTSE fat cats, corporate lawyers and Premier League footballers who we’ve allowed to run riot at the other end of the social scale.

  This evening, at a reception in Kensington Palace, the following tantalising exchange with a Cabinet minister of my acquaintance, regarding Geoff Hoon’s failed coup attempt.

  ‘A misjudgement,’ said I.

  ‘No. He was betrayed.’

  ‘You mean he was expecting a senior member of the Cabinet to join him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A vague assurance or a promise?’

  ‘A promise.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ah, that will have to wait for my memoirs.’

  He added, ‘When it’s all over, the big question will be how Gordon ever got there in the first place.’

  Thursday, 28 January

  A call from the chief executive of Shop Direct (formerly Littlewoods), a mail order company, to say that he is proposing to close his Sunderland operation with the loss of 900 jobs, almost all women, many the only breadwinners. The cause is said to be internet shopping, though the company is looking to ‘outsource’ some of the work to homeworkers. So once again our ‘redundancy task force’ rolls into action. A well-rehearsed routine. Coles’s Cranes, Dewhirst, Pyrex, Vaux Brewery – one by one the dominoes have fallen. In fairness the picture is not entirely gloomy. The call centres at Doxford business park are looking to recruit another 200 employees and Nissan announced today that it was taking back 400 workers laid off last year. We are still light years away from where we were in the eighties.

  Today’s Guardian contains the following headline: ‘Fox the most trusted US news channel, poll says’. God bless America.

  Friday, 29 January

  To the Church of St Peter and Paul in Ilford for Uncle Peter’s funeral, the last member of Mum’s immediate family. A much-loved, self-effacing, technophobe, poet and local historian. An Essex man to the end, except that his was not the Essex of bling, brutalist new towns and vulgar hacienda with gold-topped railings. His was the Essex of
unspoiled villages, country lanes and ancient churches – which still exist for those who know where to look. The church was packed, even though Peter had outlived most of his contemporaries. I herewith reproduce, from the order of service, one of his poems in order that some record may exist of the work of this talented man, unrecognised outside his own small circle:

  To Beauchamp Church in Winter Time

  Could I, of all that’s dead and past,

  One treasured hour renew at last

  Down Essex lanes, content, I’d stride,

  With you, my laughing love, beside,

  And take the Abbess Road and climb

  To Beauchamp Church in winter time.

  Through silvered fields by frozen brook,

  Near haunts of redwing, thrush and rook,

  We’d vault the ditch where ways divide