by Chris Mullin
Later, I tapped out a short addendum to the Guardian’s obituary of Daphne. She led one of the most remarkable lives of anyone I have known, with the possible exception of Wilf Burchett, who was very definitely on the opposite side of the barricades.
Friday, 26 March
My valedictory led this morning’s Yesterday in Parliament and the Guardian has published 1,000 words culled from the speech.
To Sunderland on an early train. Alistair has rather spoiled the effect of his Budget by appearing to agree with an assertion by the BBC’s Nick Robinson that even if Labour wins, we can expect cuts in public spending ‘deeper and tougher’ than those of Margaret Thatcher. However, today’s Guardian publishes a table headed ‘Who has benefited from Labour?’ produced by the Institute of Fiscal Studies. It demonstrates beyond peradventure that 13 years of Labour government have produced a substantial redistribution of wealth. The least prosperous 20 per cent of the population are said to be 12–13 per cent better off while the 20 per cent best off have lost out by between 3 and 5 per cent. Overall 60 per cent of the population are said to be better off, which knocks firmly on the head the nonsense from some quarters that the poor – or even most of the middle class – have got poorer on our watch. Interestingly, the Telegraph leads with a mendacious story based on the same report which it manages to spin as ‘10m families have lost out in Labour’s tax changes’. The story below contains the following delicious sentence: ‘The report by the IFS discloses that, despite years of Labour declarations of support for the middle classes, its policies have consistently favoured the poor . . .’ Amen.
Monday, 29 March
‘Tories to block National Insurance rise,’ declares the headline in this morning’s Telegraph. That’s another £5bn they have to find from somewhere. Where on earth are they going to get it? My guess is that, once elected on a platform of tax cuts, they will immediately push up VAT. Exactly as in ‘79. One can’t be too cynical about these guys.
Alan Milburn was on the tube from King’s Cross. Despite all the talk of a hung parliament, he predicts a small Tory majority. Alan also reckons that Gordon will cling on to the leadership, unless there is a complete meltdown.
This evening, dinner with the Tory Chief Whip, Patrick McLoughlin; he too predicts a small overall majority for the Tories.
Tuesday, 30 March
A two-page handwritten note from Mr Speaker Bercow: ‘Your speech on Thursday was one of the most moving and powerful I have heard over the last 13 years . . . At heart I am a romantic and it brought tears to my eyes.’
At lunch in the cafeteria Dennis Skinner berated me for giving up. He dismissed out of hand my suggestion that I wasn’t much use any more, but when I said that my wife was the casting vote, she wants to work and it is her turn, we have a 14-year-old daughter and someone has to stay home, he accepted that as a reasonable explanation. Which only goes to prove that Dennis, in his later years, has mellowed.
Friday, 2 April
Oh dear, more trouble. A group of big businessmen have signed a letter to the Telegraph, castigating government plans to increase employer National Insurance contributions and praising Tory promises to reverse the increase. Never mind that more than half of them have connections to the Tory party (seven are known to be donors), they have struck a hammer blow at our economic credibility and the media have piled in behind them. To compound our woes, a poll in today’s Guardian suggests our support has slipped back below 30 per cent and the Tories are again on the rise. A meltdown cannot be ruled out.
A leader in today’s Times, listing me as one of a handful of departing MPs who will be missed. ‘A View From the Foothills is his eloquent answer to those who believe that all politicians are in it for themselves.’
Tuesday, 6 April
To Westminster with My Two Best Friends. We set out early from Burnham Market, where we have been staying with Liz, stopping en route at Chelmsford to place carnations on Granny’s grave.
As expected, the election is to be on 6 May. Gordon went to the Palace this morning. Within the hour the BBC were running vox pops with The Disillusioned: ‘I shan’t be voting’, ‘A plague on all of them’ etc. No one asks the obvious question: ‘Did you vote last time? Or the time before?’ By and large one suspects The Disillusioned are mostly the same people who fail to put out their waste bins on the appointed day, allow their dogs to foul the pavement, take no interest in their children’s education and so on. No matter, they are allowed to proclaim their disillusion, unchallenged – the Great Expenses Meltdown providing yet another excuse for indolence. Meanwhile a tented media village has sprung up on College Green, where the pundits will spend the next six weeks talking to each other in front of an empty parliament. By the time it’s all over the nation will be bored witless. Much talk of a hung parliament, but most of the evidence points to a Tory majority. I suspect most of the pundits think that too. They just keep blathering about a hung parliament to give themselves something to talk about.
Wednesday, 7 April
My last PMQs. Cameron on a high, cheered on by his own side, reading out a long charge list to which Gordon, instead of meeting him head on, responded with a long string of facts. ‘Poor Gordon,’ Emma remarked afterwards. ‘He was proper slaughtered.’
‘Bosses step up war on Labour’ is the splash headline in tonight’s Standard over a story that another 30 FTSE fat cats have piled in behind the 20-odd who came out against the proposed increase in National Insurance.
Thursday, 8 April
The last day. To Westminster with Sarah and Emma. A dozen or so ‘Vote Conservative’ posters on billboards have appeared overnight in gardens along Kennington Road. They have one thing in common: without exception every house sporting a billboard is worth at least £1 million.
At the House we climbed 334 steps to the top of Big Ben (something I have never done before). Lunch on the terrace in bright sunshine followed by a tour of Speaker’s House. As we were being shown out down the grand staircase we came across Speaker Bercow and his wife, Sally, who chatted pleasantly for 15 minutes, after which he signed a copy of the guidebook for each of the girls and one for Ngoc and posed for a photo with us on the doorstep.
Everywhere we go people, Members and officials alike, coming up to shake hands, say how much I’ll be missed etc. It’s been like this all week, giving rise to a hollow feeling inside. No matter, the die is cast.
At just after five the House prorogued and we all – or those of us still on the premises – processed to the Lords to hear the Queen’s commissioners, swathed in ermine, with much doffing of caps, give her consent to an agreed list of Bills. Then back to the Commons for the last time, where The Departing lined up to shake hands with the Speaker and a line of clerks behind the Speaker’s chair. Then, with the girls, to the Tea Room, where we said goodbye to Noeleen and her staff and posed for photographs in front of the fireplace at the Tory end. All very out of order, but no one complained.
Several hours clearing out my room, 68 Upper Corridor South. Finally, in the cool of evening for a last drink on the terrace. Then we climbed into the car and drove away.
Friday, 9 April
Up at five and on the road by six, the roof box crammed with office papers and other detritus which I cannot yet bring myself to dispose of. The headline in today’s Telegraph reads: ‘Tory win best for economy say top bankers’. Only the lunatics who now run the Telegraph could fail to see the irony.
Saturday, 10 April
The President of Poland has been killed in an air crash in Russia, en route to commemorate the slaughter at Katyn.
Sunday, 11 April
Sunderland
Out canvassing in Plains Farm with Julie Elliot, my likely successor. Canvassing is not as it was in my day, when we knocked on every door. These days it is done from a telephone bank and entered into some great computer program. All we are doing is filling in the gaps. As a result, it is difficult to get a feel, but I didn’t sense much overt hostility.
Our national c
ampaign grows increasingly inept. The latest folly – a leaflet accusing the Tories of wanting to increase waiting times for suspected cancer patients. They have neatly turned the tables by alleging (falsely) that we have targeted cancer sufferers using confidential NHS files. Nevertheless, the evening bulletins feature people diagnosed with cancer saying how tasteless it all is and who can disagree?
Tuesday, 13 April
Both main parties have now published manifestos. Ours making a desperate bid to recapture the New Labour brand by promising another five years of hyperactivity re the public services, taking over failing schools, hospitals, police forces etc. . . . and foolishly promising not to raise income tax. The Tories have come up with a giant new wheeze, ‘an invitation to join the government of Britain’, which involves local referenda, elected police chiefs, allowing sharp-elbowed parents to set up their own schools and mid-term sackings for errant MPs – a populists’ charter, if ever there was. The elephant in the room which no one mentions is VAT. All parties seem to have calculated (and they may be right) that the pampered, mollycoddled British middle classes, not to mention our hysterical media, are simply incapable of coping with a mature discussion about tax.
Wednesday, 14 April
To Oxford with Sarah. Along the A19 through much of North Yorkshire farmers have erected huge hoardings proclaiming, ‘Vote for Change – Vote Conservative’. Elsewhere the Tories are running a mendacious poster campaign depicting an uncharacteristically cheerful mugshot of Gordon with captions such as ‘I let 80,000 criminals out early. Let me do it again’; ‘I caused record youth unemployment. Vote for me’; ‘I doubled the national debt. Vote for me’. Insulting to the intelligence, but will people fall for it? Enough, I fear.
At Oxford, after depositing Sarah at Queen’s, I whiled away a pleasant hour with a circuit of the Fellows’ Garden at Magdalen, great drifts of blue and white anemones engulfing the daffodils. Then the long drive back to Sunderland, with only my Alan Bennett tapes for company.
Thursday, 15 April
Tonight, the long-awaited leaders’ debate. The bland leading the bland. After about 30 minutes I found myself losing consciousness and went upstairs to watch a BBC2 documentary about the men who scratch a living on the huge garbage dump in Lagos. Uplifting, moving, humbling. Not a trace of self-pity. Their dignity, wit, optimism, sense of solidarity and community causing them to soar above their awful circumstances, putting to shame those of us leading what, to the scavengers of Lagos, must be lives of unimaginable comfort, wallowing in our tabloid-induced misery.
Meanwhile in Iceland a volcano has erupted, sending a great cloud of ash into our airspace, grounding all flights until further notice. The silence in the skies is beautiful.
Friday, 16 April
Nick Clegg is widely reckoned to have been the clear winner of last night’s debate. Ironic considering that, for all his fluency and utter self-confidence, he is easily the biggest charlatan of the lot. Who would guess, listening to him prattling piously about MPs’ expenses, that he was a maximum claimer? Or that six months ago, when it seemed to be the flavour of the hour, he was demanding ‘bold and savage cuts’ in public spending, a subject on which he is now silent. Or that this is a man who, according to the needs of the hour, is capable of arguing with equal passion for or against retaining Trident nuclear missiles? From our point of view this is not necessarily bad news. A modest Lib Dem resurgence may be just what we need to dent what, until recently at least, seemed to be the inevitable Tory triumph.
Saturday, 17 April
Sunderland
Much excitement re Nick Clegg’s alleged triumph in Thursday’s debate. A YouGov poll puts the Lib Dems on 30 per cent, with us on 28 and the Tories down to 33. A flash in the pan or the long-awaited breakthrough? Too early to say. What it does mean is that the Lib Dems’ fanciful manifesto will now come under somewhat more rigorous scrutiny than has so far been the case. How, for example, are they proposing to find the several billion needed to raise the tax threshold to £10,000?
Jim Naughtie came to interview me for the Today programme and afterwards we had a cup of tea in the garden. He remarked that until now he had been unable to foresee any outcome that did not result in David Cameron ending up as prime minister, but for the first time, one begins to glimpse other possibilities.
Sunday, 18 April
Clegg mania grows steadily more ludicrous. Today a poll suggesting he is the most popular party leader since Winston Churchill. I have been acquainted with each of the last five Liberal or Lib Dem leaders and he is by far the shallowest.
Wednesday, 21 April
Nick Clegg was on a Radio 4 phone-in. I have reluctantly to admit that he was impressive: personable, fluent, on top of his brief. The trouble is that one knows he could argue the Tory or even the Labour cause with equal dexterity.
Thursday, 22 April
The Tory press have launched a huge assault on Nick Clegg: ‘Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain,’ screams the Mail; the Sun has a four-page attack, the gist of which is that he’s soft on defence and immigration. Nastiest of all, the Telegraph, whose three-deck front page headline reads: ‘Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem donors and payments into his private account’. On careful reading it turns out that the money was donated to help pay his staff some years ago when he was home affairs spokesman. It all seems to have been properly declared and accounted for. Unwise, perhaps, to run it through his own account, but there is no evidence of impropriety. Naturally, the Tories say that it’s nothing to do with them, but you can almost see the strings leading back to the disreputable spinners who lurk in the Tory underworld. If Clegg continues to pose a threat to the Tory revival, he can expect much more of this.
Wednesday, 28 April
To Number 10 to pay a long-overdue social call on Tom Fletcher, my erstwhile private secretary. Eerily quiet, since Gordon and the politicos were campaigning up country. Tom gave me a tour of the parts I have never previously penetrated, upstairs, downstairs, starting with ‘The Hub’ in what used to be the boardroom of Number 12, where he sits for much of the day within a heartbeat of The Maximum Leader. Gordon sits at the centre of a horseshoe surrounded by key advisers, each in identical black leather chairs, facing identical computer screens. Everyone within earshot. All very modern, clinical and intimate. A wee bit too much so for my liking. Behind, a room overlooking the garden, to which The Leader can retreat when he feels the need and to take important phone calls. The blotter is covered with Gordon’s graffiti. ‘Still in denial,’ reads one. And in a far corner of the garden, just below the Cabinet Office, Sarah’s vegetable garden. Sadly, it is unlikely that she will be there long enough to reap the harvest.
Tom speaks highly of Gordon. ‘Despite all, I’d work for him again in a flash. He’s a person of substance. He wants to make the world a better place. And, yes, you can tease him.’
At intervals around the building, flat screen television sets beaming in, courtesy of Sky, a constant diet of rolling news. Even as we toured, word was coming in of a new disaster. Gordon, in Rochdale, has apparently been overheard labelling as a bigot some harmless lady, a lifelong Labour voter to boot. The drama unfolding minute by excruciating minute. By the time we reached the press office in the basement he had driven to the woman’s home to apologise in person. The cameras were focusing on the plastic front door of a modest terraced house, grim-faced Special Branch men keeping the media scrum at bay. ‘He’s been in there 30 minutes so far,’ said someone. Mesmerisingly, mind-numbingly awful. A slow-motion car crash. This, surely, is the point of no return.
Thursday, 29 April
Sunderland
An email from a retired film director arguing that the ‘Brown gaffe’ story is essentially a Murdoch surveillance coup. ‘The sound mixer ought properly to turn the microphone off once the politician/performer has exited the shot. If they don’t they are essentially being spied upon. But if conversation is picked up, a professional director or producer will not normally release it nationwide.’
Yes, indeed, but this is war and in the current climate any attempt to complain would be laughed out of court.
A call from the Mail on Sunday. Would I be interested in writing a piece about ‘the curious psychological make-up of Gordon Brown’? I wouldn’t actually.
‘Can you suggest someone who would?’
‘Just about anyone who has served in the Cabinet during the last 13 years, except that I imagine they are otherwise engaged.’
This evening, the third and last of the leaders’ debates, which I, taking part in an election event at the University of Newcastle, missed.
Friday, 30 April
The consensus seems to be that Cameron was last night’s winner. Gordon is said to have performed well, but sadly no one is listening. The polls indicate that the Tories are pulling away again. Our support is hovering around 25 per cent. Meltdown territory.
A call from the Daily Mail. Somehow word has reached them that I am none too keen on Nick Clegg. Would I like to do a 1,200-word knocking job? They are very keen. ‘We can ghostwrite it, if necessary.’
Thanks, but no thanks.
Saturday, 1 May
Sunderland
A surprise visit from Our Much Maligned Leader. An ‘event’ has been hastily arranged at the Glass Centre. By invitation only. All carefully choreographed. A dozen well-scrubbed youngsters arrayed behind the lectern. A battery of cameramen confined to a little pen at the rear. Gordon arrives to rapturous applause. For the first 15 minutes all goes well and then a bearded oaf in his thirties starts bawling. Instantly the cameras home in. We hold our breath, only too well aware that the slightest overreaction will be headline news. Clare Phillipson (height 5’ 1”), mother of one of our candidates, makes the first move, gently easing the troublemaker towards the door. She runs a hostel for battered woman and has considerable experience of dealing with out of control males. The miscreant is bundled from the room. The press pack disappear after him and for about 20 minutes he holds court in the corridor, his words receiving far more attention than those of the Prime Minister. Happily, however, he is not a granny with a grievance, just a passing loudmouth who saw a chance to seize his 15 seconds of fame. The evening bulletins make light of the incident.