Politics? It’s Former MP unleashes his fortune-telling prowess to reveal what lies ahead for our governments
Chris Mullin has a reputation as a political soothsayer.
Before becoming an MP, the former journalist wrote A Very British Coup in 1982, a gripping novel about a socialist Prime Minister being undermined and overthrown by the British establishment.
The fiction turned out to be fact when it later transpired, just as in the book, security services were spying on left-wing MPS, had infiltrated the council for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and had placed a man in the BBC who would screen for communists, in the ominous-sounding Room 105.
Mullin served in Parliament until 2010 as a Labour MP, and recently repeated his fortunetelling trick with sequel novel The Friends Of Harry Perkins. In it, a battered Labour Party abandons socialism when its leader moves to the political centre ground in an effort to win an election in a Britain devastated by Brexit.
Now a celebrated diarist, Mullin, 77, former MP for Sunderland South, is pondering what comes next for British politics in what is shaping to be a seismic year.
Next on the cards seems to be a general election, and, if Mullin is once again reading them right, it will be a Labour victory. “I don’t think that’s controversial to predict,” he says, speaking from his home in Northumberland. “I think it will mark the end of this Conservative Government.
“One of their problems is they’ve simply run out of ministers. They don’t have people left who can govern, and some of them last only a few months.
“I think there will be a Labour Government at the end of this, but it will not be a very brave one. They will be more competent but I don’t think that’s a very high bar. You can see with
Labour how terrified they are of the Daily Mail and other Tory newspapers, and how they can be weaponised against them.”
Mullin believes Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will attempt to fight the election with Tory competency as its key issue. He points to a recent article by The Economist showing that, from 2010, charts marking public policy – from rough sleeping to real wages to waiting lists at hospitals – have all headed in the wrong direction.
The feeling British institutions, the Post Office one of the most recent examples, are failing, is real among the electorate, and the Conservative Party is too riven with in-fighting to effectively fix it.
“They have been captured by ideologues, and there’s a civil war going on within their party,” Mullin says. “In Labour, we’re used to civil wars, but this one seems even more damaging than any I can remember, and it could put them out of office for a long time.
“Brexit was an extraordinary act of self-harm and it’s got us a very bad reputation abroad. Perhaps it didn’t have the apocalyptic impact some predicted. No armageddon, just a long, steady slide into decline.”
Mullin’s recent diaries, Didn’t You Use To Be Chris Mullin?, are his fourth volume, and chart the years after he left Parliament in 2010. It covers the fall of New Labour until the death of Queen Elizabeth II – a 12-year period in which it seemed the pace of historical events increased from a march to a sprint.
“I read a tweet in 2022 in which someone said their son had lived through three prime ministers, two monarchs, four chancellors and three home secretaries. He was four months old,” Mullin recalls, wryly.
Despite the signs pointing to a Labour landslide, similar to the one on which Mullin and New Labour were elected in 1997, he believes Labour is regarding polls which give it a 20-point gap with suspicion.
“Blair was cautious in 1997, just as Labour is now,” he adds. “Prior to 1997 he didn’t believe, and neither did I, that we would win by anything like that margin.
“Blair thought we’d win by 20 or maybe 30 seats, despite what the polls were saying. But it turned out the polls were correct and it may, or may not, be the case this time around.”
Blair, Mullin adds, was the great Labour leader of his lifetime, and hesitates to compare