Hinterland: A Memoir by Chris Mullin review – the Labour left always gets demonised

A leftwinger who wrote A Very British Coup and campaigned to free the Birmingham Six, Mullin also worked with Blair. This is another canny memoir

Chris Mullin is a bit of a mystery. A leftwing troublemaker who managed to serve in the Blair government; a weedy-looking operator who took on the police and the IRA to free the Birmingham Six; an idealistic socialist reporter who freelanced for the Sun and Telegraph; a dedicated parliamentarian who did not enter the Commons until he was 39; a writer of conspiratorial novels who reinvented himself as a self-deprecating, almost cosy political diarist – Mullin, now 68, has folded together multiple careers more like a Victorian than a modern MP.

Hinterland is another canny, deceptively casual Mullin performance. Covering his whole life, including phases already covered by his highly successful diaries, this slim book begins as a series of loosely connected anecdotes, after-dinner in tone, apparently random in their chronology, about the Labour party in the 70s and 80s. Mullin describes a boisterous, off-duty union leader, Norman Willis, a “long-winded” Neil Kinnock, and Tony Benn’s tumultuous 1981 challenge for the Labour deputy leadership. It’s all vivid stuff; but anyone who knows the party’s history will be familiar with most of it already.

His relationship with his wife in postwar Vietnam is recalled with a melodrama that could almost be Graham Greene

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