Hinterland by Chris Mullin (Profile Books 2016)

It was some time before I had any further contact with Blair. Then, in November 1994, he invited me to his office and asked if I would be willing to go on the front bench. This was not the first time I had been asked (I was by now very respectable). As long ago as 1992 John Smith had asked me to be housing spokesman and I had declined in favour of remaining on the Home Affairs Select Committee. Blair talked of ‘pepping up’ the front bench and giving it a radical edge. ‘So many of the left are …’

‘Impossibilists,’ I said.

‘I was going to say “conservative”. Their idea of being radical is to defend the status quo.’ An astute observation and one that was hard to deny. The Labour left at this time had few new ideas beyond repealing the Tory trade union laws (some of which were sensible and popular) and reversing all changes in the management of the NHS, regardless of whether or not they made sense.

A Man Out of Time

The tubes at Tribune still won't join the 21st century by putting a decent archive on their website, but this sideline page/blog of theirs looks promising in a leftish trainspotterish kind of way (can't be arsed to link to their other sideline blog, a cartoon page, 'cos the cartoons in general aren't up to scratch).

Nice self-deprecating touch by leading off their historical page with a wee political hand-grenade thrown the way of the late Woodrow Wyatt; a man who, in his political life, started out as part of the Tribunite/Bevanite left in the Parliamentary Labour Party in the immediate post-war period, only to end up with a peerage courtesy of Thatcher for journalistic services to her Government's policies.

The sub-heading of the piece on the Tribune page is 'Lech, Toady and Turncoat' but one can't help feeling that the late bow-tied duffer's has been a bit hard done by.

A lech and a toady? Yep, his published diaries and his weekly column for the News of the World in the 1980s, 'The Voice of Reason', testify to the fact that he was enthralled by power, but a 'turncoat'? The bloke was New Labour when Blair was still reading the liner notes to the Tom Robinson Band's 'The Power in the Darkness', as if it was official Labour Party policy.

The poor sod was simply born before his time.