Lewes Speakers Festival: Chris Mullin

The All Saints, Lewes, BN7

Sun 14th May 2023 12:50PM

“When I retired from Parliament in April 2010, I ceased keeping a diary, on the assumption that life would no longer be of sufficient interest to justify doing so. It soon became apparent that I was wrong…
I am under no illusion, however. Despite the occasional moment in the sunshine, I have never been much more than a fleabite on the body politic. On a visit to Parliament a couple of years after retiring, I came across a former colleague. He peered at me over the top of his glasses and said, ‘Didn’t you use to be Chris Mullin?’”
Picking up where he left off in 2010’s Decline and Fall, celebrated diarist Chris Mullin returns with his trademark irreverence and keen eye for the absurd to chronicle the turbulent last decade of the second Elizabethan era.
Didn’t You Use to Be Chris Mullin? charts the collapse of New Labour, the long years of austerity politics, the highs and lows of Brexit, the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and no fewer than four Tory Prime Ministers, culminating in the death of the Queen.
Wise, witty and deeply perceptive, Mullin paints a vivid portrait of our recent political history.

 

Chris Mullin was the Labour MP for Sunderland South from 1987 until 2010. He played a key role in Tony Blair's New Labour government, chairing the Home Affairs Select Committee and served in three departments. He is the author of three volumes of diaries, A View from the Foothills, A Walk-On Part and Decline and Fall, and the bestselling novel A Very British Coup, re-published by Serpent's Tail, which was turned into an award-winning television series.

 

A Q&A Session will follow.