Move Along Please. Nothing to See from Here

"The most wickedly indiscreet and elegant political memoirs since those of Alan Clark."

Thanks Mail on Sunday. You've just saved me from reading any more political memoirs published since those of Alan Clark.

I approached Chris Mullin's A View from the Foothills in hope of gaining some insight into the Blair years, some salacious gossip about spin and iniquity in high places, and with the expectation of gaining some greater understanding of the way politicians come to think about and see the world they live in. However, as Mullin tells us at the start, this is his diary cobbled together at the end of the week from notes. And that is exactly how it feels. There's no insight, no depth, and all we really learn is how little control this particular politician feels he has over his own career, over party policy, and over life in general.

Mullin comes across as a somewhat bumbling, well-meaning fan of all things Blairite (with a concomitant, almost visceral fear of all things Brown), and with no particular principles other than an aversion to New Labour's constant setting of targets it can never reach and use of jargon that only serves to alienate the public. There's little sense of his own complicity, other than the occasional "oh dear," but perhaps that's because he doesn't feel any great responsibility for affairs, given his lack of power. Not that this excuses his adoring references throughout the book to Blair as "The Man," however, which is both nauseatingly fawning and a feeble literary conceit. And it's a sign of Mullin's distance from the heady heights of the party that the best stories in the book are actually about the Royals: the Queen Mother telling Neil Kinnock in the strictest confidence not to trust the Germans (the fact that we have this story tells us she shouldn't have trusted Neil Kinnock), and the Queen's intervention in a conversation Phillip is having with a group of women "empowerers" from Birmingham; seeing him about to explode with derision, she distracts him by pointing out some nonexistent pottery on the other side of a wall.

These are diaries that cover the period of 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraq wars, but you'd barely know it. So bogged down in his work is Mullin that he seems to have less time to follow current affairs than the rest of us. One might have wished he'd have spent less time making notes for his memoirs and more time paying attention to the world around him.