Chris Mullin, a former Labour MP, is the author of Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings and A Very British Coup, among other books.
Friday, 25 February. To the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, to respond to an application – under the Terrorism Act, no less – from the West Midlands Police. They are demanding that I hand over notes I made in the 1980s during my investigation into the Birmingham pub bombings, in the hope that these will help them to track down one of the two surviving bombers. A bit...
By far the worst appointment made by Boris Johnson in his cabinet reshuffle last month was that of Anne-Marie Trevelyan as secretary of state for international development. An ardent Brexiteer, Trevelyan has no known interest in overseas development; just about her only previous public utterance on the subject was an observation that ‘charity begins at home.’ But then she is...
One Saturday some years ago, while cycling over Wearmouth Bridge in the centre of Sunderland, my young daughters and I got mixed up with the football crowd. ‘There’s that MP,’ someone sneered. ‘Gas him,’ someone else responded. Not ‘Kill him’ or ‘Throw him in the river,’ but ‘Gas him.’ I don’t mind admitting we speeded...
Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup was a nostalgic book that turned into a prophetic one. First published in 1982 and set towards the end of that decade, it nonetheless recalled...
I’m on research leave in Finland, which, like any well-ordered social democracy, but unlike the UK, maintains an air of strenuously contained bedlam. Public notices in Finnish look as if...
For several weeks after 21 November 1974 most Irish people in Birmingham took cover. Even the most respected and entrenched felt unsafe. Outrage and grief overwhelmed the city and spread far...
Buchi Emecheta’s novel is dedicated to her 1981 students at the University of Calabar. Double Yoke is a tale of student life at that university and evidently the teacher has learned a great...
He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony...
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