Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Chris Mullen. Chris Mullen has had a most unusual life

in British politics. He began as a journalist and became well known for leading the campaign

for the release of the Birmingham Six, who were victims of a serious

miscarriage of justice when they were falsely accused of a major IRA bombing in the 70s.

That case is still in the news because Chris Mullen led a multi-decade effort to keep from having to disclose his sources for the story,

and the police are still trying to get him to reveal the names of those who were involved in the bombing,

and Chris Mullen has long been a campaigner for journalistic independence.

Chris Mullen was a member of Parliament for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010,

where he became known as part of the Labour Left, but an eclectic part of the Labour Left.

He served in Tony Blair's government, but he was the only member of that government

to vote against the Iraq war. He became known

for his political diaries, which document his time in power and were acclaimed as an essential

document for understanding the new labor era in British politics. He is also a novelist having written the novel, a very British

coup in the 1980s, and most recently its sequel, The Friends of Harry Perkins. There's a lot to

Chris Mullen. I want to just read this description from The Guardian who say,

Chris Mullen is a bit of a mystery, a left-wing troublemaker who managed to serve in the Blair government,

a weedy-looking operator who took on the police in the IRA to free the Birmingham 6,

an idealistic socialist reporter who freeloads 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 cozy political diarist.

...