Informed 05 Update A Very Mullin Coup Mark Tomas


not contain names and addresses which would have given hostage to fortune. He said of the confessions wrought


by the police: “You only had to study them for a few hours to see there was something wrong – it was fairly obvious to any unbiased observer that the confessions were dodgy and contradicted each other in key respects.” His efforts eventually led him to tracking down Michael Murray one of the bomb makers, who died in 1996, who gave him “a prety good account of what had happened”; he then knew that the wrong men had been sentenced. In an article in the London Review of Books in 2019, Chris Mullin named Murray and James Francis Gavin as guilty of the bombings, saying he had no compunction identifying them as they were dead. Gavin had died in 2002. Chris Mullin edited Arguments


He has variously been feted as the MP who was found to own a black and white TV at the height of the sleazy expenses scandal and derided as the loony MP who backed the IRA bomb gang by Te Sun newspaper. Chris Mullin, journalist, author and


former MP for Sunderland South, has had a long, varied and productive career. Last month, he and Michelle Stanistreet walked out of the Old Bailey to celebrate a famous victory for journalists’ rights aſter Judge Lucraſt ruled that his refusal to hand over materials to the West Midland Police was in the public interest. Te production order sought under


the Terrorism Act 2000 by the police, who wanted to seize his notes from his investigations into the wrongful arrests of the Birmingham Six, was turned over. In an interview with Tim Dawson, Chris explained the importance of his investigative work for the World in Action and in his book Te Error of Judgement truth about the Birmingham bombings. He said: “It wasn’t just a case of


overturning one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history,


it also led to the disbandment of the notorious West Midlands Serious Crime Squad and the quashing of 30 or more of their wrongful convictions. It led to the seting up of a royal commission, one of whose recommendations was the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission which has subsequently quashed another 500 convictions, the latest being of those unfortunate postmasters who were persecuted by the Post Office.”


His withholding of the notes – which included interviews with the real bombers of the pub that night in 1974 – had been seen as controversial, especially by the relatives of those killed. He said: “I have no brief for defending terrorists,” going on to explain: “If I had gone around in the mid-80s interviewing the 16 or 17 former members of the IRA that I had tracked down and said I can’t guarantee not to pass your name to the police, nobody would have talked to me.” He said he had co-operated with the police and thought the relatives had been misled into believing he had information that would have led to convictions, whereas he had been careful his notes did


for Socialism and Arguments for Democracy by the late MP Tony Benn and was editor of the Tribune in the early eighties. His novel A Very British Coup, which imagined a leſt-wing Prime Minister whose downfall was ploted by an establishment cabal, was published in 1982 and made into a film. He was elected MP for Sunderland South in 1987 until 2010 when he did not seek re-election. Viewed as a leſtist, headlines about him included ‘Twenty things you didn’t know about crackpot Chris’. “I did not know most of them either,” he said at the time. He took up a number of junior minister jobs in Tony Blair’s government and his entertaining diaries of his time in Parliament examine politics and power with humour and insight, revealing that he felt most influential and productive during his stints as chair of the Home Affairs Select Commitee. Of his Old Bailey victory, he told Tim


Dawson: “Happily there are still enquiring journalists around and I think they are a bit safer because of this judgment.” Watch the video: https://www.nuj.org. uk/resource/chris-mullin-interview- with-nuj-journalists-protect-sources. html


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