Once vilified, Chris Mullin finds himself in a walled garden and a good place

One, he said, was represented by “a boil on the a**e of the Labour Party” – by which he meant Bob Clay, MP for Sunderland North – and the other, Sunderland South, had just chosen as its candidate a certifiable lunatic.

Chris Mullin, championed by Clay and the lunatic in question, recalls similar deprecations with wry amusement.

The Daily Mail supposed that if relegation for the city’s football team weren’t sufficiently disastrous, Sunderland had then gained Chris Mullin. The Sun, no less surprisingly, ranked him No 8 in “Kinnock’s Ten Loony Tunes” and offered “Twenty things you never knew about Crackpot Chris”.

“I didn’t know most of them myself,” he says.

AUTHOR: Former MP Chris Mullin

Promotion followed, if not for the footballers. “Is this the most odious man in Britain?” asked the Sun, sheltering behind the flimsily traditional defence of a caffy-hearted question mark.

They concluded that he was. “I’d briefly overtaken Ken Livingstone,” recalls the supposed Crackpot Chris. “It was the highest honour the Sun could bestow.”

WE meet at Richmond School – “the Socialist Republic of Richmond” says one of his subsequent audience, with hobnailed sarcasm – where he’s giving the final talk in the town’s Walking and Books Festival.

Talking the talk not walking the walk, perhaps – the literary festival is the new political meeting, he supposes – though at 68 he remains an enthusiastic long distance walker, too.

He’s a journalist and author, edited the left wing newspaper Tribune, spent several years in the Far East – Ngoc, his wife is Vietnamese, the Dalai Lama among his oldest friends – represented Sunderland South from 1987-2010 but may best be remembered for his over-the-parapet campaign to free the Birmingham Six.

“Loony MP backs bomb gang,” splashed the Sun, a front page still framed in his study in north Northumberland.

Their eventual exoneration – “I went down some very dark alleys” says Mullin – led both to a Royal Commission and to what his latest book calls “the path to respectability".

He’s a bright lad, five honorary degrees to add to the one academically earned, knows the meaning of vindication.

He’s happy to talk before the Sunday evening event, asks what I’m up to, is advised that in semi-retirement just two columns remain, one sport and the other waffle.

“I expect I’m waffle,” says Mullin, correctly. The most odious man in Britain proves personable in the extreme.

NEIL KINNOCK wasn’t alone in his unhappiness. Local party members – “the oligarchy,” he calls them – were similarly dismayed. “I wasn’t expecting to be carried shoulder high into the Commons tea room and I wasn’t disappointed,” he says. “A southerner to boot.”

He became chairman of the Home Affairs select committee and a junior minister in three departments, low office which became the source of three acclaimed volumes of political diaries – the first called A View from the Foothills.

“Destined to be handed out as leaving present in offices across Whitehall for years to come,” said David Cameron (who probably now has about 36 copies himself.)

He tells his Richmond audience of the occasion, minion minister in John Prescott’s many-tentacled Department of the Environment-and-Just-About-Everything-Else-Besides, when an invitation, constantly cascaded, finally landed on his desk.

On it a note remained. “This is of very little importance,” it said. “I suggest we give it to Mr Mullin.”

The Mullins now live in the foothills of the Cheviots, west of Alnwick, where he so attentively tends a one-acre walled garden that it recently made six minutes on Gardeners’ World. Ngoc, he says, is a fair-weather gardener.

“I’m not naturally green fingered but I work quite hard at it. Half of it was Christmas trees. I have 11 vegetable plots, so there’s plenty to do.”

He also lectures at Newcastle University – “the rise and fall of New Labour” – is North-East chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund, writes, talks and travels extensively. “At the moment I think I’ve taken on slightly more than I can cope with,” he admits.

“I love the garden. I hope that I’ll be carried out of it one day a long time from now. There’s not a day passes when I don’t count my blessings.”

THE Richmond appearance marks the culmination of the nine-day festival, 40 walks and 19 book-related events.

Promoting his new autobiography, Hinterland, the day previously he’d attracted 400 to a literary festival in Ilkley – not what you’d suppose a Socialist republic, either. At Richmond there are around 150. “More than I got as an MP,” he says.

Though he likes and respects Jeremy Corbyn – “I met him on a train once. He gave me half his sandwiches, vegetarian” – he didn’t vote for him in the Labour leadership elections. In a social media post spoke of the risk of “annihilation.”

“He’s a lovely man, a very decent man,” he says now. “He’s won two leadership elections, the party has to unite behind him, give him time.”

The book, printed just before the second leadership election, supposes Corbyn’s tenure “an interesting experiment, but always one destined to end badly”.

Often repeating Hinterland almost verbatim, he speaks for 45 minutes. “It’s better to go when people are still asking why, not when?” he says.

The book talks of his hope to fade away quietly in Coquetdale, tending vegetables and thinking great thoughts. The path to respectability? “Well, that would be rather nice, wouldn’t it?”

BACK to Richmond four days later, a judge at Camra’s North-West Yorkshire branch beer festival. They call it blind tasting – and if not blind, then seriously myopic, anyway.

Jibes about hard work but someone having to do it may be discarded, however. These guys take it very seriously.

Hitherto the beer of the festival had been decided by popular vote. Now it was down to a panel of 18, some of whom talked of attenuation and sparging and getting green notes and one of whom just supped the stuff.

Most were good, one or two awful. “The aroma is of vomit,” proclaimed the estimable Simon Theakston of one antiseptic ale, a sickly feeling with which it was hard to disagree.

The technical term for such things is WTP, we learned. It stands for waste treatment plant.

Another judge, best nameless, preferred an automotive analogy. “It’s like a Ford Mondeo,” he said. “Perfectly reliable but not what you’d call exciting.”

Doubtless disappointing some of the admirable local brewers, the winner was Urban Fox, a black London porter from the Slightly Foxed brewery in Sowerby Bridge, at Yorkshire’s opposite extreme.

The judging took two hours. After that all that work, we were ready for a drink.