Arise, Sir Christopher

Sir Andrew Mitchell writes:

Arise Sir Christopher! One of the more unexpected but nonetheless well-deserved knighthoods in the King’s birthday honours was that conferred on former Labour MP, journalist and author Chris Mullin. Well before he was elected to parliament, he made his mark with A Very British Coup, the first of his four novels, which was made into a successful television series. He later published four widely acclaimed volumes of diaries.

In parliament he had a reputation as a principled politician who might have risen higher up the ministerial ladder had he not voted against his government on Iraq. But all this is surely eclipsed by his almost single-handed struggle to rescue the six innocent men convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British history.

The Birmingham Six had been convicted during the wave of public outrage at the bombings, which killed 21 people and injured more than 200. Once the machinery of the state pronounced them guilty, every pillar of authority closed ranks.

Police officers lied with practised confidence. Dubious forensic science was accepted as conclusive. A succession of senior judges displayed a chilling willingness to overlook contaminated evidence and upheld the convictions.

Mullin endured a long campaign of vilification. The entire apparatus of the state behaved less like a justice system than like a medieval priesthood defending its infallibility. Mullin not only helped to demolish the case against the six. He tracked down and confronted those actually responsible for the bombings. 

His book Error of Judgement remains one of the greatest examples of investigative journalism. As Robert Harris, political editor of The Sunday Times, wrote at the time: “Whoever planted the bombs in Birmingham also planted a bomb under the British legal establishment.” The consequences were far-reaching.

Within hours of the collapse of the convictions, in March 1991, the home secretary set up a royal commission to examine all aspects of the criminal justice system. Among its many recommendations was the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which has resulted in more than 600 successful appeals.

In an age when the British legal establishment appeared immovable and unchallengeable, Mullin forced the country to confront a terrible wrong. Arise, Sir Christopher.