A View from the Foothills

I recently finished Chris Mullin's A View from the Foothills, which is the predecessor to Decline and Fall that he is currently publicising.

What is most striking is the sense of utter impotence he feels as a junior government minister, epitomised by getting a document passed on to him to which a Civil Servant has appended "This seems a very priority. I suggest we pass it to Chris Mullin."

The only time this changes is when he becomes minister for Africa in the Foreign Office, which allows him to travel around meeting Prime Ministers and the like. It perhaps helps explain why many of our politicians get sucked into foreign policy, where they get a much greater sense of their own importance. One way of looking at our history over the past century is as a declining power desparately trying to behave like a Great Power, but only able to do so on a smaller and smaller scale.