Newport West MP Paul Flynn’s new book, The Unusual Suspect, has just been published. Here NIGEL JARRETT thumbs through a ‘candid self-examination and a sometimes withering assessment of others’.

PAUL Flynn, the battling and bruising MP for Newport West, has taken as many verbal clouts as he’s doled out along the often treacherous corridors of power.

In his new and autobiographical book, The Unusual Suspect, he bemoans today’s lack of uncompromising backbenchers like Leo Abse and Sidney Silverman, who were relentless in pursuing the enemies of reform.

The justifiable inference, of course, is that he’s one of them.

Abse, for many years the flamboyant Labour MP for Pontypool, knew very well why he would never become a government minister.

"Too ­ er ­ full of myself, dear boy," he once told me, while we were in a dingy corridor waiting for the result of some election or other. He never had much to worry about in that immoveable Labour bastion.

But while Abse was routinely pictured on Budget day dressed like a minor character from Alice in Wonderland, he never commanded the unorthodox and often outrageous Flynn’s ability to catch the ear of political correspondents regularly, even in pre-cyberspace days.

Flynn, sometime bus conductor and blue-collar steelworker and ever a ‘new techie’, was blogging when many others were fiddling with the new typewriter ribbon.

He’s just been sniping online at the government's Afghanistan policy ­ again.

But Paul Flynn full of himself? Only in the non-pejorative sense that applied to Abse, who was too busy reacting to events and issues beyond earshot of the party Whips and outside the Commons for ministerial advancement to concern him.

In any case, preferment in politics is never that simple.

The arthritis which led to Flynn’s early retirement from the laboratories at Llanwern steelworks compounded the fatigue of briefly being a front bench spokesman under Neil Kinnock ­ he’d ‘sacked himself’ during an earlier stint ­ which in turn led to his move to the back benches.

He has been on them ever since, regularly ‘kicking against the pricks’, as a Tory commentator once sniggeringly described his thorn-in-the-side persona.

His wife, Sam, says he would have been prime minister if he’d followed her advice, which he nevertheless has on many occasions.

She must have been thinking of his intellectual clout rather than his nose for miring controversy and hot water.

Flynn is unusual ­ and ‘suspect’ suggests someone mischievously getting up the Labour party’s nose.

He’s done that often and strained his allegiances in the process. However, as a speaker and writer with a choice turn of phrase, he rarely stoops to the idiomatic.

His rage and determination were inspired by the plight of his father, a machine-gunner in the Great War who was shot in the leg and later deprived of his pension by a heartless government.

The picture of a man vainly trying to sell full sets of encyclopaedias in the 1930s to support his family is pitiably graphic.

Cardiff-born Flynn’s ‘infatuation’ with Newport as resident and family man, steelworks employee, borough councillor and then MP is coincidentally linked with the city’s Chartist past. But his own early rebelliousness included pre-Thatcher approval of council house sales and the loosening of bonds between Labour and the trade unions.

He was thrown off the Labour group at Newport for opposing the demolition of some council houses as ‘unnecessary’, characteristically supporting his view with an analysis of how society on estates can spiral into decline. His ‘exotic’ ideas had long had the group squirming.

The book confronts the personal and painful, including the breakdown of his first marriage and the suicide of Rachel, his and his first wife Ann’s beloved teenage daughter.

And it reminds us that though innumerable spats and disappointments have been inside the party, he remains the scourge of those outside politics who think they can get away with stupid and deceitful antics.

All the well-documented Flynn crusades are here (against mortgage mis-selling and 4 x 4 bull-bars just two of them), as well as the reforms for which he was a catalyst and promoter.

There is also vitriolic assessment of colleagues ­ former Commons Speaker George Thomas and the ‘arrogant, shallow and malicious’ geriatrics of the old county council, to name just thirty.

Those whose opinions differ will still find some conclusions preposterous, not least the idea that to have opposed devolution for Wales in 1979 was to have contributed to some kind of national ‘disgrace’. You wrong, me possibly arrogant ­ as it were.

Flynn, who has always written for the public prints, coined the nickname ‘Doris Karloff’ for Ann Widdecombe and had it taken up by the tabloids as well as the lady herself.

Perhaps he’s seen a job on the Daily Mirror go begging. He can certainly write. And give generous praise where it’s due.

This is a candid self-examination as much as a sometimes withering assessment of others. Expect more in similar vein from your ever-ready, ‘off-the-planet’ representative.

The Unusual Suspect, by Paul Flynn MP. Biteback Publishing Ltd., £19.99.

Blair, Scargill, marriage and the future

Flynn on Tony Blair, right: ‘My unhappiness with the Blair project deepened. Was he a cuckoo in Labour’s nest?’

Flynn on Arthur Scargill, left: ‘He lived in a dream world that had no discernible link with real politics.’

Flynn between marriages: ‘There were lots of girlfriends and late nights, and far too much beer and wine.’

Flynn on Labour’s geriatrics: ‘The story of one chairman of the library committee who spent his lunch hours reading children’s comics was unfortunately not apocryphal.’

Flynn on the future: ‘As a late developer, I sense the best is yet to be.’