FOR Mick Whelan, it was just a fancy-dress party. But in the run-up to the first strikes in the bitter dispute over Boris Johnson’s feted Night Tube, it became a gross insult to the travelling public.

“In a fedora and with a replica pistol concealed in his waistband at a Mafia-themed party, this is the £120,000-a-year union boss behind the crippling rail strikes threatened this week,” screamed the Daily Mail.

Whelan, whose union Aslef represents 96 per cent of British train drivers, says that at the time he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Now if that’s the worst thing they can find out about me, then I’m quite pleased,” he chuckles. “I think I’ve done far worse than that.”

I meet Whelan in his airy central London office shortly before London Mayor Johnson indicates all-night Tube running will be delayed from its September 12 start date — which, the unions say, allows them the “breathing space” to reach a settlement.

Aslef faced some criticism for its decision to not join the third and fourth days of strike action with fellow tube unions RMT, TSSA and Unite — but all unions ended up calling off their action as bosses indicated they were ready to move.

Nonetheless, says Whelan, the causes of the different unions are not one and the same.
“The reality is that also we represent different grade groups with different responsibilities. Drivers already work through the night — maintenance, cleaning, moving trains, whatever.”
The other unions, he says, have had to stomach the hypocrisy of Johnson — pushing through slash-and-burn closures of Tube booking offices with one hand and pushing station staff onto nights with the other.
And Whelan is in fact proud to have taken joint action in the sector — and he expresses gratitude for the support he received from comrades in the RMT on his election in 2011.
“Bob Crow was a great friend and a mentor in some ways,” he reminisces.
“When I became general secretary Bob was one of the first people who put an arm around me and warned me about the impact of the press and people tapping up my kids.”

It was advice he would need this summer. After Crow’s death, politicians and press magnates needed another “union baron” on whom to pin the blame for the “misery” of London’s commuters.

“The day of the first Tube strike I was on the picket line at East Finchley at half-four in the morning, and went to Preston that evening. And they sent someone to my home so they could print a story: ‘Trade union leader at home while London suffers’.”

Whelan started as a train driver in the mid-1980s after initially working as a bank clerk. He rose through the lay structures of Aslef before becoming an organiser for the Midlands and then being elected to the top job.

He now lives in north-west London with wife Lorraine and dog Zola — named after the football manager and former Chelsea player Gianfranco, but he admits a liking for French novelist Emile too.

When he first entered the driver’s cab, even arch-privatiser Margaret Thatcher saw selling off the railways as a step too far.

Whelan is convinced the franchising model, where track and train are separated and private companies bid against state-owned European railways for each route, has damaged any hope of developing an “integrated transport network.”
And Britain’s is now a railway of “perverse incentives,” he says.
“On a sunny day no-one goes and sees granny anymore, no-one goes to the seaside and generates those local economies unless they jump in their car. Unless you know that you’re doing something months in advance, who uses it anymore?”
Labour entered this year’s election having fudged a compromise on public ownership with the rail unions.

Under Ed Miliband’s plan — and in fact an earlier blueprint touted by Gordon Brown in 2010 — the state would be permitted to bid against privateers for the franchises.

The RMT, which is not affiliated to Labour, called this a “cop-out,” while transport bosses indicated they could sue a future government that wrested away control.

Whelan is more ambivalent about what this would have meant, though he makes no bones about favouring the real deal himself.
“I believe that the party were terrified of the N-word,” he says. “But I do believe they were going to do a massive review of railways.”

The terms Labour set out for a review of the “failed” franchising model “in the interests of passengers” could only have led to chucking out the privateers, he believes.

Aslef proudly backed Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership.

Whelan stood beside the new Labour leader when, as a leadership contender, he launched his plan to take franchises back into public ownership as they expire and channel investment back into public transport.

“He would need more detail in there, [the plan is] a principled document, not a detailed document, but it’s the right [way forward],” he adds.

Ironically, organisationally Aslef has grown in strength under privatisation, and there is no merger on the cards in defiance of the current trends of the labour movement.

The structures are sound “financially and politically,” Whelan says.

The union’s membership grows steadily each year — and true to its full name — the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen — even includes coal shovellers on steam trains.

Alas, even here there’s no escaping the pitfalls of the modern world of work.

“You do get a lot of casualisation, and a lot of that happens in heritage traction. Now I’m a great fan of the history of the railways for tourism and other reasons, but I’m not a fan of the zero-hours culture where you bring someone back at 85 years of age, who has some knowledge, to drive once a week.”

Aside from the ongoing Tube dispute, defeating the Tories’ attempts to stifle trade unionism yet further is high on Whelan’s list of priorities.

In July Tory rent-a-quote MP Peter Bone called for his resignation when he said the plans to impose strike thresholds and place huge restrictions on picketing “smack of Germany in the 1930s.”

Whelan stands by the comments. “Now I didn’t say the Tory Party were going to kill six million people, invade Poland or whatever else. I just said, look at the lessons of history, when you do these things they can be a precursor to other things,” he clarifies.

“It’s about the demonising of civil society, it’s about whether you’re a charity, a trade union or an NGO, that you shouldn’t have a right to criticise current government policy.”

And the railways could be a key site of resistance. “There’s a long history in the railway, and particularly the Tube, in [the wave of transport strikes in] 1989, of people wildcatting. And if we have to comply with Maggie’s laws, we’ll have to comply with them. But, of course, if we have to repudiate, we’ll defend people doing it and their moral right to do it. We’ll just say it’s nothing to do with us.

“But who will you come to to resolve it? Who will you get around the table? I don’t think they look far enough, it is just this blinkered view that they’re a ruling elite and they’ve got a right to do what they want to do, when they want to do it.”

That’s a warning David Cameron may live to regret not heeding.

n Mick Whelan is general secretary of Aslef.