Fear and Mourning at Tony Benn's Funeral

These days, your average SPAD has given up on the idea of actually changing anything long before they've even started greasing up party organisers to get themselves parachuted into a safe seat. For Tony Benn, the opposite was true. It was his experience as a bona fide minister that radicalised him. The promise of power didn't make him sell out. Power itself compelled him to sell in.

Seeing the machinations of the political establishment first hand, Benn was convinced that Britain needed a serious democratic shake up. He came within 1 percent of leading the Labour Party. If that 1 percent had gone the other way, and he had subsequently won an election, we’d probably be living in a Britain that had no nukes, loads of council housing and would not be in NATO, nor the EU. There would be no House of Lords. There wouldn't be any bankers on massive bonuses. You would almost certainly have a job and it likely wouldn't be one paying poverty wages for long hours. Who knows, perhaps that solitary percentage point was the most important percentage point in this country's post-war political history.

There are, though, plenty of unknowns and what ifs waiting for us in these daydreams. Maybe with Benn at its helm Britain would have turned into a grey Eastern Bloc nightmare. We'll never know. Either way, Benn was the figurehead of a movement that came pretty damn close to changing the UK perhaps more profoundly than even Margaret Thatcher did.

Yesterday was his funeral, so I went along to check it out.

A crowd had gathered outside St Margaret’s Church, in the shadow of the House of Commons, waiting to give him a final farewell. Benn’s political life was reflected in the people who'd gathered there. There were trade union banners, Labour Party branch members and keffiyeh-wearing Palestinian flag holders. There were pensioners, people waving Irish tricolours, others with CND placards and rainbow scarves and more wearing red bows in their hair and anti-Thatcher pins on their jackets. There were a very many hammer and sickles. As a man with a Yorkshire accent in a National Union of Mineworkers’ tie said to me, “He brought all these people together. If I were you I would get a picture of the sex workers’ banner. That says it all. Others wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole but he helped them.”

A couple of American tourists were trying to have a look at the church and couldn’t get in, because obviously they weren’t on the guestlist. They shuffled off looking disappointed. “Did you get a picture of the protest, honey?” said one to the other as they went. I can imagine Benn being pretty pleased that even in death he'd managed to convene what looked like a final rally against a fairly large cross-section of bad things in the world.

Mourners entering the Church

After a short wait, the hearse pulled up. A round of applause broke out, which gave way to a respectful silence as the coffin – covered in red roses – was pulled out and heaved onto the pallbearers’ shoulders. Men took off their hats. A guy standing next to me started tearing up and sniffling into some tissues. As the pallbearers began their walk towards the Church, people started cheering and clapping again, and trying to crane their necks to see past the flags and banners that were blocking their view. It was kind of like Glastonbury, where he regularly spoke to large crowds, except instead of a pirate flag blocking your view of a band that peaked in the 80s, it was a Durham miners' banner obscuring a passing coffin containing a politician whose career had a similar trajectory.

Into the church he went and the service started – relayed to those gathered outside by a speaker system. It was a traditional affair. "Jerusalem" was played, then a reading from Corinthians. Everyone was quiet and a lot of people looked at the ground in solemn contemplation.

Durham Miners Association. Tony Benn is on their banner. They remembered him fondly from the miners' strike.

Then members of his family gave a eulogy (outside, you couldn't tell which member of his family was talking when). It noted how his public school childhood – which he “loathed” – had “led him to hate the class system”. Then how his disgust at racism in the RAF in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) had turned him into a committed anti-racist and anti-colonialist. From then on, he was a radical for life. In 1945, he began his political career driving the Labour candidate for Westminster around in a car with a loud hailer. “One day they were in a crowded Covent Garden, when they struck the vehicle in front," one of his children told us. "Panic. Dad seized the microphone and shouted, ‘Sir! You have just been hit by the Labour candidate,’ and a cheer went up. It was, I think, a portent of the landslide to come.”

Fun details like that made it obvious that he was a good, charismatic guy. This might be the bleakest thing I've ever written but if you're young, imagine George Galloway, but not an arsehole. Everyone I spoke to who had met him had some kind of anecdote that showed him to be way more human than pretty much all of the politicians I can think of.

The best one I heard came from Max Shanly, who knew him later in life.

“We had just had a cup of tea with Len McCluskey [Unite trade union general secretary]." Max told me. "We were in the cab back and he’s rummaging around in his pockets and pulls out his pipe. I said, ‘Tony, I don’t think you can smoke in here.’ He said, ‘Well, they never seem to notice.’ Well, he lit his pipe, I didn’t know what to do so I opened the window but there was an awfully cold breeze and I thought I can’t let that continue because he’ll get pneumonia, so I closed it. When we got back to his, I took him inside, and went to get back in the cab. The taxi driver said, ‘Was that Tony Benn?’ I said, ‘It was, mate’. He said, ‘Thought so. That’s why I let him smoke in my cab.’”

If you heard that about a musician, you’d think it was fucking cool.

The crowd of mourners

After the service, the coffin came back out with the pallbearers looking even sadder than they had on the way in, to another round of applause. Slowly it was driven away as people chased, giving a final clenched-fist salute. Mourners came out of the church and Labour politicians who will mostly ignore his legacy talked to journalists about how great he was.

As I hung around outside the church, one of the attendees who knew Benn from campaigning, started chatting to me. He didn’t want to be identified, but he said to me, “Your generation is the best. There’s nothing wrong with this country. Just don’t be like Hilary’s generation,” referring to Tony’s son and former Minister under the New Labour government that Tony so opposed.

Looking at today’s brand of career politician, it would be easy to despair at our prospects. What great personalities are there to fill Tony’s boots? Could Ed Miliband, Danny Alexander or Michael Gove pull off smoking in a taxi? They'd more likely all get slapped.

More importantly, their policies suck. It’s so easy to become cynical but Tony himself probably wouldn’t want us to get too bummed out. As he said at Glastonbury in 2008, “It’s our energy we have to use. Don’t just rely on some leader to gallop on the stage on a white horse and say, 'Vote for me and I’ll solve your problems.’ It’s never happened like that… all progress comes from underneath. From the people who do something… the responsibility is on us to do what has to be done. And by God, if you do it, there is no power on earth that can stop us.”

Tony Benn’s death sees a lefty icon shuffle into the history books, his mission incomplete. But anyone at that Glasto speech who wasn’t just lost on the way to see Ladyhawke and was sober enough to listen, will know that he’d want them to carry on railing against injustice.

@SimonChilds13