Remembering Tony Benn

Illustration by Victoria Sin

So Big Benn has struck for the last time, as Alan Partridge might have it. In spite of the figure he struck, Tony Benn’s political gains were relatively modest: a failed bid for the Party deputy leadership and being the minister in charge of Concorde are far less than the size of the footprint he left in public consciousness. He was the tweedy, lugubrious pipe-smoker who ended up being reclaimed and rediscovered by each succeeding generation – from the Militants to Stop The War, he reflected and eloquently channelled people’s giddy optimism about a better world. Thousands of pages of diaries can give you the minute details, the BBC can give you the auto-summarise highlights, but this is neither. This is more a kind of miscellany: a cross-section of the oddities and obsessions that drove Labour’s longest-serving MP and the left’s longest-railing Jeremiah.

HE WAS A WALKING ADVERT FOR THE PRESERVATIVE POWER OF SMOKING
While every politician or baby boomer kicked their habit somewhere around 1991 – even Fidel Castro doesn’t smoke any more – Benn never got round to it. He puffed his pipe for 73 of the 74 years that elapsed since he was 16. “I thought I had kicked the habit but it was indispensable,” he told his local paper. “I wanted to give up for a year. And when the year came I just started again.” He was Pipe Smoker Of The Year in 1992. Rod Hull won in 1993. He also brewed tea by the pint, and, as he never ever drank, he remained spiritually wedded to his twin vices throughout his life.

THE DIARIES HE BEGAN AT AGE 11 ALREADY RAN TO 12 MILLION WORDS BY 1998
Benn often suggested that the diaries were an attempt on his part to stop, hold-up or otherwise preserve lost time. For an hour a day, he would dictate into his recording machine and a secretary would tap up the results. In the 90s he bought a handicam, to record himself doing his thing: on the Today programme, at a public meeting, always meticulously transferring the tapes in the evenings. The basic solipsism of imagining his every utterance was worth recording makes him a peculiarly ahead of his time creature – he didn’t even need an iPhone and a Tumblr to feel like he was the cultural constant at the heart of the known universe. Now, many of these recordings are going to be part of a film about his life and works – Will And Testament – that he was involved in making, due to be released late spring.

HE SAT AT THE CENTRE OF A DYNASTIC CLUB SANDWICH
His grandfather was the leader of the radical Progressive Party. His father was a well-liked Labour MP who was kicked upstairs to the House of Lords. His son was in Brown’s Cabinet. This year, his granddaughter has been selected to fight a local council seat. Yes, they’re The Von Trapp Family Legislators.

HE NEVER BELIEVED IN WINDSORS BUT WAS ALWAYS LESS THAN ENTIRELY UNCONVINCED BY GOD
If it’s there in your upbringing, somehow all the cold light of reason in the world can’t shake many people away from a niggling respect for the big guy upstairs with the clouds and the harps. Benn’s mother, a descendant of the Wedgwood pottery dynasty, was also nothing less than a widely respected biblical scholar, who spoke Greek and Hebrew: “The story of the Bible was conflict between the kings who had power, and the prophets who preached righteousness. And I was taught to believe in the prophets.”

“We used to read the Bible every night,” he later said. “My mother taught me that every political issue is really a moral question. It shouldn’t be about whether or not it is profitable, it should really be about right or wrong”.

HE DIDN’T ACTUALLY READ MARX FOR A MYSTIFYINGLY LONG TIME
“I think he had a genuinely Damascene conversion,” Dennis Healey proposed. “He read Marx for the first time in his fifties and thought he was absolutely marvellous and told us so… but was also totally unequipped to understand the way the world was changing.”

Benn clarified this Marx gap in 2003:

“Well I came across Marx rather late in life actually, and when I read him, two things: first of all I realised that he’d come to the conclusion about capitalism which I’d come to much later, and I was a bit angry he’d thought of it first; and secondly, I see Marx who was an old Jew, as the last of the Old Testament Prophets, this old bearded man working in the British Library, studying capitalism, that’s what Das Kapital was about, it was an explanation of British capitalism. And I thought to myself, ‘Well anyone could write a book like that, but what infuses, what comes out of his writing, is the passionate hostility to the injustice of capitalism. He was a Prophet, and so I put him in that category as an Old Testament Prophet.”

HE PROPOSED TO HIS WIFE NINE DAYS AFTER MEETING HER
The premise would be too oddball to underpin a Sandra Bullock romcom about a Green Card wedding, yet the relationship between well-born US academic Caroline Middleton DeCamp and Tony Wedgwood Benn is one of politics’ greatest love stories. She was his constant companion, adviser, and nurturer, until her death from cancer in 2000, and many see her as the inspiration behind his drift from the right to left of the Labour Party: a sort of Cherie Blair of her day. Except dragging her man across the spectrum of the Labour Party, rather than just from Tory to Labour.

In the late 90s, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As Caroline’s condition deteriorated, Benn put everything on hold to nurse her through her final days. On November 23rd 2000, his diary records, he drove her to the hospital one last time:

The sister came in and said: “She’s very strong. She’s hanging on. Sometimes, you know, it helps if you say, ‘You can let go now if you like.’” So at about a quarter to ten, I leaned over and I said: “Darling, we’re all here. You can let go now, if you want to. If you want to go, you can let go.” 

I gave her a kiss on her brow, and it was very, very cold, and at six minutes past ten she gave her last breath. A second later there was an exhalation, and I wondered somehow if it was coming back; but it was what we had hoped, that she should be released.

He bought the bench on which he’d proposed to her off of a church in Oxford and installed it in their garden. After she died, he installed it next to her grave, where he now intends to be buried alongside her. While she was dying he also commissioned a bust of her head to sit atop her grave.

Benn’s life never quite recovered. Reviewers often noted how much his later volumes pull up the words “depressed” or “depressing”.  The first anniversary of her death suggests just how raw that sudden shot of loss remained:

I went shopping and came home and had a cry. I just sobbed on the couch for a bit, and then I decided to work in the office all afternoon. Josh [Benn’s youngest son] arrived first for the evening family gathering. Then at six minutes past ten, which is the exact moment she died, we all went into the front room, where I’d lit a candle, and we stood in front of the picture of her, and we hugged each other and took photographs.

Even scrapping an ancient Ford Fiesta brought only heartache:

I thought, why do I care about an old car? It’s only a bit of metal; and then I realised that in that car I’d driven Caroline to the hospital, we’d driven to Stansgate, we’d done so much together, and that I was losing a link with a vehicle that she knew as well as I did, and I’d never see it again.

NEIL KINNOCK WILL MOURN TODAY BUT FRANKLY PROBABLY MOVE ON PRETTY QUICKLY TOO
Harold Wilson famously cut Benn down by noting that “he immatures with age”. This proved more and more true. It was the second half of his career that saw the once-stable careerist serving his time at the mandarin heart of technocratic 60s government, become what the tabloids dubbed “the most dangerous man in Britain”.

Throughout The Wilderness Years, the Beeb’s big documentary on Labour’s disintegration in the 80s, it is obvious that Benn has reserved a special place in hell for himself in the hearts of the party’s leadership. Healey, Kinnock, Jenkins, Hattersley, all line up to do him down, and no wonder: he made their lives hell, and very nearly split the party in two. In what was to be his own popularity high-watermark, Benn stood against former Chancellor Dennis Healey in the 1981 deputy-leadership election on probably the hardest-left platform in modern times. It involved immediate withdrawal from the EU. And NATO. Abolition of the House Of Lords. Unilateral nuclear disarmament. Import controls. Huge government market-support. Industrial planning agreements. In the detail, it was a dense quilt of special interest leftist pressure groups’ demands, partly because Benn had adopted a slightly facile slogan of “no enemies on the left”, and hence had boosted his popularity by becoming a floating home for every pressure group from the militant Trots to radical fems.

To the shock of the centrists, he came within 1 percent of winning.

HE CREATED NEW LABOUR
When you get down to it, most history-changing moments are more the swinging of a sociological pendulum than any particular event. Demographically, Tony Blair was simply the projection of a million baby boomers’ anxieties about choice. But a select few moments still turn on character. Had Benn won in 1981, it’s clear history would have been very different. For a start, his defeat made him ineligible to run for the leadership in 1983. The Militant tendency – a far-left group –were rampant throughout the party. Richard Heller, then chief of staff to Healey, is unequivocal about the disaster that would have lain in store with the hard left in charge:

If he had won, the Labour Party would have imploded. The SDP-Liberal Alliance would have become the main opposition party. It would not have won the 1983 election but would have had a fighting chance in 1987 and almost certainly would have won the election after that. Ironically, that non-Labour government would have been considerably to the Left of the Labour one with a landslide majority in 1997. New Labour would have been unnecessary and uninvented, its creators undiscovered and now unremembered.

Heller reckoned the Healey campaign, which had started with a 25 percent lead, had been losing a steady 1 percent a week every week. Meaning that, in just seven more days, The Labour Party would have been done for.

KINNOCK EVENTUALLY HAD REVENGE
In 1988, he challenged Kinnock for the leadership. Neil kicked the pants off of him, driving him back to 11 percent of the vote. It was the end of the era of Benn as a threat, and the point of departure that allowed him to gradually remodel himself into the avuncular crystal-vowelled national treasure-type that is all that most under-40s know.

REPORTS OF HIS DEATH REALLY WERE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
In 2002, Benn revealed to the world that he had been given three years to live. In1990. Diagnosed with chronic lymphatic leukaemia, it was meant to be all over for him before Kinnock had failed to be elected. Ultimately, though, he decided not to die, and simply kept on living. He still retained the disease, but it entered spontaneous remission, and he found he could get by with nothing more than medication and regular check-ups.

AMONG THE MANY HONORARY DEGREES HE HELD THERE WAS ALSO A RADIO 2 BEST LIVE FOLK ACT AWARD FROM 2003
In his eighties, he toured the country with Roy Bailey, a singer of traditional ditties about Chartists and The Peasants’ Revolt. In-between songs, Benn would pull out anecdotes, reminiscences, history lessons and rambles about left-wing and progressive thought. Basically, he was a bit like that bit where Maxim shouts, “Where’s all my voodoo people? Can’t hear my voodoo people,” between “Diesel Power”and “Voodoo People”.

HE DID NOT CROW
While Britain’s many proud old-lady death-party committees were trying to get “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” to pip Duke Dumont in the top 20, Benn’s own writings about Mrs Thatcher remained dignified. In an article for the Guardian, he noted that though they had nothing in common politically, he still admired her as a fellow spin-free zone, a creature of principle rather than PR. At the funeral of Labour MP Eric Heffer, he recounted, tears had welled in her eyes when he’d thanked her for coming. “She had come out of respect for someone whose opinions she disagreed with” – and that was his idea of a worthy adversary. “Politics is about ideas,” he liked to say. “If I have a public meeting about why I don’t like John Major, no one will come. But if I have one about unemployment, everyone will be there.”

HE DID, HOWEVER, FIND TIME FOR A FEW BARBS
Okay, OK. He certainly wasn’t above rushing to judge those who’d annoyed him in his diaries. They included:

Robin Cook: “An angry little man, so pompous.”

Gordon Brown: “Unfit to run a corner shop.”

Tony Blair: “Has behaved like a medieval monarch.”

Claire Short: “I’m afraid I have no time for her whatsoever.”

Jesse Jackson: “I don’t really like Jesse Jackson… I don’t know why.”

Gore Vidal: “I think he’s gay.”

Richard Dawkins: “Offensive.”

David Cameron: “I don’t care very much for him. It is nothing personal.”

Mikhail Gorbachev: “Quite attractive.”

Paul Boateng: “Nasty.”

Saddam Hussein: “Uncomfortably friendly.”

Tony Benn: “When I look back on my life, I’ve been so obsessed with myself all the time – Benn, Benn, Benn, Tony Benn – and actually I’m just not interesting.”

HE ATE TWO CHEESE PIZZAS A DAY FOR OVER A DECADE
On September 9 2001, his diary records that he was very miffed when his three-cheese brand was discontinued by the local supermarket.

WHILE HE NEVER MADE IT TO THE TOP HIMSELF, HE DID PERSONALLY CREATE AT LEAST ONE PRIME MINISTER
That’d be Sir Alec Douglas-Hume: the one-year wonder who took over from Harold MacMillan. Not unlike Benn, Douglas-Hume was an Etonian grouse-moors squire from a family slightly posher than the Royals. Like Benn, his political ambitions had met with a problem, in the form of a peerage. But by 1963, Harold MacMillan was able to use Benn’s newly established law that he’d campaigned long and hard for: on being allowed to renounce a peerage. Via that, MacMillan managed to establish Douglas-Hume as a candidate for the top job, simply in order to thwart his enemy, the more gifted but less Etonian Rab Butler. Score one for class mobility.

HE CAME FROM ERMINE BUT HE LOVED THE COAL MINE
Benn’s enthusiasm about the working classes went far beyond a theoretical interest in fairness. It had shades of an earlier generation of patricians. Joe Ashton: “He had this wonderful image of the working class – something like the noble savage, I’d say. I used to have to bring him back down to earth sometimes. He enjoyed their company. He was never happier than in a miners’ institute. He liked the working class, and they looked up to him, respected him. He really was a bit like the governor-general of Yorkshire.”

IN 2013, WHEN SHAVING BECAME TOO DIFFICULT FOR HIM, BENN WAS NOMINATED FOR BEARD OF THE YEAR
But he lost out to soldiers’ wife conductor Gareth Malone. Much like in ’81.

HE ELECTED ED MILIBAND IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS
Ed was an intern for Benn when he was still a teenager, and Tony later helped Ed on his way once more by voting for Mili The Younger in the Labour leadership election. Ironically, it was the early-80s Bennites who’d created the formula – with its trade union block votes – that allowed Ed to pip his brother. Their respective families were close, but Ed, Tony later recorded, still maintained a studied coolness that served to blank out the older man: “There was a sort of glass panel between us”.

IN A SENSE HE WAS BASICALLY JUST A GIANT FREUDIAN BABY CRAPPING ITSELF FOR ATTENTION  
In his post-millennial diaries, in the middle of a disagreement, his daughter Melissa cuts through all the projection, screening, cognitive dissonance and transactional shape-throwing to drill down to the very heart of Tony Benn:  “Your nanny, Nurse Parker, spoiled you and you’ve been looking for attention ever since, all the time, and you only get it when you make speeches.”

“Well, from the mouths of babes…” Benn notes, with a certain wryness.

YET NO ONE COULD EVER ACCUSE HIM OF CYNICISM
Even old foe Roy Hattersley reckoned that Benn had been nothing but stunningly honest in his intent.

“I think many of Tony Benn’s ideas are crazy. But I do not think he’s a careerist. If Tony Benn had wanted to be leader of the Labour Party, he could have been. He sacrificed the goal of becoming leader of the Labour Party by pursuing these ideas. He pursued them unscrupulously, but he didn’t pursue them with the intent of achieving high office.”

Biographer Jad Adams observes that Benn’s life, “resembles more a quest for martyrdom than a struggle for power”. This was a man who managed to be in policy discord with most of the British public nearly all the time, yet still regularly topped polls of the nation’s political heroes (an honour he often shared with that other renegade “man of principle”, Enoch Powell).

SADLY, THIS IS NOT ON THE BBC’S OBIT REEL.

@gavhaynes