TONY BENN: MYTH AND
REALITY
A guest post by Phil Larkin
Introduction
Few can have missed
the passing on of Anthony Neil Wedgewood-Benn (commonly known from around 1972
by his self-created title “Tony Benn”) last week. Over the last decade and
beyond, ever since he stepped down as an MP in 2001, he had gained the
reputation for himself as the kindly old sage of the British left, puffing his
pipe, drinking large mugs of tea, appearing on stage at Glastonbury and
providing stirring orations at ‘Stop the War’ Campaigns (in whatever corner of
the world war happened to be taking place). He was sort of a sanitised,
grandfatherly George Galloway, with far superior manners and courtesy. My main and
abiding memory of him before his death was the very funny (and revealing) spoof
interview which he did with Ali G: apparently he had jumped at the chance to
explain the idea of socialism to young people when offered the interview (of
which more below). I also recall him shepherding Gerry Adams and Martin
McGuinness around the Palace of Westminster, showing them the office and other
facilities they would be entitled to although they did not sit as MPs. In sum,
he had become a form of eccentric national treasure, welcome on many TV
programmes to expound on his “convictions” and the great issues of the day. In
addition, he was regarded (and he propagated this idea himself in no small
measure) as someone who held steadfastly to his convictions and never wavered
in his views. Yet, as one obituary rightly pointed out, this latter phase of
his life was only the third in a long and complex career spanning over six
decades. This aim of this piece is to cast a hopefully not uncritical eye over
that career and some of the benign myths that have surrounded the man over the
years. I would like him to be remembered for what he was, not for what he was
not.
Genesis
Benn was the scion of
the wealthy Benn publishing house, and both his grandparents were Liberal MPs.
He could also trace his ancestry to the famous Wedgewood family, enlightened employers
of the Victorian era whose pottery was, and is, famous throughout the world. His
father, William Wedgewood-Benn, was originally a Liberal MP who crossed the
Floor of the House of Commons to join the Labour Party in 1928, becoming
Secretary of State for India in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Government of 1929 to
1931. He later was elevated to the peerage during World War II, becoming
Viscount Stansgate in 1942. Born in 1925, Benn remembered meeting with Gandhi,
Ramsay MacDonald, Lloyd George and a whole host of other political greats at a
very young age. His mother Margaret, a theologian, was something of a radical
feminist for the age, advocating the ordination of women years before this was
accepted by the mainstream Anglican Church. It was within this rarefied
atmosphere that Benn was to be brought up. He was educated at the exclusive
Westminster School, where he appears to have been something of an unexceptional
pupil who was, according to one of his schoolmasters, “a little too conscious
of Anthony Wedgewood-Benn.” I would assert that throughout his life he was to
carry traces of the public schoolboy mentality which manifested itself in his
thought and behaviour, despite the efforts he made to disguise them. He later
tried to expunge all reference to his public school education in his Who’s Who entry. A spell as a pilot
officer during World War II and a PPE degree at Oxford (where he became
President of the Union) followed. While at Oxford, he met Caroline Middleton de
Camp, daughter of an American lawyer whose wealth matched that of his own
background. They married in 1949 and were to have a very happy family life
until her death in 2000.
Becoming an MP and Renouncing the Peerage
Although he worked for
a while as a BBC Radio producer after World War II (he was to master this
medium, as well as the later medium of television very expertly), politics was
his main focus, given his family background. In November 1950 the opportunity
to contest the Bristol South East constituency arose unexpectedly, which he
duly won, and remained MP for this seat for the next 10 years. In those early
days his position on the political spectrum was difficult to define: certainly
he was not associated with the Bevanite hard left during this period, and was
regarded as on the centre-right of the Labour Party. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader
of the Labour Party during the later 1950s, is reputed to have viewed Benn as
over-pushy, bumptious, and too eager for office. His heroes and inspirations of
this time appear to have been the prophets of the Bible and the great
Parliamentary figures of the English Civil War. Denis (later Lord) Healey
recalled him at this time as a “harmless but engaging eccentric”, while Roy
Mason in his autobiography recalls being stopped by a very agitated Benn in
Westminster Palace one day, and being asked when his birthday was. When Mason
told Benn that he was a few months older than him, Benn walked away relieved
and elated: Benn still retained the title of the youngest MP in the House of
Commons. Mason (a former Barnsley coal miner) remarked caustically on this
incident, regarding it as “schoolboy one-upmanship.” I am inclined to agree.
His real rise to public fame came on the death of his father,
Viscount Stansgate, in 1960, when Benn automatically inherited his peerage, preventing
him from sitting in the House of Commons. Benn wished to retain his seat in the
Commons, maintaining his right to renounce his peerage. He stood again for
election to his constituency, and won once more, even though still disqualified
to take his seat. Outside Parliament he continued to campaign for the right to
renounce the peerage, and the Conservative Government of the time accepted the
need for a change in the law, with Benn being the first peer to take advantage
of the Peerage Act 1963 and return to the Commons in 1963.
However, and not for the first time in his life, the
fulfilment of one of his passionate obsessions carried consequences which he
had not thought through, or could not foresee. The Peerage Act 1963 also
allowed the Conservative peer Lord Home to renounce his place in the House of
Lords and become Prime Minister in 1963 as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. This
legislation was bound to assist the Conservative Party to a much greater degree
than the Labour Party, with the former having a much higher proportion of
hereditary peers. Another suspicion of mine is that this period in the public
limelight gave him a profile which he would not ordinarily have had, and a
taste for playing the rebel which he never really lost for the rest of his long
life. This was to have near catastrophic consequences for the fortunes of the
Labour Party in later years.
Postmaster General and Minister of Technology
With the coming to power
of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1964, Benn reached ministerial level,
first in the role of Postmaster General. Again, during this early period as a
minister, his political position was not regarded as that of the hard left;
rather, he came across more as a technocrat in his attitudes and a hardworking,
generally successful minister more than a political partisan. However he was
still prone to a little radical posturing on occasion: his plan to remove the
Monarch’s profile from stamps in favour of the 17th Century
Parliamentarians was thwarted by personal opposition from the Queen herself
(one wonders what Benn’s Irish groupies in later years would have thought of
his aim to put pictures of the likes of Oliver Cromwell on national stamps!).
In the Cabinet itself he managed to get up the nose of certain colleagues with
his eccentricities: for Roy Mason he tried too hard and too earnestly to be
working class, without having the slightest clue how to do it. For instance, he
would insist on pint pots of tea being served to him, believing it to be a
proletarian habit. One is reminded irresistibly of George Orwell’s (another
public schoolboy socialist) attempts to play at being working class in some of
Benn’s antics.
As Postmaster General
he presided over the opening of the Post Office tower, then the UK’s tallest
building. He also thought that it would be a good idea to have a “rotating
restaurant” at the top, where diners would sit at tables which revolved around
concentric circles, meaning that the person who you were facing and speaking to
would change as the circles rotated, allowing you to meet more people and
ensuring, like King Arthur, that no-one could be at the head of the “round
table.” A great idea in theory, but in practice the restaurant itself was so
high up that diners would frequently suffer from travel sickness and queasy
stomachs as the scenery of the city down below revolved before their eyes. Added
to this was the fact that the restaurant menus were so expensive that only the
very wealthy could afford them. The restaurant closed. Once more, Benn suffered
from the law of unintended consequences.
Promoted to Minister of Technology in 1966, Benn’s most
memorable achievement in this office was probably the development of the
supersonic airline Concorde, which was partly manufactured in his Bristol
constituency. Benn’s imagination was captured by the idea of Concorde to the
point of obsession: there can be no denying that it was a magnificent
technological achievement. However, the fact remains that the project was
simply not commercially viable, since only very wealthy travellers, often with
business expense accounts, could afford to fly the airline. Both the UK and
French governments later came to regret persevering with Concorde, with it
finally being removed in the early 2000s. Unintended consequences had reared
their head again.
Interestingly, at this period of his career, Benn was an
advocate of both the EEC (which later became the European Union) and of nuclear
power. Given his later standpoints on these two subjects, especially his later
championing of coal powered stations and the miners during the 1984/85 coal
strike, it somewhat pulls the rug from out under his image of a man who never
changed his convictions on anything. In reality, he was probably just as liable
to make a complete volte-face as any of us.
Opposition, Cabinet, and Drift to the Hard Left
The defeat of Wilson’s
Government in 1970 by Heath’s Conservatives took most people by surprise. Along
with his colleagues Benn spent four years in opposition. His relative
enthusiasm on the EEC having cooled by the early 1970s, with Heath’s bid to
apply for membership, Benn campaigned for a referendum on this issue, and the
shadow cabinet voted to support in March 1972, prompting Roy Jenkins to resign
as Deputy Leader (a precursor to his later political direction a decade later).
With Labour back in power in 1974, Benn returned to the Cabinet as Secretary of
State for Industry. The mid to late 1970s saw him move ever leftwards while in
office, and as Industry Secretary he attempted to extend the principles of nationalisation
into British economic life, setting up worker co-operatives to re-energise
ailing industries in various parts of the UK. It appears that this policy
initiative, together with his late discovery of the works of Marx, convinced
him of the necessity of what he termed “collective” or “common” control over as
much of national industry as possible, by which he meant nationalisation. Yet
anyone who has ever been involved in any state-managed institution, even in a
school or as a civil servant (and the public sector in Northern Ireland where I
grew up is very large) will know the many possibilities/opportunities that
exist for waste, poor management, inefficiency and nepotism there, as well as
the problem of low productivity. None of Benn’s worker co-operatives lasted the
distance, with the last of these, Triumph Motorcycles, folding in 1983. The massive
problems associated with the imposition of a command economy, a strategy
propounded by Benn, were shown up in a very sharp light with the collapse of
the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, but, despite this, Benn continued to
expound on the inherent wisdom of nationalising as much of the UK’s economy as
possible right until the end of his life.
His successful campaign to hold a referendum on EEC
membership also produced the opposite effect to that which he had envisaged.
The British electorate voted in favour of maintaining membership by a margin of
two to one. Once again, Benn had not thought through the consequences of his
plans carefully enough. During the campaign the self-proclaimed socialist
luminary found himself on the same side as such right-wing naysayers as Enoch
Powell. It is said that during the 1975 referendum period, Harold Wilson’s hatred
of him had become pathological, with Wilson remarking on Benn’s drift leftwards
while in office: “Tony immatures with age.” Wilson took the opportunity of his
unsuccessful “No” campaign to demote him to the lesser position of Energy
Secretary, where he would have less influence on overall economic policy.
On Wilson’s resignation in 1976 Benn stood for the Labour Party
leadership, coming fourth out of the six cabinet ministers who stood for
election. On the second ballot he withdrew his candidature, throwing his
support behind the veteran left-winger Michael Foot. Despite this, James
Callaghan, who won the leadership contest, kept him in post as Energy
Secretary. Perhaps Callaghan would have been better to have taken that
opportunity to sack him from the Cabinet altogether, thereby removing the
publicity which this position gave him. My guess is that Callaghan calculated
that it would, in the words of President Johnson, be better to have Benn “inside
the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.” Certainly Benn was always a
great speaker with a silver tongue, and a new Prime Minister would have feared
having such an opponent on his own backbenches. Until Labour lost power to
Thatcher’s Conservatives in May 1979, Benn continued to move to the left of the
political spectrum – his pronouncements always went down well with leftist
delegates and Party activists at the annual conference, while figures such as
Denis Healey and James Callaghan found themselves often being booed or shouted
down. Benn was rapidly becoming both the mouthpiece and the tool of the new
left within the Party.
The Destructive Phase
Labour’s loss of power
in 1979 saw the beginning of the second phase of Benn’s career, of which in my
view he had good reason to be the least proud. It is important to give a little
political background to 1979/81 before proceeding further. It is easy to forget
that in its first two years of office the first Thatcher Government was so
unpopular that it was not expected to last beyond another election. With sky-rocketing
unemployment and increasing social unrest (including very violent race riots
Brixton and Toxteth), this should have provided a strong basis for a moderate
Labour government to return to power relatively promptly. Thus some of the
worst ravages of what later became known as Thatcherism could perhaps have been
prevented. This was not to be, largely due to the actions of Tony Benn, (and
those in the Labour Party who encouraged and supported his course of action),
self-styled tribune of the people and champion of the poor and oppressed.
By the end of
1979/1980 Benn had come to a number of conclusions about the direction Labour
should take, and the policies which it should adopt to gain the support of the
British electorate. The first was that there should be more democracy within
the Party, with members and activists deciding policies from the conference
floor. The reality that this would have made any form of coherent Labour policy
on any issue practically impossible did not seem to have occurred to him. He then
launched into an attack on his former cabinet colleagues, accusing them of
breaking promises which, in truth, they had not made, and of not adopting
sufficiently leftist policies, despite the fact that the British electorate had
roundly rejected such policies in the 1979 election. In addition, Benn never explained
why he had at no time chosen to resign from the cabinet during the 1970s
because of these alleged broken promises.
The second strand of
his strategy was expressed in his keynote address to the Labour Party Conference
in 1980, while Callaghan was still Party leader, where he stated that the next Labour
government would, “within days”, gain the necessary powers to nationalise key
industries, and impose capital control. Effectively this would have meant remodelling
much of the British economy on the Soviet model, which even by the early 1980s
was beginning to show signs of extreme fatigue. Within weeks, he continued,
would all powers held by Brussels be returned to Westminster, signalling a
withdrawal from the EEC (despite the fact that the UK electorate had already
expressed their intentions on this subject in 1975, and he had fought for their
right have the referendum in the first place!). Combined with a withdrawal from
NATO, an avowedly anti-US foreign policy, unilateral disarmament, the creation
of no less than 1,000 new peers to oversee the abolition of the House of Lords,
and British withdrawal from Northern Ireland (amongst other schemes) was his
grand vision for a UK political future to be fulfilled. Of course the right-wing
press vilified him for these policies, and the entire Labour Party became badly
tainted by association. Thatcher must have been rubbing her hands with glee.
By 1980 the procedure
for electing the new Labour Party leader had changed to a position more in line
with the Benn had fought for, but James Callaghan had shrewdly decided to
resign before the new rules had come into effect, thus provoking a leadership
election which Benn had little chance of winning. He was reluctantly persuaded
not to stand. Michael Foot was to win the leadership election, an outcome bad
enough for the fortunes of the Party, but even worse was Benn’s decision in
1981 to stand against the incumbent Denis Healey for Deputy Leadership, despite
the impassioned appeals of Neil Kinnock and others, as well as Foot himself,
not to stand and thereby preserve Party unity. This contest proved to be rancorous
and was fought in full view of the public. As Healey later stated, Benn made a
point of inviting groups which had no affiliation to the Labour Party along to
his public meetings: one such group was the “Posadists”, which believed that
socialism would be brought to earth by extra-terrestrial beings. Conversely, in
one of Healey’s public addresses in Birmingham, he was shouted down by a large group
of IRA supporters. All this occurred in the full, unforgiving glare of the
media. By a margin of less than 1% did Healey eventually win the deputy leadership
contest, but by then the damage was well and truly done in the eyes of the UK
electorate. Healey notes that at least some of the MPs who voted for Benn in
the contest were those right-wingers looking for an excuse to quit the Labour
Party altogether – this they duly did later in 1981, with Roy Jenkins, Bill Rogers,
Shirley Williams and David Owen forming the Social Democratic Party in another
blaze of media publicity. Benn’s actions gave them the green light to leave. And
there was even worse to come.
Benn’s general
standing within the Labour Party, and his position within the National
Executive Council meant that he was a leading light during the creation of the
infamous Party Manifesto of 1983, described accurately by Gerald Kaufman as
“the longest suicide note in political history.” The overall thrust of the
Manifesto was for the Party to act as if the election defeat of 1979 had not
taken place, and that a huge dose of renationalisation of (then crumbling)
British manufacturing, swingeing controls on capital, withdrawal from NATO, the
EEC, and Northern Ireland, an incoherent policy on nuclear disarmament, and an
immediate end to the sale of council houses to long standing tenants, was just
the medicine the nation needed to face the future. In June 1983 the UK
electorate gave its verdict on the manifesto: a landslide victory for Thatcher
and the Conservatives ensued, with them capturing 397 seats in the Commons,
compared to a paltry 209 seats for Labour and 23 for the SDP/Liberal Alliance.
Growing up in a
predominantly nationalist community in Northern Ireland, the received wisdom on
Thatcher’s 1983 and 1987 election victories usually ran something like this:
“Sure the English are that stupid/snobby/greedy etc. that they’d always vote
for the Tories.” Yet even a cursory glance at the popular vote during the 1983
election does not support this wisdom: while the Tories gained just over 13
million votes, the combined votes of Labour and the SDP/Liberal Alliance totalled
over 16 million, suggesting that a large majority of the UK electorate was
really hankering for a return to moderate consensus politics rather than the divisiveness
of Thatcherism. Instead, they were offered no viable alternative at all.
Justly, in my view, Benn lost his own Bristol seat in the 1983 election.
Benn in later life was often breezily to state that he was a
life-long learner, and that he had frequently learned from the mistakes that he
had made. However, never once did he ever come close to admitting that his
actions in running for deputy Party leadership in 1981, with all the resulting
adverse publicity for Labour, was in any way mistaken. He preferred to dignify
the wilful recklessness and stupidity of his own actions with platitudes about his decisions being based on
“policies/issues and not personalities.” Largely because of him and his
acolytes, the Labour Party was left with a reputation for crankiness, in-fighting,
and fractiousness that it took well over a decade and the coming to power of
Tony Blair to shake off. In fact, he and his supporters came damn close to
destroying the Labour Party as a force in British politics. It is small wonder that
Labour was not returned to government until 1997. He also was instrumental in providing
an open goal mouth for the Tories to romp home in the 1987 election and win the
1992 election, and allowing Thatcher in particular to claim that her policies had
received a ringing endorsement from the UK electorate, when, in reality, this
was not the case. Who paid the price for Benn and his followers’ mistakes?
Certainly not them. The people who paid were those tens of thousands of miners
who lost their jobs in the pit closures of the 1980s and early 1990s,
industrial workers who were thrown on the scrapheap of life due to the systematic
destruction of the UK’s manufacturing base during the 1980s, 16 year old school
leavers who were allowed to languish on the dole and not provided with proper
skills and training for a fulfilling career, and the grim and depressing list
goes on and on.
Anyone under 40 or so who wishes to gain a flavour of these
times could do worse than have a look on Youtube at Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff, set in a
depressed Liverpool in the early/mid 1980s. While there undoubtedly needed to
be some serious restructuring of the UK manufacturing base, and there was bound
to be a vast scaling back of the coal industry, none of this had to take the
abrupt and harsh form that it did under Thatcher and the Tories. Benn cannot,
and should not, be singled out as the scapegoat for all these evils, but he
does share in responsibility for permitting them to happen. For the remainder
of his life he still insisted on referring to the 1983 election result for
Labour as a “victory”, and his running for deputy leadership in 1981 as a
“healing process.” What planet did this man live on?
It says a lot about
the charitable nature of the Labour Party that it was prepared to allow Benn
the earliest possible opportunity of standing for Parliament after he lost his
Bristol seat in 1983. My own inclination would have been to keep him as far
away as possible from any forum/platform from which he could have damaged the
Labour Party any more than he had. Perhaps he would have then become the venerable
old leftie sage he later morphed into at a much earlier date, or even have
disappeared into obscurity. He won the Chesterfield by-election in March 1984,
with Denis Healey coming to speak on his behalf during his campaign. Yet, after
all the chaos he had already caused, what do you think “Saint Tony” did after
the 1987 election? HE CHALLENGED NEIL
KINNOCK FOR THE LABOUR PARTY LEADERSHIP IN 1988!!! Luckily by this stage he
was too marginal a figure in the Parliamentary Party to be in with any real
chance of victory, but it demonstrates to me that, like the French Bourbons, he
had forgotten nothing and learned absolutely nothing from the events of previous
years. Even his manifesto for the Party leadership had hardly changed one iota from
the 1983 general election.
So why had Benn
doggedly pursued the levers of control in the Labour Party, on foundations
which almost definitely would have made it permanently unelectable? One reason
is, as Denis Healey suggests, he did not understand the march of modern history
and of the socio-economic changes at play during the last quarter of the 20th
Century. Another reason was his undoubted self-obsession and unwavering belief
in his own moral rectitude that amounted almost to a messianic complex. My own
private theory is that there was still enough of the public schoolboy and
aristocrat left in him to engender the belief that he had some sort of natural
entitlement to leadership. Renouncing your peerage is one thing, junking
ingrained attitudes is quite another.
TV Personality and National Treasure
Removed from the inner
sanctums of power, and regarded by the later 1980s as a man whose opportunity
had passed, TV producers (especially those of programmes on affairs of state)
were keen to have him on their shows: he was never less than exciting and
stimulating as a speaker, both in Parliament and outside, and always remained
telegenic, knowing how to maintain a commanding television personality. His
strongest gift always remained the power of persuasive speech, and, in his own
words, he had become “harmless.” In the introduction to this article I
mentioned the interview which he did with Ali G, describing it as “revealing.”
What made it so funny for me was the gulf between the lofty plane that Benn
inhabited, and the real nature of the interview. He simply did not grasp that
the whole thing was a spoof and that he was being wound up, insisting on being
as sincere and articulate as ever in his answers to Ali G’s blatantly
ridiculous questions.
If respectability and
public affection had come his way in the final quarter of life, sound political
reasoning had not. His political standpoint had effectively petrified in around
1979, and he remained as wrongheaded as ever. He passionately detested Tony
Blair, declaring him to be the worst Labour Party leader and PM ever. Yet Blair
had led the Party to three election victories in a row, and presided over
Labour’s longest ever period in power. Benn could still heap sincere praise on
mass murderers like Mao Tse Tung, who he still described in his copious diaries
as “the greatest man of the twentieth century”, and be supportive of dictators
such as Colonel Gadaffi and Hafez Al Assad. As late as 1997 he sent fraternal
greetings to the North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il despite the fact that this
man and his regime were responsible for the complete absence in North Korea of
the human rights/civil liberties and democratic values that Benn claimed to
hold so dear, and who enforced his authority by putting families in
concentration camps. He had words of praise for extreme Islamist groups such as
Hamas, and compared the Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan to a sort of “Dad’s
Army”/Home Guard, fighting against external occupation. We’ve all seen Dads
Army on TV, and I can tell you now that I can see no parallels between those
people in Afghanistan and Captain Mainwaring or Corporal Jones. Perhaps his least
edifying moment came in 2003, when, as chairman of the “Stop the War” campaign he
was approached by an Iraqi woman whose family had been executed by Saddam
Hussein as CIA spies: Benn dismissed this as American propaganda. To me, that
is even worse than hurling a racial insult at the woman: he had both insulted
the family’s memory and called her a liar.
Benn claimed to have
five questions that he would ask of anyone in power, from Bill Gates to Barack
Obama:
1. What power have you got?
2.
Where
did you get it from?
3.
In
whose interests do you exercise it?
4.
To
whom are you accountable?
5. How can we get rid of you?
Few would disagree
with the underlying spirit of these sensible questions. However, in his 2003
pre-War interview with Saddam Hussein none of these questions were put to the
Iraqi leader by him, and neither, to my knowledge, were they ever posed to
Gadaffi or Assad. Could it be that Benn held the leaders of western democracies
to a higher standard of ethics and behaviour than dictators?
Also revealing are the
tributes heaped upon him after his death by people like George Galloway and
Gerry Adams. Benn always dogmatically subscribed to the policy of a united
Ireland and advocated complete British withdrawal from the region of the UK we
know as Northern Ireland. However, he never provided any solution to the
inter-communal bloodshed which would inevitably have resulted from this
withdrawal, and showed a complete disregard for the position of the Irish
government which would have to shoulder responsibility for what would have been
a war zone. Gerry Adams hailed Benn as a true friend to Irish Republicanism: of
course he did, because the latter told Republicans absolutely everything they
wanted to hear! It would have been interesting to hear leading Republicans’
private conversations on what they really thought about him. Lenin’s term
“useful idiot” springs immediately to mind.
Conclusion
It is my hope that I
have not portrayed Benn as a monster in what I have written above. He certainly was no-one’s idea of a
fiend. While I will hold firm to the belief that much, if not all of the
political criticism which I have levelled at him is fully justified, it is said
that in his personal life he was a lovely man, with stories abounding of his
many acts of kindness to people who were often complete strangers to him.
Unlike George Galloway, who is just a bully and thug with a hide like a rhino,
Benn’s courtesy was unflinching. He held no personal bitterness or rancour
towards those who were his political opponents, and to this extent his life was
a shining example. If anything I have written above is too harsh on the man’s
memory, then it reflects more about my own frequently uncharitable nature. A
very loving husband, father, and grandfather, I will miss him on the TV and in
the newspapers getting on my nerves with his weird and wacky views on the world
in which we live. I would go so far as to say that none of the political damage
he ever caused to the Labour Party was meant intentionally, but arose because
of his miscalculation and wrongheadedness. Winston Churchill once said that the
definition of success was “the ability to go from failure to failure without
loss of enthusiasm”: by this definition Benn was a resounding success.
In one obituary I read
last week, it said that Tony Benn wished his epitaph to be “He encouraged us.” In
his own way he encouraged me. He encouraged me to think through more carefully
the consequences of my actions, words, intentions and opinions, something which
I have not always taken care to do. He has also taught me the necessity of
facing up to the world as it is, warts and all, and not seeing it as I would
like to be.
RIP Tony Benn
