Tony Benn is a charismatic figure in British public and political life. It was perhaps inevitable that he would take a lead in the opposition to Tony Blair’s war in Iraq and he remains president of the Stop the War coalition. After Westminster School, New College, Oxford, and the RAF in the Second World War, he began his parliamentary career and over the years has held several important positions including Secretary of State for Energy, Minister of Technology, Postmaster General and chairman of the Labour Party.
He has always been an asset doing interviews on radio and television, especially on discussion programmes such as Any Questions and Question Time. He’s had more airtime than most contemporary British politicians. His copious diaries, journals and publications will prove an invaluable archive of modern political history. In sum, with plentiful news coverage, often controversial, and his success as a public speaker, he has become one of the most conspicuous of parliamentarians.
For 11 years he was a minister of Cabinet rank. He was a member
of Labour’s National Executive Committee for some 30 years. He played a role in some of the most important constitutional changes. He successfully renounced his peerage because he sincerely believes in elected authority and he led the campaign for a referendum on membership of the European Common Market.
He worked to reform the methods used to re-select MPs and to widen the franchise for electing the party leadership. He consistently campaigns for his belief in government for and by the people over and above the power of hereditary privilege. However, he has twice failed to achieve the leadership of his own party. This is significant. After all, he has spent his entire political life in the service of his party.
This is some career and this is some book, well documented and packed with atmosphere and insight. A strong argument holds this considerable volume together. It might be described as the biographical dialogue between Benn’s considerable political achievements and the fact that he failed to become leader of his party and to carry his Cabinet colleagues with him to realise political goals that were tremendously important to him. But whether we think of him as a failure or as a success, his importance in British politics since 1945 cannot be denied.
As this book makes clear, there are several major strands running right through his life (he was born in 1925) and career. No man or woman should be assessed in terms of this or that inherited trait.
Nevertheless, it’s a mistake to overlook what is clearly there. From his father, William Wedgwood Benn, a successful Liberal, and later Labour, politician, Benn acquired a taste for political thinking and the application of ideas to existing circumstances. Lord Halifax thought him one of the best parliamentarians of his time. His mother, Margaret Eadie, a formidable theologian (Congregationalist, an influence Jad Adams considers important in forming Benn’s ideology) and advocate of women’s rights, gave him that characteristic fearless pursuit in support of principles over office and, I like to think, his extraordinary gifts in communicating to all manner of audiences in a style always adjusted to the circumstances.
While Benn was at school, politics, religion and national and international affairs were constantly aired at the dinner table. There were strong feelings against government policies in the 1930s, against the rise of militarism, the Abyssinian War and the policy of appeasement. Benn, aged 13, spoke magnificently against appeasement in a school debate.
In 1942, aged 17, he joined the Labour Party and made a list of things to do – join the RAF, become an MP, get married and have children. As this book makes clear, all these ambitions have been realised.
There is something of the Arthurian legend about Tony Benn. Like Sir Perceval, he’s an expert knight of undoubted integrity and courage who retains an enduring innocence that enables him immediately to see through observable circumstances into the darker, secret causes of things. It was Sir Perceval alone of all the Knights of the Round Table who asked, when confronted with the mysteries of the Holy Grail: “What is the grail and whom does it serve?”
Tony Benn has had this quality throughout his long career in politics and preserved it in the face of the unparalleled, vile and persistent personal and political vilification that our loathsome press was able to manage. He reminds me very much of the kind of figure George Bernard Shaw several times portrays, the human being, not who is too good for this world, but for whom this world is not yet ready, “too childish foolish for this world” in Shakespeare’s savagely ironic phrase.
As Adams says, Benn has a strong appeal to youth, and many talented young people have volunteered to work in his office without pay: “Two writers who worked with him produced novels which owed something to the understanding of Westminster politics they had learned from him – Brian Sedgemore’s Mr Secretary of State and A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin.”
His education at Westminster School and Oxford suggests that his politics are a matter of faith rather than the result of harsh personal hardship and he always gives the impression that it would, on the whole, be much more sensible to go back to first principles rather than muck about the bloody mess we’ve managed to make of it over the years. That’s the tragedy of it all: we have to start from where we are.
But Tony Benn has always managed a difficult trick. He made politics seem honourable. Every time I’ve heard him speak in public, I felt the better for it. And that is a rare gift. The bits of his speeches quoted in this book will ring in your mind for some time after reading them. Just one example: “Many of our most precious religious and political rights in this country were won by conscientious law-breaking which compelled Parliament to make the necessary concessions to justice.”
