THE LONGEST SUICIDE NOTE IN HISTORY

See Also: DIARIES; ROYALTY Stamped Upon; TEA Tony Benn; A TIMELY CHANCELLOR; WHITEHALL Ministers, George Brown

Anthony Wedgwood Benn was a son of the Labour politician William Wedgwood Benn 1^st Viscount Stansgate. As a six-year-old he delivered his first speech in the Smith Square home of Sir Oswald Mosley. In 1950, while still only in his mid-twenties, Wedgwood Benn was elected to serve as a Labour MP. He developed into being a superb Parliamentary orator. His speeches were often marked by an element of humour. His conduct within the House of Commons was always well-mannered; he had taken to heart the advice that his father had given him that he should Never wrestle with a chimney sweep .

For his first two decades as an M.P. Wedgwood Benn was a member of the centre-right portion of the Labour Party. In the late 1960s he backed a campaign to rein in the growing power of the trade unions. His political career was fostered by the party leader Harold Wilson. However, as the decade closed, a distance developed between the two men. During the 1970 general election, Wedgwood Benn delivered an ill-judged address that became known as the Belsen Speech . Labour was defeated and the Conservatives were returned to office. In retrospect, it was appreciated that Wedgwood Benn's conduct had contributed to his own party's expulsion from power.

In 1971 the M.P. visited Maoist China. He seems to have taken what he saw there at face value. Following his return, he told some of his senior colleagues that they should become Advisers to the Proletariat . Among grassroots members of the Labour Party militant political opinions were being expressed more frequently than had been the case previously. The totalitarian Left had appreciated that it would never achieve power in Britain by democratic means. Therefore, Trotskyites had taken to joining the party in order to try to manipulate its structure in an attempt to secure political influence for themselves. Wedgwood Benn came to believe that he could advance social justice by riding the tide of growing radicalism. His outlook was not derived from Marxism. Rather, it came to converge with it, having initially been informed by a form of Christianity. He did not acknowledge the reality that the nature of the force that he was seeking to exploit stemmed in large part from the actions of a minority that was anti-democratic. It only advocated democracy as a means by which it could advance its own agenda.

In 1972 Wedgwood Benn shortened his name to Tony Benn . He also dropped the fact that he had attended Westminster School, a leading public school, from the Education portion of his entry in the annual biographical reference work Who's Who. He adjusted the section so that it read Still in progress . The exasperated Wilson remarked that Benn was a sort of ageing perennial youth who immatures with age. Jimmy Reid, a prominent Scottish-born trade union official, commented that the man had had more conversions on the road to Damascus than a Syrian long-distance truck driver. Benn had been a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee (the NEC) since 1959. He used his position as the Chairman of the body's Home Policy Committee to advance a programme that chimed with the public views of the party's Trotskyite activists.

The Conservative government collapsed under the stresses induced by inflation and industrial militancy. The Labour Party was again elected to office in February 1974. Benn was appointed to be Secretary of State for Industry. As such, his decisions were informed by utopian optimism rather than by clear-sighted realism. He believed that Britons would be best served by an isolated, command-driven economy. He thought that transferring the ownership and management of large industrial companies to workers co-operatives would prove to be a panacea for the nation's economic problems. His actions proved to be ill-judged. All of the co-ops failed. Cyril Smith, a populist Liberal M.P., declared that the minister was doing more to damage British industry than the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and the U-boats. Within Cabinet, Benn s affability had meant that many of his colleagues had been prepared initially to grant him a large degree of leeway. However, as his lack of pragmatism became increasingly evident, they felt compelled to turn down the proposals that he made.

A second general election was held in October. By then Benn had established himself as a bogeyman for much of the national press. For a spell the rubbish that he and his family put out for collection was systematically searched by tabloid journalists. The newshounds were looking for anything that they might be able to embarrass him with. Even The Guardian, which had a centre-left readership, had someone calculate how much tea he had drunk during his lifetime. This was done in an attempt to assess what its impact upon him might be.

Labour retained office. The following year a referendum was held on whether or not Britain should be a member of the European Economic Community. This was not conducted along party lines. Benn was a leading figure in the campaign that wanted the nation to withdraw from the body. This position allied him to Enoch Powell and other right-wing Conservatives. They proved to be on the losing side. Subsequently, Wilson demoted Benn to the Secretaryship for Energy. The MP accepted this slight and continued in office. He took to voicing dissent about many of the administration's actions. Some of his Parliamentary colleagues regarded this conduct as lacking integrity. For them it was too self-serving to be palatable. As a result, many MPs on the party's left became increasingly wary of him.

Margaret Thatcher was elected to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975. Benn welcomed this development since he appreciated that, like him, she no longer supported the political consensus that had existed since the Second World War. While his background was far wealthier and much more Establishment than hers was, there were several parallels between them. The two politicians both came from families that were Protestant non-conformists, his Congregationalist and hers Methodist. They had had fathers who had been members of the Liberal Party who had left it, his joining Labour, hers becoming an independent who was a de facto Conservative. Upon occasion, both were given to maintaining stances that had been rendered untenable by reality. Both had taken up more strident ideological outlooks only after the upward trajectory of their already well-established political careers had stalled.

There is a view that in the mid-1970s Benn's political ideas became fixed. Thereafter, he was doctrinaire about whether or not events complied with what he believed they should be. Upon occasion this led to him assuming stances that were extremely tortuous. He was given to condemning those who were prepared to alter their positions in response to changing facts, even though these adjustments often derived from intellectual honesty rather than opportunism.

A general election was held in 1979. Labour lost office. Benn welcomed this outcome. He believed that the most creative part of his life was about to commence. He chose not to stand for election to the Shadow Cabinet. Instead, he focused his energies upon cultivating a powerbase within the party's membership. A struggle broke out between the moderates and the Bennites. Benn's victories included: transferring the authorship of the manifesto away from the party leader's control; and establishing an electoral college to choose both the leader and the deputy leader. In the new body the MPs share of the franchise was reduced to 25%. The constituency parties were given a quarter of the votes and the trade unions a half.

In late 1980, before the college had been scheduled to start operation, Jim Callaghan stepped down from the leadership of the party. Consequently, in the contest that was triggered, the electorate was composed solely of sitting Labour MPs. They had had close exposure to Benn. They opted to return Michael Foot, whose history of being on the party's left wing was far longer than his. While the new leader was to be frequently derided by the right-wing press, his standing within the party was always firm. Benn was never to feel able to challenge him directly.

The reality of Britain's relative industrial decline had been addressed by managers in a manner that had been profoundly complacent. As a result, the leaderships of many of the principal unions had become increasingly confrontational in their outlook. This predisposition to contest the previous consensus inclined some of them to ally themselves to the Bennites. Benn believed that he would benefit from their support. In April 1981 he challenged Denis Healey for the party's deputy leadership. A bitter, six-month-long contest ensued. Many senior union officials remembered that in the late 1960s Benn had been opposed to them. Although the democratic character of unions varied, enough of them opted for the moderate cause to ensure that it was Healey who was elected to the office. Benn had been defeated under a system that he himself had created. Subsequently, Labour's non-Bennite members started to mirror the determination and the calculation of his adherents. As a result, the party slowly began to again become more reflective of the views of ordinary Labour voters. The Bennites mounted an ardent rearguard campaign.

Like Benn, Alistair McAlpine came from a materially privileged background. His family owned the Sir Robert McAlpine construction business and he had been raised in The Dorchester Hotel. An individualist, his politics were a mishmash of stances. In 1975 he and Thatcher had encountered one another at a dinner party. Their temperaments had chimed. She had appreciated the potential usefulness of his charm and administrative efficiency. She had appointed him to be joint Treasurer of the Conservative Party. Three years later he had become its sole Treasurer. He was someone who tended to have self-indulgent enthusiasms and then move on from them. However, he had concluded that politics could be fun and so chose to retain the position. He was to do so until her fall from power in 1990.

The Conservatives spent freely during the 1979 general election. Much of the money was used to run material that had been created by the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency. Labour was ousted from office. Subsequently, McAlpine informed the Saatchi brothers that the Conservative Party could not meet their bill and that until it could do so they should bask in the glory of what they had done for it. Thatcher appointed him to be the party's Deputy Chairman.

Benn, as the Chairman of the N.E.C.'s Home Policy Committee, oversaw the composition of Labour's manifesto for the 1983 general election. It stated that if elected the party would dismantle Britain's nuclear arsenal, take the country out of the European Economic Community, and nationalise a number of industries. His Parliamentary colleague Gerald Kaufman, whose outlook was moderate, described the document as being the longest suicide note in history .

When McAlpine learnt of what was in the manifesto, he dispatched one of his assistants to walk the two dozen yards eastwards across the southern side of Smith Square from Conservative Central Office to Transport House, where the Labour Party was then headquartered. There, the underling acquired every copy of the document that he could. The Tories then distributed these to anyone who they thought might be alarmed by any of the proposals that were set out in it. As a result, the Conservative campaign was bolstered. It developed such a momentum that the Treasurer felt confident enough to stop running newspaper advertisements. Thereby, he saved his party many millions of pounds. Thatcher was re-elected with an increased Parliamentary majority. Benn was one of the Labour M.P.s who lost their seats.

In part, the fightback against the Bennites and their Trotskyite associates had consisted of a number of legal actions. These had been conducted by the barrister Derry Irvine. One of the lawyer s juniors had been a certain Tony Blair. The whippersnapper became an M.P. in 1983. A decade later Benn lost his seat on the N.E.C.. The following year Blair was elected to lead the party. In 1997 a general election was held. The victorious Labour campaign was masterminded from Millbank Tower in Pimlico. The building had been erected on the site that had been occupied by No. 40 Millbank. This had been Benn's childhood home.

Late in life Benn received a death threat. His response was Hadn t had one for years. I was so chuffed. By then he was regarded as being a national treasure . He was sufficiently declawed that the right-wing press took to regarding him with a degree of fondness. He, for his part, felt able to take The Daily Mail's coin to serialise one of the books that were based upon the self-mythologising diaries that he had been keeping for almost fifty years. In the words of Brian Brivati, who wrote his obituary for The Guardian in 2014, He was like Samuel Pepys - someone who described an age without ever having shaped it - and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds, and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.

Location: 12 Holland Park Avenue, W11 4UX. Benn's home. (purple, red)

Millbank Tower, Millbank, SW1P 4QP. The site of the home where Benn was raised. (orange, red)

Transport House, 18 Smith Square, SW1P 3HZ (blue, orange)

David Backhouse 2024