The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 Read online

  When we came to the defence resolutions, including the TGWU resolution, I moved that we initiate talks. My proposal was backed by Jennie Lee, Dick Crossman and a lot of others but was bitterly opposed by Gaitskell, Gunter and Sam Watson. After the vote on it was taken I raised a point of order. I said I had tried to bring peace . . . At this, the Chairman, George Brinham, interrupted me and said it was not a point of order. I raised my voice and shouted that he should hear me out and I then said I thought this was a disastrous piece of action and I proposed to resign from the Executive forthwith. I had got too excited and as I walked across the room to the door I heard George Brinham saying, ‘Anyone can resign from the Executive, that is not a point of order.’

  I went upstairs and saw George Brown. I told him what I had done and he said, ‘Don’t do anything else until you’ve spoken to me.’ I summoned a press conference for 5.45 in the billiard room and telephoned Caroline to tell her the news. At 5.45 I read my statement to a gigantic press conference and answered questions.

  I gather that I had caused some consternation after I left. I got some pretty grim looks from colleagues who later emerged from the meeting but Walter Padley (who is not a unilateralist) clutched me warmly on both shoulders and said with tears in his eyes, ‘What’s your personal position now? Are you going to stand again? That’s all that matters.’ All the secretaries from the Party were also very tearful. They are CND and were very sorry to see me go.

  I rang Caroline and my dad and he was wonderfully encouraging. Caroline was sweet as could be but she thought I shouldn’t have done it.

  To bed but couldn’t sleep till about 3.

  Monday 3 October

  Very cold reception from colleagues and hardly anybody said they thought I had done the right thing. Someone quoted George Lansbury’s advice: ‘Never resign’, and somebody else hinted that it was just a stunt to get reelected on the Executive and avoid an inevitable defeat by Mikardo. Lots of other delegates were puzzled.

  For the first time in my life tonight I had a sleeping tablet and it was a relief to get a few hours of rest.

  Tuesday 4 October

  The results of the election for the Executive were announced this morning and I have been knocked off by Mikardo. I rang Caroline to tell her and was very dejected indeed.

  Wednesday 5 October

  The long-awaited defence debate was opened well by Sam Watson and sustained a high standard throughout. George Brown recanted, Noel-Baker cheered for his Nobel Prize, declared himself a multilateralist, Denis Healey said Khrushchev used to murder cats when he was a child and Michael Foot shone like a torch of radicalism. Finally Gaitskell in a magnificent defence of multilateralism that captured the Conference threw the whole lot away in his final minutes with his attack on ‘unilateralists, pacifists and fellow-travellers’ and by his declared intention to ‘fight, fight and fight again’. In the vote the platform was totally defeated but the Left was dejected and the right wing exultant at this ‘moral victory’. Bob McKenzie, Ivan Yates and the rest are plotting the new non-socialist radical party that they would like to see emerge.

  To the Tribune meeting to hear Soper, Mikardo and Foot and to bed very late, very depressed and feeling that I had made an absolute fool of myself by resigning. Caroline was comforting on the telephone.

  Thursday 6 October

  Still very depressed but was cheered up by the Chief Whip, who told me this story.

  He said that after the result of the NEC elections had been announced in the morning session he was walking up the hill back to his hotel for lunch, feeling rather depressed at the state of the Party. In front of him were two old ladies with white hair – obviously delegates from their constituency Parties – talking keenly together. They walked rather slowly and he overtook them. As he passed by he could just hear one saying in a squeaky voice to the other, ‘I just didn’t know which way to vote. I wanted to kick that little shit Wedgwood Benn up the arse and then that bastard Mikardo got on.’

  The Chief Whip is a great friend of mine and the tears rolled down his face as he told me.

  Friday 21 October

  Rang Audrey Callaghan. She said Jim was very depressed, but had come back from Czechoslovakia convinced that socialism does work.

  Sunday 6 November

  Hugh shouted down again at a meeting yesterday. The Party now at its worst.

  Wednesday 16 November

  To the Commons for a Broadcasting meeting. At 4.45 a messenger came in and said ‘Lord Appleby’ wants to see you urgently. I said I had never heard of him and was busy. Five minutes later the messenger came back with a note from Lord Amulree (who is a doctor): ‘Sorry to bother you, but your father is in the House and not very well. I think he should be taken home and got a doctor. It is very difficult to decide what is wrong.’ I left the meeting at once and met Amulree in the Commons Lobby. We hurried to the Lords’ Lobby where Father had been sitting, but he was gone.

  We found him in the Peers’ Guest Room, lying down in a deep armchair. He said he felt dizzy and had a neuralgia pain. ‘I won’t talk,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a bit of a rest. Ma’s coming for tea.’ His pulse was very weak and he was cold, sweating a little. I went to phone Mother to get Dr Pitts to come.

  When I went back to Father he was almost unconscious and so we got a wheelchair and carried him down the stairs, where he waited in one of the little dining rooms in the Harcourt Corridor. He had his coat on and hat and began breathing very heavily so that I thought the end must be very near. We decided instead to get an ambulance to take him to Westminster Hospital. Finally this arrived and we wheeled him out into it. He was now completely unconscious and I held his head in my arms as the ambulance went out under the arches, through the courtyard, past the Speaker’s House and through New Palace Yard.

  It was very obvious that he was leaving the Palace of Westminster for the last time. The ambulance rang its bell to get through the busy traffic and at 5.45 we got to the Casualty Department of Westminster Hospital where Mother and Dr Pitts were waiting.

  At 6.45 the result of the electrocardiogram showed that he had a coronary thrombosis. Dave and June arrived and we saw Dr Lloyd, the specialist, who said it was extremely serious. Lloyd said Father would talk but he didn’t seem to hear when the doctor told him that he must be as quiet as a mouse. He said the next two days were the most dangerous and the question was, had he the reserves of strength to recover? Father said to me, ‘What’s the news? I’m not staying here, you know. You can’t bully me.’

  Thursday 17 November

  Mother and Father’s 40th wedding anniversary. News of Clark Gable’s death. Mother phoned at 9.45 to say that Father’s blood pressure was up above the danger level.

  I went to the Commons for lunch and then to the hospital at 12.30.

  Dave came to the hospital and at 2.30 the Sister told us that Father was very seriously ill and could go at any moment, although he was just holding his own. I looked in to see him and he said, ‘Hello James. Where’s Ma? I certainly did have a thump. I can’t understand it. How’s Caroline and the children?’ He looked very, very pale.

  At 6.45 Dr Lloyd said he thought Father was rallying a bit, but Pitts said it was touch and go.

  I went back to the flat for a few sandwiches and then to the hospital, where I sat for half an hour holding Father’s hand. He was pretty much unconscious. But his mind was going back. ‘Father used to say “Boys, I never take an engagement on Sunday for money”’ and, ‘That was in 1919’ and, ‘Old boy, you’re absolutely right.’

  He took my finger and tried to write with it as if it was a pencil. He was passionately keen to get on with his work, and that was always his character.

  At 9.15 Mother was whispering in his ear, ‘Don’t worry’ and he said, ‘It’s no good without breath.’

  At 9.30 Dave and I were talking and the Sister hurried in and said, ‘Come at once. He’s very distressed and I’m very worried.’

  At the moment of his death the only
thing on my mind was all the arrangements that had to be made. One had to begin this job of fighting the peerage at the very moment when one was least inclined to think of anything else at all. But, as it happened, my mother found the battle the thing that really kept her going. The funny thing was I never had a chance to discuss the tactics with him as I’d always imagined I would. I’d always supposed he’d have an illness of a week or two, if not a month or two, and that he and I would have planned every stage together, which he would love to have done. But it didn’t work like that.

  As soon as Father died the escalator was beginning to move. The gates had clanged in the Commons and I was moved, against my will, up the other end of the building. Of course I was terribly sad and upset, and felt very lonely that the one man who could advise me wasn’t there – Father. I plunged into the deepest, blackest depression, which really made it impossible to work.

  3

  1960–64

  THE DEATH OF Tony Benn’s father led to the complete cessation of the diary for almost three years, during which time Tony Benn was engaged in the fight to prevent himself being removed for life from the House of Commons to the Lords. The commons voted to exclude him but although disqualified, Tony Benn insisted on standing as a candidate in his seat of Bristol South-East in the by-election of 1961. He won, creating an unprecedented constitutional situation. During 1962, David Butler interviewed Tony Benn extensively on the progress of the peerage campaign up to that point and it is from these interviews that the first extracts in this chapter are drawn. From January 1963, the diary becomes a continuous record.

  I went to see Gaitskell. That was a very unhappy interview. Of course he was angry with me because of the row over defence. I’ve a very short memory and my father’s death had obliterated from my mind all recollection of the row over the bomb and the Conference and so on. Looking back on it now, I realise that it must have been a much bigger factor in his mind than the peerage case. I had caused him a lot of trouble; he would have thought I’d stabbed him in the back and was now coming along and asking for a favour. So I must give him full credit for his understandable irritation with me.

  I sat down in his room at the House and he said three things to me: ‘Well, you can’t expect the Party to make a fuss over you.’ Secondly: ‘We do need young peers very badly in the House of Lords, you know; all the peers are so old.’ Thirdly he said, ‘Meanwhile, in view of the fact that you’re no longer a Member of the House of Commons, and you’re not yet a Member of the House of Lords, you’d better not come to any more Party meetings.’

  I was really knocked back by this because I had expected a rather different attitude. I think I got slightly angry. I said: ‘It’s all very well, saying you need young peers, but what am I going to live on?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose there is some difficulty in this.’

  I’m afraid that, from then on, I never regarded Gaitskell as a particular friend. His attitude throughout the case has been very simple. When it’s been in the news and leading articles have been coming out, then he joins in and makes a wonderful speech attacking the primitive tribal customs which hold back a Member, and all that. But as soon as the thing goes out of the headlines and becomes submerged, he forgets it. He thinks the public forgets it and he thinks there’s nothing much worth doing about it.

  On Friday 24 March 1961 there was a special meeting of the General Council in Bristol, an absolutely key meeting from my point of view. All these solid trade union chaps came out absolutely firmly in favour of fighting. Fred Newman of the Shopworkers’ Union said that every house in Hanham had been canvassed and 2,000 had signed the petition; less than I per cent were not prepared to sign. They were fighting for a principle. They were certain of an overwhelming victory. Another chap said, ‘Even if they do seat the Conservative this will only be confirmation of the privileges that we’re fighting.’ It went on and on like this.

  Polling day in the by-election of 4 May 1961 was the usual awful business. I do dislike polling day. I was up at 6.30. I was at the office at 8.15 and I went round to all the polling stations and all the committee rooms. It’s a killing job. I think in many ways it’s a complete waste of time, although it does encourage the Party workers and that’s the only case for doing it. There’s no point in talking to the returning officers or the clerks. After all, you must look at it from a practical point of view and I suppose you have to get in and out of a car about a hundred times on polling day and this begins to mount up. Anyway, the turnout wasn’t bad. We were quite encouraged in the earlier part of the day, although it simply poured first thing in the morning.

  At 4 o’clock I went back to the hotel, and was told that Sara Barker from Labour Party HQ wanted to see me. By then I was tired and a little worried, because you never know till the end of the day how it will work out. I went to see her in the lounge of the hotel. She was sitting there with her lips pursed and she said, ‘I’ve just come down to tell you that in your speech tonight you’re to make no reference whatsoever to the future. I’ve been asked by the NEC to come down specially to say this to you. It’s going to be particularly important if the result is better than we expect. The NEC will not support you, further, in any Election fight.’

  I must say I was very resentful of this and the way in which it was done. First of all, she didn’t wish me luck – a candidate on polling day is like a bride, he wants something nice said – there was no suggestion of good will about it. I said, ‘You could have sent me a postcard to tell me that. I’ve no intention of saying anything about the future.’

  But it did send me down to the absolute bottom of depression, the one thing that was unbearable at any stage was the feeling that my own people weren’t with me and George Brown plus Sara Barker made me, at this stage, regret the whole business. I really did think that evening that I was an absolute fool. The whole thing had been totally misconceived.

  We went out and did our last-minute knocking-up on polling day. It was still pouring with rain. The streets were absolutely empty. There simply was nobody who was going to vote from 8 till 9 – or so it seemed. The street lights shone yellow on the rainy pavement, and our voices echoed back from the loudspeaker. I raised my voice in an almost desperate way to persuade people to come out. I lost my voice completely between 5 and 9 that night; I couldn’t speak at all. We came back to the hotel absolutely finished, thinking that possibly we’d get in with a majority of 2,000. We thought it quite possible that we wouldn’t win at all, and that was just the end of the whole business as far as we were concerned.

  After the polls closed Caroline and I went and had tea and apples at Temple Meads Station, where I ate most of my meals during the Election, because it was quick and easy. At 11 we went to St George’s Grammar School to the count and we forced our way through a crowd of people who were beginning to form outside. The television lights were shining on the school on the main London to Bristol road and there was, of course, as there always is at the count, a great sense of excitement. But we were utterly dejected as we walked in. As soon as we got in people said: ‘It’s a landslide.’ Our people came up and said, ‘It’s going four to one, it’s fantastic.’ All of a sudden, the thing changed. From 11 till the result was announced was the most splendid and glorious part of the whole campaign. The clouds had disappeared, our optimism and enthusiasm soared, we walked around. We saw votes pouring out of the ballot boxes; we saw the piles going up. We really thought at one stage that the Tory candidate, St Clair, had lost his deposit.

  I think that was the very best part of the Election, just as two hours earlier had been the very worst part of the whole business. I sat on a child’s desk in the corner and drew up a little statement of victory, which I hadn’t given any thought to at all. All the press were there, and they were so friendly and, of course, the press reflects the current mood. Anyway, it was extremely enjoyable. Then we came to the declaration and the Town Clerk himself came and announced the results: Benn 23,275, St Clair 10,231.r />
  Then we went out on to the steps at the front of the school where there’s a little stone balustrade. There was an enormous crowd. I can’t estimate the number, but it’s a broad road, and I suppose there were 2,000 people there. And they were absolutely cheering their heads off. It was a wonderful moment. The only trouble was, I’d lost my voice so I had to shout hard to be heard. It sounded rather shrill. I went on from the uncontroversial bit that I’d said inside, to a highly political bit saying we’ll go on from this till we’ve removed all privilege in this country. It was a fabulous scene.

  After the speeches, we came down the steps. We got on top of a jeep and were driven very slowly from St George’s Grammar School right up the hill along the main road to London, which was utterly blocked by people, to the headquarters. We went into the Walter Baker Hall and there were all these people gathered. It was a moment of great drama and great personal excitement. We were overcome with emotion and gratitude and I was unable to express it, of course, because I’d lost my voice. The result was a 13,044 majority with a 13 per cent swing. There were about 200 supporters in the main hall. This was about 1 o’clock; how they all got home I just don’t know.

  The following day we got up at 8.30 and, of course, the press was terrific. The headlines that day about triumph in Bristol completely wiped out the memory of the Committee of Privileges, the dull lawyers, the old nonsense. Here was the response from the people I represented. I was very arrogant at this stage, extremely arrogant.

  After my election the London Gazette published a statement from the Crown Office saying ‘Member returned from Bristol South East, Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn.’ I rang the Public Bill Office and arranged to collect the certificate. I phoned the Sergeant-at-Arms to tell him what would happen that afternoon. He said that as far as they were concerned, I was a stranger. I got five Gallery tickets, phoned the Speaker’s Office and left at about ten to twelve for the House of Commons. There were four cars full of photographers chasing me there.