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More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007

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Commenting yesterday evening on the current infighting within the governing Labour party, a famous British tycoon said that whether in a business organisation or in a government if the team are not all on-side you're sunk. The latest volume (2001-7) of Tony Benn's diaries brings us the latest thoughts of the most celebrated serial dissident in British politics. Throughout his long career as successively the Rt Hon Anthony Wedgwood Benn then Viscount Stansgate and latterly plain Tony Benn, the author has been a cabinet minister, almost deputy leader of the Labour party, and longest-serving member of the House of Commons. He is now well over 80, widowed and retired from Parliament, no longer in robust health but still phenomenally active with speeches, broadcasts, interviews and journalism, and of course as articulate and nonconformist as ever.

Benn is not an intellectual of the stamp of Richard Crossman, whose background and career were similar and whose diaries were in their time as famous. By political instinct he is a man of the people, by temperament a perfect gentleman. He is almost a kind of English Chou En-lai, but less cerebral and with a passionate commitment to the politics of consent. The strongest thread running through this volume is his detestation of the politics of Tony Blair, which he represents as manipulative, messianic, egotistical and deeply undemocratic. On every page this diary prompts, but does not resolve, the question `How is representative democracy compatible with any kind of effective action?' He laments the slowness of the earnest left-wing talking shops, he knows what Labour committees can be like, specifically the one immediately after 9/11 which he had difficulty in getting to discuss that pivotal event because it was concerned as usual with leaflet distribution, but when it comes to what he perceives as Blair's answer, namely just ignore everyone else and `do what you think is right', every instinct in his makeup revolts.

That Blair achieved the electoral success he did largely through contempt for the processes of the party he led I don't doubt, and I wish Benn had addressed this matter with the candour he shows elsewhere. He is pretty dismissive himself of rigmarole and flummery, and I have to quote one jewel of his typical style, following the death of John-PaulII

`The election announcement has been delayed, the royal wedding has been delayed, because the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister want to go to Rome and therefore couldn't be there for the wedding. The whole thing is a complete farce really.'

As well as the manner in which Blair drove through his policies, Benn is of course in complete opposition to the policies themselves. `Modernising the poor out of existence just won't work' is memorable and, one suspects, true, as the inherent nature and particularly the ongoing cost of the `reforms' become evident. Again I wish Benn had addressed the public perception that the kind of socialism he represents is cumbrous, but he is more concerned with attacking what `New' Labour has put in its place, which it is hard to view as any model of efficiency either, though of course some are still trying to. He opposes the war in Iraq as you might expect, but also the campaigns in Afghanistan and in the former Yugoslavia, and he charts his own descent into disillusion with Israel, of which he had once been a fervent supporter.

Benn will talk to anyone, and his interview with Saddam is given in extenso here. He is on friendly terms with Conservative opponents, and his patrician courtesy and impeccable good manners have even made him good buddies with Dr Paisley, despite his open support for Sinn Fein and a united Ireland. What complete oafs he makes some of our leaders seem, and while on the topic of Mr Bush I recall another delicious remark regarding the President's supposed fondness for giving people nicknames `I wonder what nickname he gave Tony Blair.'

More than in previous diaries, we meet the family man here, now elderly, living alone and bereaved of his beloved American wife Caroline de Camp Benn. There are numerous accounts of how he was reduced to tears, and I have no difficulty with this image of him despite the composure that he so rarely loses in public. There are several photographs of the clan, and also numerous accounts of his interactions with his children and grandchildren. One particularly interesting facet of the diaries is of course that one member of the cabinet appointed by his abhorred Blair is none other than his own able and adored son Hilary, currently Secretary of State for International Development and uncannily reminiscent of his father in face, voice and gesture. We hear a bit of their conversations, but not as much as I would have liked to hear. You could not make Tony Benn stay on-side for any government or Labour party establishment if he did not happen to agree, but this is something different.

In a touching postscript he leaves open, as he obviously must, the question whether he will ever publish another volume of diaries. I am still left unclear and tantalised as to how his precise way of operating would make modern governing possible, or how he would, in the top job, cope with any such figure as himself in his cabinet. However the warnings he sounds about the decline of democratic process are loud valid and clear. It is not just the fault of Blair, or of New Labour, or of politicians in my own opinion. It is a matter of our own inertia and complaisance as citizens and electors. Benn rightly castigates the House of Commons for dereliction of its duty to keep a rein on the executive, and from America I don't hear many voices from either side of the political divide averring that the Congress is doing much better in that regard. Tony Benn you do a great job and don't kill yourself doing it.