The Benn Diaries: The Definitive Collection

Edited by Ruth Winstone

Hutchison, £30

Review by Iain Macwhirter

WHEN I interviewed former Labour minister and peace campaigner Tony Benn in the 1990s, his opening gambit was always to punch the record button on his cassette tape recorder and hold it between us during the interview. I didn't mind, though I thought it looked a little daft on TV.

Benn recorded all his BBC interviews to discourage malign editing of his words. He would always have the original to check against what was broadcast. But it was also for his own record, and Benn must have had the most recorded political life in history. For 70 years, the Rt Hon. Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, Viscount Stansgate, to give him his original title, kept a daily diary and recorded every jot and tittle of his public utterances.

Ruth Winstone began editing this mountain of handwritten, typed and taped material in 1985 when she was a clerk at the House of Commons. It became a life's work. She reprocessed the millions of words of his diaries into nine epic volumes, and produced numerous compilations of his speeches and writings. This is not the first condensed volume of Benn's epic diaries, either. But it is presumably intended for a new generation of Millennials for whom Benn was a national treasure, the only ex-cabinet minister to regularly appear at the Glastonbury pop festival before he died in 2014.

Benn's paranoia was understandable. In the 1970s and 1980s he was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by the security services, a disruptive influence by the Labour Party establishment, and a “loony leftie” by the press. He was undoubtedly eccentric. A teetotal vegetarian, at his height he admitted to drinking 18 pints of tea a day and was permanently wreathed in smoke from the pipe he puffed for most of his life. He was also a junk food fanatic who lived largely on pizza and ice-cream and occupied a Holland Park mansion maintained in a state of wilful dilapidation. But he was one of the greatest parliamentarians of the 20th century.

He began his diaries during the Second World War, when he was training to be an RAF pilot. Benn served in Africa in 1945 and his older brother, Michael, died in a plane crash. Like many of that generation, he comes across as a serious young man with considerable courage and a chronic fear of the opposite sex. He married a wealthy American, Caroline, whom he met at Oxford, and with whom he had four children. But perhaps his greatest love was politics.

Most politicians start on the left and become conservative as they get older. Benn did the reverse. In his early years as a Labour MP in the 1950s and 1960s, and after he renounced his peerage, he wasn't particularly left-wing. He didn't read the Communist Manifesto until he was 51 when his wife gave him a copy as a Christmas present. He was surprised to find that Karl Marx's epistle closely mirrored his own unconventional brand of New Testament Christianity.

It was the experience of the 1976 financial crisis that really radicalised Benn, while he served as a cabinet minister in the Labour government of Harold Wilson. Under pressure from foreign lenders, the Labour chancellor Denis Healy was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bail-out, rather as Greece did in 2009. The IMF demanded deep cuts in public spending, the sale of state assets like BP and an end to nationalisation and price controls. This convinced Benn that debt crises were not mere financial events, but a means by which the capitalist establishment rolled back the political gains of the working class.

His own Alternative Economic Strategy of wholesale nationalisation, exchange controls, retreat from the European Common Market and wealth taxes, never saw the light of day. Labour fell after the Winter of Discontent in 1979 and Benn entered the political wilderness. But one suspects it might have had its own problems. Benn was a brilliant speaker, an inspired propagandist and hugely energetic minister, but he was also a little naïve. He was overly sympathetic to Sinn Fein during the IRA's murderous mainland bombing campaign (which appears with shocking frequency in his diary entries), and he rather idolised Chairman Mao. Mind you, he wasn't alone. He recounts how James Callaghan, who was to become Labour Prime Minister, remarked after a visit to Czechoslovakia in the 1960s that “socialism really works”.

But it's hard to criticise a politician who lived a life of rigorous political principle in an age of compromise and capitulation. Because of his privileged upbringing – he was educated at private school – he was perhaps less susceptible to the lure of money and celebrity which seduces so many politicians of the left. He seemed genuinely to enjoy the company of trade unionists and spent a huge amount of time supporting disputes such as the 1984 miners’ strike. He had no time for Tony Blair, needless to say, and said he should be prosecuted for “war crimes”.

This is a long book at 700 pages, and perhaps because I had read much of the material before, seemed less compelling than I expected. It needs quite a lot of background to make sense of some of the entries in the 1970s and 1980s and readers will need to keep Mr Google on hand to fill in the gaps. But the Benn Diaries is undoubtedly one of the great political works of the 20th century. Benn's was a long life lived to the full, and his words will live a lot longer.