Tony Benn: Veteran Labour Politician Dies

Tony Benn: 'Controversial, But Courteous'

Updated: 1:18pm UK, Friday 14 March 2014

By Jon Craig, Chief Political Correspondent

Harold Wilson famously said of Tony Benn: "He immatures with age."

And it's true that as he grew older Benn changed from a charismatic and dynamic minister in the mainstream of government to a divisive left-winger who split the Labour Party, before becoming the national treasure of his declining years.

He was controversial, but always courteous. I first met him in the late 1970s, when he came to speak at Southampton University Students Union while still a Cabinet minister.

He paid his own train fare and came alone, without the army of spin doctors that accompany Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet members today.

Throughout his long career, he would record interviews with journalists, for many years on an old-fashioned cassette recorder. He was quirky, but never tetchy.

Teetotal and famous for drinking tea from large mugs. And before smoking was banned he would smoke his pipe at party meetings and conferences.

In the early 60s, in terms of Labour Party presentation Benn was the Peter Mandelson of his day, a "moderniser" pioneering the party's use of television as a means of communicating with voters as Wilson swept the Tories out of office in 1964.

He leaves some historic legacies. As Postmaster General in the Wilson government he oversaw the opening of London's Post Office Tower and drove pirate radio stations off the air. Then, as Minister for Technology, he was in charge of the development of Concorde.

In those days, he was known as Antony Wedgewood Benn, until he declared in 1973 – when he was moving sharply left with Labour in Opposition – that he wanted to be known in future as Tony Benn.

For years, however, the Daily Mail continued to call him by his old name.

Of course, despite his claims to be a great hero of the working class, Benn was in fact as upper crust as they come and earlier, in 1960, had to fight a battle in Parliament to disown his hereditary peerage, Viscount Stansgate, so he could remain an MP.

In 1975, when Wilson was back in Downing Street and held a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the Common Market, Benn shared platforms with Right-wing Tory MPs opposed to Britain's membership.

But it was after Labour's crushing defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that he became the leader of Labour's hardline left wing in a civil war that led to the breakaway SDP formed by major Labour figures Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen.

In 1980 he stood against Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, in one of the most bitter and divisive elections in the party's history. He lost by a whisker, but the party split deepened and within a year the SDP was on the march.

At Labour's low point, the crushing election defeat of 1983, Benn lost his seat in Bristol.

"Labour gain!" chanted Right-wing Labour MPs, appalled by Benn's destructiveness over the previous few years.

But he bounced back in a by-election in Chesterfield, selected on a snowy Sunday night – I was there! - and from the moment he returned to the Commons until he retired he was almost inseparable from his left-wing Derbyshire neighbour, "the Beast of Bolsover", Dennis Skinner.

In the 1984-85 miners' strike, Benn and Skinner were Arthur Scargill's strongest allies and loudest cheerleaders in Parliament, while Labour leader Neil Kinnock had a nightmare year because of Scargill's refusal to hold a ballot.

In 1999, he proudly introduced his son Hilary into the Commons after Hilary won a by-election in Leeds Central, campaigning on the slogan "a Benn, not a Bennite". And in 2001, the Benn dynasty in the Commons assured, he stood down claiming he was "leaving Parliament to spend more time on politics".

In his latter years, he became a leading opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming president of the Stop the War movement. And in his 80s he becamse more popular than at any time during his career, touring Britain with his one-man show and his diaries became best sellers.

At Westminster, he will be remembered as one of the best speakers in the House of Commons, highly respected by Conservative MPs who shared his anti-EU views.

But for many Labour MPs, he will be remembered as an aristocrat with a romantic view of the working class whose judgement was often flawed.

Many older Labour MPs will never forgive him for what they regarded as his destructive splitting of the party which came close to destroying it in the 1980s.

Those Labour MPs, critical too of his opposition to Tony Blair and the war in Iraq, would also agree with Harold Wilson's famous phrase about Tony Benn.

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