Tony Benn

I recently found copies of various magazines I used to edit. Each Sunday, for the next few weeks, I'm going to post some of the interviews we published.

In the summer of 2002 I interviewed Tony Benn for The Politico, a short-lived magazine I founded with Iain Dale who was the owner and MD of Politico's Bookshop in Westminster. A controversial and divisive figure when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies, Benn retired as an MP in 2001, famously announcing that he was "leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics." We met in Edinburgh where he was appearing at the Festival Theatre.

BIG BENN

‘Hello, Edinburgh!’

If those weren’t the exact words Tony Benn used to greet the 1800 people who filled the city’s Festival Theatre to hear the 77-year-old Labour legend, they should have been. The presentation might be slightly different but to these ears 'An Audience With Tony Benn' is more pop than politics. Indeed, for all his protests that this is a ‘public meeting’, I can’t imagine that political debate has ever been this cosy.

Reviewers have complimented him on being a ‘natural entertainer’. ‘Old stager Benn brings the house down’ gushed the Daily Telegraph in January. In July the Guardian likened him to Ronnie Corbett (complete with armchair) and the comparison is spot on. Except that Benn, the former big bad wolf of British politics, gets more laughs.

Insistent that his nationwide tour is not a ‘show’, Tony Benn politely declined to be interviewed backstage in his dressing room. Instead, we met the following morning at his hotel where we made ourselves comfortable while he kindly ordered tea and biscuits.

‘I always intended they would be public meetings,’ he begins, ‘[but] the media won’t report public meetings. They are a big no-no. But if they are called a roadshow they do.’

He seems slightly bemused by the media attention. Reviews, interviews, profiles, 'An Audience With Tony Benn' was even broadcast on BBC4 and may transfer to BBC1. ‘It seems quite astonishing because I have addressed far bigger audiences this year at peace demonstrations on Iraq, on Palestine, on privatisation, but none of them are reported. You get these huge meetings going on all over the place and not a word appears.’

The current tour, he says, is an attempt to bring back the public meeting. ‘We’re bringing politics back to where it belongs. I really feel that.’

He explains the humour by arguing that laugher is important as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the message. ‘You don’t want to be a po-faced academic. You want to make it come alive. The point is that in modern politics they try to control what you say, what you think and what you do all the time. If you can make that funny it is more effective than just looking at it in a grim way.’

As public meetings go these aren’t cheap. In Edinburgh it could have cost a family of four £60, which is no doubt why the overwhelming majority of the audience were middle-aged and middle class. Who would Benn have paid to hear? ‘Mr Gladstone, obviously. Lloyd George I met and some of his stuff was really powerful. Churchill was very interesting. I used to sit in the House and listen.’

You don’t have to agree with Benn’s politics to acknowledge his extraordinary charm and his insatiable appetite for work. As well as the tour, he is about to promote Free At Last, the latest volume in his seemingly endless series of published diaries.

He began writing a journal during the Second World War. ‘It was illegal to keep a diary during the war just in case you were captured by the Germans. So I had to put key words in code. It was very simple Morse code which I learned as a boy scout. I had to decode it in order to publish it.’ He then dictated his diary to a secretary until he first got in the Cabinet. ‘I had this funny idea that Cabinet was secret and I couldn’t dictate to a woman who hadn’t taken the Official Secrets Act.’

The publication of Free At Last means there are now 61 years of published diaries from 1940 to 2001. The discipline involved is truly mind-boggling. I feel exhausted just thinking about it. ‘If there was an interesting Cabinet I’d miss my lunch and dictate it while my memory was fresh.’ But in general, says Benn, he writes it ‘before I go to bed or sometimes in the middle of the day if I’ve got ten minutes to spare.’

Some entries are quite short; others can stretch to 10,000 words. ‘If you’re very, very tired at night you yearn to go to bed but you can’t. I once went from London to Tokyo on a ministerial trip and I was so tired when I got to Tokyo I turned on the tape recorder and went to sleep while I dictated my diary and my diary records that moment.’

It isn’t only the diary that has to be maintained. ‘I have three or four parallel files. I have this thing called my diary notes – all the minutes of meetings that I attend and any key letters that supplement or illustrate what’s in the diary. It’s all terribly time consuming. In fact it takes much longer to keep the papers and sort them than it does to dictate the diary.’

What motivates him to maintain this extraordinary document? There is a responsibility, he says, to account for your life when you die. ‘I think when the Almighty says, “What did you do with your life?”, if you can give him 15 million words on a CD-ROM that at least answers the question.’

The diaries also act as his working papers. ‘I use them all the time. If you do it meticulously every day, which I do, it’s a very, very valuable working document. That’s really why I keep it. I think, probably, it is the most useful thing I have done in my life. You have made available in detail to anyone who wants to look at it later what the political developments were over a period of 60 years. I’m sounding a bit conceited, but I think having recorded all that was really useful.’

He admits that his temper occasionally gets the better of him and his colleagues get the sharper side of his tongue. ‘You have to let it out, so it goes in the diary.’ The uncut diary, he tells me, is five times as long as the published diary and has ‘no limitations’. One day, he says, it will be placed in the public domain but ‘I’ll be dead and gone before that happens.’

Accuracy and integrity, he says, are vital ingredients. A diary must also be honest ‘in the sense that you mustn’t suppress the mistakes you have made. It is not a memoir where you invent triumphs and forget failures. A diary is a confession. You can’t include everything so have to choose things that obviously stand out as having been fundamentally important and things that are still relevant.’

Other people’s diaries don’t really interest him (‘I write diaries, I don’t read them’). Today he rarely reads books at all. ‘I suppose I should read more than I do but I find it quite difficult to read now. I just find I doze off and I don’t pick up ideas as quickly from the printed page as I do from when I listen and watch somebody.

‘I get my information much more orally than by reading. I suppose I should be ashamed of it but I find you can pick up something much more quickly listening to somebody than by reading it.’

I read somewhere that Benn is obsessed by the concept of time. He tells me that to write that something is a complete waste of time ‘is probably the greatest insult I can fashion.’

‘My father,’ he explains, ‘read a book by Lionel Bennett, How To Make 24 Hours Out Of Every Day. I got a copy of it for the first time about six months ago. I’d never seen it before. Bennett’s very Victorian idea was that everyone is equal in one respect: nobody’s got more than 24 hours a day and nobody’s got less, however rich or poor you are.’

‘My father had, when I was young, a time chart where he listed the number of hours’ work he did and the number of hours’ sleep he and and in theory work and sleep would equal 24.’

At his father’s request Benn also kept a time chart for a period. ‘I’ve still got it – work and sleep and I forget what other category I had. But that’s a Victorian idea. So although we are now in a new century I think a lot of my ideas and principles are rooted back in that society.’

More people should listen to Tony Benn. He makes politics – and life – sound interesting and insists there are a lot of good politicians at work today. ‘It’s very easy for old men to say “It isn’t as it was in the old days.” But then people used to say there was nobody like Gladstone and Lloyd George. There are some brilliant people in parliament now. Richard Shepherd [Conservative MP from 1979 to 2015] is a very able guy; Alan Simpson [Labour MP from 1992 to 2010] is brilliant on environmental and other matters. But they are dismissed at the moment.

‘I am really quite emotional about the political process. Somebody said to me last night, “Oh, it must have been an easy life being an MP” and I thought, “My God, if you knew.” I got 25,000 letters for the last year I was in Parliament and I read them all and answered them all. I did hundreds of meetings. I was in the House till eleven or twelve at night. Five-thirty every Friday morning I went to Chesterfield where I did an eight hour surgery.

‘The physical strain of being a conscientious member of parliament is absolutely phenomenal. This idea that being an MP or a minister is a cushy job is a complete illusion. It’s terribly hard work. I couldn’t do it now.’

Instead Tony Benn is taking politics back to the people. The gist of his argument is that politicians rarely get to say anything on television or radio without being interrupted by the likes of Paxman, Humphrys or Snow. Hence his forthcoming debate with hard-hitting Tory David Davis. With Ashdown, Widdecombe and (allegedly) Heseltine waiting in the wings to follow his example with ‘meetings’ of their own, it seems this is one crusade that Benn might actually win. Fasten your seatbelts now.

Following a stroke in 2012, Tony Benn died on March 14, 2014. He was 88. On March 5, 2019, it was announced that a large political archive of Benn's speeches, diaries, letters, pamphlets, recordings and ephemera had been accepted in lieu of £210,000 inheritance tax and allocated to the British Library. The audio recordings are said to total thousands of hours of content.