Bill Gibson, RIP

Sorry to hear that Bill Gibson has died.

Bill, 75, was a non-smoker who lived in Lockerbie, Scotland, and was a former director of the International Coalition Against Prohibition (now dissolved), and Forces International, a US-based smokers’ rights group.

Condolences to his family and friends.

PM joins BAT

Well, I didn't see that coming.

Penny Mordaunt, former Leader of the House of Commons and, briefly, Secretary of State for Defence, has joined British American Tobacco to advise the company on its harm reduction programme.

It’s a huge coup for BAT and the tobacco control lobby is, predictably, raging. The funniest response so far, however, is a tweet (reproduced below) by Hazel Cheeseman, CEO of ASH.

Her predecessor Deborah Arnott was not known, publicly at least, for her sense of humour, but I’d like to think that Hazel had her tongue pressed firmly in her cheek when she posted it.

I particularly love the idea that the former Tory leadership candidate may have deliberately sported BAT’s corporate colours at the King’s Coronation.

One thing is certain. In America, a huge market for the company, she will be seen as quasi royalty after a stellar performance that had the Americans drooling (Why Penny Mordaunt was the star of King Charles III’s coronation).

The only person who could top her appointment would be Queen Camilla, a former smoker. Sadly, I don’t think Charles, or royal protocol, would allow it.

Penny, though, is probably a more media friendly fit. Either way, Chris Snowdon should add it to his Banter Era series of podcasts.

See: Penny Mordaunt joins British American Tobacco (BBC News) and Penny Mordaunt takes job advising one of world’s largest tobacco firms (Guardian)

On the radio with Jeremy Vine

The story about the pub garden smoking ban rumbles on.

This afternoon (12.30) I was interviewed by Jeremy Vine on Radio 2. Also on the programme was John Garrod, the pub landlord who has banned smoking in the garden of the Hope Inn in Hythe in Kent.

I repeated what I said on BBC Radio Kent on Monday.

The Hope Inn is a private business so Garrod is entitled to impose whatever policy on smoking he likes, but publicans who ban smoking outside risk driving away a substantial number of customers who smoke, and in the winter months they may be glad of their custom when no-one else wants to sit outside.

I added that there is no evidence that smoking outside is a danger to anyone else’s health, so this is NOT a public health issue, and even Garrod has been quoted saying “It’s purely a hospitality measure”.

Speaking to Jeremy Vine he doubled down on this, saying, "I'm in the hospitality business", his argument being that he has to put the interests of the majority (who don't smoke) first.

However, under questioning from Vine (who took up my point that most non-smokers are tolerant of people smoking outside), Garrod admitted he had received very few complaints prior to introducing the ban.

He also admitted he has already lost several customers as a result of the ban, but that didn't seem to bother him because he thinks the policy will attract many more new customers.

It may, it may not, but do you remember how we were told that the indoor smoking ban would attract new customers who had never set foot in a pub or, if they had, were driven away by all that smoke?

And what happened? Tens of thousands of pubs closed in the aftermath of the ban, and the historical decline in the number of pub goers continued as before.

Today, many of the establishments that survived could still close, hence the outcry from the hospitality industry when it was reported that Starmer's Government might ban smoking in beer gardens.

My issue is this. I'm all for choice therefore I have no problem with smoking and no-smoking pubs (although we should have a choice of smoking inside as well as out).

But I guarantee that within a few years publicans who have unilaterally banned smoking in their own beer gardens will be calling for a level playing field so their rivals down the road can't enjoy a commercial advantage.

Anyway, the item finished with me saying:

"If publicans start banning smoking outside because some people don’t like the smell of tobacco smoke, what next? Should we also ban outdoor barbecues because the smell of meat might trigger non-meat eaters? It’s getting a bit ridiculous."

You can listen here, starting at 33:26.

I'm sandwiched between Tears for Fears and Robert Palmer, which is not something I expected to say when I woke up this morning.

PS. I'm still blocked by Jeremy Vine on X (formerly Twitter). He blocked me a few years ago when I made a mildly critical observation in response to one of his many cycling tweets.

To be fair, I would have probably muted him sooner or later because his war on drivers was driving me mad!

I'll say this, though. In my experience (he's interviewed me several times over the years) he's a fair and impartial presenter who gives his guests plenty of time to speak.

No complaints from me on that score.

100 not out

My Auntie Dorothy is celebrating her 100th birthday this week, although I’m not sure if celebrate is the right word.

My mother’s older sister, born in April 1925, has a wry sense of humour and a self-deprecating no-nonsense attitude, so I can’t imagine she would have wanted any fuss.

Nevertheless I don’t recall anyone else in our family reaching this milestone so I think it should be celebrated, even if it’s not as rare as it used to be.

Do you remember when reaching 100 merited a telegram from the Queen and a story in the papers?

You can still get a message (from the King) on your 100th birthday but you have to be in receipt of a state pension or other benefit and live in the UK, none of which applies to my aunt.

You see, Dorothy has lived in Zurich for 75 of her 100 years. She moved there in 1950 after marrying Reini, who was Swiss German.

They met in Switzerland in 1948. (I ought to know why she was there but I can’t remember.) Reini then visited her in London and proposed.

It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like moving to the continent so soon after the war, but the standard of living in Switzerland would have been significantly higher than the UK where rationing didn’t end until 1954.

Nor had neutral Switzerland suffered the extensive damage that blighted many of our towns and cities long after the war was over.

In those days few people in Switzerland would have spoken English so Dorothy had to learn the language (Swiss German) very quickly.

(I’m told that the Swiss can understand German but the Germans have more difficulty understanding Swiss German.)

As long as I’ve known her my aunt speaks English with a hint of a Swiss German accent, and by her own admission she uses words that were familiar in the Forties and Fifties but are no longer common parlance.

"Cripes", for example, although she's not alone in that. I've heard Boris Johnson use it too.

Remarkably, until he died 20 years ago, Reini and Dorothy lived their entire married life in the same rented apartment in Zurich (renting being at least as common as home ownership in Switzerland).

They had two children, my cousins Rolf and Tom, who are seven or eight years older than me. After doing national service (which is still compulsory in Switzerland) one became a doctor, the other a dentist.

We would see them occasionally when they visited my grandparents in England, but after my grandparents died they came over less frequently, although I remember Tom visiting my parents in Derbyshire several times.

After Reini died Dorothy continued to live in the same apartment but two years ago tenants were given notice that the building was to be demolished.

Although it was a wrench to leave, it was quite good timing because Dorothy was 98 by then and she was struggling to climb the stairs. (There was no lift.)

She therefore moved to a retirement complex where a small suite of rooms gives her some independence in a safe, communal, environment.

To put Dorothy’s mobility issues in perspective, she loved travelling and even in her Nineties she visited China and other countries where she would book a personal guide to show her around.

For many years she was a member of a private women’s club near Piccadilly where she would stay whenever she was in London.

We had dinner there once, but I usually saw her only when she was visiting my parents or, after my father died, my mother.

For many years I was the proud holder of a Swiss bank account into which Dorothy paid a small sum on my birthday until I was 18.

The money sat there for years until the bank said it was going to close the account due to inactivity, so I took the money out and used it to help pay for a trip to Switzerland.

That was one of several visits to Zurich. The first time was in the late Eighties when I was invited to address a conference in Basel.

I flew to Zurich, spent two days with Dorothy and Reini, before catching a train to Basel.

It was June/July and hot. Reini enjoyed watching Wimbledon (his favourite player at that time was Boris Becker) and I recall watching the tennis on television with him.

What I remember most though was their lovely balcony that was cocooned by flowers and shrubbery, allowing us to eat outside, and the ear-shattering noise of the local church bells at seven o’clock in the morning.

It was a remarkable sound that seemed to go forever (well, several minutes) and I’d never heard anything like it, but Dorothy and Reini were oblivious to the cacophony.

I also remember them taking me by car to a village outside Zurich where I heard the unmistakeable sound of cow bells echoing across the valley. A real Sound of Music moment.

My next visit to Zurich was with my own family in 2011. Reini had died a few years before so I took them to see Dorothy, my cousins, and their children.

We drove to Zurich via France after crossing the Channel on an overnight ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo. It took us two days with an overnight stop in Lausanne.

As well as visiting family, we jumped on trams, explored the old town, and took a boat across Lake Zurich.

We also ascended Mount Rigi, north of Zurich, via a mountain railway which was quite an experience.

The view at the summit, looking down on other mountains, was extraordinary.

My third and last visit, in 2014, was also business related and was prompted by a request to meet a smokers’ rights campaigner from Russia, and a cigar merchant who flew in from Austria.

We met in a cigar shop before crossing the road to continue our meeting in an impressive but discreet smokers’ lounge above a restaurant. All very John Le Carre!

(See ‘My meeting with mysterious Mr A’.)

There was very little time for extracurricular activities, but I remember having dinner with my aunt and cousins, and a few other members of the family.

What I remember most about that trip however was watching Germany play Brazil in the semi-final of the World Cup.

I was in a windowless room in a nondescript hotel but there was a large screen and the result (Germany 7-1 Brazil) was one of the most remarkable in World Cup history.

Anyway, in a few weeks I’m taking my mother to Zurich to see her sister for what, realistically, will be the last time.

They speak every week on the phone but my mother is 94 so their combined ages are 194.

We’ll also see Rolf and Tom so I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, a very happy birthday to Auntie Dorothy.

One hundred not out!

Down in the Garden of England, something stirs

A pub landlord in Kent has banned smoking in his pub garden. According to John Garrod:

“You only need one person to be smoking a cigarette and their smoke is wafting over several other people, which makes it slightly less pleasant than it would otherwise be. So, the obvious action to take is to stop smoking within the garden, for the comfort of the majority.”

Even before the indoor smoking ban was introduced in 2007 I argued that publicans were perfectly entitled to ban smoking on their property if they wished, so I’m not going to change my position now.

If Garrod thinks it’s in the best interests of his business, good luck to him. The real pity is that publicans are no longer allowed to choose whether or not customers can smoke inside their pub, and I suspect it won't be long (whatever the Government currently says) before another attempt is made to prohibit smoking outside most hospitality venues as well.

Isolated initiatives like this may seem insignificant but they generate media coverage and before long anti-smoking activists and politicians are jumping on the bandwagon.

Anyway, it reminds me of what happened before smoking was banned inside every pub in the country.

Several years before the ban was introduced a handful of pubs (including The Free Press in Cambridge, which I remember visiting) went 'no smoking' through choice rather than coercion. That was their prerogative and I certainly didn't object.

As far as I was concerned it was absolutely fine because a pub was a private business and it was up to the landlord, not government or anti-smoking campaigners, to decide on the smoking policy.

Also, what was wrong with having smoking and no-smoking pubs? Let the market decide.

Then, in January 2005, it was announced that Weatherspoon was going to ban smoking in every one of its 650 pubs by May 2006. This was over a year before MPs voted in favour of a workplace smoking ban (with no exemptions) and the company's decision must have had some impact on how they voted.

What happened however is that Wetherspoon banned smoking in just 40 of Tim Martin's 650 pubs and it was such a 'success' that the company quietly reversed the policy a year later, preferring to wait until the Government's smoking ban was introduced nationwide in July 2007, thereby creating a level playing field.

I see a very similar thing happening again, with a relatively small number of publicans choosing to ban smoking in beer gardens, with politicians subsequently taking the matter into their own hands and passing a law that denies publicans any choice.

Anyway, what began as a local story on Friday developed legs over the weekend and appeared in the online editions of several national newspapers.

Shortly after breakfast yesterday I was asked to record a quick interview for South East Today (BBC1), which was duly edited into a (very) short soundbite, and this morning I was on BBC Radio Kent.

And by complete coincidence, I just happened to be in Kent on Sunday and Monday.

On Sunday we drove to Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse where we met friends and were taken (by taxi) to Chapel Down Winery near Tenterden.

After lunch in the on-site restaurant we were given a tour of the vineyard, followed by a (generous) tasting session.

(I should add that my wife and I love Chapel Down sparkling wines, our current favourite being the Chapel Down Grand Reserve 2019, closely followed by the award-winning Chapel Down Rosé.)

We then returned to Sissinghurst Castle Farmhouse where we stayed the night.

Monday began with a delicious ‘full English’ before we checked out and went for a stroll through Sissinghurst Castle Garden which is right next to the farmhouse.

Designed by English novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West (1882-1962) - who lived there with her husband, politician and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) - the gardens are considered to be among the finest in the country.

I'm not sure that April is the best or most colourful month to enjoy the garden, but the blossom was nice and it wasn't crowded, as I'm sure it must be in summer.

Now owned by the National Trust, Sissinghurst Castle Garden was nevertheless worth the visit. Combined with a tour of Chapel Down Winery, what's not to like?

Below: Sissinghurst Castle Garden and Chapel Down Winery

Grounds for discussion

Oliver Holt, chief sportswriter for the Daily Mail and a self-confessed ‘stadium nerd’, has just completed his personal odyssey to every current Premier and Football League ground.

The final one was Harrogate Town, making it 92 in total, but it may not be the end of Holt’s journey because promotion from the National League, the fifth tier of English football, sometimes introduces new grounds to the Football League.

Alternatively clubs move to a new stadium. At the end of this season, for example, Everton will move from Goodison Park, their home since 1892, to a new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock in Liverpool.

Holt’s job has presumably made the task a little easier but it’s still an impressive achievement, prompting similar stories from other football fans.

One person, for example, wrote that he too has visited every Premier and Football League ground and is doing it all again, this time under floodlights.

Compared to that the list of football stadia I've visited is pretty feeble, but I’m going to list them anyway. (If you're not interested look away now.)

In England I’ve been to 15 Premier and Football League grounds, although three no longer exist:

Chelsea (Stamford Bridge)
Derby (Baseball Ground and Pride Park)
Aston Villa (Villa Park)
Liverpool (Anfield)
Manchester United (Old Trafford)
Tottenham (White Hart Lane)
Crystal Palace (Selhurst Park)
Ipswich (Portman Road)
Southampton (St Mary’s Stadium)
Watford (Vicarage Road)
MK Dons (Stadium MK)
Leyton Orient (Brisbane Road)
Cambridge United (Abbey Stadium)
Chesterfield (Recreation Ground)

As I've mentioned several times, I was a regular at Stamford Bridge in the early Eighties, and a frequent visitor to the Baseball Ground for most of that decade after my parents moved to Derbyshire.

The Baseball Ground is one of the three grounds that no longer exist, the others being White Hart Lane (Tottenham) and the Recreation Ground (Chesterfield).

My experience of White Hart Lane wasn’t great. I went with a friend who was a Spurs supporter and one of the first female football writers.

We stood on a packed terrace behind one goal and had to dodge a hail of bricks that were lobbed in our direction by Arsenal fans in an adjoining enclosure.

The Recreation Ground in Chesterfield was the first football stadium I took my son to, but it wasn't my first choice.

He must have been six or seven and we were staying with my parents in Derbyshire so my intention was to take him to Pride Park, the new stadium Derby moved to in 1995. However, Derby weren’t playing at home that weekend so we went to Chesterfield instead.

Since then we’ve gone to quite a few matches together, in England and Scotland.

My daughter, on the other hand, was 20 when I took her to her first (and only) men’s match. On that occasion we travelled to Motherwell to see Dundee United play St Mirren in the final of the little known Scottish Challenge Cup.

To date I have visited 18 of the current 42 league grounds in Scotland, to which you can add St Mirren’s Love Street which no longer exists. The full list is:

Dundee United (Tannadice)
Dundee (Dens Park)
Aberdeen (Pittodrie)
Celtic (Parkhead)
Rangers (Ibrox)
Hearts (Tynecastle)
Hibernian (Easter Road)
St Johnstone (McDiarmid Park)
Motherwell (Fir Park)
St Mirren (Love Street)
Raith Rovers (Starks Park)
Inverness Caledonian Thistle (Caledonian Stadium)
Arbroath (Gayfield Park)
Hamilton (New Douglas Park)
Partick Thistle (Firhill)
Stranraer (Stair Park)
Greenock Morton (Cappielow Park)
Dunfermline Athletic (East End Park)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been to Tannadice (it’s well into three figures) but my favourite Scottish stadium has to be Tynecastle in Edinburgh where the steep stands are close to the pitch, creating a brilliant atmosphere.

Inverness, in the Highlands, and Stranraer, in the south west corner of the country, are the furthest I’ve gone for a match.

The trip to Inverness – aboard the overnight sleeper from London’s Euston Station – is something I'll never forget, especially the view of the snow-capped mountains as dawn broke over the Cairngorms.

Pittodrie (Aberdeen) and Gayfield Park (Arbroath) are among the coldest grounds I’ve experienced, largely because they sit right next to the North Sea. Starks Park (home of Raith Rovers in Kirkcaldy) isn’t much better.

In England I loved the Baseball Ground, and for the same reasons I like Villa Park too. It's an old fashioned football ground with enormous character, a sense of history, and a fantastic atmosphere when full.

In my experience, having sat among them, Villa fans are fatalistic but funny, which in my book is a winning combination.

Anfield, oddly enough, didn't do it for me, despite its reputation. Then again, I watched a drab 0-0 draw between Liverpool and Coventry City, so I obviously picked the wrong match.

I’ve visited one non-league ground (Maidenhead United) but that was in 1968. York Road has been home to the club since 1871 and is said to be the ‘oldest continuously-used senior association football ground in the world by the same club’.

I might revisit it, if only out of curiosity, because I’ve read that it’s hardly changed in the 57 years since I was there.

I’ve also been to Blackpool FC but that wasn’t for a football match. I was a guest at a dinner hosted by the Clubs and Institutes Union who were holding their AGM in Blackpool and the function room overlooked the pitch.

What else? Oh yes, I’ve been to Wembley, old and new. The first time I went to the old Wembley was in 1982 when England beat Hungary 1-0.

The ‘new’ Wembley, which is almost 20 years old, leaves me a bit cold because it’s rather characterless, like so many 21st century stadiums in the UK with their coloured plastic seating and tacky seat typography (yes, that’s what it’s called).

To be fair, the sight lines and facilities are far superior to the old stadium, but I loved the ‘twin towers’ and the long walk the players had to take from the dressing rooms behind one goal.

They were unique to Wembley and apart from the arch (which you don't really notice when you're inside the stadium), I don't think there's anything unique about the 'new' stadium at all.

Compared to some modern stadiums in other countries it's a bit disappointing. But at least it's not Hampden Park which should have been demolished, like the old Wembley, and replaced with a new stadium years ago.

I've been to Scotland's national stadium eight or nine times but never to watch Scotland. Each time it’s been to support Dundee United in various cup finals so apart from 1994 and 2010 it's rarely been a happy experience.

The other national stadiums I’ve been to have all been rugby grounds - Twickenham (England), Principality (Wales), Murrayfield (Scotland), and Aviva (Ireland).

Murrayfield (in Edinburgh) was the first rugby stadium I went to. It was in the late Seventies, I think, and I remember climbing up a steep bank of stairs in order to stand on an enormous concrete terrace. (In those days, apart from the main stand, most of the ground was uncovered, if I remember.)

Steep terraces with crush barriers were not unusual in those days, even after the Ibrox Stadium disaster on January 2, 1971, when 66 people died when they fell and were crushed on a stairway towards the end of an Old Firm derby.

When I began watching Dundee United in 1969 the terracing at Tannadice was pretty steep too, albeit on a smaller scale, but I loved it because the view was brilliant. (In those days opposing fans weren’t segregated either and often swapped ends at half-time.)

On reflection though it probably wasn’t the safest place when there was a capacity crowd. The problem was, if someone was inadvertently pushed from behind where there was no barrier to stop them pitching forward, it could lead to a domino effect, with gravity doing the rest.

We didn’t think about it at the time, but when everyone around you was jumping up and down, celebrating a goal, you had to keep your wits about you and stay on your feet.

Cricket wise, I’ve been to pitifully few grounds – Lords, The Oval, and Trent Bridge in Nottingham come to mind – and I once watched a John Player Sunday League match in Canterbury.

I know it was a long time ago because apart from the competition sponsor (a tobacco company) the matches were 40 overs a side, a format of the game that is no longer played in professional cricket.

If you’ve come this far and would like to nominate your favourite (or least favourite) sporting ground, please do.

I should add that I have never been to a football match abroad, but if Chelsea Women upset the odds, beat Barcelona in the semi-final of the Women’s Champions League, and reach the final at Estádio José Alvalade in Lisbon next month, I might be tempted.

Above: Caledonian Stadium, Inverness (March 2014)
Below: Tannadice Park, Dundee (December 2019)

Working lunch

I had lunch this week with an old friend and colleague.

It’s 20 years since I first met Jacqui. She was working as a consultant to a PR firm called Kaizo that was recruited to work on Forest’s campaign against the workplace smoking ban.

It was my first direct experience of working with a public relations company since I was in PR myself in the early Eighties.

Back then I was a lowly account executive and I found dealing with some clients quite frustrating, so I was determined not to be THAT client when working with Kaizo.

In particular, if you hire someone for their creativity and expertise, don't fight or continually dilute their ideas because the end result will probably please no-one.

If they get it wrong the chances are you didn't brief them properly and they misunderstood what you wanted.

On the other hand, I once had to work with a graphic designer who was so hostile to any feedback I found it quite stressful, if not intimidating. Then again, I was 22 and it was my first job.

By coincidence Kaizo's office in Margaret Street near Oxford Circus was very close to the office Forest moved to when we left Audley House in Palace Street in Westminster in February 2005.

A small team, including Jacqui, was assigned to the Forest campaign (Fight the Ban: Fight for Choice) and we had great fun generating ideas with Kaizo’s creative team and executing them.

Subsequently employed directly by Forest as a consultant, Jacqui has worked on numerous events and campaigns, and to quote the late Cilla Black we’ve had a lorra lorra laughs.

For the best part of a decade she lived in Pembrokeshire in Wales, but a few years ago she moved to Herne Bay in Kent where she opened an independent bookshop.

The Little Green Bookshop is now in its third year and doing well, despite the difficult financial climate and opposition from the likes of Amazon and big high street chains like Waterstones.

Among the things we discussed this week was a forthcoming Forest lunch at Boisdale of Belgravia which is part of our 'Freedom Up In Smoke' campaign. Watch this space.

Big Benn

Had he not died, aged 88, in 2014 Tony Benn would have been 100 yesterday.

The centenary of his birth has prompted a number of articles and on his Facebook page singer songwriter Billy Bragg has taken a pop at Elon Musk by listing the “five questions to ask the powerful” that were once asked by the former Viscount Stansgate, a title Benn renounced in order to become an MP in 1963.

The Spectator, meanwhile, has published a review of a new collection of Benn’s speeches and articles (The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? The Political Writing), giving it the apt headline, Tony Benn, bogeyman to some, beacon of hope and light to many.

I say apt because I remember all too clearly when Benn was considered a bogeyman and a serious threat to the country.

Thankfully he finished a poor fourth (out of six) when standing for leader of the Labour Party following the resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976, and his ministerial career, which began as Postmaster General, concluded as Secretary of State for Energy under Jim Callaghan.

Thereafter, with Labour in opposition for 18 years (1979 to 1997), and fellow socialist Michael Foot destroyed at the ballot box in 1983, any threat Benn may have posed was a distant memory.

Instead he became, to some, a national treasure, while others (including me) viewed him as something of an irrelevance.

Nevertheless, in the summer of 2002 I interviewed him for The Politico, a short-lived magazine I founded with Iain Dale who was the owner and MD of Politico's Bookshop in Westminster.

We met in Edinburgh where he was appearing at the Festival Theatre, and to mark the centenary of his birth I am reposting it here.

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.