The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (19 page)

The bill, when it came in from the other side, was £7,500 and our own was £1,000. We realised that a public fund was urgently needed, and we had various talks with people. Michael Zander carried on and we got a list of sponsors, including some fairly distinguished people who agreed to give their names. Attlee, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Bronowski, Fenner Brockway, Jo Grimond, Augustus John, Elwyn Jones, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Christopher Mayhew, Gerald Nabarro, Harold Nicolson, Charles Pannell, C.P. Snow and the Bishop of Southwark all agreed to be sponsors of the Bristol Fund. We set up a committee of Ungoed-Thomas, Robin Day and Michael Zander who would be empowered to sign the cheques. Michael worked on this. It was difficult for me because I didn’t
want this presented as a hard-luck story; clearly that would have been wrong.

Macleod and Butler were both distinctly unenthusiastic about the case. I am afraid, frankly, that for reasons of crude self-interest neither of them wants Home or Hailsham to be able to come back to the Commons from the Lords. This is the only real explanation, because on grounds of principle you would imagine that both of them would side with the younger element in the Government who wants a new and modern image, and here is a way to be popular without spending any money.

David Butler mentioned that he had met Rab at a party, who had said, ‘I don’t think Macmillan is ever going to go. You know what he said to me last weekend? “I don’t see why I should make room for you, old cock.”’

I think that while Macmillan remains there, he might well think it unattractive to have Home back. Home would be a godsend to the Labour Party. His qualities are completely overrated by his own party and are preserved for the public mind by the fact that he is not subjected to cross-examination. So I would be very much in favour of him, but incidentally the Labour Party’s attitude now is slightly altered by the fact that we might appear to be helping the Government to find a more effective leader, and quite a number of people have said to me, including Dick Crossman, ‘Of course the price we pay for you is having Hailsham as the Leader of the Conservative Party.’

Friday 18 January 1963

Hugh Gaitskell died today after a terrific fight for his life over the last week or so. Nobody had realised how serious it was and it has dominated the press and television in an astonishing way. It is a terrible personal tragedy for him as he was closer to Downing Street than at any time in his life.

The odious thing about the obituaries is the way the Tories are building his death up with half an eye to suggesting that there is no possible successor. Macmillan’s tribute was the most revolting, since he and Gaitskell hated each other. Indeed one of the curious factors operating to check bipartisanship in politics has been this personal hatred.

For me, Hugh’s death produced mixed reactions. I have worked closely with him for twelve years and when he was at his nicest he could be very kind indeed. After the 1959 Election he put me on the Front Bench as Shadow Minister of Transport, which was an extraordinary promotion.

On the other hand he was a divisive leader of the Party. He had a real civil servant’s mind, very little imagination and hardly any understanding of how people worked. His pernickety mind always managed to engineer a confrontation of principles which he would then seek to resolve by brute force.

He never could understand the force or logic of views with which he disagreed. He projected the unilateralists as Communists and fellow-travellers
and those who supported the Common Market as traitors to the Commonwealth and extremists. He thus isolated himself from an increasing number of colleagues as time went on. But his death seems a disaster because it looks as if George Brown will succeed him and for a number of reasons he is totally unsuited to be Leader of the Party.

Thursday 14 February

Tonight Harold was elected Leader of the Labour Party. It is a great shot in the arm and opens up all sorts of possibilities for the Party. I have known him well personally, have always agreed with his general line and voted for him against Gaitskell in November 1960. He is an excellent chairman, gets on well with people and has some radical instincts where Hugh had none.

Monday 25 March

This evening I had fifty minutes with Harold in his room. It was a delight to find him so relaxed and easy. Gaitskell used to be so tense and tired and often signed his letters while I presented my points to him. I gave Harold all the stuff I had prepared for the debate next Thursday and he seemed pleased with it.

Then he walked up and down beside the long table and talked in an expansive way about how he was going to run the Election. He plans to have a mobile headquarters of personal staff and writers moving from city to city with him and do a daily press conference and one or two major evening appearances. He’s not going to hundreds of village courts and market squares.

He said, ‘I’m not going to sit in my hotel room putting shillings in the gas and writing an article for the
Sunday Times
in my pyjamas as Hugh used to. If I have to do articles I’ll have J.B. Priestley travelling with me writing them for me.

This is a most imaginative idea and we must gear our TV and radio to it. He seemed to want me to be with him all the time during the Election, which would mean even less time in Bristol than I had in 1959. He obviously expects me to do most of the working out of this.

Thursday 28 March

Had a long talk to Dick about the Profumo-Keeler scandal. He said that Dr Stephen Ward, the Harley Street osteopath procurer, ran a sort of brothel on the Astor estate at Cliveden. Profumo lied in his statement to the Commons and Wilson is putting a note of what happened to Macmillan with a warning that it will be raised if something isn’t done about Profumo. I’m not in favour of private life scandals being used politically but it certainly makes the Government look pretty hypocritical.

Friday 10 May

On to Bryan Magee’s party and then to Tony Crosland’s for a couple of
hours. I had a long talk to Tony about his attitude to Wilson, who he still thinks is a shit, but who he also thinks has done very well and would like to help in any way he could. I must try to pass this on to Harold since Tony is too good to waste. But the simple fact is that with Hugh’s death his old courtiers feel out in the cold – exactly as I felt with Hugh. Roy Jenkins is bitter about it and jealous of what he conceives to be my relationship with Harold, which frankly is similar to his relationship with Hugh. Tony is getting nicer and nicer as the years go by and, as he is a very old friend, that is rather pleasant.

Monday 13 May

This evening went to St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, for a meeting of the Christian Agnostics to hear the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, talking about his book
Honest to God,
which we had gathered to discuss. The Reverend Joseph McCulloch has organised this group, justifying its name by reference to the line (from Oranges and Lemons) which runs: ‘I do not know – says the great bell of Bow’.

At this gathering were Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral, Father Corbishley (a Jesuit writer), George Dickson (an industrialist), Duncan Fairn (who took the chair), Gerald Gardiner, Dr Graham Howe (the humanist psychiatrist), the Earl of Longford, Canon and Mrs Milford, Mrs J.B. Priestley and a number of others.

The Bishop opened by saying that secularism was not basically anti-Christian and that Christians must understand and even welcome the revolt against dualistic supernaturalism, the mythological view of the world and the religiosity of the Church. He said his book was designed to help those who were in revolt to see the basic validity of the Christian message.

Canon Collins asked whether Christ was perfect, for if he was he was then God. Woolwich replied that he wanted to write a book about Christ and that the Virgin birth made Christ seem unreal. Woolwich’s interest in Christ lay in his normality, not his abnormality. He felt he could not make sweeping statements about Christ’s moral life, for what was significant was his obedience. Collins replied that if you simply say Christ was ‘the best man I know’, Christianity could never get started.

We broke up for supper and resumed for another hour and a half. Later we had a much deeper discussion about the supernatural in which I had a long confrontation with Corbishley about whether the evidence for the supernatural came really from external manifestations or the discovery of hidden depths. Corbishley was splendidly Jesuitical in saying that you had to have mythology ‘to get people to pray’. Here is the real nub of the question. Is prayer a duty or a need?

I attacked the double standards by which the in-group of Christians know that the mythology is bunk but they don’t discuss it publicly for fear of
offending the faithful. Moreover, if the maintenance of the idea of the supernatural is justified on the grounds of practical necessity, it must be judged by results. And by results it has failed to stem the rising tide of secularism.

Woolwich summed up briefly. He is really an academic with guts but he is coming under such heavy fire now that I wonder if he can stand up to the pressure. The Anglican hierarchy is beginning to sense that his vibrations may start an avalanche and ruin its plans for Christian unity. But then unity on those terms is death. I hope he has the courage to go on and see it through.
Honest to God
is certainly the most helpful Christian theology that I’ve ever come across and I’m sure millions of others feel the same.

Friday 17 May

Had to catch the night sleeper back from Teignmouth to London and got to Exeter station at 10.30 with three and a quarter hours to wait. The refreshment bar was closed of course. The waiting room was bare with a few hard-backed chairs, so I blew up a beach mattress, had a cup of tea from my thermos, set my alarm, stuffed the earpiece of my transistor under my pillow and went to sleep.

The alarm went off at 1.30 and I found the room full of football fans who had been eyeing me as if I was a drunk, or a crank, or both. The train was on time and I got to sleep quickly.

Saturday 18 May

Home at 8 am and off at 9.30 to Yarmouth for a Festival of Labour rally. It was so cold on the pier that the band was playing with literally nobody in sight. However, about a thousand people turned up for the meeting inside. I travelled back with Harold Campbell, the new Secretary of the Co-operative Party, and he explained to me the inside story of the London Co-op row in which John Stonehouse, a former director of the Co-op, has become involved. It is a complicated story but John doesn’t come out of it very well. Also heard from him what a difference it had made to Labour’s relations with the Co-op to have Harold Wilson in the job. Wherever you look his touch is evident.

Friday 24 May

This evening Caroline and I went to Mervyn Stockwood’s fiftieth birthday party at Bishop’s House in Tooting Bec. His chaplain, Mr Mayne, had organised it and it was a very amusing do. He called Mervyn ‘My Lord’, which was slightly overdone. Mervyn was wearing a huge purple cassock with a clanking pectoral cross.

The first people we met were the Attlees. Clem was sitting in the garden in an overcoat, looking terribly frail. He said my battle was a historic achievement and I thanked him for his support from the beginning.

Vi Attlee said what a great failure Herbert Morrison had been as Foreign Secretary – ‘he just didn’t understand it’.

Mervyn introduced the Archbishop of Canterbury to us at the end – the first time I have met him. He is a mountain of a man and so plump and smooth that he looks like some medieval prince of the Church. I thanked him for his kindly reference to my case and said I had never had any sort of Archiepiscopal blessing for anything else I had ever done. Ramsey gave a watery smile and indeed looked at Mervyn most of the time he was talking to me. He said that he had made five speeches in the House of Lords this year, two of them right, and three of them left. A very silly comment. Alas he is only fifty-seven though he looks seventy – so we shall probably have him for the next twenty-five years.

I also met a man called Oliver Cutts, the son of a costermonger who bought a lorry in 1946 and I imagine is now a millionaire who owns a chain of filling stations, a road haulage fleet and a great deal of land. He retained all his Cockney charm and obviously was a man of great drive. He’s a friend of Bob Mellish’s and shocked me by saying he hoped Bob would one day be Sir Robert Mellish, Bart, in view of his services to the Queen and Empire.

I said I very much hoped no such thing would happen and that Bob had been serving the people of Bermondsey and not the Queen and Empire at all. Here was a guy who left school at nine, licked the Establishment, and got to the top, and was now yearning to be a part of that Establishment. If politics is only about who is to get peerages and honours – our chaps or their chaps – then I’m not very interested in it. But I liked him all the same.

We went from there to Elwyn Jones’s flat in Gray’s Inn Square where he and Polly Binder live. He is a dear man and she is a tough and delightful woman. They had some Chinese author there and a few others. Elwyn is working with Gerald Gardiner on a book on law reform to be published soon. Apparently they have a scheme for appointing a vice-chancellor who would sit in the Commons as Minister of Justice responsible for legal reform. I hope they are getting this all through to Harold Wilson. If we are going to do the job that has to be done quickly, everybody must be ready to carry through some pretty fundamental changes as soon as we get into office.

Wednesday 5 June

This afternoon Profumo wrote to the PM, admitted that he lied in his personal statement to the House of Commons, and resigned. The BBC asked me to do a discussion about the political implications of this in their 10 o’clock programme but I refused. I can’t think that the Opposition rubbing its hands in glee can do anything but political harm. It’s a bit like wrestling with a chimney sweep.

This evening Caroline went to dinner with Lois and Edward Sieff and there she met a man called David Pelham who is making a film of Christine Keeler’s life. She had a long talk with him and he said that Christine Keeler
was absolutely determined to bring the Government down. She was ‘a woman scorned’ and felt bitter about being dropped by the top people. It is all a very murky world.