The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (50 page)

Thursday 1 March

Geoff Bish, Stuart Holland and Margaret Jackson came in this morning to discuss our Green Paper on the development of Labour’s industrial policy and the idea of a State Holding Company. I presented the outline I had made of existing government powers and the new powers that we would need in order to succeed. Stuart Holland is a very bright guy who worked at Number 10 with Harold during the last period of government. He is dissatisfied with Harold now and is rather attaching himself to me, though I don’t see much prospect at the moment of my own chances improving since I am still living in the shadow of my year as Chairman of the Party and the events of the Conference.

I went to Bristol for the AGM and afterwards watched the result of the Lincoln by-election; Taverne won overwhelmingly. It was very depressing because Taverne was cock-a-hoop and the TV coverage has been so pro-Taverne, there was not even a pretence of being fair.

Wednesday 8 March

There were two bombs in London, one outside Scotland Yard and one in Whitehall. The violence of the IRA appears to have come to the surface and this has created a new political atmosphere in a way. It is frightening people, and fear always turns them to the right.

Monday 12 March

At the Home Policy Committee of the NEC there was a discussion about the next Labour Government. They all felt that the programme was so complicated and full that it would take three Parliaments to implement. So I chipped in and said I was uneasy about this; we really couldn’t wait for twenty-five years. What we wanted was a substantial and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in the
next
Labour Government and that it wouldn’t necessarily cost money if we were prepared to act swiftly.

Jim Callaghan said we should go more slowly and ‘leave our humane imprint on the social legislation of our time’. I declared that wasn’t enough for me and I would need an Industrial Powers Act if I was going to carry through the sort of industrial policy a Labour Government would need. This little clash was well worth having and I was much tougher than I have been for a long time at that committee.

Thursday 5 April

Hilary came out of hospital and we are profoundly relieved that he will be able to get married on Saturday as planned.

Caroline was co-opted again as a member of the Inner London Education Authority.

At the House of Commons there was a meeting to discuss Judith Hart’s document for a State Holding Company or National Enterprise Board.

Tony Crosland immediately raised three questions: were we clear about whether we wanted these companies to be profitable or not? Could we get efficient management? How would we justify the choice of companies for public ownership? He was in favour of a smaller experimental start.

Judith Hart said the Industrial Policy Committee had deliberately not revealed the companies they had identified. We said in the paper that twenty to twenty-five companies would be needed to yield significant control of the economy and she didn’t think the management opposition would be an insuperable problem.

Stuart Holland emphasised that anything less than twenty companies would be a mere salvage operation. To be effective you needed a much larger number and Continental experience had shown this would work.

Edmund Dell said that by not naming the companies concerned, you are giving greater hostages to fortune. You could exaggerate the benefits against the cost involved; when you come to power there could be a crisis and this would all create short-term disruption. Management was a real problem that couldn’t be brushed aside and it would be better to have a slow advance.

Eric Heffer didn’t really like the State Holding Company and he would only accept it as a halfway house because we needed a better perspective. He was in favour of spelling out the names of the companies. Management problems couldn’t be a reason for not going ahead and we may have to pay over the odds to get good managers. As to industrial democracy, he was in favour of self-managing socialism.

I said that the conditions after the next Election might be very serious with accelerated job losses as a result of EEC competition. If we were returned to power, since we have price and profit control in mind, we might as well develop a powerful capacity to increase investment. As to management, after my experience dealing with private management, I couldn’t say I was very struck by it. Top management was not particularly efficient and the good management was just underneath it. On the choice of firms, we couldn’t really make that selection now and this was inherent in the problem. On industrial democracy, we were waiting for the TUC to come forward. But certainly on the central question of whether the next Labour Government would introduce some control of the economy I am sure all Ministers would agree that bribing, cajoling and merging industry could not continue.

Judith Hart said that you couldn’t extrapolate from existing experience of
public ownership because conditions would be different. The Conference resolutions were our remit, and this remit required us to advance substantially; profitable manufacturing companies were the areas in which we should move. She thought the twenty-five companies should be named but we would be taking over going concerns and there were serious problems to be faced.

Anyway, the paper was more or less agreed after a good discussion. Crosland has got his eye on Trade and Industry in the next Labour Government and this is why he attends all these meetings religiously.

Saturday 7 April

Hilary and Rosalind married at the Kensington Register Office this morning with all the family there. We held the reception and they spent the night at our house after watching ‘Match of the Day’ on television!

Sunday 22 April

Easter Sunday. There is no doubt, looking back, that my chairmanship and my final speech at Conference strongly criticising the media did me a great deal of damage. In return, they attacked me bitterly for several weeks and then let me rot in silence for a time.

I go up and down, get depressed as things go wrong and then cheer up again afterwards. But I have got from now until the end of July, three months’ hard work, to build up support in the House of Commons and make my Trade and Industry group work better.

I have written to Alastair Hetherington, Editor of the
Guardian,
Harold Evans, Editor of the
Sunday Times
, and Hugh Cudlipp, Chairman of IPC, saying I would like to see them again.

Friday 27 April

The Watergate scandal in America has reached astonishing proportions and today Patrick Gray, the head of the FBI, resigned. It is thought he destroyed relevant records in the case. This could well have a desperately damaging effect on Richard Nixon’s last term and reveal him for what he really is, which we know from his early days as a muck-raking, anti-Communist McCarthyite.

Sunday 29 April

At noon Antonia Fraser came to see me about biographies. She has written a well received life of Mary Queen of Scots and of Cromwell, and has been invited by the BBC to do a programme in the ‘One Pair of Eyes’ series for August. In this programme she is interviewing the Conservative MP Nigel Fisher, who wrote Macleod’s life, Macleod having left no papers when he died in 1970. She is interviewing Professor Hugh Thomas, who wrote John Strachey’s life; James Pope-Hennessy, the biographer of Queen Mary, and
Michael Holroyd, who wrote the life of Lytton Strachey; and she wants to do some contemporary filming of me at a May Day rally in Birmingham in order to examine the possible role of film in biography.

As I sat and talked about it all with her it became quite clear to me that if one is going to record every minute as fully and completely as this, one does have to ask oneself the central question: ‘Am I a participant in life and politics or am I an observer?’ and if there is any conflict between the two, one must be a participant. It is rather like filling up the North Sea with oil instead of taking it out. One creates a great archive which may or may not be of interest to anyone else. What one is bequeathing is one’s working papers and documents; watching life simply to make it interesting is not enough.

Antonia Fraser said that she had met Anthony Eden a couple of years ago in Barbados, and how pleased he was to talk to her. She described how her mother Elizabeth Longford, who lived in Hampstead and was a friend of Hugh Gaitskell’s, bitterly hated Harold Wilson; how contemptuous she was of his style of life in Hampstead Garden Suburb. This explains a great deal of Wilson’s dislike for that snobbish Hampstead establishment of upper middle-class socialists and Fabians.

Monday 30 April

Today the US Attorney-General, Richard Kleindienst and two of his closest aides, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, were sacked; tonight Nixon is due to make a great television broadcast about the Watergate scandal.

Tuesday 1 May

Nixon’s address to the American public was awful, a speech in which he accepted responsibility for what had happened because he was at the top, his office had to be preserved, it would be cowardly to do otherwise and there could be no whitewashing in the White House – a really gimmicky PR phrase. But he didn’t answer the fundamental questions and even defended the people he had sacked on the grounds that perhaps their zeal had been in a cause in which they deeply believed (namely his own re-election as President).

Wednesday 2 May

At the end of the Shadow Cabinet I raised the question of whether I should issue a statement drawing attention to our ‘nationalisation without compensation’ discussions in order to frighten off speculators from buying up bits of Rolls Royce, which the Government have put on the market. Shirley Williams thought this might be the occasion for redundancies, which the Government could blame on us. There was a generally discouraging atmosphere. Somebody said, ‘Why do we always make Tony into a bogeyman? At any rate, he does draw these things to our attention.’ So I let it slide. There is no point in going to the stake for one controversial statement.

Thursday 3 May

Coming back on the train from a meeting in Brighton, Ron Hayward told me about how Marcia Williams was ‘running Harold’, how she and her brother, Tony Field, and her sister worked with him, how Joe Haines was in Harold’s confidence, Alf Richmond, a press aide from the
Daily Mirror
, was the baggage master, and Gerald Kaufman was round and about. This is the kitchen cabinet – Harold’s court. It has always been like that but it still annoys Ron Hayward, who has not got a lot of time for Harold. But Harold is a very shrewd political operator and one must not forget that.

Friday 11 May

The papers are full this morning of the total failure to float Rolls Royce. Only £7 million was purchased by public subscription, only 360 of the 900 workers applied for shares and it was generally admitted that my speech had played some part in stopping it, which is a great achievement. Even so, the institutions have promised to pick up the remainder, so the flotation will take place. The
Financial Times
reported the support given me by the TGWU, and the
Daily Telegraph
had a fierce denunciation entitled ‘Limousine Socialism’, saying that unless the Government adopted Labour’s policy of threatening to reverse existing policies, Labour would be in power whether in or out of office – a marvellous comment in view of the fact that the House of Lords and the City of London have kept the Tory Party in power in and out of office for years.

Clive Jenkins rang to say that the ASTMS Annual Delegate Conference was going to have an emergency resolution along the lines that ‘This Conference welcomes the statement made by Tony Benn in support of the defence of public assets and in defence of the security of the people whose jobs depend on them’. This will be debated on Monday. Also next week is the debate on Rolls Royce. So the Government are going to be in a real difficulty.

Saturday 19 May

I should report that every day this week the Watergate hearings have been on and are being shown simultaneously on television by satellite. It is absolutely riveting. This is clearly going to bring Nixon down.

Monday 21 May

To the TUC–Labour Party Liaison Committee meeting at Congress House, and in the lift I said to Jack Jones, ‘We must nationalise the aircraft industry, and I want a bit of help from you on this.’

While we were sitting waiting for the meeting to begin, there was some joking about what positions we would like to hold. Jim Callaghan said he’d like to be head of the IMF. Douglas Houghton wanted to be General Secretary of the TUC. Harold said, ‘No doubt Tony would like to be the
Archbishop of Canterbury.’ It was a very snide remark. But I said, ‘Do you know, Jim, I had a dream about you that you
would
join the IMF’ (these rumours have appeared in the last few days) ‘and that you would come back on a mission when the next Labour Government was in power and wreck that government too.’ It was going very near the mark but he did have the courtesy to laugh.

Thursday 24 May

The papers are absolutely crammed with the Lambton resignation; Lord Jellicoe, Leader of the House of Lords, has also resigned admitting that he had had affairs with call girls. It is astonishing when this happens. You get two Ministers resigning and the press behaves as if the whole world is coming to an end.

Sunday 27 May

Stansgate. Twelve hours in bed. The Lambton and Jellicoe affairs dominated the papers today – articles by A. J. P. Taylor and by Montgomery Hyde, editorials on private and public standards, historical parallels. ‘Is it a Communist plot?’ The Bishop of Leicester is sympathetic. Comments by the Chairman of the Church Committee for Social Responsibility, and so on.

Friday 8 June

Enoch Powell has made a great speech implying that he might recommend his followers to vote Labour in the next Election on the grounds that only the Labour Party would offer an opportunity to the people of this country to vote against the Common Market. This has created an enormous sensation: Will he be thrown out and what are his motives?