The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (51 page)

Sunday 10 June

Brian Walden, the Labour MP for Birmingham All Saints, came to the house at 11 o’clock and stayed until 3.1 had asked him to look in. He drank quite a lot, and talked continuously but I learned a great deal. He told me that he had been Hugh Gaitskell’s scriptwriter and that it was he who wrote ‘Fight, fight and fight again’, which was the speech that triggered off Harold Wilson’s candidature against Hugh Gaitskell for the leadership in 1960. Also, in respect of the Common Market, Brian had invented Hugh Gaitskell’s phrase about ‘throwing away a thousand years of British history’. So these two phrases, for which Gaitskell is most clearly remembered, didn’t actually even come from him. As one of Hugh Gaitskell’s older scriptwriters myself, going way back to 1956,1 was fascinated to hear this.

Anyway, Brian took it that I had wanted his advice and proceeded to give it me. He said he thought that I could possibly be the Leader of the Party and that I had to turn my mind quickly and carefully to the problem of why I
wasn’t getting across to Labour MPs. He thought the reason was that I was frightening them. They had their constituencies, a good job in the House of Commons and I disturbed them, disrupted life and made them feel they might lose. What they wanted was reassurance: Harold Wilson was always reassuring them and I was worrying them. This is not so different from what Frank McElhone says.

We went on to talk about economic policy and the mixed economy. He talked compulsively. ‘Of course we want a mixed economy but a real one, in which the big companies and major corporations are either run or owned by the state; if people pay their taxes and are treated decently, and provided for properly, particularly with their pensions so that they are not humiliated in retirement, then we can have competition and capitalism at that level, where it really applies.’

Of himself he said he would never hold office and he intended to retire from Parliament when he was fifty. Although he wanted to go on with politics, it didn’t pay enough. I urged him to think again but I think he was probably deeply hurt that he hadn’t been given a job by Harold Wilson, just as Dick Crossman was that he hadn’t been given a job by Clem Attlee in the 1945 Government. So Brian has compensated by using his natural brilliance in order to make money and to secure his own future.

Wednesday 20 June

Shadow Cabinet all day, where we had a full and important debate. Tony Crosland started by saying, ‘What is the electoral strategy of the Left? The polls don’t seem to imply any rise in militancy, and nor do the by-elections. There is no swing to the left, and, if anything, there is a swing to the Liberals. There is anxiety about undemocratic local Parties and trade unions. Labour MPs are more in touch with local Party members than members of the Executive. The trade union block votes are unpopular.’ As a result, he couldn’t either see or understand a lurch to the left.

Michael Foot said the 25-company proposal was crazy and he believed I had committed an error in submitting it. The Manifesto Committee was a joint body and not two bodies. He didn’t want to have a vote on the twenty-five at the Conference and therefore we had to find a formula beforehand to avoid difficulties. Ron Hayward should start discussions on public ownership and we should put a statement to Conference that would wipe out the issue of the twenty-five companies, so that there would be general agreement. If we couldn’t sort it out we were not fit to be here.

I said I wasn’t prepared to go back and try to bribe businessmen to do what was not in the interests of their shareholders. As to Party democracy, I couldn’t object to what Harold had said about the veto because he had only said publicly what had been said privately for years. But the case for taking some notice of the Conference was that when you looked back over the conflicts between the Conference and the Labour Cabinet in the years we
were in office, the Conference had very often been right. But, I said, I thought there was a danger of double standards in saying some things privately and other things publicly.

Denis Healey blurted out, ‘Well, Tony Benn has just advocated absolute madness – that we should debate this publicly – absolutely mad.’ He was livid. Denis is a management man. He sees everything in terms of looking tidy and neat and efficient.

Then Michael Foot asked me, ‘Are you
really
going for the twenty-five companies? Do you think we could win the Election? Do you want to win the Election? What are you up to? What are you saying?’

By the time I finished lunch, the rumour was already going round that Michael Foot had accused me of wanting to lose the Election, suggesting that I wanted to do it simply in order to become Leader of the Party. This story had been leaked immediately after the Shadow Cabinet and appeared in all the papers tonight: ‘Foot Bashes Benn’, ‘Foot Stamps on Benn’. I declined to comment because I could immediately see the advantage of not trying to combat this story but to let it ride as having come from others. So I said nothing.

Collected the papers at midnight and cut out all the headlines. This is exactly what I wanted; leaks from the Shadow Cabinet that couldn’t possibly have come from me and that will help me to put across my argument that the Shadow Cabinet proceedings should be made public.

Thursday 21 June

Jim rang up to tell me that I had been badly used and he said, ‘You know, we could work well together.’ He also told me he was writing a preface of a book on Giro and asked if I could help him with it. So I went back to my files and dug out my original article of June 1964 in the
Guardian
about the Post Office, Jim’s letter to me when he was Chancellor, expressing great caution about it, and the text of my speech announcing it, and sent them all off to him.

Michael Foot came into my room at the House, very shamefaced because he has been described in the papers as the man who destroyed me at the Shadow Cabinet. He thought I would be angry but I wasn’t. He didn’t agree with it; he told me that Jack Jones was against the twenty-five, which I knew anyway. He said he had written to the papers saying the report that had appeared was inaccurate. He said, ‘We can’t have a confrontation over the veto and the NEC should submit a statement on public ownership which would ease the difficulty of compensation and the twenty-five companies.’ I said I thought it was, in the end, a matter of honest politics, whether one was ready to say publicly what one said privately. I don’t think Michael liked that very much.

Saturday 23 June

We prepared for a party today. About sixty people came, including Michael
Foot and Jill Craigie – both a little embarrassed – Dick Clements, Norman Atkinson and his wife, Eric and Doris Heffer, Ron and Phyllis Hayward, Frances Morrell, the Zanders, Robin Day, Margaret Jackson, Tony Banks, Alan Evans of the NUT, Peter Shore, Stuart Holland, the Harts, the Arnold-Forsters and the Meachers. It went on until about 2 in the morning, and it was jolly and friendly. We agreed to form the ‘Twenty-five Club’ committed to the nationalisation of the twenty-five companies.

Tuesday 26 June

I have been really absorbed by reading about the English Revolution and I asked Jack Mendelson, the Labour MP for Penistone, a former university lecturer, if he would give me a private tutorial. We had about an hour in the Tea Room on the Levellers and the Diggers or True Levellers, who comprised a radical group in Cromwell’s army. It was fascinating. He gave me a reading list including Christopher Hill on Cromwell, so I have set aside Antonia Fraser’s book now and am concentrating on the serious ideological and historical stuff.

All the parallels with the situation today are there. The argument with the King and his court: Heath and the City of London, with the big corporations. Then one can see the right wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party as the Presbyterians, rigid, doctrinaire, right wing, but officially on the side of puritanism or socialism. The Socialist Labour League and the International Socialists on the left are the Agitators. The Levellers are broadly the Labour Movement as a whole. There is the argument about the pulpit and who has access to it, which could be seen as the whole debate about democracy today. I had no idea that the Levellers had called for universal manhood suffrage, equality between the sexes, biennial Parliaments, the sovereignty of the people, recall of representatives and even an attack on property: concepts which later emerged in the constitution of the United States and indeed in the French Revolution.

Monday 9 July

John Poulson, the architect, and Andy Cunningham, who is on the NEC, have been arrested. At the House today, I spoke to John Cunningham, the Labour MP for Whitehaven, who is Andy’s son, and I just said, ‘If there’s anything I can do, let me know because your father has always been very kind to me.’

Tuesday 17 July

Lunch at Quaglino’s with the 1972 Industry Group of Labour businessmen masterminded by Rudy Sternberg, Sir Joseph Kagan, Wilfred Brown, Arnold Gregory, Derek Page and one or two others who have offered to advise the Labour Party on industrial matters. They are very dose to Harold
and hope to be put in positions of authority under a Labour government. I am rather cynical about them.

Thursday 19 July

Bill Rodgers came to dinner. Hilary and Rosalind had bought some strawberries and I gave him a good bottle of wine in the back kitchen of my basement office, where we talked for about three hours. First I tried to get him to assess the political situation – the prospects of winning. He thought there was a chance of winning but he didn’t believe a radical change would be in tune with public opinion. On public ownership he felt that the case hadn’t been made out and that we shouldn’t really be doing it.

Then we got on to Harold and he said that Harold was a liability. He was meaner than he used to be, he hadn’t matured as a statesman after he had been in power, that the middle of the Party was getting disillusioned with Harold. The new MPs had come into Parliament in 1970 thinking he was wonderful, and the more they had seen of him, the less they liked him.

Tuesday 11 September

Today there was a coup by the Junta in Chile and President Allende was murdered.

Friday 14 September

In the evening, Stephen and I went to see Alvaro and Raquel Bunster. Alvaro was the Ambassador in London for what was Allende’s legitimate Chilean government. The Naval Attaché, an admiral, has thrown him out of the Embassy today. We went to see if I could be of any help. I took my tape recorder and recorded his account of what happened during the coup as far as it affected him, and an interesting record it is. Raquel has been ill and she asked me to get a message to her mother in Santiago so I spent most of the night trying to get through to Chile on the phone. The Post Office in London said they couldn’t connect me; I tried a friend in Cincinnati who said he would try; finally I got through to ITT in New York and all their lines to Santiago were open, which in fact confirmed what Bunster had said, namely that ITT were in on the coup. I daresay we shall find out when the coup is over.

Wednesday 19 September

Jim Callaghan invited me to have lunch with him. It is all part of Jim’s campaign for the leadership but still, I like him. We had a most pleasant time and talked about farming. He said, ‘Of course, I am finished, past it,’ and I said, ‘Rubbish, we are moving into an era where much older people take over the leadership. Look at Churchill, de Gaulle, Mao and Tito.’

Friday 21 September

Peter Shore’s pamphlet was published today recommending that an
incoming Labour government should boycott all the institutions of the Common Market and discontinue all payments. I agree with this strong line.

I offered Frances Morrell a job as a political adviser in my department if we won the next Election.

Sunday 21 October

Nixon sacked Professor Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, and Elliott Richardson, the Attorney-General, has resigned in protest this gives the whole Watergate crisis a completely new impetus because Nixon has alienated the immensely powerful legal lobby, a sort of breach of constitutional rights.

Had a long telephone call from Stephen, who said he had been invited to St Antony’s College, Oxford, for the weekend and since that is the great spy school, it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to recruit him.

Monday 22 October

Had lunch in the Tea Room with Jim Sillars, who brought me up to date on how wildly Scottish Nationalist the Scottish TUC had become, and how, if Britain stayed in Europe, he would become a Scottish Nationalist member.

At 5 we had the Shadow Cabinet and the Channel Tunnel came up, since it has now become inextricably linked with the Common Market. Peter Shore and Michael Foot are strongly opposed to it, as I am, with Tony Crosland in favour.

Saturday 24 November

Drove up to Ilkeston, Ray Fletcher’s constituency, for a meeting. The local Party had laid on a bazaar and there was an old fortune teller, ‘Madame Eva’, in one of the side rooms with a crystal ball covered with a black velvet cloth (she was, of course, also an ordinary Labour Party stalwart). I was sitting in the hall working, having arrived early, and she came and sat down and began uncovering her crystal ball. I would
never
have gone to her for a prediction but I did talk to her, and after we had finished talking, she told me how she saw things in the ball, and how she had predicted various events.

As I left she said to me, ‘You are going to have a great shock in February, a terrible shock. You are going to get the blame for something you haven’t done. Then in September, it will all be all right again.’

Friday 30 November

Went early to see Harold Evans and Hugo Young of the
Sunday Times
and they listen attentively to my political analysis. I said, ‘Look, both parties have failed. There is an energy crisis, and there may be a slump. The crisis is a crisis of confidence shared by the Establishment. It is not just a case of crooks governing morons. There is something else wrong. It is a crisis of consent as
in the late colonial period. We have got to convert negative to positive power and that means more equality and more democracy. You can have a right-wing dictatorship or a left-wing dictatorship, but we want more democracy and equality and not a National Government. A coalition government would be crazy.’ Harold Evans, of course, has got his own candidates for a National Government and so have I. He asked, ‘Why are you so unpopular with the press?’ so I said, ‘Because you write such unpleasant things about me. That’s why.’