Read The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 Online
Authors: Tony Benn
Wednesday 11 June 1975
THE PRESS WERE
outside our house again by 7, three cars filled with reporters, poised with telescopic lenses. Ron Vaughan turned up at 7.30 with all the morning papers. The
Guardian
had it right ‘Wilson gives Benn’s head to the City’. By the time Josh left for school, there were about fifty journalists, two television units and three or four radio interviewers with microphones standing outside. We had decided not to say anything at all to the press, so when they confronted Josh, he ignored them. One of them shouted, ‘You fucking well answer my questions.’ Josh took no notice so they said, ‘You push off, you little shit.’
Now Josh, at sixteen, is perfectly capable of exchanging harsh words with anybody of his own age, but when two or three grown men who, in a sense, are symbols of authority, swore at him like that, it really worried him.
Ron walked ahead of me with my bag and Caroline, Stephen and Hilary watched me as I left. I walked out slowly and as I opened the front gate, the television cameras turned, the flashbulbs popped and the mikes were pushed menacingly at me. ‘Do you regard your job as a promotion or demotion?’ ‘What do you think of Mrs Hart?’ and so on.
I just walked through them as if they weren’t there and that made them wild. They had dehumanised me in the press, now I was dehumanising them by not acknowledging their existence.
Monday 30 June
I found in my red box a farewell letter from Sir Antony Part. It read:
Personal, 29 June
Dear Secretary of State,
It was sad that, for whatever reason and perhaps due to a misunderstanding, we did not say goodbye to each other when you left the Department. At any rate I want to write now on behalf of the staff of the Department as well as myself, to thank you for all the many courtesies you displayed towards your civil servants, and so far as I am concerned, the sympathetic consideration you showed to me during my recent illness.
It was especially kind of you to find the time to come and visit me in the hospital and write as you did to my wife with your programme of radical change. Granted the political balance within the Cabinet, you were bound to face your senior advisers with some difficult problems, but whatever our professional anxieties were from time to time, we enjoyed the challenges and the stimulation, and you were generous in your appreciation of the support that you received on such key subjects as the Industry Bill and the Post Office.
We admired your outstanding skill in communication (even when, occasionally, we were worried about what you were communicating!) and the deftness of your drafting. But, important though these are, they are less significant than the general thrust of your philosophy, so clearly illustrated in its many facets in the book of speeches (and it is characteristic I know that they were speeches and not private memoranda) that you kindly gave me.
In our different careers we have both sailed through rough waters and, indeed, I expect we should each be surprised if the waters were ever to become smooth, and possibly not know what to do with ourselves if that were to happen! For the marriage of ideas and reality is unending and
fascinating, and the responsibility for the fate of others is an unremitting burden for people who are in positions of leadership.
But where would either of us be without such challenges – and how would either of us fare without the imperturbable and invaluable help of such people as Roy Williams?
I send you from myself, Peter Carey and all those who served you in this department, the most sincere salutations together with my own warm thanks for your personal kindness.
Yours sincerely,
Antony Part
No one can resent a warm letter; in the end I sent the following reply:
Dear Sir Antony,
It was very good of you to write and I appreciated it. I well realise that my brief period in the Department of Industry imposed a heavy strain on you and your officials arising from new policies and initiatives which in turn aroused a major public debate.
Throughout all this I received every possible personal help and I hope you will convey my gratitude to all those involved at various levels, from your own throughout the Department, and including the Private Office.
I am sorry that the pace of the reshuffle made personal farewells impossible, but that is one of the hazards of political life. I do hope you are completely fit again and that the anxieties of the winter will never recur.
With kind regards,
Tony Benn
Wednesday 2 July
At 9.15 I saw Bernard Ingham, my new press officer, who asked me about my personal position. I told him I was strongly opposed to the proposal for public expenditure cuts and that there were four options: to put up with it, to oppose it from the inside, to come out and oppose it constructively, or to come out and oppose it destructively. I thought opposing it from the inside was perhaps the best thing to do.
He asked if it would be a good idea to brief Ian Aitken of the
Guardian
. I arranged for this to be done later.
Thursday 3 July
At 7.30 a group of Ministers gathered in my room – Peter Shore, Michael Foot, Stan Orme, Albert Booth, Joan Lestor, Michael Meacher, and Barbara Castle. Frances Morrell joined us. At the prospect of resignations by the Left, Barbara began shouting, ‘The Left, it is always the Left, you always lose. Why don’t you fight? Why don’t you put up an alternative?’
Shirley Williams has the room next door and the walls are so thin, she probably heard every word.
I said, ‘I put up an alternative months ago on import controls.’
‘Oh, that’s no good,’ she said. Barbara thinks socialism is about the social wage, which of course is based on the expenditure of her own department. Although she argues against a statutory policy, she would accept it if it would prevent public expenditure cuts in the DHSS. Actually she’s not on our side at all, she’s on the other side.
Boy, was she shrieking, throwing her arms in the air. ‘All right, you say I am not fair, but nobody has ever been fair to me.’ That revealed the burning sense of personal injustice which makes Barbara tick. She is a tough woman and she certainly fights for what she gets, but she is very cynical, and she hates my guts. One thing’s for sure, all of this will get back to Harold. If Barbara tells him we are thinking of resigning, that will really worry him.
Sunday 6 July
The
Observer
had a huge two-page spread on the government U-turn. It included a leading article praising Wilson for adopting the Heath policy, and a piece on Jack Jones describing him as the Godfather, privy to everything that was going on and supported by Michael Foot.
Tuesday 15 July
At 3.30 Sir Eric Drake of British Petroleum came to see me and I went out of my way to be charming. He said that government holdings of British Petroleum shares must be kept below 50 per cent because it would destroy the credibility of the company in the United States, in New Zealand and elsewhere – BP operates in eighty countries. Therefore, he wanted the BP Burmah shares sold off in the open market but not to foreign governments. Well, I’m not accepting that.
I had contemplated giving Drake the chairmanship of BNOC but he was so negative and hostile that I changed my mind. I’m glad I saw him and it is probably a good thing to be on reasonably good terms with him, though he is the most Tory of Tories.
Spent most of the afternoon on the Petroleum Bill Committee.
Spoke to Gerald Kaufman, who told me that, at a meeting in Oxford, a man had got up and said, ‘The only reason that Tony Benn didn’t nationalise Westland is that he has shares in it.’
Well, that’s an extraordinary story. I was grateful for him telling me.
Thursday 17 July
The papers over the last couple of days have reported the news from New York that Exxon has openly admitted to paying $51 million (£20 million) to Italian politicians and political parties over the last nine years. That’s over £2 million a year flowing from a single oil company into Italian political
funds. The number of people who could be bought, corrupted, suborned, diverted, blackmailed and assassinated with £20 million defies the imagination. One shouldn’t be in any doubt at all as to what we’re up against and I shall use this if necessary to defend the development of BNOC.
Saturday 19 July
Went shopping with Melissa and we walked up Kensington High Street. We went into Biba’s store which really is the end of a dream. You can see why it failed really because it was the final fling for the excrescences of sixties fashion, now all gone bust.
Tuesday 22 July
I heard today that the problem of what we would do with oil off the Falkland Islands has been settled by the Foreign Office. They have insisted that we agree to discuss with Argentina joint exploration of the South Atlantic, and this is intended to get us off the hook.
Lunch with Frank Kearton at Courtaulds headquarters in Calenese House. I have known Frank now for nine years and he is resigning tomorrow as Chairman of Courtaulds.
We talked about Harold Wilson and he said he had met Harold recently and Harold had told him, ‘In politics, timing is everything,’ and compared himself to Stanley Baldwin. Harold has compared himself to all sorts of people in his Walter Mitty life. He was the Kennedy figure in 1962 with ‘Let’s get Britain moving again’. Then he became a bit of a Macmillan figure. Then he and Lyndon Johnson were the greatest pals. Now he’s Baldwin. That just about sums him up.
We discussed Jack Jones, for whom Frank has enormous respect because he’s a great statesman. We talked about worker participation and economic policy and I mentioned the co-operatives. I said that the Treasury was now running things.
‘I don’t think the Treasury has a policy,’ he said. ‘They stumble along from day to day. When William Armstrong resigned from the Civil Service, he had a little dinner party at Sunningdale and I was invited. He just kept saying that all was lost, and there was no hope for the country and he couldn’t see his way forward at all. I have never seen a man so utterly defeated.’
I said, ‘That’s because he was the one who persuaded Heath to drop the Party’s objections to the prices and incomes policy, and then he saw the policy crumble in the face of the miners and I think he was utterly demoralised.’
Melissa came into the House and everyone admired her out on the terrace, saying she looked like an actress from a television programme, ‘The Main Chance’. She was shy as the MPs came up to speak to her but I was so proud of her.
Tuesday 29 July
Yet more strange goings-on with our rubbish. For some time it has been collected very early each morning, whereas before, Kensington Borough Council only collected it once a week. We wondered who was taking it and, as we read recently in the paper that someone had bribed the trashmen in Washington to give them all the rubbish from Kissinger’s house, it occurred to me that this might be happening to me. So I decided to buy a shredding machine and also Joshua fitted up a wire leading from the rubbish area at the front of the house to a bell in the house.
Talked to Bernard Donoughue, who was interested in the fact that officials were mainly concerned to protect the confidentiality of official advice to Ministers, which is why the Crossman
Diaries
worried them so much.
At Cabinet we talked about Meriden and the future of the co-operatives, and the discussion threw light on a number of things. First of all, it was absolutely clear that both Court Line, and Meriden, which is Eric Varley’s razor job, are being used to discredit my period at the Department of Industry. They are trying to make out that it was incompetence on my part, and linking it with Rolls Royce, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and Concorde.
Secondly, Harold’s strategy in moving me from Industry is not only to reverse the policy, but also to ensure that I get the blame for the troubles that come when the policy
is
reversed. He is hoping to chip away at my standing within the Movement at the same time as the new policy is being prepared – a Treasury policy under which people will not be able to go to the Industry Department for money because there will be no money, no help, no tea and no sympathy. Gerald Kaufman is certainly in there digging around seeing what he can find that might be damaging to me.
Friday 5 September
Got to the House of Commons at 12.10 and missed the bomb at the Hilton Hotel by about ten minutes. It killed two people and wounded sixty-nine.
Thursday 25 September
There were more reports in the press on the hearings in Washington which have revealed that the CIA was opening the mail of senior politicians, including Nixon before he was elected. One really is indebted to the American investigative process for bringing things to light. No doubt similar things have happened here and exactly on the same basis, but they are kept completely secret.
Caught the train to Blackpool and checked into the Imperial Hotel.
Friday 26 September – Labour Party Conference, Blackpool
The papers today reported the admission by the FBI that they had engaged in over 250 domestic burglaries for political and other purposes. There was
also a report in the
New York Tunes
that the CIA was again giving money to West European socialist parties to intervene in Portugal.
Just before the Executive at 10 I had a word with Bryan Stanley of the POEU and I mentioned my concern about telephone-tapping.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘there’s no question about it. I believe that the Tories were engaged in a widespread surveillance campaign involving the telephone-tapping of activists in the trade union movement and the Labour Party, as well as in the Communist Party. The aim was to prepare a general dossier and, in the run-up to an Election, blacken the character of political opponents.
‘Whenever I tried to find out anything about it from my own members, I discovered that this telephone-tapping is done by specially recruited people who, though they may be members of my union, are not prepared to say a word about it. There is tight security amongst them. It goes on on a more limited scale now, but during the referendum campaign, for example, people in the anti-Common Market groups on one or two occasions picked up their telephones and found recordings of what they’d just said coming back to them.’