The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990

by Benn, Tony

  Thursday 14 October

  To the Aberdeen Head Office this morning about 9 after spending yesterday visiting Edinburgh.

  In fact the real news today didn’t come from my trip in Scotland at all but from a letter written by Mitchell at Number 10 to Wratten about stamp design. It was an astonishing letter for any civil servant to have written for it contains within it a clear statement that the Queen might under some circumstances ‘reject the advice of her Ministers’. This of course does not come directly from the Palace but Adeane had conveyed this impression to Mitchell and Mitchell had conveyed it to the Prime Minister, who has decided to frighten me off by conveying it to me.

  There are many angles of this letter which require a great deal of thought. The first is that it looks as if my new stamp policy has been torpedoed. Whether or not the Queen cares personally about it, Adeane and all the flunkies at Buckingham Palace certainly do. Their whole position depends upon maintaining this type of claptrap.

  Realising that they were dealing with somebody who didn’t intend to be bullied and couldn’t be flattered, Adeane decided to get at me sideways by going to Harold Wilson and threatening political controversy, which he knew would be sufficient to effect an order by Harold to me to stop. This is exactly how the Palace works. It doesn’t want to appear unpopular, yet at the same time it does not want certain things to happen and it uses the threat of controversy to stop any changes from going too far. Whether or not Adeane will go so far as to say to Heath or Salisbury or Home ‘You’d better watch that Postmaster General, he’s trying to take the Queen’s head off the stamps’, I don’t know. They certainly aren’t gentlemen when it comes to political in-fighting. But, at the present, Adeane obviously thinks this is the best way to operate.

  For my part, particularly after all the unfavourable press comment that I have had, I am not sure how far I would want to go with the new stamp policy. It is only peripheral and I would be prepared to give it up if I could get out of the Palace an official order to stop it. For a piece of paper written in that way would be of priceless constitutional interest. What I am not going to do is to allow myself to be stopped without getting that particular order.

  This evening I began to turn my mind to the best way of dealing with this letter. I do not intend to raise it with Harold Wilson. It is too unimportant to worry him with and I don’t want him to give me orders to do anything. I want them directly from the Palace.

  Sunday 17 October

  A usual family day at home. I went to see Mother this morning. After lunch, we all went to the park and sat in the hot October sunshine. It was far better than days in June or July. The boys played football and Melissa played with a balloon. It was a lovely day.

  Saturday 23 October

  Surgery at Unity House, Bristol, this morning. It went on for two and three-quarter hours. There was a woman who’d had a miscarriage while on holiday in Austria and had had to pay the hospital bills; a philatelist whose first-day cover had been ruined; a Post Office engineer who said he had been passed over for promotion; an architect with a planning problem; an upholsterer whose factory had been burned down and who had now got into trouble for putting up a portable building one-twentieth of which was outside the building line and wanted help because he had an important export order. There was a manufacturer of ladders who was worried about rising British Railways charges; a woman who had fallen in the street and wanted to claim damages from the Corporation; a real working-class Tory who had come to argue about compulsory-purchase procedures; and there was a telephone call from someone who wanted to know whether educational welfare officers had any part to play in the new Home Office family service courts. In fact it was a perfectly representative surgery.

  Tuesday 2 November

  At 5 o’clock I went to see Harold in his room at the House of Commons, with my stamps. I thought he was a little uneasy to begin with and this was no doubt because Mitchell had told him I was being difficult. I opened all my stamps and showed them to him and he was absolutely captivated by them. The ones he liked best were of the old railway trains. I should have guessed this since he wrote his thesis at Oxford on the early days of the railways. In fact he was absolutely certain that I had had these specially designed to win his support. He overrates my political sense. He also laughed very hard about the sporting prints, which he agreed were the best way of presenting new ideas to the Palace.

  With regard to the Queen’s head, he said that he had spoken to the Queen personally about it and that she didn’t want her head removed from the stamps. ‘She is a nice woman,’ he said to me, ‘and you absolutely charmed her into saying yes when she didn’t really mean it.’ He went on, ‘I don’t think you ought to go back and argue it out with her again because I’m sure you would win and she really wouldn’t be happy.’ He thus disposed of my claim that the network was operating to prevent this from happening. For my own part, I suspect that Harold more or less invited her to say no in order to keep in with the Palace. But, coming from him, there was no argument and I told him that it would create no problems as I could put a head on every stamp and showed him the cameos. He relaxed and realised that this would present no political difficulties for him.

  Marcia came in at this stage and so did Brenda and they looked at the designs and were delighted with them, especially with the costumes. But when Marcia heard about the Queen’s view she burst out and said it was a scandal that in modern England the Queen should have any say about anything at all, and why did she choose the stamps, what had it to do with her and couldn’t Ministers reach their own decisions. I told her that I agreed with her entirely but if there was likely to be political trouble it wasn’t worth it, and I would accept this. I do like Marcia, she’s got all the right instincts and she does Harold a great deal of good.

  Anyway, Harold said he would be seeing the Queen tonight at his audience and would tell her that we’d made great progress and probably the right thing to do would be to go along for another audience soon.

  At 8 o’clock I went back to Downing Street for dinner with Dick, Gerald, Peter, Tommy and Marcia. Mary waited for us in the living room in the flat where they live and she was sad at having to live away from home. She really doesn’t want to be the Prime Minister’s wife and would love to be the wife of an Oxford don. This is not an affectation, it’s perfectly genuine. She is a nice and unaffected woman. Private Eye are bringing out ‘Mary Wilson’s Diary’ as a book and we discussed whether any action could be taken to stop it. Harold said that nobody had read Private Eye for over a year now as it was so scurrilous! It’s one thing to run a comic column called ‘Mary Wilson’s Diary’ and it’s another thing to publish a book which many innocent people will think has been written by Mary Wilson. I think some legal action is called for and would succeed.

  Harold came in straight from his audience with the Queen and told me that he had been there for an hour and a quarter. ‘We spent ten minutes on Rhodesia, and an hour and five minutes on stamps,’ he said. I’m sure this reflects the proportion of the Queen’s mind which is devoted to Rhodesia as compared with stamps. He told me that she was perfectly happy to accept a silhouette, and to accept the rulers of Britain, including Cromwell and Edward VIII, but that her head had to appear on everything and the press was not to see any stamps without her head.

  Anyway there it rests. The plain truth is that the Palace has won on the main point and I have been defeated by Palace pressure exercised through the network on me, using the Prime Minister as an intervening force. Harold, who is so busy using the Queen on Rhodesia and wants it to be known that he enjoys the closest possible relations with her, is prepared to sacrifice this for a quiet life, and freedom from political criticism. Within its limited power the monarchy and all it stands for is one of the great centres of reaction and conservatism in this country.

  I heard a little bit more about Derek Mitchell’s attempt to get Marcia Williams out of Number 10. There is a big tussle going on. Marcia is infinitely the most
able, loyal, radical and balanced member of Harold’s personal team and I hope he resists efforts to dislodge her.

  Thursday 18 November

  I worked over lunch and at 2.30 Dr Konrad came to see me. He is a psychologist who had done a report for the Post Office on alpha-numerical codes covering telephones and postal coding. The Office want to do a postal coding system which will consist of two parts: the first for despatch or outward sorting, consisting of postal districts in London and a simple extract code for other cities, the second part for inward sorting or despatch and they suggested that one digit followed by two letters would be best [eg WIA 4WW]. In my opinion this is confusing.

  Downes and Wolstencroft had been at lunch with him and no doubt stoked him up on their side. In the end he was prepared to accept that it might be the subject of further research. Mr Downes said that if there was a change now it would set them back for six months and the coding in Croydon would have to be stopped, an argument that they had never used before, having previously told me that the coding could be organised in any way that suited Dr Konrad. I decided to drop my opposition to it.

  Saturday 11 December

  This evening Stephen had a party with his friends. They just bumped about and giggled like a lot of colts. The record player blared out and I could see my ceiling rising and falling by about two inches with the dancing above. Meanwhile I dictated letters and brought my diary up to date.

  Wednesday 15 December

  The pirate radio letters are continuing to flood in and there must now be 2,000 or more. I decided to make it clear that there would be a gap between the warning and the prosecution of the pirates and I think the prosecutions cannot begin until after the White Paper on broadcasting. But it was necessary to make a statement about prosecutions in order to take the heat off the Foreign Office, which is under heavy pressure from European countries.

  Wednesday 22 December

  Back home about 7.30. The Cabinet reshuffle was announced this evening. Barbara Castle is to be Minister of Transport in place of Tom Fraser and Roy Jenkins Home Secretary. I am quite happy to be at the Post Office for a few more months to carry out the changes that I have started. Yesterday I sent a long letter to Harold reporting on the Post Office and giving him an idea of what was coming in 1966. It didn’t call for any decisions but I thought there was no harm in making a private report to him.

  Tuesday 28 December

  Up early this morning and drove to Stansgate. The place was icy cold and within a few minutes of getting there the main electricity fuse went. So we had no light, heat or power. I rang the Electricity Board and they were there within three hours. After that we huddled round electric fires we’d brought from London and managed to get the central heating going, which gradually took the chill off the house. The place was in a terrible muck and we more or less camped but it was pleasant to get away from London and Stansgate is about the only place where I can relax and forget about the Post Office and politics and almost everything else.

  Thursday 3 February 1966

  To the Commons to see George Brown. He now claims that he is planning to settle the railway strike and is being stopped by Ray Gunter and Barbara Castle. He behaved monstrously to his officials, sending a senior civil servant out for bottles of gin and whisky and five minutes later ringing his own department in Storey’s Gate to find out where the poor chap had gone. He really showed off. George is completely erratic and irrational and an impossible old boozer – rarely being sober after lunch.

  Sunday 6 February

  Peter Shore came to collect me to take me down to Chequers. If he hadn’t done this I certainly shouldn’t have got there.

  The place was crowded with the whole Cabinet and National Executive – about sixty in all. Harold started by saying that all options must be kept open. We were not there to discuss the date of the Election.

  Then George Brown gave a general introduction to the document that had actually been prepared by Peter but for which Terry Pitt was most elaborately praised. Tom Driberg queried whether there would be a statement on overseas policy. Then Jack Jones asked whether it would be possible to cut defence costs and asked whether one could divorce defence and foreign policy from economic policy.

  After that we came to part one of the document, which was on the state of the economy. Jim Callaghan said that the debt problem was not insoluble but he did not expect that the growth rate could be up to 4 per cent before 1968/9. He asked us not to be impatient and said we would have to have priorities within the public sector. He warned us that public expenditure was going up 9 per cent this year and we had to keep our promises in the Election within limits. He predicted that tax rates might have to go up and said that personal taxation was already too high. He rather pooh-poohed the idea of abolishing the rates because of the burden on the Exchequer.

  We broke for lunch and I sat opposite Tony Crosland, who admitted that he now had some doubts about the binary system for higher education and rather regretted the philosophic speech he had made in defence of the binary system when he had only been at the Ministry a short time.

  After lunch Dick made a most effective speech about the need for a policy covering the whole physical environment and the need to share social furniture between different groups. He thought it was ludicrous to have a large playing field for a school and then find the local authority wanted more open space for general recreation, etc.

  Barbara then made a speech about transport in which she said that we must democratise car ownership and extend it more widely, spend more on the roads and get the physical integration of freight traffic on rail and road. She wanted to get away from the concept of paying our way in transport.

  We then moved on to the social services, where Douglas Houghton talked about the need to re-examine family allowances and to rationalise social payments with fiscal policy. He warned us that social security – especially pensions – was mainly concerned with women, since 5.5 million out of the 7.5 million pensioners were women. Crosland said a word about school building and how difficult it was to provide new schools to replace old ones with his present budget. He broadened it out to say that we needed to have a poverty programme covering housing, social services and education under a separate agency – rather taking a leaf out of President Johnson’s book. He went on to say that he was sure that there was more money that could be raised by taxation and that we were not at all at the limits of it as compared with other European countries.

  Next came Kenneth Robinson, who again complained of the great difficulty in meeting needs under his present budget, which would have to be expanded two and a half times in order to provide for all the hospital beds required at the end of the century and to replace the pre-war hospitals.

  We had tea and afterwards Jennie Lee spoke about the University of the Air and Peggy Herbison reported on pensions progress.

  Marcia came round and whispered that Harold wanted ‘the group’ to stay behind – Dick, Peter, Gerald and myself. Tommy Balogh, of course, was not at Chequers. We had a meal with Harold and discussed the Election strategy. It is pretty apparent that the Election will come soon and we were told to come to Chequers again next Sunday by which time Peter Shore has to prepare a draft manifesto.

  Home about midnight, feeling extremely tired and full of flu.

  Sunday 13 February

  Peter Shore turned up at 8.30 this morning and drove me to Chequers.

  The manifesto should be a very good one. Harold was rather tired but we had an amusing time. I thanked him for bringing my Post Office reorganisation forward.

  We talked at lunch about George Brown and Jim Callaghan and how both of them would like to be Leader of the House of Commons and got as near as we could to discussing various other changes. When the question came up of who would succeed Harold if he were knocked down by a bus, I asked Harold outright and he said that he would want to know who had paid the man who drove the bus.

  Home in time for tea with the family.

  S
unday 20 February

  Collected Peter Shore this evening to go to Number 10 at Harold’s request to go over the manifesto. It is obvious that the Election is imminent, although Harold pledged us to deep secrecy and didn’t actually say so outright.

  He began talking about his colleagues. Harold is terrified that if Jim Callaghan became Leader of the House of Commons he would conspire against Harold and weaken his position and we tried to reassure him that he was all right and had nothing to fear. It is extraordinary how a man in his position should have anxieties on that score.

  He was incredibly indiscreet and it was interesting that every reference he made to his colleagues referred to their weaknesses. Caroline thinks, and I am sure she’s right, that the way in which he manipulates people is by concentrating on their weakness. I must say I found the evening extremely unattractive. My opinion of Harold was lower tonight than it has ever been before. He really is a manipulator who thinks that he can get out of everything by fixing somebody or something. Although his reputation is now riding high, I’m sure he will come a cropper one day when one of his fixes just doesn’t come off.

  Thursday 24 February

  To the Cabinet, where it was decided, after a short debate, to go over to decimal currency in 1971.

  News from Ghana today that President Nkrumah has been deposed by a military coup. Everyone here is cheering because Nkrumah was such a hated figure. Much publicity is being given to the release of the political detainees. But of course they will soon be replaced in prison by Nkrumah’s supporters. However wild and uncontrollable the cult of personality has become in Ghana I feel sure that history will treat Nkrumah much more kindly than now appears from the British press. It is hard to escape the conclusion that a newly independent country requires a tough leadership and a focus of loyalty, and although he has no doubt been corrupt and wasteful and has isolated himself from the people, I suspect that in terms of fundamental development Ghana has not done too badly.