by Benn, Tony
The reason was that at that time we opted to become an imperial country instead of continuing as an industrial one. I recalled in my speech that in my childhood I had been taught a great deal about the engineers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but that after that the school books concentrated on viceroys and generals, civil servants and diplomats, and this country had simply opted out of industrialism. Thus all the schools had geared themselves to producing the sort of people the Empire needed. When I said this there was a spontaneous burst of applause and one or two people came up afterwards and said I ought to publish the speech. In fact it was a pre-introduction model of a major speech which I intend to make on every possible occasion from now on. The truth is that Britain must now give up being an imperial country and become an industrial country again and only in this way can we reshape our society, and encourage people to regard work in industry as the most worthwhile job they can possibly do.
Friday 29 – Sunday 31 July
The whole family drove off to Stansgate, arriving at 10.30 on Friday. All day doing nothing on Saturday. It takes an awful time to unwind after a week’s work and I have nightmares in which I am required to see General de Gaulle about the future of Concorde, or I arrive late in the office unshaven, not having read my Cabinet papers.
An old Post Office pillar box was delivered today at Stansgate – it weighs about half a ton. I had ordered it as Postmaster-General and it was to cost five or six quid. But as I had left by the time it was delivered they decided to give it to me as a gift. With a sledge hammer we broke off the bottom and gradually moved it over and erected it. I am very proud of it.
Pleasant sunny day on Sunday and we sat on the lawn. I didn’t even open my red box. We drove home, getting back about 6.15. Parliament rises at the end of next week and I shall be glad of a break.
Saturday 6 August
Number 10 lives in an atmosphere of intrigue, encouraged by George Wigg, who is a completely crazy adviser, Marcia, who gets a bit hysterical and Gerald Kaufman, who just sits wisely and nods. What Harold needs is a frank talk from his friends, but at the moment he won’t allow his friends to meet. He’s afraid that if Dick, Barbara, Tommy, Peter, Judith and I meet, we may turn out to be against him. I find the upper strata of politics less and less attractive. It’s not exactly that I’m naïve, but I really am only interested in politics in order to get my job done. Peter is of course a wise bird. He suggested that I should go and see Harold soon, in order to mend my relations with Number 10 which are very poor at present.
Sunday 7 August
We had another pleasant day and Peter and I went over one or two joint projects affecting Mintech. I rang Tommy and he suggested I should ring Marcia, and he said, ‘Harold was wounded, but is also very loving.’ It was a typical Thomas remark. I rang Marcia and said perhaps I could come and see Harold at his convenience. She said he’d been waiting for me to come and see him ever since the crisis broke. I said I didn’t want to bother him and wasn’t at all sure what had gone on. Marcia said, ‘At your level he expects you to bother him whenever you want to.’ He would also like me to ring him before Cabinet when anything important is coming up to find out the line that he wants to take. On balance, I’m glad that I struck out on my own, since I had been Harold’s adviser for too long and it is a good thing that he should see me in my own right.
Wednesday 10 August
George Brown has been moved to the Foreign Office. It is said that George made it a condition of his staying on at the time of the recent threatened resignation and that Harold acceded to it.
There is a great deal of dismay about the future of the DEA although it may be that Michael Stewart, with his quiet Fabian manner, will keep the thing going on a rather better basis than George could have done. There is some anxiety about George at the Foreign Office but he has always wanted the job and Harold presumably didn’t feel able to stand out against him. I think Dick Crossman’s appointment as Leader of the House is the best news of all as we probably shall get some parliamentary reform and he will now be acting as the liaison between the Government, the Parliamentary Party and the National Executive.
Thursday 25 August
The whole family – without Stephen – went to the Bradwell Nuclear Power Station this morning. They had laid on a superb tour for us and we saw the station which cost £58 million to build and is of a Magnox type, now obsolescent. We walked right into the reactor and saw the gantry that moved the nuclear fuel. We were frisked by Geiger counters, saw the heat exchanger and the turbines and then had lunch with the senior officials of the CEGB who had come to see us. It was altogether an enjoyable day.
The thing that interested me was the difference in attitude between Joshua, who is aged eight, and myself. I had to drive out of my mind all my primitive knowledge of how power stations worked – whereby you burned the coal, heated the water and the steam turned the turbines – and try to think of the implications of atomic energy. Joshua took it entirely for granted. It seemed natural to him that if you had a nuclear power station, you would be able to generate electricity and because he wasn’t consciously thinking about the process, he got an awful lot more out of it than I did.
Tuesday 13 September
At noon Mr Webb, the Head of NASA, came to see me with Dr Draper, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was responsible for the guidance system of missiles including the Polaris missile. Webb said the American space effort had reached such a scale that the payload they were going to put up could take over a number of scientific research projects which exceeded the capacity of American universities to provide. He wanted co-operation with us. I was extremely non-committal on the subject of expenditure but expressed a general interest in sharing the dissemination of information so that the technical fallout could be spread more evenly among the Western countries. Webb’s main object of course is to build up a Western space capability in Europe to rival that of the Soviet Union and particularly to see that the French don’t break away on their own and monopolise all the space technology in Europe. His first idea had been to suggest links directly with the Germans, following Chancellor Erhardt’s visit to President Johnson last December when the joint space probe was proposed. He had then thought that it would be worthwhile looking in to see us and I tried to say enough to keep the options open without committing us to any expenditure which we couldn’t afford.
Sunday 18 September
Lunch with Tony Crosland. Tony was in a very curious mood. He stressed how he was trying to cut down on the work he was doing and how important a complete holiday was. He said that he was devolving more and more work to his department, that the comprehensive battle was won and he was leaving it to Assistant Secretaries to approve the various reorganisation schemes that came up.
After lunch we sat and talked and I told him I did not like the idea of having to make every discussion in Cabinet a vote of confidence. I raised the question of the conspiracy and asked him if he had any knowledge of it and he denied it entirely. He said, quite frankly, ‘I never was an admirer of Harold Wilson but I think he’s probably as good a peactime Prime Minister as this country ever gets, even though over the last four months we appear to have been entirely without a strategy and I think he’s been very bad. But in time he will learn to be less gimmicky.’
He thought that Jim Callaghan might conceivably visualise himself as Leader some time and he thought Roy Jenkins was ambitious too, but that none of these things was in sight over the next five years. I don’t know whether Tony Crosland is discreet or not but there is always a certain risk in talking even to Cabinet colleagues. I don’t particularly want this to get back to George Wigg.
Friday 23 September
To Number 10 for a discussion under Harold’s chairmanship of the Productivity Conference and afterwards he asked me to stay. He said that his reshuffle in August had been the smartest piece of work he’d ever done ‘as there are now six crown princes instead of just one’. This, I
think, was his real motive and it confirms retrospectively what one has feared about his analysis of the July crisis. He also said that the only reason he had reshuffled on that day was because George Brown had told his press adviser and it had to be announced before it leaked. I asked if Mintech would have a new Minister of State in the next reshuffle and he said that it was very difficult, as he was up to the legal limit of Ministers of State and Ministers and he had to fit in Patrick Gordon Walker and he didn’t intend to let Fred Lee go, and so on and so on. So it looks as if things are going to be delayed for a while.
Saturday 22 October
Driven to Chequers for the meeting on Europe at 10.45 am, which lasted until 7 pm. There were nineteen Ministers there, and numerous officials who left in the afternoon.
There was a great row in the morning when Sir William Armstrong, Joint Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, said that he didn’t see any prospect at all of Britain being able to be in the Common Market unless and until we had devalued. George Brown got quite hysterical at this thought, because he knew that the Cabinet would be opposed to devaluation, George himself being in favour, and that this would affect our chances of entry. William Armstrong was really in the doghouse for saying this. We agreed that Harold Wilson and George Brown would visit the six countries of the Common Market to do a ‘probe’. Harold was not prepared to let George go alone because he didn’t trust George and he thought that George didn’t trust him. I came to the conclusion that Britain would be in the Common Market by 1970.
Monday 24 October
In the evening we went to the Soviet Embassy and as George Blake, the spy, had just been ‘sprung’ from Wormwood Scrubs there were a lot of rumours around that he might actually have been in the Embassy at the time of the party.
Thursday 27 October
Caroline and I had dinner with the Gulbenkians at the Ritz. Christopher Soames and his wife and Sir Alec Douglas-Home and his wife were there. I sat next to Soames’s wife Mary, the daughter of Churchill. She told me how bitterly angry and disappointed the family were that Lord Moran had been so unfair as to publish a book about her father’s health. An enjoyable evening – Gulbenkian is an amusing man.
Sunday 4 December
Harold came back from HMS Tiger with a document half agreed with Smith. Wilson had been negotiating with Smith on board Tiger in the Mediterranean to try to end the Rhodesian crisis. We had a Cabinet specially summoned and everyone was there except Barbara Castle. I had great anxieties as to whether it was right to agree with what Harold had brought back, but I did.
Monday 5 December
Rhodesia rejected the terms agreed with Harold at the talks on HMS Tiger.
Tuesday 6 December
Lunch with Solly Zuckerman at London Zoo. We talked about nuclear weapons and he told me that he was keen that Denis Healey and the Defence staff should not be able to get away with further expenditure on nuclear weapons by hardening the Polaris submarine warheads. He said that he and Lord Rothschild were really at one on this.
Thursday 15 December
I called Donald Stokes and George Harriman in together to discuss the Chrysler/Rootes crisis. I put to them three simple questions. Do you want to see Chrysler take over Rootes? Do you think it is worth attempting a British solution – a regrouping that would include Rootes and British Motors and Leyland, in which there might be some government participation? Would you be prepared to bring about a merger between your two companies to try to absorb Rootes if the Government were prepared to help?
Thursday 22 December
At Cabinet I saved the Harrier vertical take-off jet, one of the most brilliant British aeronautical innovations, which Denis Healey always tries to cancel on every possible occasion.
The Rootes-Chrysler deal was approved by the Cabinet with general commendation. I tried to promote the idea of a special concession on electrical cars by taking off the tax and purchase tax so as to encourage their development.
In the evening I did a long and – given my limited knowledge of French – painful broadcast for the BBC French Service.
Thursday 26 January 1967
Had a row over Cabinet Ministers’ memoirs. It had been reported in the papers that Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle had signed contracts to write their memoirs and a Minister raised this at Cabinet on the grounds that it made some people very uneasy to know that their colleagues were keeping a record of everything.
Dick did admit that he had a contract to write and publish his diary. He had got a woman from Nuffield to edit it for him but out of respect to the Party he had arranged that they were not to be published until after the General Election. But there was still anxiety because if there had been a very narrow Labour or Tory majority followed by another Election, and in the interval between the two Elections, Dick Crossman’s memoirs – with confidences about his colleagues – were published, it could have done enormous damage to the Party.
Barbara then admitted that she had also signed a contract to write her memoirs.
Harold declared that he intended to write three books. ‘One,’ he said, ‘I will write immediately we leave office and that will be an absolutely factual record of the Administration. Later, when I retire, I shall publish a much fuller account in which I will give far greater detail – this is when I have retired from public life. Thirdly,’ he said, ‘I shall write a book about what really happened with instructions that it should not be published until after my death.’
I said that there were some of us who felt resentful that we hadn’t been approached to publish our memoirs, and I said that I, too, was a diarist.
Monday 6 February
Premier Kosygin’s visit to Britain, and his plane was diverted from Gatwick at the last minute so the whole Cabinet was diverted too. I drove at 110 miles an hour at one point to get there. Then to Claridges with Soldatov, the Ambassador, and Kosygin.
I might add here that the security services bugged Kosygin during his visit. I know this because I got a mysterious memorandum from the security services, reporting something they had picked up on tape that Kosygin had said about Pompidou. I didn’t find it very useful, as it happened, except that it indicated how very close Kosygin and Pompidou were, due to de Gaulle’s Eastern policy.
Wednesday 8 February
I went to Elliot-Automation with Kosygin and on the way in the car he kept looking out of the windows – I think it was the first time he had been to Britain – and asking questions, ‘What is the cost of that house?’ This was as we were going up through Hendon to Boreham Wood. ‘How long would a man have to work as a worker to be able to afford one of these houses?’
In the evening we went to the Kosygin reception at Lancaster House, followed by dinner at the Soviet Embassy. George Brown got tight and kept shouting, ‘I want to go home. Are they all Bolsheviks?’ and similar remarks.
I received an invitation to go to Moscow for the May Day Parade and for talks. Sir Geoffrey Harrison, our Ambassador in Moscow, was absolutely opposed to a British Minister attending the May Day Parade because, he said, it would cause great political embarrassment.
Thursday 2 March
To Cabinet, where we discussed Party discipline arising out of abstentions on the defence debate. At the PLP meeting later, Harold made his ‘dog licence’ speech – that each MP is allowed to bite once like a dog but if they abstained or voted against the Government again they would be in trouble. This was a remark that he had thrown off at Cabinet in the morning and I must say that I didn’t like it very much, and I liked it even less when he said it at the Party meeting. It caused tremendous offence because it was very insulting to imply that we were all dogs and he was our trainer. It also gave me a great insight into his attitude towards the Labour Party, namely that we were there to support him and that he licensed the Party, whereas of course we license him because we elect him.
Thursday 13 April
The GLC elections, and Labour were absolutely routed. We are losing support as a government, and
this is rubbing off on Labour councillors who are very resentful against the Government. But there is a school of thought, of which Gerald Kaufman is one of the leading exponents, that the Labour Party doing badly has the great effect of sweeping out the most ghastly reactionary old Labour councils and bringing in new leadership – a very cynical view.
Monday 17 April – Ministerial visit to USSR
I went to the airport and flew on BEA to Moscow with Tommy Balogh, Ieuan Maddock, Harry Slater and William Knighton. Caroline was invited but Harold had personally vetoed it.
We were met by Kirillin and the Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, and Gvishiani of the State Committee for Science and Technology and I was put up at the National Hotel. We had a short walk round the Kremlin – it was very cold – and we had dinner at the Embassy with Sir Geoffrey and Dr Alexander, who is the Science Attaché and generally thought by the Russians to be an intelligence man.
Then we had a meeting in the Embassy’s secret conference room, which is in the basement and is suspended from the ceiling so that it does not rest on any foundations. From a corner of the room came the recording of a cocktail party playing continuously over our chat, and Ieuan Maddock worried them by saying that he could bug the room easily by stripping off the noise of the cocktail party and picking up the vibrations of the suspended room through the earth. But once you are in a room like that you can’t honestly think of anything secret to say! We discussed our strategy until 1 o’clock in the morning by which time I was extremely tired.
