by Benn, Tony
Tuesday 18 April
To the Institute of the Tele-Mechanics where we were greeted by Academician Trapeznikov, a very distinguished man who was studying control theory and trying to relate cybernetics to biology and neurology. As we walked around his Institute there was a girl sitting with wires on her arms, picking up electrical impulses. She was opening and closing her hands and on the oscilloscope you could see the electrical impulses being recorded while people were trying to find out how the brain sent a message to the hand.
In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. Madame Santalova was the interpreter.
I had been told by the Ambassador that Russian Ministers never invite British Ministers to their flats or homes and he was absolutely amazed when his invitation came in but it was, of course, because I had asked Kirillin to my home in London. It was lovely. We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child lived. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together, then he showed us home movies of his trip to England and having snowballs thrown at him by the children.
It was a marvellous evening and afterwards he told us stories of Azerbaijan Radio, a great joke in Russia. Azerbaijan Radio apparently invites listeners to write in with questions like, ‘Why do the Americans produce better automobiles than the Russians?’ Azerbaijan Radio replies, ‘Why do the Americans persecute the negroes?’ indicating that there is no good answer.
Artsemivitsch, who is a leading nuclear scientist, was interesting. ‘Science, we say in the Soviet Union, is defined as “Satisfying your curiosity at the expense of the State”,’ which is an amusing definition.
We talked about fusion. I had great anxieties as to whether we should go ahead with the huge Culham fusion programme which wasn’t producing results. Artsemivitsch said, ‘Well, ten years ago we said it would take us twenty years to make fusion work and we still say it will take twenty years to make fusion work, so we haven’t altered our view in any way!’
Thursday 20 April
I went to the Institute of Cybernetics and met Academician Glushkov, one of the most brilliant cyberneticists in the Soviet Union and a member of the American Computer Society. We had a Ukrainian lunch with them and at the Institute I was shown a computer they had built. I wasn’t, of course, in a position to judge how good their technology was, but Ieuan Maddock, who was with me, said it was many years behind Western standards. They showed me one computer which had been specially programmed to put together every day of the week with every day of every year back to 1700. They said to me, ‘Minister, tell us when you were born and we’ll tell you what day of the week it was.’ So I told them I was born on 3 April 1925. The computer creaked and groaned and produced the reply that it was a Friday. I said that was quite right, because I knew the day. So they asked, ‘How do you know that it is correct?’ and I replied very flippantly, ‘Well, I don’t remember 3 April, but I remember how excited I was on Thursday 2nd.’ This was translated into Russian and then back into English and into Russian again and they thought it was rather a flippant joke for a senior Minister to make.
Sightseeing in Kiev and shopping with Mme Santalova. Then we caught the sleeper back to Moscow. On the train, sitting in the compartment next door was Academician Kornichuk, who is the President of the World Peace Council. I went in and introduced myself to him and Academician Glushkov, who happened to be in the train, came into the compartment and translated. We all sat and talked and I asked Kornichuk about the work of the Peace Council and how he was getting on in bringing the Israelis and the Arabs together. He replied, ‘Ah they are impossible, impossible. We tried very hard but the Arabs walked out when the Israelis appeared.’
He was very drunk. He was on his way to Moscow to be given the Lenin Prize for a play that had made him famous, which he had written during the war. He was a sort of Kingsley Martin of Russia – an old intellectual on the left with an international reputation. He started attacking computers in exactly the way that John Betjeman might attack them. Glushkov translated, ‘My comrade says that if computers are in general use they will destroy man’s genius and his spirit and his imagination.’ Glushkov, who was a young chap, laughed and was very amused by it. It was great fun.
There was a lot of champagne and singing in the corridors and Kornichuk and Glushkov and I ended up joining in, with some British songs included to make me feel at home. I was of course stone-cold sober and getting rather tired by this time.
Friday 21 April
The train arrived in Moscow at 9 o’clock and I had a very discouraging telegram, which I might have predicted, from the Foreign Office, signed by George Brown
Tommy Balogh was waiting at the hotel to see me said that we must have a discussion together before the final talks with the Russians. I said, ‘Well, look, I am all tired and dirty,’ so he came into my suite and sat on the bidet in the bathroom while I was quietly having a bath and he told me what he hoped to achieve and how we must plan it. It was only later that I realised we had disregarded all the warnings in the security briefings. The Russians would have photographs of me in a bath and the Government’s economic adviser sitting on the bidet! We had a laugh about that.
Final talks and drew up the protocol with Kirillin. Then we drove to the airport and got back to London in three and a half hours.
Saturday 22 April
I went to see Harold about the Russian visit and he was very pleased with what had happened. I told him the story about my bath but he didn’t think that was very funny.
Monday 24 April
I was debriefed on the USSR. Otto said to me, ‘You must remember, Minister, that our trade with Russia is only 1 per cent of what it is with Denmark, and it is not an important market.’ And that was the attitude of the Board of Trade people throughout – they never cared about this operation. Nor did the Foreign Office.
Sunday 30 April
I went to Chequers, where we had Cabinet all day on the Common Market and we voted by 13 to 8 for an unconditional application. I made a speech which created a favourable impression with the pro-Europeans, who thought me anti-European. I said we had to cut Queen Victoria’s umbilical cord.
Those of us who favoured the application were not too worried about the conditions because we were a defeated Cabinet. Going back to the war, we had tried as a Labour Government to solve the country’s economic problems and we had left in a balance of payment crisis in 1951. The Tories had tried and had left in the balance of payments crisis in 1964. We had tried and had had to put the brakes on in 1966, and we were now looking for solutions to our problems from outside and somehow we were persuaded that the Common Market was the way of making progress.
Wednesday 10 May
In the evening went to the State Banquet at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.
Had to hurry back to vote in the Common Market debate in the House of Commons and there was a massive vote in favour of application. Almost all the Tories and the majority of Labour MPs were in favour.
Sunday 22 May – Ministerial visit to United States
To Washington and I met the Water for Peace UK delegation and said we were here to describe our own achievements and to sell our products.
Then I went to talk to Sir Patrick Dean at the Embassy, a man I very much dislike – a typical British Ambassador, arrogant and smooth.
I asked to see Robert McNamara at the Department of Defence and was taken to the Pentagon. It is impossible to convey adequately the tremendous respect with which McNamara is regarded in Washington. Here was the great American defence establishment, overwhelmingly the most powerful in the world, and McNamara, one of Kennedy’s men, had come in and established civilian control and crammed through programme budgeting. It was like going into an emperor’s cour
t – the centre of military power in the world.
I said that we in Britain knew of his military achievements but we didn’t know as much as we would like to know of his control of the Pentagon, and I asked him whether he was interested in the Concorde or supersonic aircraft for military purposes. He said he wasn’t.
Tuesday 23 May
Caroline went to Capitol Hill to see the Senate and the White House.
It was the official opening of the Water for Peace Conference at the Sheraton Hotel and Stuart Udall, the Secretary for the Interior, and President Lyndon Johnson attended. President Johnson came round to meet us. He looked absolutely drained of energy, totally exhausted. The only other man I have ever seen who looked quite as white and tired was Kosygin. The leaders of the US and the USSR really do carry a load far beyond the capacity of a single person. What was interesting was the way the American President moved, with no protocol but absolutely maximum security.
He was surrounded by about five or six security men with their backs to him, moving as he moved, and they had walkie-talkies into which they were talking all the time, describing where he was, looking round, saying check this and check that. It was like a Roman emperor with the Praetorian Guard, only the Praetorian Guard was defending him with an electronic network of security, rather than with actual weapons, though I have no doubt the men were armed.
Wednesday 31 May
Melissa came to have a meal at the House and was kissed by George Brown – she was thrilled. She met Barbara Castle, Douglas Jay, Elwyn Jones and Jeremy Thorpe and she was as happy as could be.
Saturday 3 June
Went to the Farnborough Air Show. Met Pompidou briefly and Pierre Messmer, the Minister of Defence, who was in charge of Concorde. Group Captain Townsend, Princess Margaret’s old boyfriend, was there.
It was a beautiful display. The French do these things in a fantastic way – far better than we do. The Farnborough Air Show is just a pre-First World War country cricket match compared to the Paris International Air Show. Of course the French planes and French technology dominated. The F-111 came over, folding its wings. The paratroopers dropped, the French Hovercraft was available for us to see, the Concorde was presented as a French plane – it was a marvellous example of the glory of France being exploited.
I came home and had my first ever automatic landing in a British aircraft. I saw the pilot with his hands just by the stick but in fact it landed itself.
Wednesday 5 July
Bill Penney came in to talk about the centrifuge separation method for producing enriched uranium. This centrifuge as a way of producing uranium was based on a development by Dr Zipper, a German scientist, during the war. In order to produce enriched uranium, centrifuges have to turn at enormously high speeds, posing a mechanical problem rather than a nuclear one, and once you have solved that, you can enrich uranium without the tremendously expensive and bulky gas diffusion process.
Penney said that the centrifuge project has enormous military implications because the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons is much greater than before. It means that countries like South Africa, which have natural uranium, might be able to develop enrichment plants on a small scale almost completely undetected, near their natural uranium field. I could see that the effect on the Non-Proliferation Treaty and on other areas would be great. Penney told me that all that had held up the centrifuge system from operating was that there had been no parts able to rotate at the required speed without breaking down. So the development of this use of centrifuge was really a mechanical engineering refinement. Our fear was that if anyone knew that the British AEA was using the centrifuge to enrich uranium, then all the work that had been stopped or never started on centrifuges elsewhere would begin with renewed vigour. We ourselves, after announcing that we were going ahead with a bigger atomic programme for peaceful purposes, had stated that we would be expanding Capenhurst for the purpose of enriching uranium by gas diffusion, and everybody was waiting for the second stage of the Capenhurst development to begin. In physical terms, civil engineers and so on were all ready to move in and build it. But it was now unnecessary to expand Capenhurst and we were afraid that the secret would leak out simply because of the fact that Capenhurst wasn’t going ahead. Anyone who knew the score would be able to read into that the fact that the AEA had the centrifuge. It would mean that Britain could meet its own enriched uranium needs without being so dependent on the Americans and that the big French plant at Pierre Latte would be the most expensive piece of junk ever.
The Dutch had boasted that they had found a better way of enriching uranium and that they were using the centrifuge, but the Dutch had no nuclear know-how and nobody believed them. The Germans were thought to be involved. When I visited the Julich reactor with Stoltenburg earlier in 1967, this was where the Germans were working on it.
It was so important that I went to see Harold at 11.45 that night to tell him the news, and explain to him the implications of it all, which he took on board. Then I went home and I worked till 3.30 am.
Wednesday 19 July
Cabinet meeting on public expenditure, during which there was a sonic boom. It was very funny. I told the Lightning jet crew to fly over London at 12 noon as we were sitting in Cabinet. It was a tremendously hot day and all the windows were open. I was afraid that there would be a frightful din so I passed a note to Harold saying that there would be a sonic bang at midday and should I tell the Cabinet? He said, no. So I sat there dreading it. At 12 o’clock, which we heard on Big Ben, there was a great sound like a clap of thunder. It did cause a shock, and was different from subsonic noise but it wasn’t as bad as one had expected. But Miss Nunn, who was in the Cabinet secretariat, hadn’t known what was happening and went very pale.
Friday 4 August
Because of unemployment in the North East, we were anxious that Swan Hunter should tender for two container ships which were on order, and I had had authority to offer a subsidy for this purpose to Sir John Hunter, who hadn’t bid for it on the grounds that it wouldn’t be profitable.
I called in the directors of Swan Hunter and as quick as a flash they realised that we had to give them the money for employment reasons, so they simply stuck out for more. I think originally we offered them half a million. They stayed for three hours and we tried to arrange it so that we could supervise the accounts. But in the end they went away with a million quid. Absolute bribery.
Saturday 16 November
Cabinet decided to devalue.
Spent all morning in a package of cuts while I had this terrible guilty secret, which I had to keep quiet until it was announced.
Saturday 18 November
Devaluation from $2.80 to $2.40 announced. A great moment of defeat for the Government but I felt cheerful about it as a matter of fact, because this was, after all, what we had tried to prevent for three years and this delay was itself a great defeat for Harold. The following day he did his absurd broadcast on television saying, ‘The pound in your pocket won’t be devalued.’
Monday, 11 December
To Paris in the HS125. Collected Sir Patrick Reilly, the Ambassador, in Paris and went to Toulouse for the roll-out of the 002 Concorde. It was icy cold.
Chamant met me and I made a little speech. I didn’t speak in French, but I did say that as a tribute to this occasion we would now in future have a British Concorde which would be spelt with an ‘e’. There was great cheering. I said, ‘That is “e” for excellence; “E” for England and “e” for “entente concordiale”.’ This went down very well.
In fact, there was a hell of a row about this. The press said it was a capitulation to de Gaulle, whom had I consulted, and so on. When I sat and thought about it I realised that this wasn’t taken as a joke. I had an angry letter from a man who said, ‘I live in Scotland, and you talk about “e” for England but part of it is made in Scotland.’ I wrote back and said that it was also ‘E’ for ‘Ecosse’ – and I might have added ‘e’ for extravagance and ‘e’ for
escalation as well! I then discovered that the British Concorde had always been spelt with an ‘e’, but after the French vetoed British entry into the Common Market in the early sixties, the Government gave an order that the Concorde was to drop the ‘e’. So I had only reinstated the original spelling.
But it was a great day and, except for the icy cold, it was well worthwhile. It was nice to see Concorde out of the hangar. After worrying so much about Concorde, you wondered if you would ever see it.
The immediate problem confronting the Labour Government in 1968 following devaluation of the pound, was the mounting pressure for further public-expenditure cuts, and early in the New Year a succession of Cabinet meetings was held to find the money from different departments.
Defence expenditure was a target particularly the commitment east of Suez and the defence equipment budget, notably the proposed purchase of fifty American F-111 aircraft which had been ordered to replace the TSR-2 after Labour came to power. Concorde was also under threat.
In 1968 Tony Benn began the practice of dictating his diary on to a cassette and, for the first time, recorded Cabinet meetings in detail.
Wednesday 3 January 1968
To see Denis Healey, who was surrounded by some of his senior people who were in a very angry mood, and his language was full of f . . . this and f . . . that. He said that the defence cuts were mad; that they were just being done to make it possible to introduce prescription charges; that the whole thing was crazy. He did not intend to offer or accept any reduction in the F-111 commitment. He was also strongly in favour of retaining Polaris. I asked him about Concorde and warned him that if cancelled, this might lead to the cancellation of the Anglo-French military package. He thought that Concorde should go but if I supported the F-111, he was prepared to let others take the lead on the Concorde issue. This was really very crude politicking and I listened attentively and left without any sort of commitment.
In the evening we went to the Crossmans, where we had dinner with Tommy Balogh, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle. We started with a great gripe about the absolute exclusion of Cabinet Ministers from important decisions.
