The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990

by Benn, Tony

  Sunday 24 November

  The papers this morning are full of the news that de Gaulle has refused to devalue the franc. I must say I laughed myself sick all day. From all accounts at the Bonn conference last week the French threatened to devalue by 25 per cent and said they could not accept a devaluation of less than 11.11 per cent. And then in the event de Gaulle has refused to do it.

  This afternoon Caroline and I went for an hour and a half’s walk in Kensington Gardens. It was a very nice quiet day.

  Saturday 30 November

  Among my letters today was one from a man in Bristol who told me to keep away from the House of Commons for the next fortnight because he had sold some grenades at £3 each to somebody who intended to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Normally one would dismiss a bomb scare letter like that as a hoax but there were certain features of the letter which made it more interesting.

  First of all he specified the amount of money he had been paid for each grenade in brackets; he was also concerned that I might be hurt and said that I had helped him once in Bristol, which made the thing rather authentic. He then went on to say that he had heard it was something to do with the Welsh nationalists, and the BBC in Monmouthshire. It so happened that the day after he had posted the letter the Welsh nationalists did stage a sit-in at the BBC studios in Cardiff, so there was enough to make it look quite serious.

  I rang the House of Commons Police and got a phone call back, suggesting I take the letter to the local police station, so I sent Stephen round to Ladbroke Grove and he stood in line with a woman who had lost a handbag and a boy whose bike had been pinched. When the policeman asked what he wanted, Stephen said, ‘It’s about a bomb.’ So they whipped him into a private room and he gave them the letter and told them the background. A few minutes later I had a phone call from Inspector Watts of Special Branch, who asked if I would let him have a note of the people I had helped in Bristol. I said that in eighteen years as an MP, I must have helped about 40,000 people, and he asked if I had any correspondence.

  Tuesday 10 December

  I went to Cabinet, where Harold began by ‘Warning the Plotters’. He said that four senior Ministers had told him that one member of the Cabinet had been going round stirring things up, indicating conspiracy against Harold’s own leadership, and that if this went on, within further ado he would simply reconstruct his government.

  Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan are the obvious suspects, and they probably are doing it a little bit, but not as much as Harold thinks. I knew nothing about it one way or the other but I’m sure if there are conspirators that is about the worst possible way of dealing with them.

  Wednesday 11 December

  I went to Cabinet and the Falkland Islands was the only item; a long discussion. The general view was that the scheme that had been worked out and presented by Michael Stewart, ie signing a memorandum with Argentina saying that we would hand over sovereignty as soon as possible on a date to be fixed, but having a simultaneous document saying we wouldn’t do it without the Falkland Islanders’ agreement, gave an impression of deviousness.

  Michael Stewart was very upset, understandably, but he had gone rather further than his brief and his paper was rejected. I think Harold was a bit embarrassed because he was pretty heavily tied up in this as well.

  Friday 13 December

  I went to Bristol and spoke at the Bristol Graduate Club about technology and politics. Just before my lecture there was a message from students at the sit-in in Senate House inviting me to go.

  Yesterday I had made enquiries to Shirley Williams about what I should do and she told me the Vice-Chancellor was very worried and not prepared to negotiate with the students. She said I shouldn’t go into Senate House and my office were so worried they arranged for a police escort to meet me at the station and at the university, which didn’t please me very much because I don’t need police to protect me in Bristol or among students. But I felt I couldn’t visit the sit-in, so I wrote a little note saying, ‘My meeting has just finished, I am going to have some food and I will be in the Grand Hotel later.’

  I got back to the hotel just after midnight and three students were waiting for me, having been sent from Senate House. We talked for about two hours. I tried to be as sympathetic as I could. They said the writs against the six people the Vice-Chancellor had had to name were victimisation. I said the Vice-Chancellor is not going to abandon the writs and give up the fight against people who have taken over the building.

  In a way, they sympathised with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Collar – he is an aeronautical engineer – who found this problem on his shoulders and doesn’t know what to do, while the other vice-chancellors are breathing down his neck. The pressure has built up, led by the Western Daily Press and the Right in Bristol, to use tear gas, smoke bombs and water cannon to get the students out of Senate House.

  Actually the students are being very careful. They let the police in to inspect and have locked up documents; I don’t think the Maoists are in control at all, but there are students there from other parts of the country.

  Friday 3 January 1969

  Up at 6 am to London where we had a Cabinet on Barbara’s trade union White Paper. Barbara had rung me on Thursday night to discuss this because she’d decided to talk to the TUC before bringing it to Cabinet. This created a tremendous row. A lot of Cabinet Ministers bitterly resented having read in the press what the proposals were before any papers had been put to us. Dick Crossman was extremely angry, partly because he thought Barbara’s White Paper was going to scoop his pensions White Paper, which he had been working on for eleven years, and partly because he thought it was sloppy work.

  Jim Callaghan and others, Dick Marsh particularly, were entirely opposed to the idea of ‘cooling off’ periods or strike ballots. I joined in and said I was in favour. First of all industrial life is more complex now than it ever has been and you simply cannot have a disturbance in the system anywhere without us all suffering, and second, the democratisation of pressure groups, which is the case for strike ballots, seems right to me.

  Friday 10 January

  I got up early and spent the day with the Beagle Aircraft Company. I was flown up to Leicestershire in a 206, a beautiful aircraft, with the chairman, Peter Masefield. We saw a tatty little company producing these marvellous aircraft in a shed – just like building Spitfires during the war. I talked to the men in the shop and I told them why we had bought the company and how we were going to leave the management to handle it we believed in them and hoped that they would support us.

  Then in the plane down to Shoreham and saw the Beagle production going on, again talked to the workers from a platform they put up for me. It’s part of my idea of talking to people directly.

  I flew back to Gatwick in a Beagle Pup and Peter Masefield’s son, Charles Masefield, who was the chief test pilot, let me loop-the-loop and do a slow roll which I haven’t done for twenty-five years. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

  Monday 3 February

  I took Melissa and Joshua with me this morning to meet Colonel Frank Borman, the American spaceman, who’s come to Britain on the first stop of a European goodwill tour. I met him at the front of Millbank Tower and he presented me with a miniature of the module which is going to land on the moon this summer, and then I took him up. I had the little ones waiting in the lift and he was awfully sweet with them. We had a most interesting discussion.

  He said as far as spin-offs from the moon programme were concerned, the really valuable spin-off was management. Here was a programme that cost $40,000 million and involved 400,000 people. There were four million moving parts in the rocket spacecraft and they had got round the moon and splashed down within a few seconds of the computer predictions. This is undoubtedly a most important feature.

  He told me one or two other amazing facts. For example, one thousand million people had heard him read from the Book of Genesis on the other side of the moon on Christmas Eve: 500 million on television and 500
million on sound – about one in four of the world’s population. Borman himself said he thought the whole space programme had helped to unite humanity and to unite past and present and he gave a very interesting example. He said that during the flight the children of one of the other astronauts had sent a message through the space centre in Houston asking, ‘Who’s flying now?’, and the answer was Sir Isaac Newton, because at that particular time they were operating without controls, just being carried towards the moon by the force of gravity. ‘It united us with Galileo and we felt a part of history,’ he said.

  Wednesday 12 February

  Up at 6.30 to go to the Babcock and Wilcox factory which is threatened with closure. Dick Mabon had come and together with the head of Babcock and Wilcox we went into the canteen to address the workforce. It was just like a pre-war scene of thirty years before, with the men in their raincoats and caps, all dirty and brown and no colour at all except for the bright lights of the television cameras covering the meeting. I said I had nothing to promise them but I would do my best. They listened very patiently and asked questions, and there was a cheer as we left.

  We travelled to Scott Lithgow’s along the Clyde in the ferry, saw them building their big bulk carriers, then to Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and as I went in I saw a tremendous crowd of people shouting and waving placards, ‘Wedge Don’t Hedge’, and ‘Let’s Go With Labour But Not The Labour Exchange’, and all that.

  The shipyards were empty as I walked round with Tony Hepper. I slipped, through the gates and walked to a football field where 15,000 people had gathered.

  It was a terribly cold day; my face was almost frozen with the cold. I could hardly smile, but I still jumped up on the truck and they listened to me. That was the main thing. I told them that it was difficult to get a match so that jobs were available in exactly the right quantities at exactly the right time. They were cheering and jeering and they didn’t know quite what to make of it. They were clearly pleased I had come up to the Clyde to encourage them and I told them to keep their spirits up.

  When I had finished my short speech, I jumped off the truck and talked to a few people. A woman came up and gave me a kiss and said, ‘He’s lovely’: there was deep anxiety and criticism but also human warmth.

  Tuesday 25 February

  I had a meal at the House, changed into a black tie and went to Number 10 to meet President Nixon, who had expressed a desire to meet Cabinet members other than those who were going to dine with him.

  The whole Cabinet was there, and so were John Freeman and the US Ambassador. John Freeman has apparently made a statement to the effect that he has ceased to be a socialist and to this extent has repudiated his past, but then again Nixon is supposed to have had psychoanalysis and repudiated his, so I suppose it is evens.

  After introducing Nixon, Harold brought him round and described everyone’s responsibilities. When I told him I was married to a Cincinnati girl, he said, ‘Aha, Hamilton County,’ which showed what a good politician he was, knowing the county pattern in a particular state. I told him about the Harriers we hoped to sell him and that I did a lot of business with America on aviation and nuclear energy.

  Then we went and sat round the Cabinet table and Harold welcomed him formally. It was a rather agreeable atmosphere. Nixon said a word: how he was anxious that co-operation with Britain shouldn’t only be about foreign policy but should cover the whole range of domestic matters. He laid great emphasis on the current problems of youth and protest and said that young people had nothing to strive for, and that there was no idealism left – or rather there was, but no scope for it.

  Harold was quite contemptuous of the young and said they didn’t know what to do, and all that. Judith corrected him and said the young needed to be inspired. One or two other people were asked to speak, then I said, ‘Mr President, I spend five days a week trying to introduce technology and the other two thinking about the effect this has on society. Young people today are aware of this and they take it for granted; they have nothing to forget, as older people have, and they think we are suffering from acute institutional obsolescence – and I suspect they are right. It is all very well to mock them for not knowing what to do but I am not sure that we know what to do. They are international. Mr Borman spoke to one thousand million people when he read from the Book of Genesis orbiting round the moon: international technology has created a world youth movement.’ I said I had a son of seventeen and had learned more from him than he had from me.

  Then Denis Healey said something about young people not being interested in technology at all, but that wasn’t the point I was making.

  Dick Marsh said he had a son of eighteen and young people just liked making trouble, that was the important thing. There was really nothing in student protest to think about: it was just intellectual masturbation. It was a very crude and vulgar comment.

  Dick Crossman said that all was lost, that De Gaulle was the silliest old man that ever was; that we were heading for an extreme right-wing period; that the Left had simply created a Gaullist victory in France, and had created Nixon’s victory in America. It was a really New Statesman defeatist speech of the kind that Dick excels at. But there was a lot of laughter and at the end Nixon said, ‘Why don’t we have Dick Crossman, and we’ll send you Marcuse!’ That more or less ended the discussion.

  Friday 14 March

  Up very early this morning with Ivor Manley from my Private Office and Derek Moon, my press officer Gerry Fowler [Parliamentary Secretary] having missed the plane, and flew to Glasgow. This is my big visit to Upper Clyde to try to get over to the men that in fact there is no possibility of Upper Clyde being sustained indefinitely by a safety net. I had ten meetings, and I must have spoken to 7,000 or 8,000 men altogether. I began with the UCS board, who conveyed their extreme anxiety and said they had been let down. They had all gathered there thinking they would get three or four years to prove the profitability of the company.

  Then I had a general meeting of the shop stewards from the UCS group and I delivered my first talk and answered questions. It was pretty tough and there were a few shouts. One guy called Sam Barr, a Communist shop steward, said they simply wouldn’t accept redundancy.

  I remained in the canteen and the staff of John Brown at Clydebank had arrived, so I gave the same talk, and someone said that Hepper was much too remote in Fitzpatrick House and wasn’t keeping in touch with the situation, which I am sure is true.

  It was a very tough, very tiring day. But I think my trip to the Clyde created an impression that we are genuinely trying to help. And if you go there and see it for yourself, people relax. They know you know the problems and they don’t get so intense.

  Monday 17 March

  Upper Clyde Shipbuilders is still a great anxiety and relations between the Shipbuilding Industry Board and UCS have completely collapsed because SIB are being obstinate rather than tough and UCS are just declining to pull their finger out.

  There are so many people who want the whole thing to fail: Sir Charles Connell, the Deputy Chairman of UCS, who wants to punish Fairfields for their experiment and believes in the old idea of throwing men out of work to discipline them; Yarrow, the other Deputy Chairman, who is longing for the moment when he can pull out Yarrow’s from UCS and make a profit and join up with his old friends in Lower Clyde; then there is Barry Barker of the SIB, who wants it to fail for rigid reasons; Victor Chapman and Cliff Baylis in my office, who think it can’t possibly succeed; and Jack Diamond, who isn’t prepared to provide Government money. There are a lot of enemies of Upper Clyde, quite apart from Lower Clyde, and others, so I am going to have a job propping it up. But I am going to go on trying because the industrial consequences of the failure of Upper Clyde would be tragic.

  Wednesday 9 April

  Having heard last night at Stansgate that Concorde 002 was to fly for the first time today I got up at 5, drove to London and caught a plane to Bristol.

  We landed at Filton and it was an extraordinary atmos
phere. There was this beautiful bird being pulled out on to the tarmac, the most advanced aircraft project anywhere in the world, and it was just like a sort of village cricket match. Juster, the President of Boeing, was there and Ziegler of Sud Aviation, and so on, standing about on the grass because there were no seats; and there was a buffet lunch.

  Brian Trubshaw, the test pilot, dressed in his yellow flying suit, kept going backwards and forwards muttering, ‘It’s the paperwork that’s holding us up, it’s those chaps doing the paperwork.’ As he left to get into his car everyone shouted, ‘Good old Trubby, good old Trubby.’ I thoroughly enjoyed it as a matter of fact, but I wondered whether the occasion reflected a degree of amateurism in modern technology that wasn’t quite right. George Edwards, with his hands plunged into his pockets and his pork pie hat on his head, was walking about like a vicar at a country fête wondering whether everything would go well.

  In the end, in the afternoon the plane was ready and I stood on the runway and watched the fantastic belching of black smoke, my backbone vibrating with the noise. Then it went along the runway for its final taxi and simply took off. I jumped into a helicopter with Ziegler and Juster and George Edwards and we flew to Fairford where it was to land, but we lost our way and we got there too late to land before the Concorde but we saw it on the ground and I took some movies. There was a fantastic scene of pressmen crowding and fighting all over the place; it was like the landing of Charles Lindbergh in Paris in the 1920s, or one of Amelia Earhart’s flights. The crew came down very modestly and they were asked to wave and then there was a press reception.

  I flew back in the helicopter to Filton and went to the presentation for the crew. Trubshaw was given a gold cigarette case and George Edwards made a speech in which he congratulated ‘those chaps who did the steering. Your gang were very good, Trubby,’ he said. ‘I remember the days when we brought you in from the RAF; and I would like to say a word about the Minister who in my book is keeping a friendly eye on this in Whitehall’, and all that. The whole thing was just like Biggies or Richmal Crompton’s Just William; it had an entirely pre-war feeling about it.