by Benn, Tony
Anyway, I called Willy Hamilton instead, and he delivered an attack on me but it made a friend of him for life, so Frank McElhone assured me!
In the end the Executive statement and the Boilermakers’ resolution were carried and the AUEW was defeated. Jack Jones had been to see Harold and Harold had given him some assurances about this and that, and no doubt twisted his arm. So Jack had agreed not to vote for the AUEW, there being no love lost between him and Hugh Scanlon at the moment.
I had a talk to Jimmy Reid and the UCS people who were down. They were meeting Wayne Harbin, President of Marathon oil rig builders, that night. I had an amusing exchange with them. We were talking and I was advising them as best I could; they were all my old buddies. Then Jimmy Airlie said, ‘There’s a photographer here, do you want a photograph?’ So Jimmy Reid said, ‘We’re seeing Chataway tomorrow and it might be embarrassing if we were photographed with you.’ I said, ‘That’s fine. A year ago I was wondering whether it was respectable to be seen with you but if now it’s the other way round and you don’t want to be seen with me, that’s a very great tribute that I shouldn’t be respectable enough for you.’ They saw the point immediately and they laughed, and they got the photographer.
Friday 6 October
We had Harry Nicholas’s farewell speech in which he meant to be friendly but it came out in a way that revealed him for the male chauvinist pig that he is – with all the cheap jokes about women. Made Caroline cringe.
I had heard rumours of Dick Taverne’s imminent resignation as Labour MP for Lincoln and so I had asked various journalists to keep their eyes open and Mary Lou to feed me immediate information on the platform in case Taverne did make a statement before the end of the Conference. I waited anxiously all morning. Tony Banks, a Labour councillor, moved his point of order asking whether the changes I had made in Conference procedure would continue in future years. I said that was a genuine point of order but it was not for me, it was for the next Chairman. This was designed to boost my chairmanship, which had come in for a lot of criticism.
Then at about 12.15 I began getting news that Taverne had called a press conference. All the press lobby had gone to London to listen to it. He announced that he would be standing as a Democratic Labour candidate, and he attacked the Party. Mary Lou sent me a garbled typed account of what he had said but it was enough to indicate that his plan had been to see the Labour Conference end on a phoney vote of unity and then wreck it all by his statement. So I decided – without telling Caroline or anyone else – that I would make this the occason for a comment on Taverne and also on the role of the mass media; because last weekend The Times had published its survey showing that there would be tremendous support for a new centre-left-Liberal-type party, and I knew that John Torode was involved in helping Taverne in preparing a television programme this weekend.
So when it came to me to speak, I made my proper Chairman’s remarks of thanking everybody and then I said the Conference had wanted socialism; wanted unity; wanted us to work hard together and wanted an Election. I said by chance, not of our making, the opportunity for the latter had come with the announcement this morning, a few minutes ago, that there would be a by-election in Lincoln. ‘I say nothing about our departing colleague except for a tinge of sadness; but others have tried to damage us before and haven’t succeeded.’ They cheered and cheered at all this. Then I said, ‘This is more than that because it is the first time that the mass media has actually put up a candidate in the Election. I wish the workers in the media would sometimes remember that they are members of the working class and have a sense of responsibility to see that what is said about us is true.’ This led to another great wave of cheering. Then I went on to say that the mass media was difficult to deal with when it was selling their papers or producing their programmes but if they actually put up a candidate, then we should have a chance of defeating them. Then I brought the Conference to its feet to sing ‘The Red Flag’.
It was quite clear to me that the people on the platform were absolutely livid at my speech. Harold apparently had been smoking his pipe furiously and everyone else was angry that I had raised the temperature by mentioning Taverne. What I gathered was that they still regarded Taverne as a member of the Party and an attack on Taverne was reopening inner Party splits, which they wanted to play down. Also they were annoyed about the reference to the mass media because they don’t want trouble with the media and they are all gutless.
We packed up, and caught the special train home. When we got to London, the Evening Standard was already running my ‘amazing’ outburst against the press and my ‘savage personal attack’ on Taverne.
We were very tired. Caroline thought that a period of silence was required. She thought I had really perhaps made a mistake in ending the Conference the way I had done. I think that was also the view of Mary Lou, Frances Morrell and one or two others.
Saturday 7 October
There was tremendous coverage this morning of my Blackpool speech, the Telegraph charging me with inciting workers to strike against the press.
Sunday 28 January 1973
Ray Buckton drove me to Doncaster for a meeting on the railways. I like Ray: he is an interesting man, and a great friend of Clive Jenkins. Since he became General Secretary of ASLEF, he has been playing a very active part in trade unionism and is regarded as a great rather than a dangerous radical. He was cautious with me in the car – I suspect most trade unionists are cautious with all parliamentary people – but at the same time very friendly. He told me how the railwaymen had succeeded last year in helping the miners to prevent oil getting through to the power stations and, indeed, without the ASLEF ban on oil supplies he didn’t think the strike could have succeeded. He also told me that someone from the Post Office Engineering Union had warned him that he, Ray, was having his telephone line bugged during the strike. These examples of working-class solidarity being used, tentatively, to defend people against the Government impressed me. I felt that they were preparing themselves, not in any sense for a revolution but for a transfer of power of an important kind.
Monday 29 January
Big news today arising from the Poulson hearing. A claim was made that Tony Crosland had been given a £500 coffee pot by Poulson. Tony, very sensibly, called a press conference immediately, produced the coffee pot, which he had had valued at £50, returned it at once and said he wished he had never seen the damn thing. By acting really quickly, he disposed of the issue straight away.
Saturday 24 February
I arrived home at about 2 am from Bristol to find the children still up and that Caroline had gone to Brighton because Hilary had been kicked in the back playing football there and had been admitted to hospital with serious kidney damage. Caroline stayed with him overnight. I had a few hours’ sleep then drove down to Brighton, found Hilary in a bad way and we authorised an emergency operation. Rosalind his fiancée was very worried.
Wednesday 28 February
There was an all-day ASLEF strike today. The industrial disputes at the moment – the gas workers, the hospital workers, the railway engine drivers and the teachers – do represent a major government confrontation with the trade unions, something which is creating a great deal of public agitation and nervousness on the part of the political leadership.
Thursday 1 March
Geoff Bish, Stuart Holland and Margaret Jackson came in this morning to discuss our Green Paper on the development of Labour’s industrial policy and the idea of a State Holding Company. I presented the outline I had made of existing government powers and the new powers that we would need in order to succeed. Stuart Holland is a very bright guy who worked at Number 10 with Harold during the last period of government. He is dissatisfied with Harold now and is rather attaching himself to me, though I don’t see much prospect at the moment of my own chances improving since I am still living in the shadow of my year as Chairman of the Party and the events of the Conference.
I went to Bristol for the AGM and
afterwards watched the result of the Lincoln by-election; Taverne won overwhelmingly. It was very depressing because Taverne was cock-a-hoop and the TV coverage has been so pro-Taverne, there was not even a pretence of being fair.
Wednesday 8 March
There were two bombs in London, one outside Scotland Yard and one in Whitehall. The violence of the IRA appears to have come to the surface and this has created a new political atmosphere in a way. It is frightening people, and fear always turns them to the right.
Monday 12 March
At the Home Policy Committee of the NEC there was a discussion about the next Labour Government. They all felt that the programme was so complicated and full that it would take three Parliaments to implement. So I chipped in and said I was uneasy about this; we really couldn’t wait for twenty-five years. What we wanted was a substantial and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in the next Labour Government and that it wouldn’t necessarily cost money if we were prepared to act swiftly.
Jim Callaghan said we should go more slowly and ‘leave our humane imprint on the social legislation of our time’. I declared that wasn’t enough for me and I would need an Industrial Powers Act if I was going to carry through the sort of industrial policy a Labour Government would need. This little clash was well worth having and I was much tougher than I have been for a long time at that committee.
Thursday 5 April
Hilary came out of hospital and we are profoundly relieved that he will be able to get married on Saturday as planned.
Caroline was co-opted again as a member of the Inner London Education Authority.
At the House of Commons there was a meeting to discuss Judith Hart’s document for a State Holding Company or National Enterprise Board.
Tony Crosland immediately raised three questions: were we clear about whether we wanted these companies to be profitable or not? Could we get efficient management? How would we justify the choice of companies for public ownership? He was in favour of a smaller experimental start.
Judith Hart said the Industrial Policy Committee had deliberately not revealed the companies they had identified. We said in the paper that twenty to twenty-five companies would be needed to yield significant control of the economy and she didn’t think the management opposition would be an insuperable problem.
Stuart Holland emphasised that anything less than twenty companies would be a mere salvage operation. To be effective you needed a much larger number and Continental experience had shown this would work.
Edmund Dell said that by not naming the companies concerned, you are giving greater hostages to fortune. You could exaggerate the benefits against the cost involved; when you come to power there could be a crisis and this would all create short-term disruption. Management was a real problem that couldn’t be brushed aside and it would be better to have a slow advance.
Eric Heffer didn’t really like the State Holding Company and he would only accept it as a halfway house because we needed a better perspective. He was in favour of spelling out the names of the companies. Management problems couldn’t be a reason for not going ahead and we may have to pay over the odds to get good managers. As to industrial democracy, he was in favour of self-managing socialism.
I said that the conditions after the next Election might be very serious with accelerated job losses as a result of EEC competition. If we were returned to power, since we have price and profit control in mind, we might as well develop a powerful capacity to increase investment. As to management, after my experience dealing with private management, I couldn’t say I was very struck by it. Top management was not particularly efficient and the good management was just underneath it. On the choice of firms, we couldn’t really make that selection now and this was inherent in the problem. On industrial democracy, we were waiting for the TUC to come forward. But certainly on the central question of whether the next Labour Government would introduce some control of the economy I am sure all Ministers would agree that bribing, cajoling and merging industry could not continue.
Judith Hart said that you couldn’t extrapolate from existing experience of public ownership because conditions would be different. The Conference resolutions were our remit, and this remit required us to advance substantially; profitable manufacturing companies were the areas in which we should move. She thought the twenty-five companies should be named but we would be taking over going concerns and there were serious problems to be faced.
Anyway, the paper was more or less agreed after a good discussion. Crosland has got his eye on Trade and Industry in the next Labour Government and this is why he attends all these meetings religiously.
Saturday 7 April
Hilary and Rosalind married at the Kensington Register Office this morning with all the family there. We held the reception and they spent the night at our house after watching ‘Match of the Day’ on television!
Sunday 22 April
Easter Sunday. There is no doubt, looking back, that my chairmanship and my final speech at Conference strongly criticising the media did me a great deal of damage. In return, they attacked me bitterly for several weeks and then let me rot in silence for a time.
I go up and down, get depressed as things go wrong and then cheer up again afterwards. But I have got from now until the end of July, three months’ hard work, to build up support in the House of Commons and make my Trade and Industry group work better.
I have written to Alastair Hetherington, Editor of the Guardian, Harold Evans, Editor of the Sunday Times, and Hugh Cudlipp, Chairman of IPC, saying I would like to see them again.
Friday 27 April
The Watergate scandal in America has reached astonishing proportions and today Patrick Gray, the head of the FBI, resigned. It is thought he destroyed relevant records in the case. This could well have a desperately damaging effect on Richard Nixon’s last term and reveal him for what he really is, which we know from his early days as a muck-raking, anti-Communist McCarthyite.
Sunday 29 April
At noon Antonia Fraser came to see me about biographies. She has written a well received life of Mary Queen of Scots and of Cromwell, and has been invited by the BBC to do a programme in the ‘One Pair of Eyes’ series for August. In this programme she is interviewing the Conservative MP Nigel Fisher, who wrote Macleod’s life, Macleod having left no papers when he died in 1970. She is interviewing Professor Hugh Thomas, who wrote John Strachey’s life; James Pope-Hennessy, the biographer of Queen Mary, and Michael Holroyd, who wrote the life of Lytton Strachey; and she wants to do some contemporary filming of me at a May Day rally in Birmingham in order to examine the possible role of film in biography.
As I sat and talked about it all with her it became quite clear to me that if one is going to record every minute as fully and completely as this, one does have to ask oneself the central question: ‘Am I a participant in life and politics or am I an observer?’ and if there is any conflict between the two, one must be a participant. It is rather like filling up the North Sea with oil instead of taking it out. One creates a great archive which may or may not be of interest to anyone else. What one is bequeathing is one’s working papers and documents; watching life simply to make it interesting is not enough.
Antonia Fraser said that she had met Anthony Eden a couple of years ago in Barbados, and how pleased he was to talk to her. She described how her mother Elizabeth Longford, who lived in Hampstead and was a friend of Hugh Gaitskell’s, bitterly hated Harold Wilson; how contemptuous she was of his style of life in Hampstead Garden Suburb. This explains a great deal of Wilson’s dislike for that snobbish Hampstead establishment of upper middle-class socialists and Fabians.
Monday 30 April
Today the US Attorney-General, Richard Kleindienst and two of his closest aides, Ehrlichman and Haldeman, were sacked; tonight Nixon is due to make a great television broadcast about the Watergate scandal.
Tuesday 1 May
Nixon’s address to the American public was awful,
a speech in which he accepted responsibility for what had happened because he was at the top, his office had to be preserved, it would be cowardly to do otherwise and there could be no whitewashing in the White House – a really gimmicky PR phrase. But he didn’t answer the fundamental questions and even defended the people he had sacked on the grounds that perhaps their zeal had been in a cause in which they deeply believed (namely his own re-election as President).
Wednesday 2 May
At the end of the Shadow Cabinet I raised the question of whether I should issue a statement drawing attention to our ‘nationalisation without compensation’ discussions in order to frighten off speculators from buying up bits of Rolls Royce, which the Government have put on the market. Shirley Williams thought this might be the occasion for redundancies, which the Government could blame on us. There was a generally discouraging atmosphere. Somebody said, ‘Why do we always make Tony into a bogeyman? At any rate, he does draw these things to our attention.’ So I let it slide. There is no point in going to the stake for one controversial statement.
Thursday 3 May
Coming back on the train from a meeting in Brighton, Ron Hayward told me about how Marcia Williams was ‘running Harold’, how she and her brother, Tony Field, and her sister worked with him, how Joe Haines was in Harold’s confidence, Alf Richmond, a press aide from the Daily Mirror, was the baggage master, and Gerald Kaufman was round and about. This is the kitchen cabinet – Harold’s court. It has always been like that but it still annoys Ron Hayward, who has not got a lot of time for Harold. But Harold is a very shrewd political operator and one must not forget that.
