by Benn, Tony
After that, the Meriden shop stewards Bill Lapworth, Dennis Johnson, John Grattan and Geoffrey Robinson and I talked until 9. Broadly the strategy we worked on was this: we would get the shop stewards from all three plants together, and work for the objective of public ownership for all three plants in a British motorcycle corporation.
Caught the train back to London and got home exhausted.
I did get a clear feeling from today’s events of an alarming situation; there was the militancy of people sticking to their jobs, which I fully support, but at the same time, the fear of slump means that workers will turn against workers and working-class solidarity will be strained to its utmost.
Friday 22 November
I walked through St James’s Park and got to Number 10 at 10.30, where the joint meeting of the Cabinet and NEC was taking place up in the State Dining Room.
Harold began by announcing that owing to the bombing in Birmingham last night, he wouldn’t play much of a part in the discussion but he hoped to look in and out. In fact, he disappeared altogether and except for one walk through the room later, he kept himself absolutely clear of the whole business.
The bombing story is absolutely dominant with anger rising, a petrol bomb thrown into a Catholic church, some factories in Birmingham refusing to work with Irish workers. The damage done to Irish people here, even though they may be Protestants, is terrible, every one a victim of this same awful process of escalating violence.
Monday 25 November
Walked across the park again this morning. The John Stonehouse drowning is a bit mysterious. Bob Mellish had dug out a Hansard text of the last written question John Stonehouse asked before he disappeared, requesting the statistics on death by drowning. It was a most extraordinary coincidence – or else very mysterious. People don’t believe he’s dead. They think that with the financial trouble that he’s in, he’s just disappeared. Coastguards on the Florida coast say that he certainly didn’t swim out more than fifty yards because they monitor all swimmers who go out that distance. I can’t bring myself to write to his wife, I don’t know what to say.
Cabinet met at 10.30 and the first item on the agenda was the report from the Home Secretary on Northern Ireland. His paper outlined the measures he proposed: to outlaw the IRA and other organisations, to provide for closer border checks with the Republic and to take powers to deport certain Irish people in Great Britain who had lived here for less than twenty years back to the Republic or Northern Ireland. The main provisions were to be temporary and would expire after six months unless continued in force by an order.
They were emergency powers of a pretty Draconian kind, including the power to extend the detention period from forty-eight hours to seven days on the Home Secretary’s instructions.
Harold Wilson asked, ‘I take it we’ll include other terrorist organisations’ and Roy replied, ‘Yes, but not the Palestine Liberation Organisation – or the NUM, no matter how difficult they get!’
Later, I saw Don Ryder and I offered him the chairmanship of the NEB, which was a bit of a formality since he already knew about it through Harold. He is very managerial, rather conceited and he thinks he is the cat’s whiskers. But he will carry a degree of confidence and that’s about as far as I need to take it. I think if I give him a couple of strong union men he’ll be under a bit more pressure than he might expect.
I talked to Frances about the whole impact of the civil war that has begun. Three postboxes were blown up at Victoria, King’s Cross and Piccadilly today. It is very alarming and one doesn’t know what’s going to happen but I suppose we’ll have to learn to live with it like the Irish do in Northern Ireland. There’s no doubt in my mind that we shall have to get out.
Monday 9 December
Frank McElhone arrived and I took him home for a meal. As he spoke to Caroline and me, it all came out again, his absolute disenchantment with my performance. He said that the Parliamentary Party remains centre and left, and that if I didn’t give some attention to the centre of the Party, I would never have any chance whatever. He still had great faith in me but he said I really did have to take this seriously now; even the Market was going to slip through, with only the Left voting against it.
Obviously, he was sick of the fact that I haven’t made much use of him over the last seven months, haven’t listened, and that there’ve been no perks of office. Then he said, ‘Look, I’ve got ten premium bonds in the bank. I haven’t got a penny behind me. I’ve just put a new loft in the house and I’ve told the children that if the Scottish Nationalist advance goes on, and I lose my seat, we’re back to a council flat, in the ghetto. We’ll just go back to where we started.’
He made it clear that his work with me made him hated both in the Lobby and the PLP, and he now feels that this makes life too difficult I think he suspects that his chances of becoming a Minister would be greater if he severed his link with me, and he needs the money as a Minister. I think that’s it, and I’ve done nothing for him: it’s very human and understandable. So, he actually wants to break the link as my PPS. He says that we’ll still be friends and that he’ll do what he can for me, but he does not want that organic link.
Saturday 14 December
Rang Joe Ashton and asked his advice on who I should appoint as my new PPS. He agreed to do it himself, saying, ‘I wouldn’t do it for anyone else, and I wouldn’t do it for you for a long period, but at this particular moment you need your friends around you, so I’ll help.’
That’s settled then. I’m very pleased because I like Joe; he gets on well with the media people, he has a good solid trade union background, he’s a journalist of note and linked very closely with the trade union movement, and as he is Chairman of the Industry Group of MPs we shall work very closely together.
Thursday 26 December
Boxing Day. Continued the draft of my letter to my constituents on the Common Market. I identified the five changes that would occur as a result of Common Market membership, stressing that I was writing as an MP and not as a Minister. I was not dealing with the arguments for or against entry. I added that I was ready to accept the verdict of the referendum but that we should respect each other’s views, and so on.
Saturday 28 December
Up early and stapled the copies together then sent them round to all nationals, to the Press Association, to the Western Daily Press, to the Bristol Evening Post, to Harold Wilson, to Joe Ashton, to the office, to Michael Foot and to Peter Shore. The copies went out at 12.30 and that was the die cast, though the release time is not until 1 pm on Sunday. I sat tight and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, at 6.20, one of Wilson’s Private Secretaries rang and said the Prime Minister had received the text of my letter and wanted to know whether the copies have already gone out to the press. So I said, ‘Yes, they have, but if you are speaking to him, you might draw his attention to the fact that I do not deal with the renegotiation at all, simply the constitutional change that has occurred.’ He told me that I would be receiving a personal message later tonight from the Prime Minister. Then I did begin to think that he was going to make this the occasion for firing me and I became slightly anxious.
On the other hand, the issue is so crucial that I couldn’t possibly withdraw this one to please him. I rang Peter, who asked if there was any reason why I shouldn’t hold it back for a bit if the Prime Minister asked me to. It would be almost impossible to ring round all the papers and cancel it and I didn’t intend to do that. But it would be very disappointing to be fired at this moment.
Left for Stansgate at 7.30, and within a few minutes of arriving there, the phone rang and it was Roy Williams. He had had a telephone call from Stewart, one of the Prime Minister’s Private Secretaries, with the following message:
‘We spoke earlier this evening about a statement which your Secretary of State is releasing to the press tomorrow morning in the form of an open letter to his constituents about the Common Market. I understand that the text of this statement is alread
y in the hands of the press with an embargo for midday tomorrow. The Prime Minister, who has seen a copy of the statement, has asked that what follows should be conveyed to your Secretary of State tonight as a matter of urgency:
‘The Prime Minister considers that this statement contravenes the Cabinet decision of 12 December as minuted in the confidential annexe sent to all Cabinet Ministers immediately afterwards and summarised in the Prime Minister’s letter to the Secretary of State for Employment and copied both to the Secretary of State for Trade and to your own Secretary of State in reply to their letter on the proposed agreement to differ.
‘The Prime Minister trusts that your Secretary of State will recall that on the meeting on 12 December it was agreed that the Cabinet should meet early in the New Year to discuss all aspects of the handling of the problem, including the issues raised in the letter from the Secretary of State for Employment, and it was agreed that no one should be involved in private enterprise on these issues until the Cabinet had collectively discussed how the matter is to be handled.’
I said to Roy Williams that he should ring Stewart to say he had transmitted the message to me and that I did not believe that I had contravened the decision of 12 December; indeed, I did not recall having received the letter Harold referred to, responding to our joint request that Cabinet Ministers should be allowed to differ over the Common Market. Roy Williams couldn’t recall having received it either. So if the Prime Minister has made an error and this letter did not reach me, that puts me in a slightly stronger position.
But I emphasised he should say to Stewart that as the Prime Minister’s message contains a reference to documents, I would have to wait until Monday until I could have access to those documents and then I would send a minute in reply. This means that on Monday, in a fairly leisurely way, I can get the documents and study them and compose a very short response. I am not going to get locked into a long correspondence with the PM. He’s a very curious man; he simply won’t talk to any of his colleagues, he has to communicate by correspondence which creates an arm’s length relationship that is entirely artificial and unreal.
Sunday 29 December
Very nice to be away from the rush and furore. Joshua was busy with his car.
Came upstairs and began listening anxiously to the 1 o’clock news, which contained a reasonable summary of my letter. ‘The Secretary of State for Industry has made an attack upon the Common Market and said the British people would be signing away their democratic rights if we remain in the Common Market.’ They went on to list some of the democratic rights that I had said would be affected. There was no comment and there was an interview with Harold which had obviously been recorded before he went to the Scilly Isles.
So it has got the best possible start and we shall just have to see what happens. Nothing further has come from Number 10.
Thursday 16 January 1975
At Cabinet we had a brief report on John Stonehouse as to whether he should be unseated from the House of Commons and I asked, ‘May I say something that I know won’t be very popular. I think we’ve got to be very careful about this. I’m the only man sitting here who’s been expelled from the House of Commons by a House of Commons committee, and that’s wrong. The electors put us here, and once we start arranging that people can be dismissed by the House of Commons, that’s a very dangerous precedent. Stonehouse hasn’t been convicted of any offence, you can’t pre-empt that. When Peter Baker, the Tory MP for Norfolk South, was in jail in 1954 for nine months awaiting trial, he didn’t resign. You say Stonehouse has been absent from the House for two months, that’s true, but Francis Noel-Baker was absent from his Swindon seat for three years after the 1966 Election. You say that he’s let his electors down, but then Chris Mayhew changed parties. The Chiltern Hundreds is not for nothing because an MP cannot actually resign from Parliament.’
To my amazement I got a bit of support. Roy Jenkins and one or two others agreed. Bob Mellish just took the lynch mob’s view. ‘The Party’s angry, we want to get him out.’ So we agreed to set up a select committee.
Tuesday 21 January
Cabinet, where the entire morning was devoted to Europe.
First Harold said that he thought an agreement among Ministers to differ would be acceptable from the moment of the Cabinet decision. We would need guidelines to ensure that we all behaved in a comradely way, and there should be no personal attacks.
Barbara Castle thought that the freedom we were being invited to agree followed from the referendum. Of course, in the end, the renegotiated terms we got would not necessarily meet with the requirements of the manifesto. There would be a messy middle-of-the-road muddle.
‘You talk about a messy middle-of-the-road muddle, but if the Cabinet understands what I mean, I’m at my best in a messy middle-of-the-road muddle,’ said Harold.
Everybody hooted with laughter; it was a very revealing comment, and Harold is at his best in those circumstances, laughing at himself. Bob Mellish passed a note across to me: ‘He’s like a hippopotamus who likes flopping about in the mud.’
Thursday 23 January
In the afternoon, I heard Harold make his historic statement, that there would be a referendum and that Ministers would be free to speak and to vote – a notable constitutional change. I am intensely proud to have been associated with it.
Dashed over to the office where Gregor MacKenzie was giving a party for Burns night. He asked me to propose a little toast to the immortal memory of Robert Burns. I said my mother was a Scot and I therefore spanned the great border. I had as Postmaster General instituted a stamp for Robert Burns, though when I suggested it, my officials were very much against it. They warned me that Robert Bums’s private life had fallen below the standard that would be accepted by Her Majesty for admission to the enclosure at Ascot.
Wednesday 29 January
I have been told that the Foreign Office will stop the Industry Bill if I don’t give a pledge to the Commission that it will conform to Treaty obligations. I am bloody angry and this is the real crunch, revealing the Foreign Office at its weakest. All these promises that are given that you wouldn’t have to bother about the Commission, that British interests would be safeguarded, are absolutely false.
Tuesday 4 February
The great event today is the Tory leadership election and I heard Heath make what turned out to be his last intervention as Leader of the Opposition when he asked about the risk of a war in the Middle East. He was pretty confident against Mrs Thatcher.
Made my statement on steel and there was a bit of a hoo-ha in the middle of Questions and Answers because the result of the first ballot for the Tory leadership was spreading round the benches. It was Mrs Thatcher, 130; Heath, 119; and Hugh Fraser, 16. So Heath resigned and that’s the end of him. Very sad in a way. Politics is a brutal business, and I think we would be foolish to suppose that Mrs Thatcher won’t be a formidable leader; and Harold couldn’t pour scorn on a woman because people wouldn’t have it. I think the quality of the debate will be raised because the Tory Party will be driven to the right and there will then be a real choice being offered to the electorate.
Wednesday 5 February
Willie Whitelaw, James Prior, John Peyton and Geoffrey Howe announced that they were standing against Mrs Thatcher in the second ballot. But I guess that she will sweep the board, because the opposition has become a completely negative ‘Stop Thatcher’ campaign, which I think will bring her tremendous support.
Saturday 22 February
Mrs Thatcher has been mobbed in Scotland. She’s like the Queen really; she looks like her, talks like her and is of the same age. I don’t know whether she will be able to survive after the honeymoon but she is a popular figure. Heath is being forgotten and is being sloughed off just as Eden, Macmillan and Home had been.
Sunday 23 February
Frances Morrell told me that she had heard from the journalist Patrick Cosgrave that Tory Central Office had prepared a tremendous campaign in favou
r of Britain remaining in the Common Market and constituency parties were being asked to work flat-out to get a ‘Yes’ in the referendum. But when Mrs Thatcher was elected she told them to drop the whole thing – this was the price demanded by the anti-Marketeers for their support. So Tory Central Office has shelved it. It is a most interesting story.
Meanwhile, Heath is to head the pro-Market campaign around the country and if he becomes the hero of the Tory press, that will undermine the position of Mrs Thatcher. On the other hand, if Wilson is supporting Heath then it will do enormous damage to Wilson. Heath’s support won’t help anybody!
A telegram arrived last week from Bristol saying, ‘Get out if you value your life.’ It had been passed to the security people, who sent it to Canon Row police station, where a Superintendent Harden had asked Mary Lou to go in and see him tomorrow to discuss it. It is slightly odd that they should take so much notice now. I have been getting letters every month saying, ‘You have six more months to live,’ ‘. . . five more months to live’, ‘ . . . four months’, and so on, posted in the Reading area and nobody seems to have taken any notice of them. But this telegram apparently interests the police. I am surprised that the Post Office agreed to send such a telegram. Perhaps they reported it to the police in Bristol; perhaps they know who sent it. I am slightly irritated in fact that Bristol should be the source of the message because I have always rather prided myself on never getting any threatening letters from the city of my own seat.
Tuesday 25 February
To Ministerial Committee on Economic Strategy this morning, where we dealt with the paper I had submitted, called ‘A Choice of Economic Policies’, outlining Strategies A and B. Strategy A was the strategy which had been discussed fully in the Committee so far. In consisted of three aspects: tax increases and public-spending cuts; some form of enforceable pay restraint; and further transfers of cash into the company sector. I thought it would be very serious to adopt this strategy, which I feared would lead to heavy deflation, rising unemployment, cuts in real wages and the withdrawal of support from the Government by the TUC and the Labour Movement.
