by Benn, Tony
Moss Evans said, ‘The Transport and General Workers’ Union is firmly committed to mandatory reselection and so am I, but I am not mandated here. Therefore, I favour what Clive says, that if 40 per cent of a Party wanted it there would be mandatory reselection.’
Moss continuted, ‘Jim has shown that the evidence in favour of mandatory reselection is not strong and therefore I would like to build a bridge by laying down criteria that 60 per cent of a Party would positively have to want a reselection conference before it was agreed.’
Clive said, ‘No, there should be an obligation on all constituency Parties to hold reselections unless 60 per cent don’t want it.’
It became a great muddle, and Bill Keys suggested we adjourn for five minutes. When we returned, David put the main question, ie that we supported last year’s Conference resolution, and that was carried by 7 votes to 6.
So David Basnett said, ‘Well, we’ve disposed of that’, but Jim added, ‘Ah no, we’ve got the question of who is going to reselect – a lot of people think it should be done by all the members of a local Party, not just the GMC.’
He went on, ‘I can only tell you you have got a fight on your hands. The PLP will never accept this. I can’t recommend this to the PLP.’ And he picked up his papers and walked out; it was a tense moment, the Leader of the Party and a former Prime Minister picking up his bag and leaving a committee.
David Basnett said, ‘We’ll adjourn until tomorrow.’
Eric Heffer said, ‘I am not accepting an adjournment.’
People began moving about, David Basnett picked up his stuff, and gradually the Left were the only ones who remained; it was very dramatic and people thought Jim would go back to London. We began discussing among ourselves what we would do and it was clear that there can’t be any reversal of the vote. But we will vote for the GMCs to reselect because it’s the only way it can be done.
I went down to have a drink and it was more dispiriting. Clive was sitting there absolutely depressed, and he said, ‘You’ve wrecked it now’, which Bill Keys repeated: ‘You’ve wrecked it.’
‘What have we wrecked?’ I asked.
‘You’ve wrecked the arrangment we had that the electoral college and the manifesto would be part of a compromise on reselection.’
I said, ‘Well, look, if you intended that this was going to be a deal, you might have mentioned it to us so that we could have thought about it. I could have given you a better arrangement.’
They were really angry, and the truth is that the trade union leaders and Jim had tried to get this one through and Moss had let them down, because he wouldn’t be able to face his Executive Council if he voted against mandatory reselection. I did wonder whether Jim had stormed out because he couldn’t face the PLP.
Sunday 15 June
The Commission met at 9 with Eric Heffer in the chair. He said, ‘As far as reselection is concerned, the question of the participation of all members of the Party in the process doesn’t arise because we agreed we would adopt the reselection policy voted on at last year’s Conference, which was that the GMCs would decide.’ So that was that. ‘Now we come to the Leader.’
To cut a long story short, when Eric Heffer put the final proposals to the vote, ours was lost 6–7, and Moss’s was carried 7–6, and at least we established the principle that the electoral college would choose the leadership.
I had a word with Moss and Clive and tried to be friendly.
Drove home and slowly unpacked.
Looking back on the weekend, Eric, Jo, Norman, Frank, Joan and I stuck together. Clive Jenkins and Bill Keys are just fixers. Moss Evans is absolutely unaffected by the mandate of his trade union. David Basnett is devious and cynical but hasn’t got real strength; you can beat Basnett. Duffy is much tougher and honest and straightforward. Jim is angry and cross, on his way out. Michael Foot is hopeless. Anyone who reads this will think what an awful man to say those things about his colleagues but I’m getting it off my chest.
Whitehall College itself is like an executive mansion for the chiefs of multinational companies to relax in. Eric Heffer said on the phone how corrupt it was, and this is the form the corruption takes. The saunas, the swimming baths and champagne, everything laid on, is corrupting and you can’t produce reform unless you withdraw from that, challenge it. But when you do, and are serious, you are up against bitter opposition.
Saturday 28 June
Caroline went to the Socialist Educational Association Conference; I went with Dawn Primarolo to the Bristol City Farm, which is apparently the biggest and best in the country. It was lovely. There are geese, goats, rabbits, ponies, a barn, a workshop for mothers and children, and it is run by a heavily tattooed man of about twenty-five who had six ribs shot away and his liver damaged while serving in the army in Belfast.
Tuesday 15 July
I left for Birkbeck College for the debate with Eric Hobsbawm, the famous Marxist theoretician, which Marxism Today is going to publish in its September issue. He had sent me his line of questioning but I didn’t prepare myself in any great detail for it, as I thought it would be better to be more informal. Eric Hobsbawm is Professor of Economic and Social History at Birkbeck, a very charming man of about sixty-three, a real intellectual with a pinched face and flowing hair. He looked like a thinner version of Jimmy Maxton. Bernard Crick, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck, and his wife were present. The meeting was packed out with research students and other people. I was then subjected to this most penetrating cross-examination. He was fair but pressing, and I’m not sure my answers were all that good. There were questions and answers from the floor which I enjoyed.
Tuesday 22 July
Went to the Commons and heard the unemployment figures – nearly 1,900,000, a jump of 250,000, I think, in a month. James Prior was not convincing and when Mrs Thatcher got up people shouted ‘Resign’ and ‘Out’. Jim said there would be a motion of censure.
Tuesday 29 July
Went into the House to hear Prime Minister’s Questions and the censure debate.
Jim Callaghan was heavy, concerned, sincere, and said it was wrong to spend money on the Trident missiles when the public services were being starved (even thought it is widely alleged that he spent £1,000 million on Chevaline without consulting the Cabinet; also, it is alleged in American reports that he was strongly in favour of the Trident). Next he called for import controls in a way that sent my mind back to the 1976 IMF discussions. But otherwise his remedies were trifling. They were just intended to edge the present Government back to the policy he had pursued – which hadn’t been all that successful.
Thatcher got up and she just romped home. She quoted what Healey and Callaghan had both said in office. She demonstrated that there was no difference in analysis between herself and them but that, whereas they were weak, she wasn’t The Government were determined, they wouldn’t do a U turn, the public supported her, and so on. It was a parliamentary triumph really.
Monday 22 September
To the new Labour Party headquarters, Walworth Road, at 10.20, and there was Denis Healey standing outside. I said, ‘I really liked your book of photographs. I had no idea what a good photographer you were.’
‘Ah, you see, I’m not as daft as I look,’ he replied.
‘I always thought you were much more cunning than you appeared, but anyway they were really good pictures.’
So then he said, ‘I enjoyed listening to your mother on the radio.’ It was all very matey.
Tuesday 23 September
I have a terrible cough and cold, I haven’t been smoking for a week. The cough and cold and sore tongue really frightened me, and I have a pain in my leg which makes me think I have got circulation trouble.
Friday 26 September – Labour Party Conference, Blackpool
The Imperial Hotel was more run down than ever. They have redecorated downstairs, but the rooms upstairs are really crummy.
There was a thundering disco going on all evening and the whole h
otel vibrated with the noise until 2 am.
In yesterday’s Listener, Barbara Castle’s diaries were reviewed by Michael Foot, who was violent against diarists. Enoch Powell in Now! magazine was also strongly against them. It is interesting because Powell and Foot, who were thought of as tribunes of the people, want to keep the mystique of the state in order to make it easier to govern the people.
Watched Newsnight, which included a profile of me that Adam Raphael had put together. It lasted about sixteen minutes; I thought it really was an assassination job, done with considerable skill. Barbara Castle was quoted to my disadvantage and then David Owen, who said I was phoney and bogus for being ‘ashamed of my middle-class background’ and that the PLP didn’t like phoney, bogus people. Sir Antony Part, my former Permanent Secretary at Industry, thought my problem was that I was a radical Minister in a non-radical government (which was quite fair). Then an awful interview with Joe Ashton, who said, ‘The trouble with Tony is that he idealises the working class and there are as many shits in the working class as there are in the middle class – I know because I am in the working class.’ There was no reference to the fact that my father had been a Labour MP.
Saturday 27 September
This evening I went to Jo Richardson’s hotel room with Joan Maynard, Judith Hart, Neil Kinnock, Tony Saunois, Joan Lestor, Eric Heffer and Dennis Skinner, and we planned how we would handle the leadership question.
Sunday 28 September
Shirley Williams on Weekend World said she would leave the Party if the Conference voted to come out of the Common Market.
Monday 29 September
Michael Foot opened the economy debate with a speech entirely without content, just rhetoric.
On behalf of the NEC, I made a competent, ‘prime ministerial’-type speech, putting forward the possibility of a Labour government creating a thousand peers to abolish the Lords and hence their power to delay our legislation on public ownership and industrial democracy.
Caroline attended the education debate as she has contributed to Party policy. Apparently Neil Kinnock got a standing ovation – for the second year – and he got it partly for saying that government cuts would have to be more than restored. Actually he had been saying elsewhere that he couldn’t guarantee to restore them at all.
Wedneday 1 October
The Common Market motion was moved brilliantly by Clive Jenkins, talking about food mountains. He said, ‘We have had a marvellous barley harvest. Next year we’re having harvest festival in a hangar at Heathrow.’ It was hilarious.
I went up to Ron Hayward and asked when Peter Shore was going to be called, and he said, ‘I don’t know whether Lenajeger will call him.’ I argued that he should; after all, he was the parliamentary spokesman. As a result the whole debate was given another ten minutes and Peter got in with a Churchillian-type speech. By 5 million to 2 million, we voted to withdraw from the Common Market. That is sensational, a fantastic victory.
In the afternoon we had three great debates on the constitutional changes.
The first was on mandatory reselection of Labour MPs. Joe Ashton made a notable speech against it. Joe is an old friend – he was my PPS – but he said something disgraceful.
‘When you were sacked, Tony, from your seat by the House of Lords in a very unfair way, you fought and fought again, and you have never stopped fighting the House of Lords since . . . MPs who think they have been unfairly sacked will tend to react in the same way. Because if an MP gets the sack and walks away into the sunset, and says nothing, he does not get a penny redundancy. [But] if he stands and fights he can pick up nearly 13,000 quid.’ This was a reference to MPs who, if they are defeated in an Election, get a lump-sum payment. He said it was letting a Trojan horse into the Party. ‘If Roy Jenkins wanted to form a party of twenty-five sacked MPs now in this Parliament, they would be in business in six months’, because, historically, sacked MPs won their seats when they stood as independents.
His speech did the PLP no good at all.
At the end Sam McCluskie delivered the most devastating argument in favour of mandatory reselection and it was carried: the Conference nearly went berserk.
Next was the manifesto. The NEC amendment was moved formally, and its effect would be to remove the Shadow Cabinet’s joint control over the manifesto and to provide only consultation with the Leader. Very little was said during the debate. David Warburton of the GMWU, one of these well-dressed, right-wing, clever young trade union leaders, who are very pro-EEC, attacked the National Executive.
I was called to reply, and I described what had happened, why the manifesto was important, why in the past it was secretly killed, and then I dealt with Warburton and said all the measures Trade Unionists for a Labour Victory had wanted had been ruled out in the manifesto last year. I must say it was the best speech I have ever made at Conference, probably the best speech I have ever made in my life at a public meeting. It was followed by tumultuous applause from the CLPs and a standing ovation, while the trade union delegations sat looking very uncomfortable. By a narrow majority – 100,000 or so – the NEC motion was defeated, but I had heard that they had expected it to be lost by more.
Then we went on to the manner of election of the leadership, which Eric Heffer introduced in a halting way. He outlined the procedure the Conference had to follow, which was extremely complicated, and there was an absolute uproar when the Conference voted by a pretty narrow majority – 98,000 – to support the principle of an electoral college for electing the Leader and Deputy Leader. This was not what had been expected. Indeed, the Express said this morning that the Left would be defeated on all three issues.
It was a most thrilling day.
Caroline and I went to the Tribune meeting and 1,900 people were in the Pavilion Theatre. Neil Kinnock was extremely amusing during the annual collection – exceptionally talented and funny. After I spoke, the general consensus was that I went on too long.
Then Michael Foot, now the old lion, wound up and got a cheer although he hasn’t been a figure of the Left for a decade. His usual line is to warn that we face the greatest crisis since Hannibal’s march on Rome and that we must do nothing whatever that might interfere with total mental inactivity and 100 per cent loyalty to the Leader, whoever he may be – but particularly Callaghan, followed by Healey, followed, if all goes wrong, by Roy Mason and Eric Varley in about that order!
At 11pm Vladimir Derer, Tony Saunois, Joan Maynard, Margaret Beckett and others met in Jo Richardson’s room. The general feeling was that at tomorrow morning’s NEC we should propose a new constitutional amendment based on a division of 40 per cent to the PLP and 30 per cent each to the unions and constituencies, because that was thought the one most likely to get through. Tony Saunois, the YS representative on the NEC, emerged in the discussions as the most formidable, principled and serious politician, at the age of twenty-five.
However, just as I was going to bed, the phone rang and it was Frances Morrell, and a few minutes later, with Caroline and Melissa in bed, she plonked herself down in the same room and said this had been a terrible sellout. The Left never knew when it had won, we should not give the MPs 40 per cent but should insist on the unions getting 40 per cent because anything we put forward would be accepted tomorrow. Pressed and somewhat overpowered by Frances, who was in her full battlegear while I was in my underpants, I conceded that this seemed logical at 1.45 am and so she retired.
Thursday 2 October
When I went downstairs I found Stephen sitting in the hotel lobby with a typewriter, having worked all night on an emergency resolution about Chile.
‘Benn’s a Liar’, ‘Labour in Chaos’, ‘Anarchy Here’, ‘Callaghan Denounces Benn’, and so on, the papers all said. I heard that Callaghan had denounced me at the miners’ dinner, which did cause great offence to the miners because I had been a good Energy Minister.
The National Executive met at 8, and it was dear that Frances, Vladimir, Jon Lansman, Peter Willsman, Victor Sch
onfield and Francis Prideaux had bullied members of the Executive into agreeing to the new CLPD alternative –40 per cent for the unions and 30 per cent each for the MPs and constituencies. We kicked this around for a bit, and eventually it was carried by 13 votes to 7, which was excellent.
Out of the blue, Jim announced that if this was implemented he would withdraw what he had said about Labour unity, he would open up a campaign and he would recommend to the PLP that they elect their own leader. Neil Kinnock said this was all rather regrettable.
I said, ‘Jim has made a very important statement and I think we should consider it. If he tries to get the PLP to vote for a leader in this way, for which there is no provision in the constitution, either he would fail (and I think he will because most Labour MPs are good loyal members of the Party), or he will succeed and set up a centre party. Either way it would be very bad for us. All these threats do no good.’
So Jim announced, ‘Well, I tell you that the Parliamentary Party will never accept a leader foisted upon them’, and added, ‘I’ll tell you something else, they will never have Tony Benn foisted upon them.’
I said, ‘Jim, you speak for yourself and nobody else.’
So, on that happy note, we went into the Conference. The morning debate was on defence, and passed two unilateralist resolutions overwhelmingly.
Then to the NEC statement agreed this morning on the election of the Leader, and Eric introduced the debate. To cut a long story short, there was a bitter debate, with Tom Jackson of the Post Office Workers accusing the Executive of being a conjuror producing white rabbits out of a top-hat, Andrew Faulds attacking ‘the Right Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn’ (inaudibly, since the mike was switched off), and Martin Flannery saying what he thought of Terry Duffy. In the end all the options for the electoral college were defeated, leaving only the principle agreed. Then David Basnett, who had spoken against the NEC constitutional amendment, moved an emergency resolution that we hold a Special Conference in January to resolve the method of electing the Leader of the Party, and that was agreed. So we are back where we started.
