by Benn, Tony
Friday 3 October
It has been a watershed of a Conference, of that there is no doubt, and, unlike any other Conference, it will continue to cast its influence over the PLP, over the leadership and over the future of British politics.
Sunday 5 October
The Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Observer all presented the week entirely from a right-wing point of view – ‘Representative Democracy Threatened’, ‘The Left Tyrannicals’, and so on.
That it was the culmination of years of work to get a democratic Party in which the leadership was more responsive to the rank and file never surfaced at all. The Sunday Express raised the question whether the Queen could ask someone who had been made Leader by the Party outside Parliament to form a government.
Caroline has a bad cold. Got on with a bit of work but, having stopped smoking, I am putting on weight.
Sunday 12 October
We had guests at 8 – Norman Atkinson, Geoff Bish, Chris Mullin, Frances Morrell, Vladimir Derer, Tony Banks, Audrey Wise, Martin Flannery, Jo Richardson, Reg Race, Ken Coates, Stuart Holland and Julie Clements. There was some discussion as to whether we might have witnessed a real split in the Party. Sixty MPs have demanded that the PLP maintain the right to elect its own leader, and it looked as if they were calling for Callaghan to go.
Jo Richardson then proposed that if Michael Foot stood no one else should. Stuart Holland agreed.
Chris Mullin turned to me and asked, ‘Tony, are you going to stand? You shouldn’t. You have nothing to gain from standing, and everything to gain by abstaining.’
At some stage I was asked to speak. I said, ‘First of all, this is a political and not a personal question. I have consulted my GMC and have made no commitment. Leaving aside the split question, we must see this in the wider context.’ I thought the correct strategy was for us to challenge the leadership, the deputy leadership and the Shadow Cabinet appointments. I went on, ‘The Party needs a strong leader now, and if the Left abstains there will be continued personal conflict with the left leader-in-waiting, and the incumbent will win in the electoral college. I don’t think I could fight and win the college if I abstained now.’
But the unanimous view was that I shouldn’t stand yet. After the discussion, I drafted a couple of resolutions, one for the NEC and one for the PLP.
Just to sum up the evening. First of all, it was a meeting of the Left in strength, and very formidable they are, but they were unanimous that I shouldn’t stand and I am bound to take that seriously. I am in no hurry, and I have lots of meetings in which I can talk about the issues. But they were strong and firm, and dearly the view that Frances Morrell, Victor Schonfield, Dennis Skinner and others put forward earlier was right, so I simply bowed to the will of the majority.
Wednesday 15 October
To Coventry for a union meeting, and at the station I heard the news that Jim Callaghan had resigned. The media had all got in their taxis and cars and arrived at the station. Caroline had advised me simply to say, ‘Although I have had many personal differences with Jim Callaghan, I feel that in the hearts of many people will be a desire to say thank you for his personal contribution; as to the future, nothing must be done that divides the Parliamentary Party from the Party in the country.’ I said that several times.
Got home at 6, and on the news it was announced that Michael Foot had decided not to stand. I had a word with Eric Heffer, who said, ‘Now look, I have consulted Doris’ (very important, because Eric takes a lot of notice of his wife, quite properly) ‘and if Michael Foot is not going to stand, and if there are no candidates other than Silkin and Healey, you and I should stand for the leadership and deputy leadership.’
Monday 20 October
At 5 Michael Foot declared. Then a couple of hours later we heard that Peter Shore was going to stand, so we have now got Healey, Foot, Shore and Silkin. Silkin will do badly. Michael gave the extraordinary reason that he had decided to stand because of the pressure of advice and because his wife would divorce him if he didn’t. I think Foot has a good chance of beating Healey. So the whole thing looks shabby and calculating.
Sunday 26 October
The clocks went back so we had an extra hour in bed.
Caroline, Hilary and I went to Hyde Park for the CND march and rally. It was a fantastic day. I am not a descriptive writer but everything about it was thrilling. There were fourteen columns – the national column first, then Scotland and Wales, then East Anglia, and so on, right the way through. There was a huge balloon in the sky shaped like a hydrogen bomb with a mushroom cloud, and there was a children’s puppet theatre. It had this element of gaiety and festivity about it, and there were tens of thousands of young people. I would think there were 100.000 in total.
Fenner Brockway, another old peace campaigner, spoke with amazing strength – he’s ninety-three. I gave him a hug, I was so proud of him. The speakers were introduced by Lord Jenkins, Bruce Kent and Neil Kinnock. Sister Mary Byrne, the nun, upset the crowd by mentioning abortion.
Thursday 30 October
I voted last night for Michael Foot as Leader of the Party.
Friday 31 October
To Bristol to the Wills tobacco factory to meet the shop stewards. The President of the Tobacco Workers’ Union was also present. Their joint complaint was that I had approved a resolution calling for the banning of cigarette advertising and they were angry with me, but it was really that they were terrified that the cigarette industry was running down, that Imperial Tobacco might be pulling out of Bristol. We calculated that there were about 35,000 people in Bristol who individually or in families derive their income from cigarette manufacture.
Monday 10 November
To a TULV dinner at St Ermine’s Hotel. When Michael Foot came in, everybody rose and cheered, and he said, ‘I want a double whisky and another double whisky. What I want to say is that I have got to go and record a programme, so do forgive me. But we will beat the Tories, we’ll fight them on jobs and on nuclear weapons.’
He looked cheerful, and anyone who becomes Labour Leader becomes a little bit different. They step outside the mainstream, and now Jim Callaghan has dropped back into normality, as Harold Wilson has. Of course, an ex-leader still has a certain something, but they lose that magic power. With a new suit and a haircut, Michael already looked a bit different.
Tuesday 11 November
I heard tonight that the new electoral boundaries in Bristol will produce only four constituencies – North, East, South and West – and that means I will have to fight either Mike Cocks for the Bristol South nomination or Arthur Palmer, who will probably go for Bristol East. I must confess I am very uncertain about it, but clearly one seat will be winnable; I think probably East and South will be Labour, and North and West, Tory. I’ll have to mend some fences with the Bristol Labour leaders, otherwise there will be pressure to see I don’t get in. I just won’t worry about it.
Saturday 22 November
Caught the train to Newcastle for a book-signing of the Penguin paperback of Arguments for Socialism. A man came up at the station, produced a little plastic ID card and told me he was a police inspector. He said they had had a threat that I was going to be killed today when I visited a particular bookshop so wherever I went I would find plainclothes policemen and policewomen.
Thursday 4 December – Trip to United States
Up earlyish and caught the tube to Heathrow for the conference in Washington on ‘Eurosocialism and America’ arranged by the Democratic Socialist Organising Committee.
I was met at Dulles airport by the Ambassador and driven to the Capitol Hilton Hotel. As soon as I got in, I rang the Whips’ Office and heard the result of the Shadow Cabinet elections.
Denis Healey’s place was filled by Neil Kinnock and David Owen’s by Gerald Kaufman. Neil Kinnock was lowest with 90 votes and I was the runner-up with 88, so I didn’t get on. In a way, I am quite pleased because I think it would be wrong to be on at this moment. I certainly shan’t
accept a Front Bench job from Michael Foot because, if the PLP prefer Bill Rodgers and Roy Hattersley and Eric Varley to me, that’s for them.
I rang Caroline. Then the phone in my hotel room went continuously – the Daily Mirror, the Western Daily Press, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph. I simply said, ‘No comment.’
Sunday 7 December
Woke at 6 and turned on the television and for one hour I listened to a man called Pat Robertson, who runs a right-wing born-again Christian evangelical movement. It was such a hair-raising programme that it undid all the optimism that I had begun to feel when I came to this conference. This guy Pat Robertson, who looked like a business executive of about forty-five with one of those slow, charming American smiles, was standing there with a big tall black man beside him, his sidekick, and he talked continuously about the Reagan administration, about the defeat of the liberals, about Reagan’s commitment to the evangelical movement. He had a blackboard showing what in the nineteenth century ‘liberal’ meant. He then wiped that from the blackboard and said that today the liberals are Marxists, Fascists, leftists and socialists.
Then he showed an extract of Reagan saying, ‘We want to keep big government out of our homes, and out of our schools, and out of our family life.’ He went on and on for an hour like this. At the end, he said, ‘Let us pray’, and, his face contorted with fake piety, pleaded with Jesus to protect America, ‘our country’.
I couldn’t switch it off. It was so frightening, the feeling that we are now entering a holy war between that type of reactionary Christianity and Communism. It is a thoroughly wicked and evil interpretation of Christianity.
I checked out from the hotel and went into the conference to hear François Mitterrand give the keynote speech. I have heard him on a number of occasions and I find him rather boring and platitudinous, but today he was excellent. He made a most sensitive speech about the development of socialism, beginning in a very human way by showing a picture of the fist holding the rose and describing how it had developed. He went on to talk about economic and political democracy and traced the ideas of democracy through to the rights of man, together with the principles of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity. It went down extremely well.
After lunch Willy Brandt gave the closing speech and talked about the three challenges: new technology, the Cold War and the North–South divide. He went through it in his thoughtful way, as he always does, and he got a warm reception. I must say, my feelings did change a little. I felt more warmly disposed to them because they may sound pretty conservative in Europe, but when you hear them in America they are beacons of light in a dark continent.
Looking back on the conference, it was a significant event, although the media didn’t cover it at all in America as far as I can make out.
Afterwards I went to the Aeronautical Space Agency museum with Edith Cressoil, a French socialist deputy in the European Parliament, who is here with Mitterrand, and together we touched the piece of moonstone that was there – it was exciting to see and feel it.
Friday 12 December
The Prime Minister yesterday was in South Wales, where there was a big demonstration, with 1,200 police on duty and fifty-five arrests. And an egg hit her car. Then there were pictures on television of her speaking at a CBI dinner in Cardiff saying demonstrations don’t help to get jobs – that it gives Wales a bad name for investors, and all the rest of it. Here is a woman entirely without any human sympathy whatever, applying rigidly capitalist criteria at a time of great hardship and deliberately widening the gap between rich and poor. The country is ready now for major unrest.
Monday 22 December
To the Friends of the Earth Christmas Party. What became clear from chatting to people there was that they were mostly pre-socialist in their thinking. One felt that all this concern was the middle class expressing its dislike of the horrors of industrialisation – keeping Hampstead free from the whiff of diesel smoke, sort of thing. It was also a bit of a warning that local Labour Parties could become full of people like this, like the Liberal Party with no solid working-class and trade union experience behind it.
Friday 26 December
Late lie-in. Collected Melissa and she and I walked across the park. It was a fantastic year for press hysteria and violence; a few days free of that at the moment is welcome.
In 1981 there will be the Special Conference and I think some form of electoral college will be established. Michael Foot will certainly be re-elected unopposed. My intention at the moment is to stand against Denis Healey for the deputy leadership in order to pinpoint the real issues for the Party, but I don’t expect to succeed.
I think the possibility is that there might be some minor breakaway from the Labour Party encouraged by Roy Jenkins and supported by Shirley Williams; if Mrs Thatcher gets into serious trouble, they may try to bring together a sort of national-reconstruction government with a federal European shift, a statutory pay policy and proportional representation. I have a feeling that the political fight that lies ahead will be a bitter one.
Monday 26 January 1981
Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers were splashed all over the front pages with their ‘Limehouse Declaration’, so called because it was made from David Owen’s home there in East London. It is a turning point in a way because from now on the Labour Party is going to be treated as if it is illegitimate, and resentment is growing strongly in the Party about this.
The big news tonight is that thirteen MPs are supporting the Council for Social Democracy, and the media are giving it massive coverage. If there is going to be a new political party, which the Gang of Four claim, that is important news. But the Left are holding their hand and I think that is right. I don’t think it’s sensible for us to attack the Social Democrats at the moment; let them come out with their own policies and then we shall raise the question whether Tom Bradley and Shirley Williams on the NEC, and Bill Rodgers in the Shadow Cabinet, can be allowed to plan a new political party while remaining in the Party. It is absolutely wrong.
Tuesday 27 January
Beause Bill Rogers has resigned from the Shadow Cabinet, I take his place. At 9.30 I went to see Michael Foot, and it turned into the most sensational interview.
He mentioned the NEC tomorrow, and said, ‘I don’t see why we should pass this resolution of Party loyalty. Why do we need it?’
I explained, ‘Because the Social Democrats are saying they are going to leave.’
He said, ‘It’s quite unnecessary.’
So I replied, ‘Well, it’s quite straightforward: if you don’t like it, vote against it.’
He was angry and red-faced.
I said something like, ‘You’re certainly very soft on the Right, buttering up Bill Rodgers all the time, but I notice you chose this morning to attack me violently in the PLP meeting. You have really been all over the shop to try and keep the Right in the Party, and you don’t feel quite the same about the Left. Why didn’t you attack Bill Rodgers for the “myths” he is spreading?’
He was angry about that. So then I said, ‘I have come from the left group on the NEC who asked me to request a meeting with you.’
He snapped, ‘Oh, so you meet before the NECs, do you?’
I said, ‘Yes, we do.’
He said, ‘Well, that’s very disruptive of committees if people meet and discuss them in advance.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I remarked. ‘You went round and saw people to try to get 50 per cent for the PLP at the Wembley conference.’
‘I did not,’ he said.
‘I heard you had, but if I’m wrong . . .’
He repeated, ‘It’s very disruptive, a caucus of that kind.’
Well, since the husbands’ and wives’ weekly dinners met at his house throughout the whole of the Labour Government, to do exactly the same, I couldn’t understand his anger.
Then he asked, ‘You try to fix votes in advance, don’t you?’
&nbs
p; I said, ‘No, I try to reach a sort of general agreement about things.’
‘You’re a bloody liar,’ he said.
So I just walked out, and that was my first meeting with my leader as a member of his Shadow Cabinet. I am not being called a liar by anybody. I was pretty steamed up. So I went back to the left group of Eric Heffer, Tony Saunois, Eric Clarke, Norman Atkinson, Frank Allaun, Joan Maynard and Jo Richardson, and I told them what had happened. They said, ‘Keep cool.’ I said, ‘I’m as cool as a cucumber.’
Later, while I was sitting in the Division Lobby waiting to vote, I talked to Peter Shore and told him that, in some ways, I admired David Owen because he was saying what he believed. I didn’t agree with him, but at least he was arguing his case.
Peter said, ‘If you admire that, you’ll have a lot of admiring to do in the next year.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
He said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of fighting going on and I shall be in on it.’
We went through the Lobby together and as we walked along the corridor I sensed an absolute reservoir of anger against me. Peter said I was obstructive; I think my relations with him are temporarily ruptured. As he is a very old friend, I am extremely sorry about that.
Monday 2 February
Went into the House and saw Michael Foot at 2.30.1 said, ‘Let’s just forget last week completely. We were all under strain and I know you have got a great problem on your plate.’ So that made things seem all right. I asked if the Gang of Four would go.
‘It looks as if they will. I am seeing them this afternoon.’
I said, ‘I don’t want them to go, but at the same time I don’t think we ought to offer them anything to keep them in.’
He replied, ‘Well, I won’t. On the question of a job, I can’t really do a reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet at the moment.’
I said, ‘I understand that. Do whatever you need, but I would like Regional Affairs.’
