by Benn, Tony
I daresay we are back in the old routine of death threats, with the Gulf crisis.
The layout of the Conference is fantastic – lots of photographs and the slogan ‘Looking to the Future’. The rostrum is quite separate from the platform, and everybody had been pushed up on to the second row, except for ‘leading figures’. It is now all stage-managed for the telly. It is symbolic of the separation between the leadership and the membership.
Monday 1 October
I was disappointed that the Conference rejected by 3 million-odd to 2,788,000 a motion to phase out nuclear power over fifteen years.
Looking at the platform in the afternoon, I though that all these impressive Front Bench people – Tony Blair, Michael Meacher, Jack Straw, Frank Dobson, John Cunningham – made a much better team man for man, or woman for woman, than the Tories. I think people have had enough of the Thatcher philosophy, and they want a change.
Wednesday 3 October
Up at 6.45, and I practised and timed my speech on the emergency resolution on the Gulf, on which I intended to speak from the floor.
Ken Cameron moved the emergency resolution very well, seconded by somebody from Bolsover who sounded just like Dennis Skinner and was brilliantly funny. Then Denis Healey spoke, and John Edmonds made an outrageous speech in which he asked about the commanders of British troops in Saudi Arabia, ‘Are they not to be allowed to make a pre-emptive strike?’
I got up after every speech, expecting to be called, and finally Jo Richardson, the Chair, said, ‘That’s where we must leave it. The Conference Arrangements Committee have allowed us five speeches from the floor.’ So people on the floor shouted, ‘Call Tony Benn!’ Jo said, ‘I’ve called two MPs, and nobody has a special right to speak.’
I didn’t complain, but, as a result of all the fuss being made about my being excluded, the media gathered round, and in fact I did masses of interviews on what I would have said anyway. I was very sharp at Edmonds: ‘For a general secretary sitting in his comfortable armchair to call for a pre-emptive strike against Baghdad when he is not going to be killed himself is disgraceful.’
Sunday 21 October
Ted Heath saw Saddam Hussein today and is hoping to come out with some of the British hostages. Bit by bit, one could see the whole of the Gulf War enterprise grinding to a halt, with the American President in deep trouble domestically over his budget.
Thursday 1 November
A bombshell today: Geoffrey Howe, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House, has resigned from the Government – the last surviving member of the original 1979 Cabinet. He is a very nice man; I like him personally.
Willy Brandt is going to Baghdad. I feel a certain pride in this because Ralph Miliband had suggested I approach Ted Heath, and then I suggested to Heath that Willy Brandt might be brought in. It may have come from that. Brandt is going to Baghdad with the goodwill of the UN Secretary-General, although Douglas Hurd has complained to the German Government about it.
Howe’s resignation has put the Tories into a panic, and there may be a leadership election; if Heseltine became Leader, there’s not much difference between him and Kinnock, except that he has had a lot more experience.
Tuesday 6 November
The Iraqi Embassy rang, saying the Ambassador would like to see me. I wasn’t prepared to go to the Embassy, so they said the Ambassador would come to my home at 1.30.1 informed the Foreign Office, so that it was all above board.
The Ambassador, Dr Shafiq al-Salihi, came with his Third Secretary, and Ruth Winstone, who is working on my diaries, greeted them in Arabic – which I think created a favourable impression.
He said straightaway, ‘We have been following your statements on the Gulf crisis and I have been in structed by my government to invite you to visit Baghdad.’ He then asked if I had any advice as to how the matter might be resolved.
I said, ‘Yes, I have. I think you should release all the hostages, because they are not worth anything to you in terms of bargaining. They won’t protect you from a war and, if they were all released, the whole thing would look quite different. After that, I think, you would have to be prepared to put Kuwait under the control of the UN and then sit down without preconditions to consider the implementation of all the resolutions.’
‘I hadn’t thought of the hostage point,’ he said, and added, ‘If the President’s programme permits, he will see you in Baghdad.’ He also told me that I ‘wouldn’t come back empty-handed’, which implied that some hostages would return.
I told him, ‘My prime interest would not be in the humanitarian appeal for some being allowed out but in the political case for all of them coming out.’
He looked very uncomfortable. Then he asked me to dinner, and I thanked him.
When they left I rang Ralph Miliband, who was responsible for the whole idea of my approaching Heath. I also rang Heath’s Private Secretary, who told me that Heath had put that very point about the hostages and had also spoken to Bob McNamara in California.
I told the UN Secretary-General’s office about the approach, and faxed them my account of the meeting.
Later in the day, I spoke to Heath (who got thirty-three hostages released) and said, ‘I haven’t seen you since you went to Iraq. Congratulations. I have had an invitation. Shall I go?
‘Yes, of course,’ he replied.
So everyone I have asked thinks I should go. I’ll have to work out carefully what to say, and I will make it an explicitly political mission, not one about humanitarian issues. The air tickets will cost £825.
Friday 9 November
I made it clear to the Iraqis that if I went to Baghdad I would want to see Saddam Hussein, I would want some hostages released, and I wanted to see King Hussain in Jordan.
Yesterday in the Commons Douglas Hurd had urged me not to go to Baghdad. On the other hand, letters and telephone calls of support are pouring in. Two people offered to act as interpreter. Richard Branson’s office rang to say he would be happy to send one of his Virgin Airline planes to Baghdad to bring any hostages back.
To Chesterfield. Johnny Burrows had been a bit upset that he hadn’t been told I was going, and he felt I wasn’t consulting the local Party. But after a talk he supported me 100 per cent.
Saturday 10 November
Looked in to see Melissa, and found Joshua and some of the grandchildren there. They were very concerned about my safety in Baghdad, so I rang an Irish PhD student, Paul Lalor, who is a brilliant Arabist and who had offered his services as an interpreter, and said I might be able to take him. There is such a lot to do, and the hostages’ relatives keep ringing the office with requests. Michael, my eldest grandchild, asked, ‘Are you going to be killed in Baghdad, Dan-Dan?’
I said no, and he looked relieved and went on watching the telly.
Sunday 11 November
I spoke to Paul Lalor, the Arabic speaker, an Irishman of thirty-two who is at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has agreed to come if I pay his airfare and expenses.
Tuesday 13 November
Geoffrey Howe made his formal resignation speech, which was devastating; he savaged Mrs Thatcher, was amusing and committed. It was all about Europe and the maintenance of the free market and so on. It has certainly transformed everything. We have really come to the end of the Thatcher era, I think.
Friday 16 November
I rang a former Jordanian Ambassador, who was most courteous and friendly and advised me how to approach Saddam Hussein and King Hussain of Jordan.
Later in the day, the Leader of the Democratic Opposition in Kuwait rang me and described the atrocities in Kuwait – the torture and rape and looting – and said he thought war was inevitable. I said, ‘I suppose you don’t think I should go.’ He said, ‘No, I don’t.’
Tuesday 20 November
To the House, and went to the Committee Corridor because I wanted to see what was happening in the first ballot for the Tory leadership – Michael Heseltine versus Margaret Thatcher.
&
nbsp; It is quite a historic event. By secret ballot, Tory MPs have the power to remove as Leader of their party a Prime Minister who has been elected three times by the British people.
When I got there, the whole corridor was packed from the upper waiting hall right down to the far end, with hundreds of people. I had my radio with an earpiece and the aerial sticking up, and I must have looked like a man from outer space. I stood on a bench so that I could see everyone – Tory, Labour and Liberal MPs, clerks, secretaries, journalists – a sea of faces.
There was a bit of scuffling further up, and then all of a sudden, through the crowd, came a number of journalists, who ran by so quickly I could hardly recognise any of them. The crowd opened like the Red Sea. One of the journalists said to me, ‘Second ballot. Can you comment?’
So I said, ‘It is appropriate that it should have happened to her when she was in Versailles’ – a point Caroline had made to me.
He said, ‘Brilliant’, and rushed off.
It wasn’t for some time that I heard the results. Margaret Thatcher had got 204 and Heseltine 152. It was four short of an outright victory for her on the first ballot. Almost immediately I heard her on my radio from Paris, where she is attending the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, announcing she was going to fight in the second ballot.
Heseltine said he had let his name go forward to the next ballot, so the crisis continues for another week.
The Labour Party is of course keen to keep Thatcher, and Kinnock has put down a motion of censure against her, for Thursday, to try to consolidate Tory support around her. It is a disgrace that in eight years this is the first motion of censure against the Government.
At 10, when a statement was made that there would be a motion of censure against the Government on Thursday, Jim Sillars made exactly that point.
Wednesday 21 November
Mrs Thatcher arrived back from France. The rumour going round at the moment is that the men in grey suits went to see her to say, ‘Time to go.’ Indeed, I think Willie Whitelaw went to see her. But according to rumours she just absolutely refused to have anything to do with that advice, so then the Cabinet was polled privately and, whatever they thought individually, they took a common line to support her. So Hurd has nominated her again, and Major has signed her nomination. Actually, if you look round, there isn’t a dominant alternative figure. Hurd and Major aren’t really up to it, but Heseltine is flamboyant and experienced and is getting marvellous press.
In terms of stamina and persistence, you have to admit Margaret Thatcher is an extraordinary woman. She came out of Number 10, saying, ‘I fight on. I fight to win.’ Then she went to the House and made a statement on the Paris CSCE talks. You would think she would be downcast after that setback, but not at all. When Paddy Ashdown got up and said that the Paris Treaty was one of the great moments of the twilight of her premiership, she replied, ‘As for the twilight, people should remember that there is a 24-hour clock’, which was a smashing answer.
Kinnock tried to be statesmanlike but couldn’t manage it. I then went upstairs to see Douglas Hurd about my Iraq trip, and there were three officials in his room. It was the very same room in which George Brown had tried to summon Harold Wilson in 1968 on the night George resigned as Foreign Secretary, and I told the civil servants the story. They asked how I thought history would see Margaret Thatcher.
I said, ‘Everyone drops into the darkest of all worlds between the headlines and the history books. Not many live long enough to come back again, but it is too soon to say.’ I didn’t want to be offensive. I asked, ‘Who do you think will win?’
One of them said he thought Heseltine would.
Hurd came in. He is a weakling and hasn’t got any stuffing.
After the pleasantries he said, ‘What I am afraid of is that you might give Saddam Hussein the impression he wouldn’t have to leave Kuwait.’
I replied, ‘Quite the opposite. As a matter of fact, I am going to tell him that there is going to be a war.’
‘Nobody wants a war,’ he said.
‘Well, in my opinion, that’s what it is all building up to.’
Hurd was slightly thrown.
I told him, ‘I am going to try and bring out some hostages, obviously, but my main argument is that he should release them all and explore the possibility for negotiations.’
He said, ‘He gave Ted Heath a very rough time, talked about chemical warfare and made his flesh creep.’
‘I’m too old for that! You are a diplomat and are experienced at diplomacy, and it must be frustrating that you can’t do anything about it, using your diplomatic skill.’
I got the feeling he was uneasy. I think he is really a dove in this situation.
He said, ‘It’s very easy for him. He has only got to withdraw from Kuwait.’
‘It’s not quite like that. The Prime Minister talks about a war crimes tribunal, about destroying his military capacity and about compensation, and I am not sure that withdrawal from Kuwait would necessarily do the trick.’
At the end, I was given the latest list of hostages compiled by the FO. But I could feel the awful pressure from all these reasonable civil servants and Tory Ministers.
Thursday 22 November
I was in the middle of an interview about the war in the Gulf for ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4 when my secretary Kathy burst in to say Margaret Thatcher had resigned. Absolutely dazzling news, and it was quite impossible to keep my mind on the interview after that. So people have been to her and told her that she can’t win. She called the Cabinet together this morning and told them. But the motion of censure is still taking place this afternoon.
To the House, which was in turmoil. We had the censure debate, and Kinnock’s speech was flamboyant and insubstantial. When he was cross-examined about the European currency he simply couldn’t answer. Thatcher was brilliant. She always has her ideology to fall back on; she rolled off statistics, looked happy and joked.
Monday 26 November
We were met at Baghdad by three MPs from the International Relations Committee of the Iraqi Parliament, and we sat in this beautiful, glamorous new airport which was absolutely deserted because there are no flights other than internal ones. Gave a press conference.
We were driven to the Al-Rasheed Hotel; in the car we were given the government line about how the Iraqis were prepared to make any sacrifices and die for their people, and so on. Who should be at the hotel but Svend Robinson MP, of the Canadian New Democratic Party, whom I met two years ago. He has been here for a week with an all-party Canadian delegation but has not yet succeeded in seeing Saddam.
We went down to dinner with the Iraqi MPs, who said Saddam would see me. I asked if they could give me an indication of how many hostages were likely to be released; they said the number would be on the same sort of scale as Willy Brandt was allowed.
Tuesday 27 November
At 7.45 am I was taken in pouring rain to the tented encampment in the garden of the British Embassy, which looked like a refugee camp. There are about fifty-seven people in the tents, and they eat in a place they call the Oasis Club, a sort of hut with some basic cooking facilities. They are all British, work for Bechtel, and have been living there since the beginning of the crisis. They are in engineering, construction, procurement and information technology, all working on contracts for the Iraqi Ministries. They are all being paid and buy food from the streets with company money. A doctor visits once a week and a nurse twice a week. One of them said that on the streets they had encountered growing public hostility to Saddam Hussein.
Heard on the news that John Major has won the leadership of the Tory Party with 185 votes against 56 for Hurd and 131 for Heseltine; as he was only two votes short of an overall majority, Hurd and Heseltine had immediately withdrawn. So he becomes the youngest Prime Minister this century; a competent person from a simple background, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. He is a new type of Thatcherite really; not strident, probably
slightly less ideological, more sympathetic to Europe, a hard man in terms of financial policy, but confident.
Wednesday 28 November
The Spectator has voted me Backbencher of the Year. Fat lot of good that does! Tony Banks is accepting on my behalf at the Savoy Hotel today.
Up at 6.30 and had breakfast with four members of the ‘Committee of the British Community’, and their description of British Embassy treatment was awful. They were not welcomed at the Embassy, had had absolutely no help from it, and had even been told they had to put stamps on their letters home. Because they are not British taxpayers, they were told they couldn’t expect any concessions. One man’s mother-in-law had died, somebody’s sister was dying of cancer, and their anger at the British Embassy was great. But they have organised themselves well.
Went downstairs after breakfast with a view to meeting the Deputy Prime Minister, when I recognised the President’s interpreter, Dr Sa’doon Zubaydi, and all of a sudden I realised that this was the big meeting. I said I would be taking Paul with me as my adviser, and they said, ‘You can’t; we haven’t permission.’ If I had put my foot down, I may have been able to insist, I don’t know. However, not only did they refuse Paul, they took my bag off my shoulder and said I would have to leave that behind. So I put my hand in my bag to pull out some papers, and I thought that I had pulled out the full list of hostages which we had been advised should be handed in at the Presidential Office. But owing to the hurry – I wasn’t even in my best suit, which I had brought for the meeting – I failed to take the list and also the box of medicines which I brought to give Saddam.
Anyway, we got into the car and had a candid talk. Dr Zubaydi asked if there were many matters I would like to discuss. So I took my opportunity and said, ‘There is great anxiety in Britain about the Kurds. I know you have given them a lot of autonomy, but this is a problem. There is great anxiety about human rights.’ He looked a bit uncomfortable, but at least I did raise these matters. I added, ‘But I don’t want to raise this now, because the central question is peace.’
