Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  In reality, Benn was neither a Bolshevik nor a maniac. Born in Westminster in 1925, the son of a Labour minister and a feminist theologian, he was the incarnation of high-minded progressivism. A teetotaller and a puritan, he adored gadgets, travelled with his own teabags and often asked for bread and cheese when he dined with colleagues. On the platform he was fluent and inspiring; behind the scenes, admitted The Times, he was ‘an excellent mimic and a brilliant humourist’. Few politicians worked harder or thought more deeply about Britain’s future in a world of economic change. None was so committed to politics as a public endeavour. At every demonstration, every meeting, he was always there, eloquent and evangelical. The Labour historian Kenneth Morgan called him ‘the pied piper of every available left-wing cause’, from workers’ control and nuclear disarmament to feminism, environmentalism and gay rights. And through it all, Benn tried to live by John Wesley’s apocryphal rule: ‘Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, to all the souls you can, in every place you can, at all the times you can, with all the zeal you can, as long as ever you can.’40

  Yet for all Benn’s qualities, many of his fellow Labour MPs absolutely despised him. Those who knew him well often said what a genuinely polite and friendly man he was, before going on to accuse him of being a sanctimonious, opportunistic, narcissistic hypocrite. Shirley Williams, who spent years alongside him in the Cabinet, recalled that ‘personally he was the sweetest of men, concerned about his friends and colleagues, ready to help, funny and self-effacing’. But she also thought him a fanatic, drunk on his own charisma. Denis Healey thought he was a ‘political ninny of the most superior quality’. Another Labour moderate, Bill Rodgers, thought him ‘intellectually dishonest’, using his fluency to peddle untruths to pliable audiences. Barbara Castle wrote of his ‘unctuousness’ and ‘ambition’. Michael Foot, who came to loathe him, similarly thought he was ‘obsessed by ambition’.41

  Working-class MPs were often outraged by Benn’s conversion, epitomized by his adoption of the proletarian-sounding ‘Tony’ instead of his old nickname ‘Wedgie’. John Golding, a potter’s son from Birmingham, ‘could not stand him’. As a young MP Golding had been a great Benn fan. But in 1972 he took Benn to visit some striking miners and was appalled when, in the car, his hero said: ‘John, what shall I tell them that will please them?’ To Golding, Benn was a typical patrician do-gooder, pandering to his working-class audience instead of telling them the truth. Another centre-left MP remarked that the sight of Benn posing as the champion of the working classes reminded him of the German spies parachuted into England in 1940, who wore spats and monocles to pass themselves off as locals. A third MP remarked that Benn romanticized the working classes as ‘virile and romantic’ because he had spent his whole life in a patrician bubble, and was now suffering from ‘Lady Chatterley syndrome’.42

  Although Benn would have rejected the label, he was, in fact, a classic populist. The world was divided into heroes and villains. The heroes were ‘the people’: not people who went to garden centres and watched Cagney & Lacey, but real people, who became shop stewards, marched against Cruise missiles and came up to him on trains to tell him how wonderful he was. The villains were the City, the media, the Americans, the Europeans, the Conservatives, the Liberals and a large part of the Labour Party, including Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey and Michael Foot. Parliamentary democracy was a sham, an exercise in ‘queuing up for the privilege of running a declining capitalist economy … under what is really basically a rotten establishment system’. Behind the façade, power was wielded ‘by the military, by the Civil Service, by the multi-nationals, by the bankers’, a ‘narrow, secretive, undemocratic’ elite.43

  The fact that Benn had been educated at Westminster and Oxford, lived in a large house in Holland Park, west London, and had briefly been a viscount did not make him any less of a populist. History is littered with aristocratic champions of the people against the elite. Like all populists, Benn offered a simple programme that would, at a stroke, banish forever the evils of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Like many populists, he was at heart a nationalist, a little Englander who identified his enemies as the ‘Common Market, NATO [and] the IMF’ and dreamed of erecting import barriers to keep foreign goods out. And like all good populists, he always told his audiences what they wanted to hear. Unlike Sir Keith Joseph, who consciously tried to make converts, Benn preached only to the faithful and never told them anything that might discomfort them. As The Times’s Ronald Butt remarked in 1981, he used his remarkable eloquence ‘to conjure up applause’, never ‘drawing attention to an inconvenient reality’. There would always be enough money; there would never be compromises, setbacks or disappointments. All that was needed was to dream of a better world, and then things would fall into place. Nothing to kill or die for, no need for greed or hunger: this was the politics of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’.44

  What made him tick? Some of Benn’s colleagues saw him as a monster of self-aggrandizement, pandering to the activists to promote his ambitions. His diaries show that he was obsessed with the Labour leadership. Again and again he records people telling him that he will be leader one day, from senior union leaders to anonymous passers-by. In April 1979, with the general election in full swing, he asks his advisers ‘whether I should stand against Callaghan immediately after the Election’, only to be told he cannot win. But in the months that follow, the succession is never far from his mind. All the time he records encouragement from random members of the public, which he sees as a sign that the British people are on his side. In November, for instance, a man at Bristol station tells him that ‘despite the attacks on you in the press I want you to know that everybody here supports you’. ‘That sort of thing’, Benn writes, ‘is happening a lot at the moment.’45

  It is unfair, though, to see Benn as nothing but an opportunist. If he had been, he would never have pursued a course that did such extraordinary damage to his own reputation. When he preached the gospel of the left, he believed every word. Brought up in an atmosphere of intense moral self-righteousness, he saw himself as a born-again socialist, a prophet chosen to bring the good news to the people. Becoming Labour leader was a crucial step towards that goal. ‘I was always sure’, wrote Golding, ‘that what motivated Benn was a belief that he was the messiah and, with his small group of disciples and his chosen people, he would create a heaven on earth.’ Unfortunately, Golding went on, ‘many working-class British people knew that what he was offering was, in fact, hell on earth. They would never vote Labour until he was removed. He was God’s greatest gift to Thatcher and had to be stopped if the Labour Party was to survive.’46

  Golding was not alone in this view. Almost every week, more abuse came crashing down. ‘Tony Benn is a liar,’ declared the Mirror in the autumn of 1979: ‘a cool, calculated, deliberate, with-malice-aforethought liar.’ ‘Though his tongue speaks with sweet reason,’ said the Express the following summer, ‘he has the mind of a ranter and the eyes of a fanatic.’ Yet the criticism spurred him on. It was a sign that he was right, a badge of his martyrdom. There was a vast capitalist conspiracy to keep the masses down, and the media were a central part of it. And whenever things went wrong, it was obvious who was to blame. ‘Quite a lot of people’, Benn remarked sadly, ‘believe the lies published in the papers.’47

  The dust had barely settled after the general election when Benn launched his campaign. That weekend, Michael Foot invited him over for a post-election dinner. Benn turned him down. In Foot’s words, ‘he had his own plans and his own new body of close associates’. In fact, Benn had already decided to leave the front bench and stand in the next leadership election. A few days later, he told Callaghan that he intended to lead the campaign to curb the leader’s power and hand the initiative to the activists. Callaghan snapped that reforming Labour’s rules was a ‘false issue’. But Benn’s mind was made up. Changing the party, he wrote privately, was merely the first step in a wider campaign ‘to educate the
public not only about socialism but about the legitimacy of trade unions, the public services and full employment’.48

  To a different Labour leader, this might have been the ideal chance to stamp his authority on his restive party. But, at 67, Callaghan was exhausted. Having held all four great offices of state, survived the IMF crisis and endured the Winter of Discontent, he had little appetite for a battle with his own activists. Left to himself, he would almost certainly have retired to his Sussex farm. But many of his closest supporters persuaded him that it was his duty to prepare the ground for a new regime under his former Chancellor, Denis Healey. So Callaghan told Healey that he would stay on for eighteen months to ‘take the shine off the ball’. At the time, Healey was relieved, because he too was shattered and wanted to recharge his batteries before assuming the leadership. But as the Labour right-winger Bill Rodgers later put it, Callaghan’s decision was a ‘fatal error’.49

  The recriminations began immediately. When Callaghan’s old Cabinet met on 9 May, Benn suggested a major post-election inquest. ‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Callaghan said. ‘We lost the Election because people didn’t get their dustbins emptied, because commuters were angry about train disruption and because of too much union power. That’s all there is to it.’ Benn thought this disgraceful and told a public meeting that there must be a detailed inquiry into the party’s failure. Five days later, the left-wing newspaper Labour Activist launched a savage attack on Callaghan for refusing to put out a radical manifesto. Then, on 16 May, Labour’s MPs met for their first discussion since the election. For moderates like John Golding, Labour’s problem was obvious: Mrs Thatcher had won over working-class voters by promising to bash the unions, restore law and order and let them buy their council houses. But the left saw things differently. ‘We lost because of right-wing policies and a negative campaign,’ insisted the Walsall MP David Winnick. ‘We shouldn’t blame the unions – the yellow press do that. We are a working-class party and activists are our best people.’ It was less than two weeks since the election, and already civil war seemed inevitable.50

  Over the summer the two camps prepared their forces, and in October they assembled in Brighton for the party conference. ‘Stop feuding – start fighting the Tories,’ begged an editorial in the Mirror. Yet even before the delegates had taken their seats, the air was laced with poison. In an extraordinary sign of the general mood, the organizers had arranged for the MPs to be clustered together on a kind of ramp to one side of the rostrum, like defendants in a show trial. One of Callaghan’s former ministers compared the arrangement to a ‘People’s Court’; others likened it to a ‘sin-bin’, a ‘ghetto’ or a ‘mass dock’. The tone was set by the chairman, the hard-left Frank Allaun, who kicked off by observing that there had not been a decent Labour government since the 1940s. There was only one reason Labour had lost the election, said Allaun, glaring at his fellow MPs: the ‘Cabinet majority’ had ignored the activists and pursued their own Tory policies. ‘That is why Mrs Thatcher is in Downing Street.’ The delegates roared with approval. On the platform, reported the Mirror, Callaghan ‘sat grim and stony-faced’.51

  But Allaun was just the warm-up act. Next came the former Birmingham MP Tom Litterick, who had lost his seat in May and was still seething. The general election, he said, had been a ‘fiasco’. In his hand he brandished a sheaf of documents, each of them a left-wing policy on everything from women’s rights to getting out of Europe. These, he said emotionally, should have been the basis for the election manifesto. ‘Then, one day in April of this year, Jim Callaghan turned up, and that is what he did to your policies.’ With that, Litterick hurled his papers in the air, from where they drifted down like confetti among his listeners. ‘“Jim’ll fix it,” they said,’ he went on bitterly. ‘Aye, he fixed it. He fixed all of us. He fixed me in particular.’

  Litterick’s attack brought loud cheers of approval. Even the party’s veteran general secretary, Ron Hayward, could not resist having a dig at the last Labour government. The Winter of Discontent, Hayward said, had only happened because Callaghan’s Cabinet had ignored their own activists. ‘I wish our ministers or our Prime Minister’, he added, ‘would sometimes act in our interests like a Tory Prime Minister acts in their interests.’ And although Michael Foot insisted that the charge of betrayal ‘just isn’t true’, the mood was clearly against him. When Foot had finished, there were ‘angry shouts’ from the constituency section. It was ‘contemptible’, wrote Benn. ‘There is no rebellion in Michael Foot any more; he is entirely an establishment figure.’52

  The next day’s papers were predictably dire, the Guardian lamenting ‘an extraordinary day in the long and bloodstained history of Labour Party conferences’. But there was more to come. The next afternoon, the conference turned to the supremely contentious issue of mandatory reselection. The scene was set by Ron Hayward, who insisted that activists did not ‘send an MP to the House of Commons to forget whence he came and whom he represents’, and added that if any MPs thought they were indispensable, he had ‘a queue a mile long that wants to go to the House of Commons’. Even Benn admitted that it was an ‘angry’ debate, with a ‘lot of barracking from the floor’. But since the CLPD had laid the groundwork with supreme skill, the result was never in doubt. By a margin of some 2 million votes, mandatory reselection won the day.fn3 ‘The efforts of the right have failed,’ wrote a jubilant Benn, who thought there were now ‘635 vacancies for candidates in the next Parliament’.53

  All things considered, Benn thought, Brighton had been wonderful. ‘The whole Conference has been really friendly’, he wrote, ‘and not only is it a turning point for the Party, but I felt I had been taken to its heart.’ But almost nobody else saw it that way. Among Labour’s natural supporters, the Guardian was reminded of an impeachment trial, while the Mirror was horrified to see Labour MPs ‘corralled at one end of the hall’, to be ‘criticised, ridiculed and derided by the Bennites on the rostrum’. ‘Even as a Tory’, wrote the right-wing MP George Gardiner, ‘I felt sick at the sight of Jim Callaghan being vilified by men who had rushed to lick his boots as Premier, while his party voted to make its MPs puppets on a string held by Anthony Wedgwood Benn.’ And although Benn’s supporters insisted that democracy had prevailed, most observers agreed that the real winner was sitting in Whitehall. ‘No wonder Mrs Thatcher is so cheerful,’ said the Express. ‘With enemies like that, who needs friends?’54

  Labour’s woes were a gift to the newspapers. In this Stanley Franklin cartoon (Sun, 3 October 1979), Tony Benn appears in full Jacobin regalia, complete with hammer and sickle, while Eric Heffer knits at an upstairs window. Jim Callaghan makes a fine Louis XVI, while Michael Foot and Denis Healey are presumably next for the chop.

  The great irony of Benn’s campaign was that he had been one of the very few people who had sat through every single moment of the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets. Yet by the time the party left Brighton, he stood unchallenged as the chief critic of what he called ‘twenty years of surrender’. His former colleagues could barely contain their outrage at being condemned by somebody who had worked alongside them for so long. Yet Benn never doubted that he was right, and by the end of 1979 he felt sure that history was running in his direction. Two days before Christmas, he began to make ‘basic preparations’ for a leadership election, photocopying the Guide to the House of Commons, cutting out all the Labour MPs’ photos and dividing them into piles labelled ‘for’ and ‘against’. After sleeping on it, though, he reflected that the MPs would never back him. The solution was to put pressure on them not to choose a new leader ‘till Conference has endorsed an electoral college, then have a leadership election after that’. This, of course, would put him in pole position.55

  In the meantime, the Labour right were in a state of shock. Some argued that they had no choice but to fight back: the former Foreign Secretary, David Owen, publicly urged them to ‘challenge the authoritarianism, dogma and elitism of the activists’. But they needed a leader,
and none was forthcoming. Callaghan, once renowned as a consummate bruiser, now seemed ‘crumpled, beaten, isolated’. Even Healey seemed to have lost his fighting spirit. What was worse, the disappointments of the 1970s had almost visibly sapped the moderates’ intellectual confidence, their cocksure certainty that they alone knew how to run the country. Like the Tory Wets, they knew what they were against. But what were they for? When pressed, they made the same old noises about incomes policies, higher spending and a more active role for the state, which sounded like a rerun of the Wilson years. As The Times remarked, at least the left had something to say, a sense of optimism and mission that kept their activists toiling into the early hours. By contrast, the right had run out of ideas.56

  By the spring of 1980, therefore, everything seemed to be going Benn’s way. Callaghan was on his last legs, the right were on the run and the future belonged to the left. If people could not ‘accept Labour’s socialist principles, aims and objectives’, Benn’s friend Eric Heffer declared on 3 February, ‘then they really ought to join some other party which is more to their taste’. On 30 May Benn’s allies formed the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, a hard-left coalition uniting the CLPD, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, the Militant Tendency, the Institute for Workers’ Control, the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory behind the total victory of the left, or as he put it, the ‘programme of Party democracy’. And that night, as he and his wife held a party for the Rank and File’s leaders – among them Ken Livingstone, Chris Mullin, Peter Hain, Jon Lansman and Dawn Primarolo – he felt a rush of excitement. ‘When the time comes,’ he wrote, ‘they will be the people who organise the Benn election campaign.’57