The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990

by Benn, Tony

  ‘I have good personal relations with Harold but I’m shut out completely.’

  She said that Harold sometimes nearly gives up and she was sure that one day he’d resign.

  Well, that’s a load of rubbish! She asked what I thought about being moved. I said, ‘It was like moving Nye Bevan from the Health Service. It was a complete capitulation.’

  ‘Harold was under heavy pressure,’ she said, ‘not just from outside but from inside too.’ Well to hell with that. ‘Harold reported that you had lectured him more than he had ever been lectured before. He does have a difficult time and he thought it best to move you, and he found a way which both met the criticism and annoyed the others.’

  I said we should keep in touch because I like Marcia. If she went it would be awful.

  Thursday 23 October

  At 8.50 this morning, just before I went off to work, Caroline and I were in the bedroom and there was the most enormous explosion. I thought it was a bomb in Roy Jenkins’s house near by. So I dashed down the stairs and opened the front door and I saw there were a lot of people about 150 yards down the street. Then, through the trees in Campden Hill Square, I saw flames licking up twenty-five to thirty feet and realised that the explosion was over by Hugh Fraser’s house. Indeed, it turned out that someone had put a thirty-pound bomb near his Jaguar.

  The street was in a tremendous state of uproar with police cars and fire engines all over the place. There had been a bomb just up the road at Notting Hill when the Jordanian Ambassador was hurt, but this was the closest to home and it absolutely shook us. A friend of Josh’s, who comes up the hill every day to meet Josh, said the boy just in front of him had been blown off his bicycle. Some of the windows in the house next to ours had been blown out.

  The press turned up in their hundreds and Caroline went down and asked whether any schoolchildren had been injured and when they said no, she went up to the school and told the headmaster, so that when anxious parents rang up, he was able to tell them that everything was all right.

  Monday 3 November

  Arrived at Aberdeen at 8.30 for the landing of the first oil from the Forties Field. After breakfast at the Skeandhu Hotel, a film was shown of the Forties Field and then Harold Wilson arrived with Jim Callaghan, Sir Eric Drake of BP and a lot of others, and we all drove to BP’s headquarters at Dyce.

  The first thing I noticed was that the workers who actually bring the oil ashore were kept behind a barbed wire fence and just allowed to wave to us as we drove by. We arrived at a huge tent, constructed at a cost of £40,000, and laid with an extravagant red carpet. The tent was about the size of two football pitches and held 1,000 people, most of whom had been brought up from London. We were given a cup of coffee as we waited for the Queen to arrive.

  Eventually we were taken out on the dais to watch the Queen’s Rolls Royce approaching. Out came the Queen in a green dress, followed by the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Andrew. She shook hands with all of us, and we went back into the tent and had drinks, and the Queen circulated. Then she went into the computer control room and we followed. She pressed a few buttons I believe before going outside for her walkabout. There, behind another fence, were about 500 Aberdonians waving Union Jacks, and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh walked in front of them as if they were animals in a zoo.

  At lunch I sat next to Mrs Steel, the wife of David Steel, who is to succeed Drake as Chairman of BP. Jim was on her other side and he said how much he enjoyed the Foreign Office and it wasn’t like the Treasury. ‘You know, you would enjoy the Foreign Office, Tony.’

  I said, ‘Well, Jim, perhaps in your second administration that will be possible.’ He laughed.

  To be frank, the day was a complete waste of time and money, and when you see the Queen in action, everything else is just absorbed into this frozen feudal hierarchy. All the old bigwigs are brought out into the open as if they were somehow responsible for a great industrial achievement, while the workers are presented as natives and barbarians who can be greeted but have to be kept at a distance. It is a disgrace that a Labour government should allow this to continue. I know there is a security problem but there was no need for this. I also felt that this great Scottish occasion was just an opportunity for the London Establishment to come up and lord it over the Scots.

  Saturday 8 November

  On the train back from Bristol, a nervous, rather weedy-looking buffet car attendant came round with coffee. He told me he served in the army but after four or five stints in Northern Ireland, he had a nervous breakdown. ‘It was terrible,’ he said. ‘The children spit at you, the grown-ups throw stones at you and shield behind the children. My friends were blown up, but what really upset me was that I used to go out with a Catholic girl who was going to be teacher. Her brothers found out and shot her through the knee caps as a punishment for going out with a British soldier. She had to have both legs amputated.’

  It was a most brutal story. My God, we have to get out of Ireland.

  There was a programme last night about the Orange Order in Glasgow marching through Catholic areas to provoke them. We will have to get out because the English cannot solve the Irish problem.

  Tuesday 11 November

  The Scottish Daily News died yesterday.

  Cabinet at 10 and there was an oral report on Chrysler. I had stayed up till 3 am going through all my papers on this. Eric Varley told us that American-owned Chrysler had been in difficulties earlier this year and that 25,000 jobs would be directly affected. Chrysler have said that if the UK took it over, it would have losses of £55 million and another £80 million would be needed for investment. The alternative would be to let it go into liquidation in three months.

  I said, ‘Prime Minister, this is the biggest collapse in the industrial history of this country, twice the size of UCS, involving perhaps 67,000 people at a cost in unemployment pay of about £70 million. It is a disaster. This is a repeat of the motorbike industry, and it is happening year after year.’ Harold Wilson said it wasn’t a lame duck, it was a dead duck. ‘138,000 working days have been lost in disputes in the motor industry this year and the report must go forward and be agreed.’

  That was the end of that discussion and we went on to devolution. Had a most fitful night just lying on the couch with the light on and my door open so people could see me. Every time the division bell rang I went to vote – I have no idea how many times.

  Thursday 13 November

  Cabinet at 10 and the much delayed discussion on public expenditure. Harold opened by saying this was the hardest of all decisions for any government to make and he hoped there would be no recriminations.

  Denis Healey began, ‘We are talking about the period when we are returning to full employment. Output will be rising from 1977 to 1979. There will be a shortage of resources and money. We must make room for investment and exports. A 10 per cent increase in investment is expected in 1977–9. We must aim at a balance of payments surplus in 1978–9 or else the debt repayment will burden us and mortgage the North Sea oil. The Crosland proposals for lower cuts would pre-empt resources and would be a recipe for disaster. We cannot escape these cuts. We cannot borrow unless we make the cuts now or within the next six months. We are already borrowing 20 pence in every pound. The only alternatives to public-expenditure cuts are to print money or raise interest rates and a quarter of the PSBR is now due to the recession.

  ‘As for taxation, some increases are inevitable which will undermine the £6 pay-limit policy. If company tax is raised it will either cut jobs, investment or prices: on income tax you might go up by between 5p and 9p in the pound, which will cut take-home pay and the unions will then start bargaining on post-tax income.

  ‘At the Labour clubs you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will all tell you about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got eighteen children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holi
days.’ If that’s the case, I’d be interested to know how many people who frequent the Labour clubs actually vote Labour.

  Wednesday 19 November

  Lunch with the Japanese Ambassador, Mr Kato. His wife was most amusing, very beautiful, and had been brought up in America. We had a long talk about acupuncture – the Ambassador has arthritis and he has had fifteen injections at £20 each which have done him no good at all. Madame Kato said, ‘I could have bought a new outfit with that.’

  I said, ‘Look, I have some acupuncture needles and I’ll come and stick them into him any time you like. Then you can have a new outfit.’

  Madame Kato asked me if I had heard of pressure points. I said I hadn’t and the Ambassador told me that it was part of Zen Buddhism. Madame Kato began to press my hand and pull my fingers, saying, ‘This will help your heart, this will help your stomach, this will improve your eyesight,’ and we had a good old laugh. It was most unusual because the Japanese are generally rather formal.

  Jack Rampton came to see me and we had a helpful talk. I said, ‘While we’re on staff matters, I’m a bit worried about Bernard Ingham.’ He told me Bernard had gone to see him, saying he feared that he’d lost the confidence of Ministers. I said, ‘I think that’s true but it’s a much deeper problem. He doesn’t seem to take an interest and isn’t very helpful.’

  ‘He’s an energetic chap,’ Jack said. ‘He has an idea of what a Minister should do and he bullies him until he does it.’

  I said, ‘On the principle that everybody does best what they most enjoy doing, wouldn’t it be a good idea to give him a full-time job on energy conservation?’

  ‘That might be one way of doing it or else I could have a word with Douglas Allen of the Civil Service Department and see what can be done.’

  Wednesday 26 November

  Hilary’s twenty-second birthday.

  The Western Daily Press had a marvellous headline, ‘Benn and Son Lead New Market Attack’ and said, ‘Mr Tony Benn, Energy Secretary, and his son Hilary, together with other Cabinet Ministers . . .’ It was because Hilary was on the list of sponsors of the Common Market Safeguards Committee. I was really pleased.

  Thursday 21 November

  The press reported that Reg Prentice had been rejected by the NEC on his appeal but that some attempt at conciliation was going to be made; Reg has now said there are a number of Trotskyite Labour MPs in the House of Commons. He is doing himself terrible damage and I think his prospect of recovery is slight.

  Cabinet, and the first item was the problem of pay beds in the NHS. Barbara Castle said she was faced with militancy by the consultants and the unions and she wanted the Cabinet to agree that she could legislate to phase out pay beds and establish control herself over all private hospitals with more than seventy-five beds in case there was a flood into private hospitals.

  Harold Wilson said he didn’t mind that (though he had doubts about it) but there would have to be real consultation and there were some things he couldn’t say now because they would leak. I guessed that, for the first time, he was talking about Harold Lever leaking to the doctors. On every issue Harold Lever always supports the Right, the rich and the powerful against the Labour Party and all it stands for.

  Harold Lever himself said he was against a general holding power, and he thought there was great danger in putting such power in the hands of a Minister. There was a risk of bringing the Government down because there would be a Labour revolt in the House of Commons on private pay beds, and he said there was a lot of Trotskyite pressure on the Health Service.

  At the end, Harold Wilson said, ‘Don’t let’s decide anything today. Just empower Barbara and me to see the doctors and we’ll have a little miscellaneous committee of Ministers to consider it.’

  Listening to the discussion, which could in a way herald the end of the Health Service, I was reminded that the key question is: Whose interests are you looking after? As a Cabinet it is our job to look after the 90 per cent of the population who use the Health Service and not to worry about the 10 per cent who don’t.

  Friday 28 November

  Up at 6.30 and with Caroline to visit the Bedwas Colliery.

  After lunch we headed off down the pit. There had been a great fuss about whether Caroline could come. Ronnie Custis had told us that superstition prevented women being allowed down the pits. So I made the most scrupulous enquiries and could find no trace of this.

  Anyway, they decided to send a young nurse from the pit hospital down with Caroline and a party of about twelve of us set off in all the gear – woolly underpants, a blue shirt, a great orange boilersuit, a donkey jacket, socks, boots and a scarf. It was an old pit opened about 1912. We went down about 2,500 yards into the roadway below and sat in a little train which took us up the roadway. Then we walked in the dark with the lamps on our helmets to guide us. We had to crawl about 300 yards along the coalface to see the coal-cutting machine in action.

  One of the dangers pointed out to me by the manager was a break in the chain pulling the machine along, and in fact it did break. We could hear a lot of talking and shouting over the loudspeaker system but they were all very polite. Later I realised the reason they didn’t want Caroline to come down was because they were afraid of the bad language. In the social club later in the evening, I said, ‘That explains why when the chain broke, I could hear the miners up and down saying, “Oh bother it, dash it, golly, it’s broken!”’ The miners roared with laughter.

  We were underground for about two and a half hours. Then we came up and had a shower and a cup of tea. The characteristics of the mining industry that make it so remarkable are that most of the colliery managers, under-managers, overmen, deputies and shot-firers all started at the pit and worked their way up and therefore there is no management brought in from the outside. There is no real parallel with the rest of British industry in that sense.

  The nation is not remotely interested in the mining industry. If there is a pit disaster, they are heroes; if there is a wage claim, they are militants, but as to the rest they simply don’t want to know.

  Afterwards at the social club we met Neil Kinnock and his wife Glenys, a sweet woman. Arthur Hayward, the chairman of the Lodge, welcomed us. ‘Tony, we greet you as a friend. Many of us came over to help you last year because we felt you were a good man and we wanted to assist you during the Election; and we want to make a presentation to you. We want to make you an honorary member of our Lodge in the NUM.’

  Afterwards, I was given an overman’s stick and all the miners signed it for me – a lovely reminder of the day.

  Thursday 4 December

  When we came to Foreign Affairs and the EEC, I said, ‘Can I ask one question about passports? On television I saw a picture of our blue British passport disappearing and a purple European Community passport being substituted. That really hit me in the guts. It is quite unnecessary. Everybody knows that Britain is in the Common Market. You could put European Community on the back of the existing passport, you could stamp on page 3, “This man is a European whether he likes it or not.” But we have got to be careful: like metrication and decimalisation, this really strikes at our national identity and I don’t like it.’

  Harold Wilson said, ‘I don’t need to be lectured on Kipling.’

  I said, ‘Well, Harold, if you can talk to the Commission and keep the common touch, I shan’t worry.’ Everybody laughed but it, is a serious concern.

  Saturday 6 December

  There was a very funny item in the Guardian this morning called ‘What Makes Tony Benn Run?’ by Martin Walker. It estimated that on my eighteen pints of tea a day for forty years, I would have drunk 29,000 gallons, used 20,000 KW hours of electricity and a ton and a quarter of tea, etc. It quoted what doctors said, what the Tea Council said: that the Jockey club would argue that this was a higher rate of caffeine addiction than was permitted for racehorses.

  Tuesday 9 December

  Ron Vaughan told me this evening that government drivers
had been told to take Ministers a different route home tonight because with the Irish terrorists holding two hostages in Marylebone (the Balcombe Street siege), there is a real fear that the IRA might try to kidnap Ministers to trade them off. I spoke to Stan Orme, who said that his government detective is desperately worried. I rang Caroline to tell her to bolt the front door and close the shutters and not let anyone in. What an extraordinary time.

  Tuesday 16 December

  At 4, Arthur Hetherington and Denis Rooke, the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the British Gas Corporation, came about appointments to the Gas Board and I agreed to Don Ryder and the three industrialists they wanted. Of the trade unionists, I wanted Hugh Scanlon and Terry Parry of the Fire Brigades Union. Hetherington said, ‘Well, as far as Scanlon is concerned, I want to be sure that the man we have is loyal to the country.’

  The background to this is that Rampton has written a note that security would not allow Hugh Scanlon to see any documents that are Confidential or above – in effect saying he’s a security risk. I had this with Jack Jones, and the NEB last year. So I insisted that I see the security report which led Rampton to write that minute because unless good evidence is produced, I’m not prepared to rule that he’s ineligible. But I’ve no doubt that Number 10 will ban him anyway.

  The truth is that Hetherington just does not want Hugh Scanlon appointed to the Gas Board at all.

  We came on to the appointment of a woman member. I said I wanted Marjorie Proops from the Mirror, a very tough, down-to-earth woman. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘let’s have the Duchess of Kent.’ That really summed it up. They wanted the Duchess of Kent, a Tory industrialist, and two right-wing trade unionists. I wasn’t having it, but was good-natured about it all.

  Monday 22 December

  I had a brief word with Rampton, cleared the BNOC appointments, agreed to put Brian Tucker on the board of the AEA, then we went on to the Gas Board appointments. Rampton told me that I couldn’t see the security services report on Scanlon and it would have to go through Number 10. Well, this is the first time I have ever been denied information from the security services. I am now (and perhaps all Ministers are) in a category that is not allowed to see security reports. Since Committees of Privy Councillors are supposed to be able to interrogate security officers about these matters, it is an astonishing drift away from accountability. Anyway, I sent a minute to Harold setting out the details and said that, subject to his approval, I thought Scanlon should be appointed.