Who Dares Wins
Page 77
Even by Benn’s own standards, his decision to announce his challenge at a time when the British people were fast asleep seemed almost dementedly unorthodox. To the next day’s papers, it was utter madness. ‘Don’t Do It, Tony!’ begged the Mirror’s front page, while the Express thought Benn ‘a fanatic’, who was ‘destined only to destroy’ his party. In the next few days, he was bombarded with messages from MPs and trade union leaders urging him to think again. Neil Kinnock tried to organize a round-robin letter among the staff at party headquarters, while at the next Tribune meeting the infuriated Orme told Benn that his decision would ‘only divide the left’. The TGWU’s deputy general secretary, Alex Kitson, who was the Labour Party chairman for 1981, sent Benn an open letter urging him to withdraw. ASTMS’s mercurial Clive Jenkins even invited him to lunch and presented him with a porcelain loving cup. On one side an inscription read: ‘Elections can be poisoned chalices, Tony’; on the other, it said simply: ‘Don’t do it, Tony’.10
But it was no good. The reaction, Benn wrote, had been ‘completely hysterical’. His only goal was to ‘force people to make choices. That’s what’s called polarisation, divisiveness and all the rest, but it’s true. You can’t go on for ever and ever pretending you’re a socialist party when you’re not, pretending you’ll do something when you won’t, confining yourself to attacks on the Tories when that’s not enough.’ In itself, this was not unreasonable. It was true that Labour often said one thing and did another. It was also true that many of Benn’s fellow MPs preferred bashing the Tories to thinking seriously about what socialism meant in an age of globalization and technological change. But there was a world of difference between launching a debate about the future of socialism and launching a divisive bid for the deputy leadership. Alas, the more Benn’s fellow MPs protested, the more they revealed their bad faith and ideological treachery. ‘You know what this is really about, don’t you?’ one of his supporters whispered during the Tribune meeting. ‘It is really about who is to be the leader of the left, and they don’t want to concede it to you.’11
From the outset, Benn insisted that the campaign was a clash of policies, not personalities. This was not entirely true, since his policies were so strongly identified with his personality. What is true, though, is that he rarely attacked Healey personally. Instead, he talked unceasingly about his plan for national revival: the restoration of full employment through import controls and a siege economy; a massive spending spree on health and welfare; the restoration of trade union privileges; the abolition of the House of Lords; withdrawal from the Common Market; unilateral nuclear disarmament; and the removal of all American bases. In essence, this was the classic hard-left wish list, although it is telling that Benn never talked about the implications for borrowing, taxes and inflation. Nor did he admit that there might be difficulties or downsides. In fairness, few politicians ever do, but other Labour MPs were infuriated by Benn’s penchant for playing to the gallery. ‘He’s telling everyone that if you just sack the manager you can win the League and the FA Cup straight away,’ one left-wing MP told the Guardian. ‘If we say, “look, international capitalism is going to be bloody hard to beat,” the crowd says “rubbish, useless, gerrof.”’12
What was really extraordinary about Benn’s campaign was that it was fought in the country. Never before had a candidate for the Labour leadership – let alone the deputy leadership – taken his cause directly to the people. And while Healey’s campaign managers relied on their contacts in the trade unions, the basis of Benn’s campaign was the hard-left Rank and File Mobilising Committee. Above all, the Bennites relied on the RFMC’s vast card index of activists in almost every part of the country. ‘News and information sent in by these people is monitored in precise detail,’ wrote the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart. ‘When pressure has to be exerted, it always comes from a supporter in the relevant area or union.’ In this respect, it was Benn’s campaign that was the future, while Healey’s seemed almost antediluvian.
None of this, however, would have been much use without Benn himself. No politician since Joseph Chamberlain had thrown himself so vigorously into a nationwide tour, sometimes addressing three or four meetings in a single evening. As the awestruck Hoggart recorded:
On a fairly typical weekend … he took a train to Liverpool to speak at a march. Then he drove to his constituency in Bristol, then back to London, back to Bristol, London, Bristol a third time for the local election campaign, to London once more, up to Glasgow for a rally, followed by another meeting in West Lothian, and then to Blackheath on the Monday for a speech about the Peasants’ Revolt.
At every stop he spoke passionately but calmly, with a ready smile, flashes of wit and a nice line in irony, his voice reassuring as he laid out the road to salvation. Even sceptics said what a nice man he was. In this respect, he seemed more like an American evangelist than a British politician. And like any good televangelist, he knew exactly what his audience wanted to hear, playing with consummate skill on their dreams of full employment, total equality and world peace. ‘Lots of politicians will tell you there are no easy answers,’ Hoggart wrote. ‘Tony Benn tells you there are plenty.’13
In the meantime, Denis Healey contemplated the prospect of yet another campaign. In public, he remained as boisterous as ever, but one of his aides recalled that he ‘suffered a lot of black dog, anger and frustration’. As luck would have it, he had just been offered the post of NATO Secretary General. By comparison, the deputy leadership was a non-job, with little status and no power. Few people would have blamed Healey for escaping the snake-pit. But, as he saw it, he had no choice. As deputy, Benn would be perfectly placed to take over when Foot retired. Healey knew the campaign would be awful. But he was determined, he said, ‘to do my duty’. To a man who had experienced the landings at Anzio, Tony Benn’s fan club held few terrors.14
Having pulled his punches during the last contest, Healey kicked off the campaign against Benn in his more familiar style. The Bennites, he announced, were ‘a minority of authoritarian extremists’, who did not care how many people were repelled by their ‘sour and intolerant sectarianism’. A few weeks later, addressing the electricians’ union, he went further, accusing the Bennites of telling ‘barefaced lies’, consorting with ‘Communists and Trotskyists’, pandering to the IRA and wanting to turn Labour MPs into ‘grovelling zombies’. Other MPs, too, lined up to hurl abuse at Benn. Roy Hattersley claimed that he was driven by ‘personal ambition and ideological fanaticism’, while Walter Johnson urged transport workers to reject the ‘bigotry, ill feeling and viciousness’ of the Benn camp. Even Benn’s old friend Peter Shore told the USDAW conference that the challenger was a ‘contemporary Robespierre’, whose hunt for traitors recalled the Nazis in Weimar Germany. Once, as Harold Wilson’s modernizing protégés, Benn and Shore had been great pals. Not any more.15
Benn would not have been human if he did not feel the pressure. The very next day he made an ominous entry in his diary: ‘I wasn’t feeling very well today. I have had this tingling in my legs and now my hands, and my face has been very hot and my skin has been rough.’ Three days later, after exulting at Labour’s victory in the Greater London Council elections, he still had a ‘tingling’ in his arms and legs. But he was on the merry-go-round now, and could not stop. Wednesday 13 May brought another blazing row with Foot, this time about Northern Ireland, where Benn wanted to support the hunger strikers in the Maze prison. Afterwards, he again recorded feeling ill, and the next morning he visited his doctor, complaining that walking was like wearing ‘wellington boots full of water with a sponge in the feet’.
But within hours he was on the train to Wolverhampton, to meet hundreds of demonstrators on the People’s March for Jobs. Here, more than ever, Benn’s adventure seemed more like a religious crusade than a political campaign. Tailed by two television crews, he came to Wolverhampton as a preacher, rekindling the spirits of the faithful. Many of his listeners were the stereotypical activists in beards, T
-shirts and leather jackets, but there were also young black women and craggy white pensioners, unemployed working-class men in their shirt-sleeves and local trade unionists in their best suits, united by their enthusiasm for the socialist gospel. And even by his own standards Benn was in extraordinarily evangelical form, his voice trembling with passion, his eyes blazing with enthusiasm. ‘What we are seeing is the rebirth of hope,’ he told a rally on the steps of St Peter’s Church. ‘It is a march for human dignity, and against those forces which still try to persuade us that men and women should be crucified on a cross of gold in the name of monetarism and profit and loss.’ Afterwards, as Benn clapped along while the Spinners, a radical folk group, sang ‘We Shall Overcome’, his eyes glistened with tears.16
Reading Benn’s diaries, it is clear that the battle for the deputy leadership was the campaign of his dreams, a lonely struggle against the forces of evil. Almost every day saw him in a different part of the country; in one week in May he travelled more than 1,000 miles. Every time he delivered the same catechism: the Alternative Economic Strategy, trade union rights, withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral nuclear disarmament. Yet all this was taking a punishing toll. ‘I am feeling really weak at the moment, I can’t run or jump, and I feel as if I am walking in heavy wellingtons; my throat is getting constricted, and my hands are tingling,’ he wrote on 19 May. But he never faltered. Indeed, by early June The Times’s labour editor Paul Routledge thought Benn was inching ahead. Already his efforts had secured the support of the train drivers, the bakers and the furniture workers, as well as the white-collar ASTMS union and the printers’ union SOGAT. He had begun as the outsider. But now, wrote Routledge, he had a ‘very good chance of emerging as the winner’.17
To Michael Foot, Benn’s campaign was both a humiliating personal insult and a devastating blow to his hopes of unity. In private, the Labour leader told friends that Benn was a liar and a coward. All through May his fury grew, and at last, on 3 June, he snapped. After another rancorous Shadow Cabinet meeting, Foot suddenly produced a long statement that he was releasing to the press. It began with a challenge of his own: ‘In view of what he has said and done over recent weeks … I have told Tony Benn that, in my judgement, his only course now is to stand against me.’ For the next twenty minutes, Foot listed what he saw as Benn’s betrayals: his contempt for collective responsibility; his breaches of the line on economic policy, Europe and Northern Ireland; his ‘sectarian intolerance’; his ‘ruthless pursuit of internal feuds’. His colleagues were delighted, but to Benn it came as a terrible shock. At the end, he wrote grimly, ‘there was a lot of banging on the table by Shadow Cabinet people … the hatred there was unbelievable.’ Afterwards, feeling thoroughly wretched, he staggered back to his office to listen to the first reports of Foot’s ultimatum. He had no intention of accepting it.18
That night, Benn found it hard to sleep, his legs more painful than ever. When, after a wretched night, he surfaced to get breakfast for his wife, he found two television crews and a horde of photographers outside his front door. His son Hilary went to fetch the papers, but the headlines were awful. ‘Come Out and Fight with Me!’ roared the Express, calling it ‘the political showdown of the century’. The Mirror preferred ‘Foot Tells Benn: FIGHT ME!’ and thought it merely ‘one of the most dramatic moments in the 81-year history of the constantly feuding Labour Party’. All the papers thought Foot had shown tremendous courage; all agreed that Benn had been ‘humiliated’. Somehow Benn found the energy to make a statement to the cameras, explaining that he had no intention of fighting Foot and repeating that all that mattered was ‘how to get out of the Common Market, how to get rid of American nuclear missiles, how to get back to full employment and how to abolish the House of Lords’.19
Then Hilary drove him to the Charing Cross Hospital, where tests confirmed Benn’s fears. He had a rare viral infection, Guillain-Barré syndrome, requiring immediate hospitalization. Nurses wheeled him to the tenth floor, where a private room was quickly found. As Benn admitted, he was desperate for a rest: ‘I am not saying that it caused the viral infection, but I have been grossly overdoing it for ages.’ On his little television, the news bulletins were still reporting Foot’s challenge. But messages of support soon poured in. Two punks delivered a Mars bar ‘from the Tony Benn fan club’, while the hospital’s shop stewards invited him to address them the following week. ‘The nurses are extremely nice,’ recorded Benn the next day, ‘and all the cleaners are members of NUPE … It’s really nice. The good old health service.’
It was lucky he enjoyed it, because he ended up staying for almost two weeks. He was not discharged until 17 June, though he was still under strict orders to rest. He brought home five sacks of unanswered letters. When he opened the door, the CLPD’s Jon Lansman was already there, poring over plans for the campaign.20
For Michael Foot, Benn’s hospitalization was the first bit of good news for months. In the press the Labour leader’s image had deteriorated from very bad to downright abysmal. Whenever Foot’s name appeared, recalled Austin Mitchell, it was invariably in the context of utter ‘incompetence and irrelevance’. His poll ratings were absolutely abject, with just two out of ten people saying that he was doing a decent job. By these standards, even Mrs Thatcher looked popular. In the unions many senior figures had given up on him. At a dinner in Westminster the AUEW’s moderate general secretary, Sir John Boyd, told Foot to his face that he would never win an election unless he ditched unilateral disarmament. Even the Guardian, which never failed to praise his decency and erudition, thought he was completely out of his depth, describing his blustering performance in one economic debate as simply ‘awful’.21
By now even some card-carrying Conservatives felt sorry for him. Watching Foot addressing the steelworkers’ union that summer, Frank Johnson thought the Labour leader looked like ‘any other old age pensioner from the traditional public service class enjoying Bournemouth this week: white-haired, courtly, still with his wits about him though occasionally a little forgetful, and perhaps rather out of place’. After a ritual denunciation of the government, Foot ambled around Bournemouth with his walking stick, chatting amiably with his ‘fellow senior citizens’ (‘Where are you off to? … splendid … hope it keeps fine … jolly good … carry on’), before pottering home. ‘What thoughts’, Johnson wondered, ‘are going through that noble old head as all this is going on? What does he make of this modern world of ours?’ Even Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher feels a pang of sympathy. ‘I must say, my heart goes out to poor old Foot,’ he tells his friend Bill. ‘There he could have been still, wandering about on Hampstead Heath, taking the dog for a walk, browsing through his second-hand bookshops, not a care in the world: instead he must be up at the crack of dawn, hardly time for a shit and a shave, and straight into battle with Benn or the Boss. What a life!’22
Almost every week brought more terrible headlines. On 16 July Labour’s vote fell by 13 per cent in the Warrington by-election, while the SDP seemed to be surging from strength to strength. Meanwhile, wherever Healey went he was heckled by Communists, Trotskyists, fans of the Provisional IRA and even a group called the Posadists, who believed that the revolution would be brought to earth by aliens in flying saucers. He gave as good as he got, telling the Guardian that the Bennites were ‘bully boys’ preaching the ‘doctrines of sectarian hate’. But to most people all this looked dreadful. Instead of offering an alternative to Thatcherism, complained The Times’s David Watt, Foot’s party had descended into a ‘moral orgy’, the tone set by ‘all sorts of ayatollahs peddling absolutes and denouncing betrayals of socialist morality’. It was a disgrace, agreed the Mirror’s Terence Lancaster, that ‘the defects of Mrs Thatcher’s government’ had been relegated to a ‘sideshow’ compared with the ‘blood-letting’ on the left. And Lancaster knew who was to blame: Tony Benn, who was busy ‘ending the Labour Party as we have known it’.23
Yet Benn never doubted that he was doing the right thing. On 3 September, lo
oking ‘fit and suntanned’, he made his first public appearance since leaving hospital, addressing a meeting of NUPE’s London branches. Far from moderating his rhetoric, the enforced break had only intensified it. The SDP, Benn said, had been set up by the Establishment ‘with the full support of the mass media to syphon off anti-Government feeling’. Talk of law and order after the summer’s riots was merely a ruse to allow the ‘imperialist’ government to establish a ‘police state’. And while his opponents claimed that Benn was handing the next election to the Tories, he knew the reverse was true. ‘The Prime Minister, the Cabinet, their allies in business and the City are beginning to panic,’ he insisted, ‘for they now realise that the Labour Party could win a landslide victory at the next general election.’ Soon, he told a crowd in Bridgend, ‘we will rebuild our industries and services and we will leave the Common Market and get rid of American nuclear bases’. Even Britain’s role in the Cold War might soon be over. ‘I will never forget until the day I die’, Benn said, ‘that the liberties that we enjoyed were bought with Russian blood.’24
Among Benn’s supporters, the excitement of his campaign was approaching a peak of millenarian ecstasy. In a manifesto published on 1 September, a group of close allies, including his former special advisers Francis Cripps and Frances Morrell and the sociologist Peter Townsend, gave a detailed preview of a Benn government. Britain, they explained, had become a ‘subject nation, unaware of its own subjection’ to the forces of global capital. So the first step, ‘the moment any future Labour government comes into office’, would be to ‘impose emergency controls on the City and banking system to block movements of funds out of sterling and fix the exchange rate’. Only then would they move on to the abolition of private schools and private healthcare, the ‘social ownership of concentrations of wealth’ and a statutory maximum wage set at £28,000 a year, the equivalent of about £143,000 today.25