All this would, of course, have been far too much for many people in the Bennites’ party. But the doubters would soon be on their way out. ‘The sooner a lot of them get out the better: the better for the rest of us who are remaining in the Labour Party who are really committed to Labour Party policies,’ explained the young Valerie Wise, the Greater London Council’s answer to La Pasionaria. She was talking not just about the likes of Healey and Hattersley, but about soft-left types like Neil Kinnock and Stan Orme. Either they backed Tony Benn or they must ‘go and join their friends in the SDP’. ‘I think the sooner they go the better’, Wise said bluntly, ‘because the trouble with these people is that they are very much identified with the last Labour Government and previous Labour Governments who betrayed the working people of this country.’26
Even on the Labour left, many MPs thought Benn had gone too far. Most damagingly for his cause, soft-left MPs like Kinnock were ‘incandescent’ at what they saw as his ideological narcissism and contempt for collective responsibility. In response, Kinnock and his friends in the Tribune Group had decided to rally behind a third candidate, the perennially optimistic John Silkin, even though he stood little chance of winning. In the meantime, Kinnock blazed away at Benn’s allies: ‘insignificant ravers’ peddling ‘a fantasy that insults adult intelligence, invites derision and guarantees disappointment’. His favourite target was the Yorkshire miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, one of the few men who could match his way with words. When Scargill told the Scottish Miners’ Gala that the Tribune MPs were ‘sabotaging’ the cause of socialism, Kinnock accused him of trying to bully people into voting his way. It was, he said a few weeks later, ‘the strutting demagoguery of that statement in Scotland which finally convinced me not to vote for Tony Benn’.27
On Fleet Street, Benn the bogeyman had now assumed horrific proportions. Six years earlier, during his ill-fated stint at the Department of Industry, the press had portrayed him as a Marxist fanatic who wanted to nationalize everything in sight. Now, with the prospect of Benn as Prime Minister looming ever larger, they called him an ayatollah, a mullah, a lunatic, even a Nazi. ‘Mr Benn – Is He Mad or a Killer?’ wondered a Sun headline on 22 May. ‘A cross on the ballot for a party which has Benn waiting in the wings for its top job’, the paper said, ‘is a cross for the bleak and cold regimes of Eastern Europe and for a government on their model.’
For the Daily Express’s Denis Lehane, Benn’s manifesto was ‘the philosophy of class hatred and envy’, which ‘would inevitably lead to civil conflict and strife’. Reviewing Benn’s book Arguments for Democracy, Lehane claimed that ‘not since Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf has a revolutionary leader in the West set out so clearly his intentions of destroying the society he seeks to lead’. And in the Express’s Sunday stablemate, Michael Cummings drew Benn as a Nazi, sporting a CND badge and a hammer and sickle on his armbands, and wearing medals with the legend ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’. Perhaps it was no wonder that, when the Guardian’s Jill Tweedie interviewed Benn that September, she was half-expecting to meet a madman, ‘lips split in demented smile, eyes spinning like Catherine wheels’. Entirely predictably, though, she came away converted. ‘No one has been so misrepresented’, she reported, ‘since Robert Mugabe.’28
Whatever else people said of Benn, nobody could doubt his resilience. The pressure was unrelenting, the criticism merciless, but he kept going: a trade union meeting here, a left-wing rally there, never wavering, never losing his temper, always alight with ideological enthusiasm. The more the press abused him, the more it reinforced his self-image as the tribune of the plebs, standing up to the forces of international capitalism. It was all the more ironic, then, that ordinary people overwhelmingly supported his opponent. In June, a Sunday Times poll found that three out of five Labour voters supported Healey, while only one preferred Benn. In the industrial working-class heartlands of the North, Scotland and Wales, Healey was streets ahead. By contrast, Benn’s strength was concentrated in university towns, inner cities and the suburbs of southern England, wherever two or three people with sociology degrees were gathered in his name.
Despite the sound and fury of the campaign, this picture never changed. In late September, another poll of Labour voters put Healey on 61 per cent, Benn on 20 per cent and Silkin on 12 per cent. A survey of trade unionists, meanwhile, put Healey on 56 per cent and Benn on 22 per cent. Only among hard-core activists was Benn ahead. According to one Gallup poll, he would probably win by as much as seven to two in the constituencies, with Silkin trailing in a very poor third. Not for the last time, a vast gulf yawned between the men and women at Westminster and the activists on the barricades.29
As a result, everything depended on the unions, with their hard-won 40 per cent of the electoral college. And even though rank and file trade unionists preferred Healey, that meant nothing. Confusingly, each union had its own way of deciding how to deliver its block vote, which made predictions impossible. The public health union NUPE, for example, was nominally on the left, but a ballot of its members favoured Healey, which meant he was likely to pick up all 600,000 votes. The engineers and the railwaymen also pledged their block votes to Healey. So did the General and Municipal Workers, whose ‘internal consultation’ found that nine out of ten regions preferred Healey, giving him another 650,000 votes. But the miners, who held pithead ballots, voted by 189 branches to seventy-nine to throw their 244,000 votes to Benn, thanks not least to a vigorous lobbying campaign by his friend Arthur Scargill.30
The battle for the unions culminated at the TUC conference in Blackpool, where on 10 September the three candidates held their only set-piece debate. In keeping with the mood of the campaign, it was an unmitigated shambles. Technical problems with the loudspeakers, which had been provided by the magazine New Socialist, caused a ten-minute delay, during which the 1,000-strong crowd booed, jeered and clapped their hands. When the debate got underway, the loudspeakers still buzzing loudly, it went exactly as expected. ‘Mr Benn manifestly loathed Mr Healey,’ wrote Frank Johnson. ‘Mr Healey clearly regarded Mr Benn as light in the head. The only thing the two could agree about was Mr Silkin, who held an equally low opinion of both of them.’ But in Johnson’s view, ‘Mr Benn carried all before him … He rang all the ideological bells, pressed all the buttons, pulled all the chains.’ By contrast, Healey was jeered throughout. When, in closing, the former Chancellor said: ‘This Labour movement of ours is a brotherhood or it is nothing,’ people shrieked: ‘IMF!’ Afterwards, Benn recorded that it had been ‘a good meeting’.31
Healey’s treatment in Blackpool was par for the course. When the candidates appeared on Panorama, the audience heckling was so vociferous that the programme had to be carefully re-edited for broadcast. But the nadir came in Birmingham on Saturday 19 September, at an event that ranked among the least edifying moments in Labour’s history. The occasion was an open-air rally in Aston Park, designed to show the party’s ‘unity over unemployment’. The organizers had hoped for 50,000 people, but only 8,000 turned up. The first signs of trouble, reported the Guardian, came during Michael Foot’s address, which was interrupted by a dozen young men ‘shouting slogans about Northern Ireland mixed with obscenities’. Then came Benn, who launched into a blistering attack on the media. The crowd loved it, chanting his name. And then it was Healey’s turn.
Even before Healey stepped on to the platform, people were chanting: ‘Out! Out!’ He managed a few sentences before he was drowned out by the jeers of ‘Tory, Tory, Tory!’ To screaming from the crowd, he stepped back and Michael Foot took the microphone. ‘We belong to a democratic party!’ he yelled at the demonstrators. ‘Those of you who have been shouting Denis Healey down have been playing the Tory game … You are a disgrace to the Labour movement!’ The noise slackened, Healey came forward – and the jeers redoubled. But Healey was in no mood to retreat. ‘When people watch these disgraceful scenes,’ he bellowed, his face scarlet with rage, ‘they will cast their votes for freedom and
free speech in even greater numbers. I am grateful for those who are yelling now for proving the truth of what I have been saying for the last six months. Thank you very much. I shall see you at Brighton!’32
To Healey’s supporters, Birmingham was a gift. ‘It was manna from heaven,’ recalled the indefatigable John Golding, who hoped ‘Benn would get the blame’. Unfortunately, Healey shot himself in the foot the next day, telling Weekend World that the barracking had been ‘led and orchestrated’ by the CLPD’s young organizer Jon Lansman. In fact, Lansman had not even been in Birmingham, and Healey had to issue an embarrassing apology. Even so, the furore probably worked in his favour, keeping Birmingham in the headlines and reminding voters of what the papers called Benn’s ‘wreckers’. And since Benn refused point-blank to condemn the hecklers, his critics went for him with extraordinary savagery.
‘The bully boys of the Left who support Benn’, Golding told the press, ‘were acting like the Hitler Youth.’ The attack had been ‘deliberately organized and encouraged’, agreed The Times, which thought Benn and his supporters were mounting an ‘attack upon the principle of free speech’. And in the Mirror, Roy Hattersley was given a double-page spread to explain why Birmingham had been a ‘catastrophe’ for the Labour Party:
Thanks to television, the screaming mob that shouted Denis Healey down spewed its contempt for free speech into half the homes of Britain.
The orgy of intolerance must have cost Labour a million votes. Watching the late night news, I imagined Margaret Thatcher smiling with delight and Roy Jenkins rubbing his hands with glee …
The mobsters who dishonoured us last Saturday pushed and shoved their way to the front of the march in the name of Tony Benn.
I cannot believe that he wants or welcomes their support. It is essential that the man they hero worship renounces both their beliefs and their behaviour … [which] would not have been out of place at a Nuremberg rally …
Some of the scenes can only be described as the cult of the personality. Joe Stalin must have turned in his grave with envy.
Benn did not mention Hattersley’s attack in his diary. But even for somebody used to criticism, it must have been a shock to find himself likened to both Hitler and Stalin – and by one of his front-bench comrades, to boot.33
Although Birmingham did immense damage to Benn’s public image, all that mattered was the arithmetic of the electoral college. By late September, it was clear that everything depended on the Transport and General Workers’ Union, with its colossal 1¼ million votes. Since the TGWU backed Common Market withdrawal and unilateral disarmament, it might have been expected to vote for Benn, which would leave the election too close to call. In fact, a ballot found that 767 TGWU branches backed Healey and only 363 backed Benn, with a further 340 supporting Silkin. In all, seven of the TGWU’s ten regions preferred Healey, while only London, Scotland and the north-west went for Benn. ‘Many of our members simply don’t like the way Mr Benn has campaigned,’ an official explained. ‘He has turned the Labour Party upside down in order to get himself elected deputy leader … They don’t think he should have stood.’
Unfortunately for Healey, the vote was merely consultative. The union’s left-wing executive had no love for the former Chancellor and felt under no compulsion to follow the members’ wishes. To complicate matters further, the TGWU’s delegates to the Labour conference were not obliged to follow the executive’s advice but were free to decide for themselves. As a result, by mid-September speculation about the TGWU’s intentions was approaching fever pitch. Most observers expected them to back Silkin on the first ballot, which was a bit of a cop-out. The word was that they would abstain on the second ballot, allowing Healey to claim the prize. But then, on the evening of 21 September, Benn had the phone call he wanted. The TGWU executive, he wrote, ‘had decided to support me in the second ballot. All hell broke loose.’ Within minutes, the press were camped outside his front door. ‘The Healey campaign has backfired in his face,’ Benn wrote with barely contained excitement. ‘So it is possible now that I might actually win. The BBC news at 9 was a funeral oration.’34
Thanks to the TGWU’s announcement, the final days were the most febrile of all. In a last, desperate intervention, Michael Foot took two pages in the Mirror to condemn the ‘planned hooliganism’ of the hecklers in Birmingham, about which Benn had been far ‘too feeble and temporising’. The contest, he said, had proved a ‘bitter divisive distraction’, and Benn ‘must bear the primary responsibility for the deep wounds inflicted on our movement’. Labour’s Chief Whip, Michael Cox, weighed in too, joining more than a dozen Bristol MPs and councillors to warn that it would be ‘little short of a disaster’ if his parliamentary neighbour won. The Times declared that Benn’s victory would mean the triumph of ‘violent rhetoric, street marches and the clenched fist salute’; the Observer warned that if Benn won, it was ‘inconceivable that the party could ever recover the confidence of voters’. But amid all the hysteria there was a thin ray of sunshine for Healey. Despite increasingly strident threats from Benn’s Rank and File Mobilising Committee, dozens of soft-left Tribune MPs were considering abstaining on the second ballot. If they did, they might just deny Benn victory. But would they stick to their guns?35
Benn’s train pulled into Brighton just before midday on Saturday 26th. Physically exhausted, he was running on pure adrenaline. The rival camps were already out in force for the party conference, the Healey supporters wearing stickers proclaiming their support for ‘Michael Foot and Denis Healey’, while Benn’s supporters handed out sheriff-style badges reading ‘Tony Benn for Deputy’. ‘What an incredible time!’ Benn wrote. ‘It is pouring with rain but I am really looking forward to it.’ In their rooms at the Grand Hotel, his son Joshua was hunched over his computer, which forecast that with the support of the TGWU, ‘a few more MPs and a few more constituencies’, the prize was theirs. If, by some miracle, NUPE threw its block vote to Benn, he might even prevail on the first ballot. Among his supporters on the streets, the mood was electric. ‘The word is going round now’, Benn recorded that evening, ‘that we are going to win.’
On Sunday morning, Benn awoke to a hubbub of activity. There were photographers everywhere, and the streets were lined with hundreds of demonstrators, most of them waving placards carrying his name. He was so busy with last-minute meetings that he did not have time to glance at the papers. That was probably just as well, since they were not exactly overflowing with generosity. Benn and his ‘fist-clenching comrades’, wrote John Junor in the Sunday Express, were ‘rats attacking our society from within. And in the end they will destroy us if we do not destroy them.’ Junor recalled the words of Ken Livingstone, ‘the IRA-loving, poof-loving Marxist leader of the GLC’, who had predicted that soon a ‘Right wing Government would send militants to the gas chamber’. ‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ Junor said mildly. ‘But might we not all be a lot safer if at least half of them were in clink?’36
Late that afternoon, Benn went across to the colossal concrete conference hall. As on previous occasions, the MPs were corralled like defendants at a show trial, with members of the National Executive above on the platform. The air was thick with tension; ‘the press were hysterical, people were cheering and shouting’. But there was bad news for Benn: the NUPE delegation had decided to honour their members’ vote after all. He collected his voting papers, and suddenly a rumour swept around the hall. The thirty-nine-man TGWU delegation had been meeting that afternoon at the Old Ship Hotel: apparently they had decided to abstain on the second ballot, instead of voting for Benn. ‘Well,’ Benn wrote, ‘that was a body blow!’
But the rumour was not true. The TGWU delegation was split right down the middle and had left the Old Ship without a decision. Having walked across to the hall, they started taking another vote outside, but then the first ballot started and they had to take their seats in a hurry. All was chaos; all was excitement. From the rostrum, somebody was droning on about a conference smoking ban. Then
, at last, it was time for the first ballot.
The result was almost exactly as Joshua’s computer had predicted. With 125 MPs and the majority of the trade unions, Healey had taken 45.4 per cent, not enough for an outright victory. Benn, whose strength lay entirely in the constituency parties, had 36.6 per cent. Silkin was a decent third with 18 per cent, which he owed to the TGWU and the soft left. So Silkin dropped out, and everything depended on where his votes would go. If the TGWU abstained, Healey was safe. On the platform, one of Healey’s union allies warned him that the TGWU would never miss the chance to promote Benn. No more than a few yards away, the delegation were passing a sheet of paper from hand to hand. Back on the platform, somebody handed Benn a message, telling him he was going to win. Then another victory message came; then another. On the rostrum, somebody was talking about South Africa. It was 8.30, the counting was almost over and the future of the Labour Party hung in the balance. On the platform, Benn and Healey took their seats. The latter’s chief lieutenant, Giles Radice, was in utter despair. Not far away, Neil Kinnock, who abstained in the second ballot, felt sick that he had not voted for Healey. The chief teller stepped to the microphone, and there was absolute silence.
‘The final decision,’ the teller said in his flat Yorkshire tones, ‘and I’ll say this now, the votes have been counted three times. Tony Benn’ – and on television, the picture showed a close-up of Benn, deathly pale, intent on something he was scribbling – ‘Forty-nine point five seven four.’ There were scattered cheers in the hall. ‘Denis Healey’ – and there he was, florid as ever, also scribbling away – ‘Fifty point four two six!’ At that, a great roar crashed around the hall. On television, Healey gave the slightest hint of a smile, took off his glasses and glanced across at his supporters. The camera cut to Benn, still scribbling, his face caught between a smirk and a grimace. A few seconds later, Healey was surrounded by grinning supporters. He had done it.37
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