BOOKS

It occasions me some embarrassment to review the new biography of Tony Benn MP, which describes me as (in 1963) his `personal friend'.

Benn and I are frequently linked togeth- er by public and media perception. Each of us is approaching the end of political life equally entrenched in opposition to legisla- tive and other power being transferred away from the House of Commons and thereby from the electorate to the institu- tions of the European Community. Overtly, the difference between us is that he has been able to reconcile, as I was not able, the defence of British self-government with remaining in a party which accepts and advocates the surrender of that self- government.

Below this superficial difference lurks one more profound. Benn believes that there is an absolute and almost mystical virtue in the electoral expression of public opinion. That this expression through the election of representatives under party labels depends upon convention and accep- tance is a notion repugnant to him. It is indeed a strange argument-in-a-circle that a people consent to be 'godly and quietly governed' just because it is done through institutions that are part of its history. Tony Benn is a radical theoretician: I am a Tory. It is one of the curious manifestations of Englishry that two persons so different can be confused with one another. It would never happen, for example, in France.

No less than a Tory, a radical is 'born not made'; and the narrative of how Tony Benn was 'born not made' is absorbing. Stafford Cripps hailed Benn's adoption by Bristol South East as that of another champion 'who is as true a socialist and who is as keen a Christian as I am myself. The biographer is quick to observe Benn's detachment

from organised religion, retaining a funda- mental belief in Christian principles without embracing the structure of Christian dogma.

If you cannot comprehend what that means, you have failed the litmus test. Significantly, Benn at an early stage described

the feeling sitting in the House of Commons that the two front benches are in alliance and the backbencher is left out of things.

Alas, that is something which one does or, according to one's native disposition, does not accept; but it happens to be how, and accordingly therefore why, the show goes on at all.

The climax of the book is Benn's encounter with government office, initially as Postmaster General in Wilson's 1964

The trials of a radical in office

J. Enoch Powell

TONY BENN by Jad Adams Macmillan, £20, pp. 514

administration. Unfortunately, the bio- grapher is too little acquainted with the cli- mate of high altitudes to be able to appre- ciate the drama.

Why [he agonises] was someone who had been caught up in international affairs in the 1950s so little concerned in the great inter- national issues (such as the USA v. Vietnam) in the 1960s?

Anybody who has been even on the foothills of Everest knows the answer: Benn was being Postmaster General and be it said without malice — enjoying it. It was not, as the biographer thinks, that 'his duties at the Post Office left him no time'; it was not due to his father's influence being removed; it was not because `decolonisation was approaching comple- tion'. He simply was not inclined to 'spend time on any matters which did not touch directly on his work'.

But there is always 'time' for what poli- tics is all about. Sooner or later, Benn had to win through to freedom from office and from the prospect of office. That is what made him so impracticable a Cabinet col- league and ensured his absence from the aspirants at the top of the Labour Party since 1970, with all their confusions,

compromises and catastrophes.

I cannot see [wrote Benn in 1965 when Harold Davies kicked over the traces at the FO] why, if you became a minister, you should have to pretend that you've aban- doned all that you've ever stood for.

I wonder if, looking back, Tony Benn `sees' now. I hope so; for he will be a hap- pier man if he does. He had already gone a long way towards 'seeing' when, on the morrow of the Common Market referen- dum, Wilson faced him with the alternative of demotion or resignation. Benn's argu- ment with himself, which is classic, deserves to be studied in full:

I came to the conclusion that resignation was only justifiable if you found that the party of which you were a member was no longer the lesser of two evils. I argued it through that, if you resigned from the Cabinet and there was a vote of confidence in the government from which you'd just resigned, you'd have to vote for the vote of confidence. If you didn't vote for the vote of confidence and there was a general election, then you clearly would have to consider whether you could stand as a Labour candidate to re-elect the Cabinet from which you had just resigned.

I have italicised the crucial words in a passage which proves, more starkly than I have ever seen it done, why, for a politician who finds himself obliged to put what he thinks to be country above his party, there is no future in our political life. It is a logic which Benn held at bay but could not avoid by his decision in 1975 to accept demotion and still remain in the government. It caught up with him again after that govern- ment was defeated in 1979 and he had ceased to carry collective responsibility: I'm happier now than I've been for a very long time. The sweets of office, such as they are, they can have. I'm very happy because I actually don't want anything from anybody.

It is then that a politician can say to his party, as Benn did at the Party Conference of 1980:

I think I have now re-opened every issue that the establishment wants to keep closed the Common Market, defence policy, economic policy and Northern Ireland.

He concluded with — if he will pardon me — the consolation of the ageing:

All these issues will mature and develop, and in time they will come right.

Yes, indeed; that is the faith which is in us, without which we could not survive. Alas, it is not the stuff of which politicians and politics are made. C'est magnifique, mail ce n'est pas la guerre. We both charged at Balaclava; only the regiments we rode with were not the same.