Attlee | Book Worms and Political Bugs

March 28, 2014
by dannie&joe Leave a comment

Crucial questions of Labour History: Was Attlee or Blair a better typist?

By Joe Oliver

The flurry of reviews appearing for John Campbell’s new biography of Roy Jenkins have made me lust to read it with all the fervour of Jenkins lusting after a fine claret or a new centre party.

However, wincing at the £30 cover price, I’ve contented myself with returning to Jenkins’ own 1991 autobiography A Life at the Centre (picked up for £3 in an Oxfam shop), from the cover of which a well-rounded (in every sense) Jenkins smiles owlishly at the reader amidst a nest of books.

It’s well worth reading both as an interesting account of life at the centre of political events for much of the twentieth century, and for no other reason than that Jenkins has such a rich, entertaining writing style.

The chapter on his comparatively brief time as Home Secretary ‘The Liberal Hour’ (or precisely the Liberal twenty-one months) is fascinating, accommodating at breakneck speed the aftermath of the abolition of the death penalty, reform of divorce laws, modernisation of the police and judiciary, the legalisation of homosexuality, abortion and (most crucially of course) Sunday opening of cinemas.

While his account of his time as a code breaker during the Second World War is one of the best descriptions of what actually went on in the huts at Bletchley Park. (Given the friendship between Jenkins and Robert Harris, I was slightly disappointed that a young Jenkins doesn’t make a cameo in Harris’ Bletchly-based thriller Enigma.)

The section on his celebrated 1979 Dimbleby Lecture is perhaps one of the most valiant attempts to make the issue of constitutional reform exciting.

Jenkins is also a man after my own heart at collecting historical minutiae, and the book is stuffed with interesting facts and anecdotes.

One in particular which caught my eye was his account of his friendship with Clement Attlee (mildly ironic given historians will probably remember Jenkins’ name in association with his door-stopper biography of Churchill).
Jenkins knew Atlee well – he was a family friend, Jenkins father Arthur having served as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, and so, in 1946 Atlee invited him to edit a volume of his speeches (Presumably a slim volume given how famously taciturn he was).

As Jenkins records ‘For this I was paid £50…Typical of both of us was what then followed. He sent me the cheque himself. I was slow to acknowledge. About five days later I received one of his famous self-typed pungent missives:

Dear Roy, I sent! you a
Cheque fOR £50 a week ago. I
(have nothad? an acknowledgement.
You’Rs eVer,
C.R.Attlee

Luckily a hasty apology restored good relations, but Jenkins remembers the incident as remarkable for ‘What other Prime Minister would ever have produced such a letter on his own typewriter?’

Probably none while in office, though talk of Prime Ministers and typos did remind me of an old C.V. of Tony Blair’s which turned up a few years ago to mild mockery in the press.

Written in 1983 when he was seeking to be selection for the Sedgefield constituency, it comes across as an amiable enough document, with a few points of interest to those with a sweet tooth for historical trivia, such as the alphabet soup of trade unions Blair mentions to stress his Labour credentials.

That Blair was a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, like many other Labour politicians, is not surprising, particularly given he was a lawyer, but it might have bemused some years later when the N.C.C.L., now Liberty, found itself vigorously opposing proposals for 90 days detention, ID cards and a host of other Blair Government measures.

Blair himself would probably have been surprised as a proud member of C.N.D. to learn that it 20 years’ time he’d be both Prime Minister, and spending billions renewing Trident.

However the comforting vague, abstract quality of his ambition for a Labour Party providing ‘radical solutions within a framework that people understand and which touches their everyday lives’ seems reassuringly like the Blair we know.

But the point that really stands out is just how terribly typed it is, with the massed ranks of typos making Attlee look like a touch typist in comparison.
It’s probably fair to assume it was hastily typed before a selection meeting on a typewriter which didn’t have a backspace function, as there really are some howlers – including one typo so unfortunate it’d make the most hardened career adviser shudder.

Name: Tony Blair

Age: 30 years

Trade Union: Transport and General Workers Union

Previous Parliamentary Experience:
I stood, during the Falklands war, in the Beaconsfield by-election, a Tory seat with a mojority of 93,000. I lost, (unsurprisingly) but gained valuable experience. Michael Foot speaking an BBC Newsnight said:
“In my view Tony Glair will make an exceptional contribution to British politics in the months and years ahead”

Background:
From 1972 -75 I attended Oxford University (St. John’s College) where Iread law.
In 1975-6 I was pupip to Alexander Irving Q.C. At the end of my pupillage, at the age of 24 years, I was awarded a full place in Chanbers as a practising barrister.

Nature of work:
I specialise in trada union and industrial law, which, in effect, has meant living and wording in London.
I also work for several major County Councils and in the area of civil liberties. The Unions I have worked for include TGWU; ISTC; NUR; GMBATU; TSSA; AUEW; NALGO.

Amongst the major cases in which I have bee involved over the past few years are:
– Defending the Labour Party in court action ageinshe Reg Prentice and his supporters
– Several cases arising aout of redundancies espesially at the British Steel Corporation, inclusing winning the unfair dismissal claim of the 30 Birmingham steelworkers

I am a member of the Excutive committee of the Society of Labout Cangreess and of C.N.D.; N.C.C.L.; L.C.C.

Family:
I am married to Cherie Booth, who was bor and bred in Liverpool. Cherie is now a barrister ( having come top in the professional exams in 1976 for the whole country). She specialises in child care and adoption work.
Cherie’s father is the actor Tony Booth of ‘Till Death Do Us Part’ fame. Anthony and Pat Phoenix form ‘Coronotion Stree’ both came and canvassed for me when I previously stood for Parliament and would be happy to do so again.

Short statement of views and intent:
I have always wanked to come back to the North East to represent the community here.
I would of course live in the sostituency in selected, and I would be a full-time M.P. to put the best case for logal people in Westmenster.
I believe in a united Labout Party offering radical solutions within a framework that people understand and which touches their everyday lives. I support party policy as determind by Party Conference.
When arguments do take place they should take place within the party, not on the media, and in a spirit of democray. That means not only the right to express your views, but the right to have them listened to.
**

Blair, as we’ve been reminded by evidence in on-going criminal trials, is now an avid user of emails, so we can assume with the help of computer power only found in Bletchley Park in Attlee’s day, he’s now a much better typist.

But I found his 1980s efforts rather pleasing, both as for providing rare comparison between Blair and Attlee, and proving, than if someone with such a terribly typed C.V. rise to become Prime Minister, there’s hope for any job applicant.
We all have to start somewhere.

Tony Benn – kindly one of a kind

March 16, 2014 by dannie&joe 4 Comments

by Joe Oliver

Within five minutes of waking up on Friday the day was ruined.
Checking twitter I felt a sickening lurch in my stomach when I saw tweets flashing up reacting to the death of Tony Benn.

Given he was 88 and had been ill for a while the news wasn’t unexpected, yet somehow it still felt a painful shock. I’d perhaps subconsciously half convinced myself that Tony Benn was somehow indestructible, like Merlin always growing ever older and venerable, but never not being with us.
Amidst the inevitable sadness we can take some comfort in the fact that he’s out of suffering, and recently told interviewers he didn’t fear death.

I was lucky enough to get to know him a bit in the last decade or so of his life, frequently encountering him as he toured the overlapping circuits of socialist and literary festivals.
Like a later day John Wesley he kept up an astonishing schedule of criss-crossing the country until recently, with seemingly no festival, rally, demo or meeting too small or geographically obscure for him to show up in support.

So I got to know him to the point that on seeing me he’d greet me with his trademark cherubic smile and ‘Hello old friend’ – a greeting, interchangeable with ‘old comrade’, which he also bestowed on thousands of other people.
I realise now I always felt I knew him much better than I did, because having read all his published diaries I’d come to know both his day to day routines and the whole course of his life.
So like so many people missing him I genuinely feel like I’ve lost a dear friend or even a grandparent.

The first thing that struck me about Tony Benn was his kindness.

Well actually that’s not quite true – the first thing that stuck me on meeting him when I was quite young was what a lot of little white teeth he could fit in his mouth. On later closer inspection I could see that a couple of them had a perfect grove evolved through decades of balancing his pipe stem.

But he was always very kind to me.

Any reader of the Benn Diaries will gather he was obsessed with the value of time. His frenetic activity was partly driven by his father’s teaching that wasting time was the worst possible sin.
I remember his fury in one entry when he realises he’s mixed up his diary and travelled to give a talk the day before he needs to, wasting an entire precious day.

Given how much he valued time it was all the more commendable how generous he was in making time for other people, seeming always infinitely willing to talk with anyone.

I remember sitting with him at Tolpuddle one year whilst the stream of people coming up to talk to him quickly became a torrent. The moment anyone approached he would beam benignly and eagerly chat to them, always asking them where they were from or what they did – and always being ready with a joke, a vintage aphorism, or a bit of encouragement for everyone.

‘What do you do?’ ‘Me? Oh I just work in a library.’ ‘Now that’s a very important job. I always think libraries are the universities of the people. Where anyone can go in, no matter who they are, or what they can afford and learn about any subject.’

‘Where are you from? Cardiff? Marvellous. I thought I smelt a bit of welsh radicalism in the air.’

To someone asking him his views on the English Civil War; ‘Well of course I don’t remember much about it. I was only a young backbencher at the time..’

And so on and so, perhaps for hours, fortified only by tea, tobacco and his genuine delight at meeting people.
Person after person, often coming up nervously or apologetically wanting to say a quick hello, left grinning, all having been made to feel they were the most interesting person he’d met all day, and often with a tale for life to be fondly repeated.

He also treated everyone as an equal, something which sounds flat and obvious in writing, but which was a huge part of his charm, showing the same enthusiasm to talk to a 16 year-old me as he did to veteran trade union leaders, and his natural good nature shining through as he heaved himself to his feet to pose for frequent photos with passers-by.

I also loved the aura of history that clung around him like pipe smoke. This wasn’t solely because of his age and the longevity of his career, but because he valued history so highly himself, often weaving in anecdotes to illustrate a point, and linking the problems of today with the struggles and great causes of the past.
(Historian Jane Griffiths examines this through his ‘romantic, passionately partisan’ celebration of the Levellers.)

He generously indulged my fascination, as a young history obsessed student, telling me tales of his dealings with Churchill and the fall of the Attlee Government – which wonderfully he still referred to in partisan fashion as ‘we’. ‘Despite all those problems in 1951 we still got more votes than 1945 and more than the Tories!’
(With his passing we lose one of the two remaining MPs in Parliament while Attlee was Prime Minister – the other being John Freeman.)

I only wish now I’d taken more opportunities to ask him questions.
But it was always an immense privilege to talk to surely one of the last people alive who’d encountered such figures as Gandhi (‘He didn’t just pat me on the head and talk to my Dad he was genuinely interested in the views of the children’), Ramsay MacDonald (who gave him a chocolate biscuit when he visited Downing Street in 1930) and Lloyd George (whom he distrusted).

As he told the Today Programme recently his political memory stretched from being told his father was going to kiss hands with the King on the formation of the Labour Government in 1929 (‘I thought what a silly thing to do’) to avidly following the bumpy ride of David Cameron’s Government. (He records in his diary Cameron telling him how much Benn’s book Arguments for Democracy inspired him. ‘I never got around to Arguments for Socialism..’)

Newsnight, quoting John Mortimer, referred to Tony Benn as ‘a very English phenomenon’ and he was eccentric in the best English manner, which only added to people’s fondness for him.

His foibles and facets were often parodied, from Private Eye’s covers to Craig Brown’s affectionate spoof Diaries.

The actual Benn Diaries do contain some wonderfully strange moments – his eating a mothball believing it to be a large sweet, his peeling a ‘No smoking’ sticker off a train window so as to smoke his pipe without breaking the rules, or – as the historian Tom Holland recalls – his description of a setback as a wasp stings him on the penis.

At times he reminded me of the scene in Harry Potter when Harry first sees Dumbledore:
“‘Is he – a bit mad? Harry asked Percy nervously.
‘Mad?’ said Percy ‘He’s a genius! Best wizard in the world. But he is a bit mad, yes.”
***

His political legacy is of course not uncomplicated or undisputed, and personally I found the 1980s volume of his Diaries do not make pleasant reading – being so full of accounts divisions in the Labour Party and bitterness from both Benn’s supporters and opponents.

Many opinions of Tony Benn within the Labour Party (let along the tabloid press) were often utterly vitriolic. The Telegraph’s obituary quotes Harold Wilson’s well known remark that Tony Benn ‘immatured with age’ and Trade Unionist Jimmy Reid’s scathing comment that ‘He’s had more conversions on the road to Damascus than a Syrian long-distance truck driver’.

These views are positively friendly compared to some of the comments in John Golding’s book about the battles of the 1980s Hammer of the Left, full of unbridled contempt for Benn and the Bennites.

My generation was perhaps fortunate to share with Tony his ‘blaze of autumn sunshine’ in which he and his opponents had mellowed, and he was respected across the political spectrum, and beloved as ‘a national treasure’.

Though he wasn’t overly comfortable with this label, saying in the trailer for the upcoming film about his life ‘I think being a national treasure is also a danger as what they’re really saying is you’re a kindly, harmless old gentleman. Well I am kindly, I am old, and I may be a gentleman, but I’m certainly not harmless!’

Indeed, he still had the ability to annoy many in the establishment and make headlines well into his years as an elderly gentleman, for example when he read out the DEC appeal on Gaza which the BBC refused to broadcast – on the BBC.

I remember last year asking if a bookshop in Bournemouth had his latest Diaries to be met with ‘Nah, there’s not much call for Communism round here’! So clearly the transformation into cuddly grandfather wasn’t universal.
***

Tony Benn’s long life was also extraordinarily multi-faceted, many aspects of which I’m sure will be celebrated and re-examined in the coming days:

As the RAF pilot whose war service in Rhodesia made him an ardent pacifist and anti-colonialist

As BBC Man serving as a producer, football commentator, presenter, and indirect godfather of Radio One

As Gaitskellite moderniser as a young MP, describing himself as ‘a sort of Peter Mandelson of the 1959 election’

As Techno Geek, epitomising Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of the technical revolution’; developing Concorde and eagerly using computers when many of his colleagues still struggled to work a typewriter.

As Postmaster General, overseeing the introduction of postcodes and opened the post office tower

As hero of Philatelists – introducing many more stamp designs, and negotiating with the Queen to reach a compromise over the size of her head

As Constitutionalist – as The Telegraph notes he helped secure the first referendum in Britain and changed the course of history with the Peerage Act allowing titles to be renounced (and Alec Douglas-Home to become Prime Minister)

As Parliamentarian, respected across the House, championing the rights of Parliament (or the Commons at least) against the Executive

As long serving constituency MP for Bristol South East (where his constituency officers included Dawn Primarolo, now Commons Deputy Speaker, and Pam Tatlow who those in the Higher Education sector will know as Chief Executive of Million+) and Chesterfield

As Feminist – Lara Prendergast in The Spectator recalling his ‘totally illegal’ tribute to Emily Davison in a Commons broom cupboard

As passionate Zionist turned campaigner for Palestinian rights.

As Anti-war campaigner addressing probably his biggest ever audience at the 2003 march against the Iraq war

As Trade Union man staunchly supporting the Miners and dockworkers of Clydeside

As Family Man with his huge pride in the achievements of his wife Caroline, his mother, father, brothers, children and grandchildren. (I remember him delightedly telling me ‘People ask me if I’m his father now’ when Hillary Benn, stood for the Labour Deputy Leadership – following the family tradition)

As Youth Icon, appealing to a younger generation through regularly speaking at student and school events and not least by appearing at the Left Field stage at successive Glastonbury Festivals. As Mark Steel writes in an affectionate variation of Harold Wilson’s ‘immatures with age’ theme ‘As he grew younger with age, so did his audience’.

As Political Canary, demonstrating to the disaffected left that there was breathable air in the Labour Party during the New Labour years, and long being a rare link between Labour and other left-wing groups

As Activist – the one person who could be relied upon to support every good cause – often long before they were popular or widely known. He was the first MP to table a motion condemning Apartheid, and supported the Bristol Bus Boycott in the 1960s when some in the deep South-West tried to mirror the deep South with segregated seating.

and
As Diarist – the excellent and exhaustive Benn Diaries alone would secure his place in history, The Guardian’s obituary arguing ‘Only Winston Churchill’s self-mythologising surpassed this as a model of how to secure one’s own place in history’.
Peter Wilby offering an overview of all 11 published volumes for the Guardian Review, notes that the full Diary (the published volumes being much abridged by his loyal editor Ruth Winstone) is estimated to contain around 20 million words.
***

While so many different people will remember him for so many different things, personally I’ll remember his kindness, the value he placed on history, which he was often a direct link to, and finally his eloquence.

His Diaries will ensure he’s remembered as a writer, but he was a much better orator and there was nothing quite like hearing him, as the many people who’ve never forgotten seeing him speak years or decades ago will testify.
Lists of ‘The best Tony Benn quotes’ have rightly mushroomed up across the internet with everyone having their own favourite.

His speeches proved it’s possible to make radical arguments without ever being dull, something which some others on the Left could learn from, and he often gilded the philosophic pill by simply being very, very funny.
Part of the charm of the Diaries is the politics and causes are constantly sweetened with amusing comments and stories. The best Tony Benn jokes require a separate list in themselves.

After reading a few tributes to Tony Benn I inevitably found myself smiling, and that the day wasn’t ruined at all but could be spent in memory and celebration of a unique man.
Although it’ll ache not having him in the world, he’ll live on through his Diaries and quotes, through his values, and through all the encouragement he gave others.

I don’t think he’d want friends and fans to be sad at his passing – having said he hoped his epithet would be ‘He encouraged us’.