Tony Benn: 'All political careers end in failure. Mine ended earlier than most'
As a boy he met Lloyd George and Gandhi; he was an MP for 50 years; has been part of every battle in the Labour party since the second world war
"As I got older I came to see that the most important thing to do was to try to influence public thinking." I suggest that, as the son of a secretary of state for India and the product of Westminster and Oxford, he romanticises the working class, perhaps out of class guilt. "I didn't romanticise them," he says. "I had a strong sense of justice. If you look back over history, most progress has come about when popular movements have emerged led by determined men and women. They take tremendous punishment from the establishment, and then if they stick it out they win the argument."
"The Sunday Telegraph had a whole page of 'national treasures' nominated by their readers," writes Tony Benn in his latest – and last – volume of diaries. "I was chosen. If I'm a national treasure in the Telegraph, something's gone wrong. All is forgiven as you get old.""As I got older I came to see that the most important thing to do was to try to influence public thinking." I suggest that, as the son of a secretary of state for India and the product of Westminster and Oxford, he romanticises the working class, perhaps out of class guilt. "I didn't romanticise them," he says. "I had a strong sense of justice. If you look back over history, most progress has come about when popular movements have emerged led by determined men and women. They take tremendous punishment from the establishment, and then if they stick it out they win the argument."
Benn is now both a national treasure and unquestionably getting on. He is 88, has just come out of hospital, is coughing after a bout of what he thinks was pneumonia, and has broken his front two false teeth. He walks a little unsteadily. "Watch him, he falls easily," says Pearl, who looks after him in his west London flat – just round the corner from the large house in Holland Park in which he lived for 60 years. I might describe him as "frail", except that he hates that word.
This final diary covers the period from 2007-9, and describes a mad schedule for an eighty-something – whizzing all over the country, giving speeches, attending demos, performing his one-man show to adoring audiences. Then at the end of July 2009, the entries suddenly stop. What should have been a routine operation leads to complications; he has what is diagnosed as a stroke – though he disputes the diagnosis – and the past four years have been a battle against increasing infirmity. "I hope I can cope on my own again one day," he writes defiantly in an epilogue to the diary. "I would like to be independent."
This new volume is called A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine, but there is quite a lot of darkness in the book. "Depressed, extremely tired," he says in July 2008, "I feel that perhaps my diary and my archives are an attempt to prolong my life in some way." So which is it, I ask when the photographer has left and the physio has been asked to come back on Monday, autumnal sunshine or wintry chill?.. read more:
