Godfrey Holmes re-examines Tony Benn’s 17 years as Chesterfield’s improbable Member of Parliament.
VISCOUNT Anthony Neil Wedgwood-Benn: forty years ago elected as MP for Chesterfield in a famous by-election; ten years ago dying at the grand old age of 88; national treasure – but a mass of contradictions. Here a non-mining MP for a traditionally mining seat. Here a fairly wealthy representative for an unfairly underprivileged town. Here a famous Labour Party figure hated by whole swathes of the Labour Party he courted and almost led. Here “the most dangerous man in Britain”: charming and collegiate. Here a devoted husband for over 50 years of a rich and talented USA educationist – yet avowedly anti-internationalist.
Contradictions aplenty. Controversies innumerable. Past conventions, past interventions, nonsensical – yet making full sense in one of the largest archives ever bequeathed the nation by any Parliamentarian, ever. Right down to the last mimeograph or audio-tape.
And whilever commentators lean lazily on those facile signposts – “Left” or “Right” – a latterly re-titled “Tony Benn” will go down in every history book as ambassador, champion of “The Left.” And in all that accounting, all that recounting: the soubriquet: Christian Socialist would be far, far more accurate for Benn than Trotskyist.
So how did this political giant, this erstwhile Postmaster General, this former Secretary of State for Industry, this charismatic broadcaster, this inventor of the Party Political Broadcast, from Filton – that area of Bristol dedicated to British Aerospace and the costly manufacture of supersonic Concorde – travel to a north-of-England hub of manufacturing and extraction about to collapse under the same doctrine of “Thatcherism” that had already delivered two huge Conservative Party victories in 1979 and 1983?
Because it was in re-drawn Bristol East that Tony Benn was, under the surprise stewardship of Michael Foot, unsurprisingly defeated in the June 1983 election. Result: a talented man loosed into the wilderness; blamed additionally for standing against former Chancellor Denis Healey; also held indirectly responsible for the defection to Social Democracy of the “Gang of Four”: Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Bill Rodgers.
“127 working-class delegates responsible for voting for their candidate, gathered at Saltergate NUM headquarters one snowy evening in January 1984, and found the brilliant Benn too hot to handle.”
By any measure, Benn’s gaining the nomination in Chesterfield – a “safe seat” vacant through its stalwart MP Eric Varley moving to Coalite – was a traumatic operation with reverberating birth pangs. Basically, the 127 working-class delegates responsible for voting for their candidate, gathered at Saltergate NUM headquarters one snowy evening in January 1984, and found the brilliant Benn too hot to handle. Moreover, he was the clean-shaven outsider up against five safer insiders including the bearded Philip Whitehead, just exiled as longstanding Labour MP for nearby Derby North.
That fiery selection meeting heard some compelling speeches of self-advocacy; lasted just over four-and-a-half hours; and needed three ballots before the mercurial Tony Benn emerged triumphant. Ironically, the subsequent real-life contest on Thursday, March 1, was anti-climactic.
Yes, the by-election, Benn’s twelfth, attracted huge media attention. Yes, remaining party loyalists converged on Chesterfield to support Benn. Yes, a record 17 other candidates entered their names on the ballot-paper – still quite inexpensive to do: Heartbeat’s Claude Greengrass; Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party; Sid Shaw, Elvis Presley; David Bentley, Four-Wheel Drive; Helen Anscombe, Keep Death off the Roads; Jitendra Bardwaj, Yoga & Meditation; Donald Butler, Buy Your Chesterfield; David Cahill, Reclassify the Sun Newspaper; John Connell, Peace; John Davey, Dental Charges; Christopher Hill, Prisoners; Thomas Layton, Spare the Earth; Paul Nicholls-Jones, Independent; also Joe Giancarlo Piccaro, Acne.
Tony Benn attracted half of all votes: 24,633, a majority of 6,264 above nearest contender, the Conservative candidate Nick Bourne – and was immediately immersed in the violent and interminable Miner’s Strike, incidentally headed by personal friend Arthur Scargill. Fair to say, no future Parliamentary contest in Chesterfield was more than an academic footnote, until the Liberal Democrat triumphed in 2001 and 2005; reverted to Labour in 2010, and Toby Perkins has held it since. Tony Benn won comfortably in 1987, 1992, and 1997.
In fact, his Chesterfield tenure was noted for its peacefulness, literally: Benn spending a good portion of his well-earned retirement campaigning for peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, wherever. And that 17-year Chesterfield tenure is justifiably noted for its “new,” imported, MP’s conscientious attention to local matters: debt, housing, planning and, frustratingly, reviving the High Street.
In the event, and for all this Parliamentarian’s benign advocacy of workers’ rights, sit-ins, walk-outs, de-nationalization, re-nationalization, whatever, Tony Benn MP: never distracted again by Ministerial Office or the Deputy-Leadership was a statesmanlike spent force. Sad. But strangely predictable. A determinedly willing Commoner who became “The Best Prime Minister We Never Had.”