Vol. 10 No. 21 · 24 November 1988
pages 11-12 | 4494 words
Off with her head
John Lloyd
- Office without Power: Diaries 1968-72 by Tony Benn
Hutchinson, 562 pp, £16.95, October 1988, ISBN 0 09 173647 1
In June of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in the next election if you’ve got a friendly peer you can write to ...’ After a little more of this, Jenkins cut in, the dwawl part amused, part irritated. ‘You do live in a wonderful fantasy world,’ he said.
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Letters
Vol. 11 No. 1 · 5 January 1989
From Keith Flett
John Lloyd has an interesting political trajectory. From dynamic editor of the Oz offshoot Ink, through Time Out, industrial reporter for the Financial Times, editor of the New Statesman and now the Financial Times’s Moscow correspondent. I would argue that he has been moving to the right politically all the while, and has become much less interesting, although no worse a journalist, as a result. I did not therefore have high expectations of his review of Benn’s diaries (LRB, 24 November). But I was wrong: Lloyd quite accurately shows them to be the fascinating document that they are, and places them in a more or less accurate political context. In doing so, he has achieved more than most reviewers, and shows that whatever else he may have been doing, he has been paying attention, these twenty years.
Something sharper could and should have been provided, however. Firstly, Benn writes, not just as a politician, but as a historian, for posterity. The really interesting thing about the diaries is not what he thought about Harold Wislon (sic) or whether or not George Brown was drunk again, but how Benn moved from the quite right-wing Cabinet Minister of 1964 to the leadership candidate of the Hard Left of 1988. Lloyd uses the analogy of building blocks to indicate that the reconstruction of Benn was always, and perhaps still is, a work in progress. The analogy is too crude. What Benn shows us is the experience of a socialist trying to administer a capitalist state and realising that the reality does not match the image. Benn’s courage lies in his pursuit of this problematic, where the more opportunistic or pragmatic have just gone along with it. Of course what you can learn from experience, while it may be of great value, is of no lasting use without theory. This may explain why, although Benn has moved far to the left in the last twenty-five years he still accepts the parameters of bourgeois parliamentary democracy. Architect and Bee, as someone or other once said.
Keith Flett
London N17
