Scoutmaster General

Peter Clarke

• Tony Benn by Jad Adams
  Macmillan, 576 pp, £20.00, July 1992, ISBN 0 333 52558 2
• The End of an Era: Diaries, 1980-1990 by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone
  Hutchinson, 704 pp, £25.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 09 174857 7

Where did it go wrong? How did it come unstuck? Here was the making of a gilt-edged, silver-spooned career in Labour politics, surely marked out for the leadership from an early stage. He was born with every advantage. Good-looking and good-natured, eloquent and earnest, well-educated and well-connected, Anthony Wedgwood Benn had the best of both worlds. Father was a radical Liberal MP who switched to Labour in the Twenties and ended up representing the Party in the House of Lords as the first Viscount Stansgate. The family lived at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad.