“... popular of all [living] Labour politicians … above, for example, Andy Burnham … Ed Miliband, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.’ According to Macintyre, a political journalist of long experience, he is ‘also probably the most respected of the eight currently living former prime ministers’. It’s not all that difficult to come top in a popularity league ...”

“... differently because they had different beliefs and had been elected on different manifestos. Tony Benn appreciated correctly the importance of getting control of the manifesto. On the other hand, governments cannot always carry out their manifestos. The last two Labour governments were obliged by balance-of-payments crises to retrench after their ...”

“... Labour Left? Wouldn’t bureaucracy make an altogether more serious demon than poor Aaronovitch or Tony Benn? Oliver seems to take his leave at about this point, pleading innocent of any reference to the real political world and claiming in a prefatory note that his poem speaks only of ‘the phantasmagoria that flit across the world of the media and ...”

“... War was not even imagined. Labour was riding high in the polls, and moving hectically to the left. Tony Benn was packing halls all over the country with a new brand of socialist rhetoric, whose theme was that future Labour administrations must make a ‘clean break’ with the opportunism and failure of the Wilson-Callaghan era. The new GLC hired numbers ...”

“... Viscount Stansgate to begin the spectacular exercise in downward social mobility which allowed Mr Tony Benn to become the arbiter of leftwing politics in the Seventies. That the second Viscount Hailsham might similarly choose to resume the political career of Mr Quintin Hogg was already on the cards. But Howard’s journalistic coup was to broaden the ...”

“... of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, it seems; inflation is higher, at 17 per cent rather than 9; Tony Benn is leader of the opposition; the Poll Tax has been introduced a decade early; John Lennon is still alive; and personal computers have already been around for twenty years or more. Intercity trains are fast (London to Glasgow in 75 minutes) because ...”

“... Kenya. And while the Movement for Colonial Freedom, supported by the Labour MPs Fenner Brockway, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle, successfully publicised imperial atrocities and attracted multiracial crowds to its rallies, Joseph Murumbi (Kenyan, though not Kikuyu) broke with the movement over its uncritical response to Suez.Some conscientious objectors ...”

“... Anthony Crosland, and Douglas Jay, and relied instead upon Ralph Miliband, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn. Honderich is only a little better-informed about past than about present Conservatives. Coleridge makes one fleeting appearance. Disraeli’s Vindication of the Constitution is cited, but only from anthologies, and Honderich appears to think that ...”

“... Invariably those, like Hailsham, who challenged him head on found themselves worsted. When Tony Benn attempted to affix the ‘Dachau and Belsen’ label to Powell’s speeches on immigration in 1970, Powell snatched the microphone to point out that in 1939 he had sailed all the way from Australia in order to volunteer as a private to fight ...”

“... against his old associates he put himself at Foot’s right hand, conspicuously abstaining to deny Tony Benn the deputy leadership in 1981 and attacking the ‘strutting demagogy’ of Benn’s supporters. ‘If anybody lost him that deputy leadership election yesterday,’ he told Arthur Scargill on television, ‘it ...”

“... She is extremely emotional, she does not listen very carefully, she is not really intelligent.’ Tony Benn, ‘although talented in many ways, a good speaker and a man of ideas, had extraordinarily poor judgment. He is the last person in the world I would go to for advice on policy.’ As for the National Executive Committee, there was an appalling lack ...”

“... Lord Longford (Eton and Christ Church) peeled off into a peculiar variety of religious activities. Tony Benn (Westminster and New College) decamped for the wild and intransigent Left. Paul Johnson (Stonyhurst and Magdalen) bolted to the radical Right. It would not be unfair to say that for most people what these diverse movements had in common was their ...”

“... Canada in 1974, he said goodbye to a country where campus radicalism was still flourishing, and Tony Benn was preparing to hoist the red flag over the ruins of capitalism. When he returned, in 1979, Mrs Thatcher was in power and social reaction in the air. As he looked around he realised, for the first time, that he was living in an old country. ‘I ...”

“... the limited nature of the social transformation: something that doctrinaire socialists like Tony Benn constantly and rightly emphasise. ‘The commanding heights of the economy’ – gas, railways, coal, steel – were handed over to the civil servants, a measure of doubtful benefit to anyone, but nobody was going to the guillotine to protest ...”

“... of the Thirties. Why has the Opposition done so badly? Two recent books afford a clue.* Tony Benn’s diaries are full of interest, in many ways the more so because we already have such plentiful diaristic accounts of the 1964-70 Labour Government. (Benn reveals, incidentally, that Harold Wilson promised that ...”