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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The righteous Harry Wharton, of course, joined the Labour Party, under the name of David Owen or Tony Benn, and screwed the whole thing up with public-school Character and Leadership. These Frank Richard types could have been recognised at our ordinary day-schools but (such is the gang spirit) we liked to think that they were essentially products of the ...”

“... they tried to run as a co-operative with Maxwell’s encouragement and the benevolent patronage of Tony Benn. So what of the Liechtenstein connection? Haines passes on, and is clearly satisfied by, Maxwell’s explanation. Originally, by this account, a small foundation was set up there to safeguard himself and his family from threatened litigation by ...”

“... assumption that we can largely agree on everything; or that people with whom we do not agree, like Tony Benn or Roy Hattersley, are people whom history has passed by. It’s a view that leaves New Labour with no explanation for the magnitude of its victory in 1997. That was a very strong expression of grievance (as well as exasperation with Tory ...”

“... of Parliament, who caused offence mainly by mistaking the Cenotaph for the Aldermaston March. But Tony Benn of Westminster School and New College? Not on your life. One of the ironies of the whole episode was that the Iron Lady’s champions appealed to a set of conventions that she had done more than any other British politician to consign to the ...”

“... of British politics – from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided ...”