Why I won't be mourning Tony Benn

There are two reasons for this. Firstly Benn died a full five days before this column appeared, and secondly there were few points I could find in favour of a man who wrecked his own party for two decades.

Benn darted in and out of my life for more than half a century. I grew up living near his large and rambling house in Kensington. He would often be seen about, a familiar figure.

As a young reporter, I had to watch his sons appear in Christmas shows at Holland Park, the posh comprehensive carefully chosen for them.

My mother worked for several years for Benn’s mother, Lady Stansgate, describing Benn as charming in the way that only true toffs can be.

My youngest brother Loch was friendly with Hilary, the son who became a cabinet minister after being elected on the slogan A Benn but not a Bennite.

In Brighton I saw Benn regularly at Labour conferences and was there in 1981 when he was narrowly defeated by Denis Healey for the party’s deputy leadership. Long before that, in 1969, Benn came down to campaign for the Labour candidate Tom Skeffington-Lodge, another toff, in the Brighton Pavilion by-election.

Only six people attended the meeting, even though he was Minister of Technology at the time. Abandoning his political speech, Benn gave an impromptu lecture on the merits of technology to the bemused few.

It is hard for people who knew Benn only in his later years as a man for lost causes to realise that he was when young a leading Labour politician.

Benn backed Concorde, that polluting white elephant of the skies that lost loads of money and which was never replaced.

It was a sign of things to come when, as Postmaster General, he was mainly concerned with an attempt to remove the Queen’s head from stamps.

Benn claimed to be without ambition, but he looked desperate that night in the Brighton Centre when Healey beat him by such a small margin. It was the end of his career as a mainstream politician and the start of his systematic wrecking of the Labour party.

He embraced dubious friends and allies, the most notorious being the Militant Tendency, an extremist group that tried to infiltrate Labour with more success in Brighton than almost anywhere else.

Benn’s antics persuaded right-wing leaders to form the Social Democrats, an organisation that split the opposition at a time when it should have been posing challenges to the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

He seemed to be indiscriminate in those he supported, Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro among them.

No protest was complete without Benn standing on a soapbox sounding off about something.

In the basement of his multi-million-pound house, with traffic tearing past outside, Benn compiled a record of his life which he eventually published as diaries.

Although not a patch on the diaries of Alan Clark or Woodrow Wyatt, they do give a flavour of the times and of his mind which was like an intellectual car boot sale.

Just when the diaries were becoming tiresome, Benn would come out with a brilliant idea, the equivalent of finding a precious jewel among the junk.

The last time I saw him he was in Brighton promoting the latest diaries. I was called over by Hilary, who had spotted my name on my conference badge.

Hilary, for all his responsibilities as a Cabinet minister, was keeping an eye on his ageing father in a way that confirmed my mother’s opinion that the Benn family was very close.

Benn was born a toff as part of a wealthy family which was born to rule. Like George Orwell a few year earlier, he idolised the working class without ever understanding it.

When renouncing his peerage, the Rt Hon Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn announced that he wanted to be known as plain Tony Benn, but few of us watching him were fooled.

Disclaiming the peerage was one of the few positive achievements in Benn’s long life, even though its first effect was allowing the aristocratic Lord Home to become Prime Minister.

Another was his campaign to ensure that Parliament rather than the prime minister of the day was responsible for declaring war.

Frequently described as a national treasure in his later days, Benn seemed to me more like a dotty old uncle in the Labour family, and one that could be unexpectedly ruthless.

He was an intelligent, persuasive man who might have led Labour had he been less naive.

But as well as splitting the party, he also ensured its present political stance is far more right wing than it would otherwise have been.

Benn showed admirable enthusiasm and energy in campaigning almost to the end of a long life, but in later years showed the truth of the maxim that there’s no fool like an old fool.