More from Benn

This too comes from the new volume of Tony Benn's diaries, published this week, More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007. In his entry for 20 October 2005, the author comments:

Bari Atwan [editor of the Palestinian Al-Quds Al Arabi newspaper] said to me that he'd had a message from Saddam Hussein's lawyer, that Saddam had asked after me and George Galloway, which is something I don't know if I want to publicise much!

But of course it's not surprising, nor is it a matter of levity, that Saddam should have held Benn in fond regard. Benn, after all, provided Saddam with the propaganda platform of a television "interview" whose obsequiousness in the face of tyranny would have put Robert Maxwell to shame. It is extraordinary that Benn couldn't, and can't, see that.

Let me balance that, however, by a point that reflects a sounder judgement. Benn's entry for 5 June 2004 begins:

The Morning Star had an article by George Galloway, and in it he said, 'Britain is currently run by a blood-spattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals.' Now, first of all I think that's a totally ineffective way of getting your case across, but secondly, last November George pleaded with me to try to persuade the National Executive to let him stay in the Party. So if I'd succeeded, he would have been still a member of a party currently run by a 'blood-spattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals'. It put me off George Galloway in a fairly fundamental way. Anyway, that's enough of that!

It's a shame he stops at that point. Obviously it's hardly exceptional, let alone exceptionable, to notice that George Galloway is a blustering, buffoonish self-publicist. But Benn has a habit - one of his least attractive characteristics - of perceiving no enemies on the Left. His regard for Arthur Scargill, a man of nugatory intelligence and much unpleasantness, is deep and fond. As a member of Labour's National Executive, Benn accepted invitations to speak at rallies organised by the Militant organisation, a thuggish and totalitarian outfit whom the Party was attempting belatedly to expel. He writes appreciatively of John Rees and Lindsey German, prominent members of the antisemitic Socialist Workers' Party. So it's notable that even a man as innocent as Benn can gain a reliable impression of Galloway's essential characteristics.

Another interesting conflict in the diaries takes place with Michael Foot. On 28 September 2002 Foot telephoned Benn to harangue him for having published his previous volume of diaries in the Daily Mail:

[Foot] continued: 'I think it's a disgrace that you should publish your diaries in the Daily Mail, it's the most bitterly anti-government paper.' So I was a bit taken aback. He said, 'I want to tell you personally.'

So I said, 'Fine, I know you don't approve of me, Michael, and you don't approve of diaries, and you don't approve of the Mail, but at least I didn't go to Australia at the expense of Rupert Murdoch!'

That shook him a bit. Boy, he was angry! I thought, bloody hell, that man joined in the witch hunt of the left, with the full support of all the right-wing papers; he was once a great personal friend of Beaverbrook, so I didn't in the end take a lot of notice of it, but still, it registered.

Now, I have to say I wouldn't criticise anyone for accepting an offer for serialisation rights from a newspaper whose views I oppose, and some of my closest friends and family have contributed to the Daily Mail. But I cheered Foot on reading this exchange. It isn't merely that Benn publishes his diaries where he may: there is a context to his self-justification. Elsewhere in his diaries (26 July 2002), Benn writes:

Oh, very funny! The Mail on Sunday rang about Iraq, so I told them to look at my column in the Morning Star. I faxed it to them; they liked it so much they asked me for another hundred words, and I think that, for the first time ever, The Mail on Sunday will reprint an article from a Communist paper. It would be amazing.

Well, not that amazing. The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday are newspapers whose values I revile in every essential and almost every particular. They are reactionary, socially authoritarian, bigoted, xenophobic and anti-American. Their collective voice is a toxic influence in public debate on every policy issue from immigration to humanitarian intervention, from homosexual equality to European integration. It is hardly surprising that sentiments published in the Communist Morning Star about foreign policy should find a welcoming home in that stable, because regardless of the nominal ideological differences there is a common commitment to reaction and isolationism. The longstanding Mail columnist Andrew Alexander even promoted the view a few years ago that "The Soviet Threat was a Myth". (The byline to the article I've linked to declares: "Andrew Alexander is a Daily Mail columnist, and is writing a book about the cold war." That book has never appeared. Possibly the author realised that an argument along the lines that President Truman came to office determined on confronting the Soviets would be laughed into submission by competent reviewers. For a scholarly assessment of the transition in foreign policy from Roosevelt to Truman, see an outstanding recent book by Wilson Miscamble of the University of Notre Dame, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War, 2006.)

I have written many critical things about Michael Foot, not least concerning his extraordinary decision to seek the Labour Party leadership in 1976 and then again (successfully for him, so disastrously for the Party) in 1980. And I will do again. But one thing I give him credit for is that he recognises malign forces at home and abroad for what they are, as Benn does not. (You can consider, for example, the respective positions that both of them took concerning intervention to rebuff the genocidal butcher Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s.) He confronted Benn with justification; good for him.