Tony Benn: still wrong after all these years

The old cynic lies when he says ‘Politics is about ishoos, not personalities.’ Political theory and political philosophy are about ‘issues’. The business of politics in the real world is about people and very little else, as the current columns of the heavies demonstrate. Politicians, no matter how lofty, want to act but they cannot do it alone. All political action results from agreement and disagreement between politicians. People. That is why politics is as fascinating as a novel to those of us who watch closely the doings of those in or aspiring to be in -- or to control -- government. The sole purpose of Benn’s nonsense is to raise himself above the fray in which he played an enthusiastic and malign part when this Man of the People was active on the hard left of politics rather than, as now, sneering down at those who still are from his luxurious patrician’s mansion in Holland Park. He shores up his image as the Great Sage on the one-man-show circuit, at the same time promoting his own Cause for Sainthood, with endless repetition of ‘Of course, I entered the House in 1950, so… ’ and tales of how he was dandled on the knee of Robert Tressell, William Lovett and John Ball. I think I've got that right; Benn tells anyone whose lapels he can grab, 'I'm terribly old, you know.' Politics can be all about now or about then. With some understanding of then, now becomes even more exciting. The connoisseur reflects with a grin on similarities between today's Number Ten Bunker and the courts of Julius Caesar and Simon de Montfort, Lord Stanley and Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Burghley, Lord Salisbury and Lord Beaverbrook. The characters may even be fictional like the denizens of the West Wing or the House of Cards. The denouement may take place in Dunsinane, Chinon, Number One London, the cabinet room of Margaret Thatcher or the elegant salon of Lord Mandelson of Everything. The threads and patterns remain unchanged as they recur in every generation. Contra the father of the future Lord Stansgate, of course politics is about people. It’s about the making and breaking of alliances, plot and counter-plot. It’s about who will silently and secretly support whom against which enemy, who will succeed in placing their man (or woman) in the key position as informant. It’s about loyalty and treachery; who will have the courage to slit the throat of whom. Cromwell’s denunciations of his enemies are retold more often than the details of his actions in government; likewise the downfall of Neville Chamberlain about whose honourable political career one hears almost nothing. We speak of the assassination of Margaret Thatcher even though the Lady is, mercifully, still with us, and more often than her radical, transforming modernisation of Britain. And now we are gathered like grinning ghouls around the stricken Gordon Brown, rubbing our hands as we watch power haemorrhaging from a latter-day petty tyrant. Vulture-spotting is become the new national hobby as scavengers wheel in from Left and Right to circle above the twitching remains of a man once feared, readying themselves for the dismemberment of the once-revered party which Brown and his horrible henchmen continue to destroy even as political death steals o’er them. If politics were about issues and not people, Macbeth would be forgotten and Shakespeare would have been short of one of his best plots. If politics were about issues, Tony Benn would be forgotten, too. But it isn’t and he knows it. He adverts briefly to the issues of his days in government in the mendacious rhetorical terms which he calculates will spice things up nicely and enhance his reputation as a controversialist. Knowing better than to bore the punters, he then sets about chanting the names of the people he has known, right back to when he was five years old. He gives the punters what they want. Benn is a small figure who once held some sort of office in a disreputable, failed Labour government which left the country in ruins. He cannot forget that he never had the sort of power which he craved and thought he deserved nor that most of the electorate hated and despised him back in the days when he was a politician. Now, blessed with longevity – a matter of luck and not of any virtue of his own – Benn will settle for your admiration of him as Parliamentarian and (God help us) soothsayer. That is, as a person. If you’re foolish enough to fall for the dishonest old ham’s nonsense, that is.