Tony Benn, a committed British socialist who died at age 88, was devoted to politics and family and the pipe he was forever smoking. He never tasted alcohol and was a vegetarian.
“Committed socialist,” announced Benn’s campaign literature, long after the word and the philosophy had been expunged from New Labour.
Through decades, Benn, a notable orator with a slight lisp, preached in chilly town halls, on the hustings and in the Commons. He had a single message- socialism and the cause of “working people and their families.”
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No setback ever seemed to depress him not five failed attempts to become Labour leader or deputy leader; not getting dumped from the party hierarchy in the ‘80s; not the emasculation of the labor unions by Thatcher; not Labour’s transformation; not the personal criticism.
“Many of Tony Benn’s ideas were crazy. He sacrificed the prospect of being leader by pursuing these crazy ideas,” commented Roy Hattersley, a former deputy Labour leader and near—contemporary.
Benn shrugged it off.
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“The five lines about me are- you’re an aristocrat, you’re a multimillionaire, you’re a hypocrite, you’re mad, you’re ill,” Benn said in a 1994 newspaper interview. “It took me a while to realize that their purpose was to discourage people from listening to what I am saying.”
Benn retired from the House of Commons in May 2001, after 51 years in Parliament, to “devote more time to politics”. By then he was the longest serving Labour MP in the history of the party, which he joined in 1942.
If anything, Benn lived more in the limelight after he retired from the House. He became a regular broadcaster, and his 2002-3 speaking tours of Britain entitled “An Audience with Tony Benn” never failed to sell out. He was unsurprisingly extremely outspoken in his opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq, and days before the final commencement of hostilities travelled to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein.
Benn was the holder of seven honorary doctorates from British and American universities, and in 2003 was appointed Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.