The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (29 page)

IN 1966 AFTER
the General Election of March that year, Frank Cousins, the Minister of Technology, resigned. Cousins had been brought in to the Labour Government from the leadership of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, to give it strength, but resigned because he could not continue to support the Government’s incomes policy. Thus Tony Benn became Minister of Technology, with, for the first time, a place in the Cabinet. Until 1968 however, because of qualms over the revelation of Cabinet discussions to secretaries to whom, at that time, he dictated his diary, he did not record Cabinet meetings in detail; in that year he began the practice, maintained ever since, of dictating direct onto a cassette recorder.

Sunday 3 April

Forty-first birthday and the children came in with gifts in the morning.
Mother came over for tea and we had a family party. No news yet of the reconstruction of the Government.

Monday, 4 April

Just after lunch a phone call came, asking me to go and see Harold. I went across and had five minutes with him. After a brief exchange of congratulations he said, ‘I’m going to offer you a Ministry but I rather hope you won’t take it. It is the Ministry of Works, which is technically a little senior to the Post Office.’ I asked whether it was in the Cabinet and he indicated that it was not. I asked whether he was reducing the size of his Cabinet and he said no. ‘The Minister of Works is thought of as being marginally senior to the Postmaster General but its housing functions will be taken away and it would be left with Royal Parks and Government Procurement and the Palace of Westminster.’ I thought quickly and decided that if I wasn’t going to be in the Cabinet there was no point in moving. Anyway I didn’t want to be under Dick Crossman as overlord of Works and Planning, and I wanted to finish my Post Office work. So I said, ‘If you’re not offering me a place in the Cabinet I think I’d rather stay where I am.’ Harold looked uncomfortable and said, ‘I have decided not to make many Cabinet changes and to try to get away from the idea of major reshuffles. Instead I will move people every year – one or two of them, like the Football League. The Ministry of Technology is the real glamour job and I can’t think that Frank Cousins will stay long. He’s not fit anyway. I’m not promising it to you but of course it would be easier to move you if you hadn’t already been moved recently. Also you have a big job of industrial reorganisation with the Post Office and Arnold Goodman has told George Wigg that you are the only person who can really settle the television problem. The Cabinet is an ageing one and there will be room for you later on.’

I suppose I should have looked a lot angrier than I felt but I’m not sure that bullying gets you anywhere. Anyway I didn’t conceal my disappointment when I said that I would rather stay where I was for the moment and finish what I had started. I told him that I was extremely interested in Technology and he said, ‘You would have to learn the difference between a cyclotron and a megaton.’

Afterwards, home and picked up Caroline and we went to the party at Transport House to celebrate the victory. It was a pleasant evening though Harold didn’t turn up. The next few months are going to be extremely difficult and are going to call for all my skill as a negotiator but I shall have a chance of modernising the Post Office along the lines that I know to be necessary.

Wednesday 6 April

loan Evans, my new PPS, came over. He suggested that I give two tea parties to meet the new MPs, which is a good idea.

At 5 o’clock I went for an hour’s talk to Frank Gillard about broadcasting problems. I adopted the new policy of being forthcoming, on the understanding that it was entirely confidential. Frank told me about his plans to have Radio 247 run by the BBC to beat the pirates. It sounds as if he can offer a service from 5 am to 2 am with entertainment music on the medium wave band for the teenage audience, by opting out of the Light Programme, which would remain on VHF. His only problem is money. But it’s mad to raise the licence fee to provide something that could be provided for nothing by advertising. All this points to a separate pop network which is used as a revenue raiser, where the Post Office rent the programmes, studios and transmitters from the BBC and pay them an enormous sum, thus ensuring that they are not corrupted by the advertising.

Tuesday 19 April

This afternoon Ryland and Lillicrap came and we had a long discussion about eavesdropping and the new menace of microbugs. I want a select committee to sit on this but apparently the Home Office are worried that if a select committee is set up, it will lead to awkward questions about the devices used by the security services. This seems to me to be just making a monkey out of the House of Commons and trying to preserve secrecy over an important area of public interest for one particular reason. I couldn’t get Ryland or Lillicrap or Wratten, for that matter, to see the importance of a serious approach to this problem. For my part, I want regulations making it an offence to eavesdrop using radio microphones or to intercept telephone conversations and listen to and record them. But I can see that I shall have some difficulty about this. No doubt every other department will brief its Ministers against me and I daresay I shouldn’t carry this through a ministerial committee.

Friday 29 April

I had a phone call from a man in Devon. He said that he had been unable to buy any 3d stamps the previous night, so instead bought 6d stamps and cut them in half with scissors and would I authorise them to go through the post. I was helpful but said that I had no authority to authorise this and that he should have put the 6d stamps on and then written to me for a refund. Later I discovered that in fact he was a stamp dealer and had not had thirty important bills to send out – as he told me – but actually sent out 600 of these half-stamps which he now claims are worth £15 a piece. I think he ought to be prosecuted.

Friday 13 May

To the Post Office Tower for a lunch for former Postmasters-General and senior Post Office officials. Of the PMGs five came – Billy Listowel, Ness Edwards, Ernest Marples, Reg Bevins and myself. The most senior former
civil servant was Sir Donald Banks, who was the first Director-General of the Post Office in 1934. He told me that at that time the Postmaster General would come into the Office about twice a week when Parliament was sitting for a glass of port at noon. All the minutes for him to sign would then be laid around a long table in his office and he would walk round and sign them one after the other, have another glass of port and then disappear. In fact, he spent as much time on Post Office work as a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster does on Duchy work. At that period senior civil servants worked from 10 am to 4.30pm, five days a week, and had eight weeks’ paid holiday a year. Life was leisurely. At least it was in Britain. But it was during those years that the rest of the world caught up with and overtook us.

Billy Listowel told me at lunch that he had tried to get the Monarch’s head off the stamps in 1945 but had been told that it was impossible and had dropped the idea under heavy pressure.

This evening to Ralph and Ann Gibson’s together to read
The Importance of Being Earnest
, en famille.

Tuesday 17 May

Caroline went to the BBC today to record the second instalment of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ in the Jackanory series.

This afternoon the Queen came to visit the Post Office Tower. I had to greet her at the entrance and we went up into the VIP lounge, where I introduced her to all the senior civil servants. Then she was taken through the apparatus rooms and up in the lift. I gave Wratten my movie camera to take some pictures on the observation platform as we walked round. Afterwards we went up and had tea with Billy Butlin, revolving in his restaurant. She was obviously not interested in the technical aspects but I think enjoyed seeing London from such a height. I suggested that there ought to be a state banquet in which all the guests went by the top table every twenty minutes.

As we came down she discussed the issue of bird stamps. She did not much like the six stamps put together and said she would prefer to have only four. I promised that this is what we would do. It was a minor concession but made me seem reasonable.

Friday 20 May

This evening Caroline and I went to the state banquet at Hampton Court for the Austrian President. I sat opposite Sir Michael Adeane and next to Mrs du Cann and Caroline was opposite Lady Adeane and next to Edward du Cann.

I spent most of the evening talking to Adeane and it was very amusing. I began by asking him about the effect the Conservatives’ decision to elect their own leaders had on the Queen’s prerogative in choosing a Prime Minister. He said that of course the Palace had had this problem three times
in the last ten years and had hoped that the new Conservative system of choosing a leader would take the load off their shoulders.

I asked him about the official view of Anastasia, the daughter of the Tsar, and he said that he thought there was nothing in this. There was an old tradition of pretenders to the throne in Russia and that in any case there was no money to be picked up. I then asked him whether there would be any family embarrassment created if it was suggested that the Queen went on a state visit to the Soviet Union. He said that he thought the memory of the massacres at Ekaterinburg would certainly have prevented George V or VI from going and he thought it still might be difficult. I then asked why it was that there had been no embarrassment with the German relatives who had fought against us in two world wars. Adeane replied, ‘Oh but the German royalty are all very decent chaps.’

Next we moved to Edward VIII and I said I thought it would be inexpressibly tragic when he died and his funeral took place. There would be a national sense of guilt that we were prepared to honour a man in his death but not during his life. Adeane hastened to point out that, certainly within the last few years, the Duke of Windsor’s decision to live abroad was his own and he was happy in his house in Paris. He also said that experience in Belgium, where King Leopold continued to live, showed how embarrassing and difficult it could be to have a former king on the premises. I said I thought that there would be some feeling about the Duchess of Windsor when her husband was taken away from her in death and put back in his position in the long line of king emperors. He completely misunderstood my point and he said that there was a place prepared for the Duchess of Windsor as well in the vaults.

Then he raised the question of stamps and I asked him how he had liked the album. He said that the rule about having a monarch’s head on the stamps had, he thought, always referred to the ruling monarch and he had some doubts about the use of previous rulers. I said that it would be easy to put the Queen’s head on every single monarch’s stamp although it might not look good. I asked him whether there would be any difficulty about having Cromwell or Edward VIII among the rulers and sounded so reasonable and earnest that I feel sure I disarmed him. So I sloshed him between the eyes by telling him that Archbishop Lord Fisher of Lambeth had written to me angrily about the removal of the Queen’s head. This was a story that told heavily against what I was trying to do but indicated the grave and serious way in which I undertook my duties.

Afterwards we walked in the sunken gardens briefly and then came home.

Wednesday 25 May

To the NEC this morning where we got through the business in twenty minutes and George Brown introduced a discussion on the Common Market. It was highly geared to a Party audience and there were no trumpet
calls for European integration. He dismissed ‘theology’ and said the Government was only engaged in a probe. He admitted that the present French Government was opposed but thought that after de Gaulle died the position would change. Certainly we should do nothing to encourage de Gaulle’s disruptive tactics against NATO. The whole thing was so anodyne that there was virtually no discussion.

Tommy and Peter and I had dinner together and Dick joined us later. I really let my hair down about my present frustrations and made it pretty clear that I thought Harold ought to give more support than he does. I agreed strongly when Dick said that it was only through being disloyal and leaking and making rows that you could get anything done. This rather shocked Peter, who still thinks that basically Harold is on the right side. I am coming increasingly to suspect that Harold doesn’t want trouble and the person who makes the most trouble will get his own way. I think I went a bit far indicating this but it won’t do any harm if it gets back to Harold. Indeed last Sunday’s telephone call to Harold has already activated Herbert Bowden, and the broadcasting White Paper will be authorised next month. It is all beginning to prove Caroline right.

Monday 6 June

Today an invitation came in from Marcia Williams for me to go to Chequers on Tuesday for the night, to have dinner with Harold and then continue our talks the following morning. Harold realises, at last, that he is in real trouble and that is why he has summoned his old ‘friends’. I think the time has come for a bit of frankness and I spent part of the evening drawing up a list of discontents so that the least I can do is to tell him frankly what people are thinking. There is an apparent loss of impetus by the Government. On key issues such as Vietnam, East of Suez and prices and incomes there is disagreement in the Party. There is uncertainty or inaction on other issues, notably Rhodesia and Britain’s relations with the European Community, Britain’s world role, parliamentary reform and Party organisation. There has been serious mishandling of the Parliamentary Labour Party since the Election, and, finally, our sense of purpose needs rearticulating.

Caroline had her Comprehensive Schools Committee meeting at home this evening and I worked late.

Tuesday 7 June

Left home at 8 o’clock to go to see Mother with a bunch of flowers from the garden for her sixty-ninth birthday.

I looked in at the Commonwealth Relations Office for twenty minutes to talk to Judith Hart who, like me, was invited to go down to Chequers this evening. Arrived there at 10.45 pm and found Harold, Marcia, Gerald, Peter and Tommy Balogh all comfortably settled in the white drawing room. Judith joined us at about 11.30.