The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (31 page)

At 1 o’clock I went to the Post Office where my old private office had laid on sandwiches and beer so that I could meet them all again. They presented me with a beautiful little reading lamp which will be just what I need for my bedside for reading official papers late into the night.

Don Wratten took me aside and told me what had happened in the week since I left. Wratten said that the DG was almost delirious with excitement at my departure and that Ted Short has asked him to delay his retirement for three months, which he was likely to do. This was so depressing that I really couldn’t bear it and I was glad to hurry away after having said goodbye to all my friends there.

Saturday 16 July

Travelled up to Durham last night for the Miners’ Gala. Breakfast in our room early and at 8.30 we heard the first bands approaching.

On the hotel balcony were Michael Stewart and his wife and George Brown. George beckoned me on one side and said he wanted to talk to me urgently. He was in a state of tension. In brief, he feared that the Treasury would come forward with major deflationary measures at home and he intended to resign from the Government tonight. He told me that he had only told Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins and me. ‘You may just as well make your speech under the same misery that I am going to make mine,’ he said. I replied that if he did this it would mean the end of the Government – so I profoundly believe. The Cabinet simply would not have a majority in the House of Commons if George Brown had decided to opt out on these grounds. George’s own remedy for the economic situation would be infinitely preferable.

Monday 18 July

I went to see George Brown and found him in a state of high excitement. Barbara Castle was with him. He repeated definitely that he was going. He said he had warned Harold a year ago that he was not prepared to put up with another episode of this kind and that Roy and Tony agreed with him.
Barbara said she thought there would be a majority in the Cabinet in favour of his view but George said that it was impossible that this could carry the day as Harold was so heavily committed publicly to maintaining the value of the pound. Barbara said she thought Harold would accept the majority view and George said, ‘No, this involves his leadership. Do you want me as Leader, Barbara?’ Barbara replied firmly, ‘No.’ ‘Then Harold will win,’ said George.

Wednesday 20 July

To the Cabinet again for another four-hour sitting on devaluation and inflation, ending at 1 o’clock. The question now is whether George Brown will resign.

Sandwich lunch at the House of Commons and then went to hear Harold make his statement at 3.30. George Brown was not sitting on the Front Bench and this became the subject of immediate comment. I had a word with Austen Albu and Bill Rodgers. Bill had just come back from seeing him and his eyes were red with tears. They all said what a tragedy it would be if he went and Austen said George had a death wish and somehow wanted to get out of politics altogether. A round robin of Members was quickly drawn up and conveyed to him.

This evening I had a talk to Peter and got home to bed after midnight Caroline told me there had just been a news flash to the effect that George Brown had withdrawn his resignation and was carrying on.

Back to the Commons where I voted for the Abortion Bill, which was carried by 223 votes to 29 – a notable victory.

Then to the DEA where I sat in while George Brown interviewed the CBI about the wage and prices freeze. George put on one of his pyrotechnic displays against Sir Maurice Laing, John Davies, Sir Stephen Brown and other industrialists. He shouted at them, bullied them, wheedled them, giggled at them, but in a way – although it was a sensational performance – I felt they were hardened to it and am not sure that it was as impressive as George thought it was. He has not really got the stability to be Prime Minister, though he is in many ways an attractive and full-blooded figure.

Wednesday 27 July

Lunch with the leaders of the major machine-tool manufacturing companies. I found myself sitting opposite Sir Arnold Hall of Hawker Siddeley. He is an extremely able and cultivated man and I like him very much. A number of leaders of the engineering industry were there as well. It was my job to make a speech afterwards and I described the work of Mintech and the importance of the machine-tool industry and then went on to develop my thesis, which I am going to make a major theme throughout the coming months. It is simply this: what has gone wrong with Britain in the industrial field is not due to two years of Labour government, thirteen wasted Tory
years, six years of socialist misrule, the War, the depression, the First World War. The origins of our difficulties go back much further. Germany overtook this country in the 1880s and indeed we began losing our lead in about the fifties or sixties of the last century.

The reason was that at that time we opted to become an imperial country instead of continuing as an industrial one. I recalled in my speech that in my childhood I had been taught a great deal about the engineers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but that after that the school books concentrated on viceroys and generals, civil servants and diplomats, and this country had simply opted out of industrialism. Thus all the schools had geared themselves to producing the sort of people the Empire needed. When I said this there was a spontaneous burst of applause and one or two people came up afterwards and said I ought to publish the speech. In fact it was a pre-introduction model of a major speech which I intend to make on every possible occasion from now on. The truth is that Britain must now give up being an imperial country and become an industrial country again and only in this way can we reshape our society, and encourage people to regard work in industry as the most worthwhile job they can possibly do.

Friday 29 – Sunday 31 July

The whole family drove off to Stansgate, arriving at 10.30 on Friday. All day doing nothing on Saturday. It takes an awful time to unwind after a week’s work and I have nightmares in which I am required to see General de Gaulle about the future of Concorde, or I arrive late in the office unshaven, not having read my Cabinet papers.

An old Post Office pillar box was delivered today at Stansgate – it weighs about half a ton. I had ordered it as Postmaster-General and it was to cost five or six quid. But as I had left by the time it was delivered they decided to give it to me as a gift. With a sledge hammer we broke off the bottom and gradually moved it over and erected it. I am very proud of it.

Pleasant sunny day on Sunday and we sat on the lawn. I didn’t even open my red box. We drove home, getting back about 6.15. Parliament rises at the end of next week and I shall be glad of a break.

Saturday 6 August

Number 10 lives in an atmosphere of intrigue, encouraged by George Wigg, who is a completely crazy adviser, Marcia, who gets a bit hysterical and Gerald Kaufman, who just sits wisely and nods. What Harold needs is a frank talk from his friends, but at the moment he won’t allow his friends to meet. He’s afraid that if Dick, Barbara, Tommy, Peter, Judith and I meet, we may turn out to be against him. I find the upper strata of politics less and less attractive. It’s not exactly that I’m naïve, but I really am only interested in politics in order to get my job done. Peter is of course a wise bird. He
suggested that I should go and see Harold soon, in order to mend my relations with Number 10 which are very poor at present.

Sunday 7 August

We had another pleasant day and Peter and I went over one or two joint projects affecting Mintech. I rang Tommy and he suggested I should ring Marcia, and he said, ‘Harold was wounded, but is also very loving.’ It was a typical Thomas remark. I rang Marcia and said perhaps I could come and see Harold at his convenience. She said he’d been waiting for me to come and see him ever since the crisis broke. I said I didn’t want to bother him and wasn’t at all sure what had gone on. Marcia said, ‘At your level he expects you to bother him whenever you want to.’ He would also like me to ring him before Cabinet when anything important is coming up to find out the line that he wants to take. On balance, I’m glad that I struck out on my own, since I had been Harold’s adviser for too long and it is a good thing that he should see me in my own right.

Wednesday 10 August

George Brown has been moved to the Foreign Office. It is said that George made it a condition of his staying on at the time of the recent threatened resignation and that Harold acceded to it.

There is a great deal of dismay about the future of the DEA although it may be that Michael Stewart, with his quiet Fabian manner, will keep the thing going on a rather better basis than George could have done. There is some anxiety about George at the Foreign Office but he has always wanted the job and Harold presumably didn’t feel able to stand out against him. I think Dick Crossman’s appointment as Leader of the House is the best news of all as we probably shall get some parliamentary reform and he will now be acting as the liaison between the Government, the Parliamentary Party and the National Executive.

Thursday 25 August

The whole family – without Stephen – went to the Bradwell Nuclear Power Station this morning. They had laid on a superb tour for us and we saw the station which cost £58 million to build and is of a Magnox type, now obsolescent. We walked right into the reactor and saw the gantry that moved the nuclear fuel. We were frisked by Geiger counters, saw the heat exchanger and the turbines and then had lunch with the senior officials of the CEGB who had come to see us. It was altogether an enjoyable day.

The thing that interested me was the difference in attitude between Joshua, who is aged eight, and myself. I had to drive out of my mind all my primitive knowledge of how power stations worked – whereby you burned the coal, heated the water and the steam turned the turbines – and try to think of the implications of atomic energy. Joshua took it entirely for
granted. It seemed natural to him that if you had a nuclear power station, you would be able to generate electricity and because he wasn’t consciously thinking about the process, he got an awful lot more out of it than I did.

Tuesday 13 September

At noon Mr Webb, the Head of NASA, came to see me with Dr Draper, formerly of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was responsible for the guidance system of missiles including the Polaris missile. Webb said the American space effort had reached such a scale that the payload they were going to put up could take over a number of scientific research projects which exceeded the capacity of American universities to provide. He wanted co-operation with us. I was extremely non-committal on the subject of expenditure but expressed a general interest in sharing the dissemination of information so that the technical fallout could be spread more evenly among the Western countries. Webb’s main object of course is to build up a Western space capability in Europe to rival that of the Soviet Union and particularly to see that the French don’t break away on their own and monopolise all the space technology in Europe. His first idea had been to suggest links directly with the Germans, following Chancellor Erhardt’s visit to President Johnson last December when the joint space probe was proposed. He had then thought that it would be worthwhile looking in to see us and I tried to say enough to keep the options open without committing us to any expenditure which we couldn’t afford.

Sunday 18 September

Lunch with Tony Crosland. Tony was in a very curious mood. He stressed how he was trying to cut down on the work he was doing and how important a complete holiday was. He said that he was devolving more and more work to his department, that the comprehensive battle was won and he was leaving it to Assistant Secretaries to approve the various reorganisation schemes that came up.

After lunch we sat and talked and I told him I did not like the idea of having to make every discussion in Cabinet a vote of confidence. I raised the question of the conspiracy and asked him if he had any knowledge of it and he denied it entirely. He said, quite frankly, ‘I never was an admirer of Harold Wilson but I think he’s probably as good a peactime Prime Minister as this country ever gets, even though over the last four months we appear to have been entirely without a strategy and I think he’s been very bad. But in time he will learn to be less gimmicky.’

He thought that Jim Callaghan might conceivably visualise himself as Leader some time and he thought Roy Jenkins was ambitious too, but that none of these things was in sight over the next five years. I don’t know whether Tony Crosland is discreet or not but there is always a certain risk in
talking even to Cabinet colleagues. I don’t particularly want this to get back to George Wigg.

Friday 23 September

To Number 10 for a discussion under Harold’s chairmanship of the Productivity Conference and afterwards he asked me to stay. He said that his reshuffle in August had been the smartest piece of work he’d ever done ‘as there are now six crown princes instead of just one’. This, I think, was his real motive and it confirms retrospectively what one has feared about his analysis of the July crisis. He also said that the only reason he had reshuffled on that day was because George Brown had told his press adviser and it had to be announced before it leaked. I asked if Mintech would have a new Minister of State in the next reshuffle and he said that it was very difficult, as he was up to the legal limit of Ministers of State and Ministers and he had to fit in Patrick Gordon Walker and he didn’t intend to let Fred Lee go, and so on and so on. So it looks as if things are going to be delayed for a while.

Saturday 22 October

Driven to Chequers for the meeting on Europe at 10.45 am, which lasted until 7 pm. There were nineteen Ministers there, and numerous officials who left in the afternoon.

There was a great row in the morning when Sir William Armstrong, Joint Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, said that he didn’t see any prospect at all of Britain being able to be in the Common Market unless and until we had devalued. George Brown got quite hysterical at this thought, because he knew that the Cabinet would be opposed to devaluation, George himself being in favour, and that this would affect our chances of entry. William Armstrong was really in the doghouse for saying this. We agreed that Harold Wilson and George Brown would visit the six countries of the Common Market to do a ‘probe’. Harold was not prepared to let George go alone because he didn’t trust George and he thought that George didn’t trust him. I came to the conclusion that Britain would be in the Common Market by 1970.