The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (32 page)

Monday 24 October

In the evening we went to the Soviet Embassy and as George Blake, the spy, had just been ‘sprung’ from Wormwood Scrubs there were a lot of rumours around that he might actually have been in the Embassy at the time of the party.

Thursday 27 October

Caroline and I had dinner with the Gulbenkians at the Ritz. Christopher Soames and his wife and Sir Alec Douglas-Home and his wife were there. I sat next to Soames’s wife Mary, the daughter of Churchill. She told me how
bitterly angry and disappointed the family were that Lord Moran had been so unfair as to publish a book about her father’s health. An enjoyable evening – Gulbenkian is an amusing man.

Sunday 4 December

Harold came back from HMS
Tiger
with a document half agreed with Smith. Wilson had been negotiating with Smith on board
Tiger
in the Mediterranean to try to end the Rhodesian crisis. We had a Cabinet specially summoned and everyone was there except Barbara Castle. I had great anxieties as to whether it was right to agree with what Harold had brought back, but I did.

Monday 5 December

Rhodesia rejected the terms agreed with Harold at the talks on HMS
Tiger
.

Tuesday 6 December

Lunch with Solly Zuckerman at London Zoo. We talked about nuclear weapons and he told me that he was keen that Denis Healey and the Defence staff should not be able to get away with further expenditure on nuclear weapons by hardening the Polaris submarine warheads. He said that he and Lord Rothschild were really at one on this.

Thursday 15 December

I called Donald Stokes and George Harriman in together to discuss the Chrysler/Rootes crisis. I put to them three simple questions. Do you want to see Chrysler take over Rootes? Do you think it is worth attempting a British solution – a regrouping that would include Rootes and British Motors and Leyland, in which there might be some government participation? Would you be prepared to bring about a merger between your two companies to try to absorb Rootes if the Government were prepared to help?

Thursday 22 December

At Cabinet I saved the Harrier vertical take-off jet, one of the most brilliant British aeronautical innovations, which Denis Healey always tries to cancel on every possible occasion.

The Rootes-Chrysler deal was approved by the Cabinet with general commendation. I tried to promote the idea of a special concession on electrical cars by taking off the tax and purchase tax so as to encourage their development.

In the evening I did a long and – given my limited knowledge of French – painful broadcast for the BBC French Service.

Thursday 26 January 1967

Had a row over Cabinet Ministers’ memoirs. It had been reported in the
papers that Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle had signed contracts to write their memoirs and a Minister raised this at Cabinet on the grounds that it made some people very uneasy to know that their colleagues were keeping a record of everything.

Dick did admit that he had a contract to write and publish his diary. He had got a woman from Nuffield to edit it for him but out of respect to the Party he had arranged that they were not to be published until after the General Election. But there was still anxiety because if there had been a very narrow Labour or Tory majority followed by another Election, and in the interval between the two Elections, Dick Crossman’s memoirs – with confidences about his colleagues – were published, it could have done enormous damage to the Party.

Barbara then admitted that she had also signed a contract to write her memoirs.

Harold declared that he intended to write three books. ‘One,’ he said, ‘I will write immediately we leave office and that will be an absolutely factual record of the Administration. Later, when I retire, I shall publish a much fuller account in which I will give far greater detail – this is when I have retired from public life. Thirdly,’ he said, ‘I shall write a book about what really happened with instructions that it should not be published until after my death.’

I said that there were some of us who felt resentful that
we
hadn’t been approached to publish our memoirs, and I said that I, too, was a diarist.

Monday 6 February

Premier Kosygin’s visit to Britain, and his plane was diverted from Gatwick at the last minute so the whole Cabinet was diverted too. I drove at 110 miles an hour at one point to get there. Then to Claridges with Soldatov, the Ambassador, and Kosygin.

I might add here that the security services bugged Kosygin during his visit. I know this because I got a mysterious memorandum from the security services, reporting something they had picked up on tape that Kosygin had said about Pompidou. I didn’t find it very useful, as it happened, except that it indicated how very close Kosygin and Pompidou were, due to de Gaulle’s Eastern policy.

Wednesday 8 February

I went to Elliot-Automation with Kosygin and on the way in the car he kept looking out of the windows – I think it was the first time he had been to Britain – and asking questions, ‘What is the cost of that house?’ This was as we were going up through Hendon to Boreham Wood. ‘How long would a man have to work as a worker to be able to afford one of these houses?’

In the evening we went to the Kosygin reception at Lancaster House,
followed by dinner at the Soviet Embassy. George Brown got tight and kept shouting, ‘I want to go home. Are they all Bolsheviks?’ and similar remarks.

I received an invitation to go to Moscow for the May Day Parade and for talks. Sir Geoffrey Harrison, our Ambassador in Moscow, was absolutely opposed to a British Minister attending the May Day Parade because, he said, it would cause great political embarrassment.

Thursday 2 March

To Cabinet, where we discussed Party discipline arising out of abstentions on the defence debate. At the PLP meeting later, Harold made his ‘dog licence’ speech – that each MP is allowed to bite once like a dog but if they abstained or voted against the Government again they would be in trouble. This was a remark that he had thrown off at Cabinet in the morning and I must say that I didn’t like it very much, and I liked it even less when he said it at the Party meeting. It caused tremendous offence because it was very insulting to imply that we were all dogs and he was our trainer. It also gave me a great insight into his attitude towards the Labour Party, namely that we were there to support him and that he licensed the Party, whereas of course we license him because we elect him.

Thursday 13 April

The GLC elections, and Labour were absolutely routed. We are losing support as a government, and this is rubbing off on Labour councillors who are very resentful against the Government. But there is a school of thought, of which Gerald Kaufman is one of the leading exponents, that the Labour Party doing badly has the great effect of sweeping out the most ghastly reactionary old Labour councils and bringing in new leadership – a very cynical view.

Monday 17 April – Ministerial visit to USSR

I went to the airport and flew on BEA to Moscow with Tommy Balogh, Ieuan Maddock, Harry Slater and William Knighton. Caroline was invited but Harold had personally vetoed it.

We were met by Kirillin and the Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, and Gvishiani of the State Committee for Science and Technology and I was put up at the National Hotel. We had a short walk round the Kremlin – it was very cold – and we had dinner at the Embassy with Sir Geoffrey and Dr Alexander, who is the Science Attaché and generally thought by the Russians to be an intelligence man.

Then we had a meeting in the Embassy’s secret conference room, which is in the basement and is suspended from the ceiling so that it does not rest on any foundations. From a corner of the room came the recording of a cocktail party playing continuously over our chat, and Ieuan Maddock worried them by saying that he could bug the room easily by stripping off the noise of
the cocktail party and picking up the vibrations of the suspended room through the earth. But once you are in a room like that you can’t honestly think of anything secret to say! We discussed our strategy until 1 o’clock in the morning by which time I was extremely tired.

Tuesday 18 April

To the Institute of the Tele-Mechanics where we were greeted by Academician Trapeznikov, a very distinguished man who was studying control theory and trying to relate cybernetics to biology and neurology. As we walked around his Institute there was a girl sitting with wires on her arms, picking up electrical impulses. She was opening and closing her hands and on the oscilloscope you could see the electrical impulses being recorded while people were trying to find out how the brain sent a message to the hand.

In the evening we went to dinner with Kirillin and his wife and daughter, Ola, at their flat, along with the Ambassador, and Gvishiani, Academician Artsemivitsch and Academician Keldersh. Madame Santalova was the interpreter.

I had been told by the Ambassador that Russian Ministers never invite British Ministers to their flats or homes and he was absolutely amazed when his invitation came in but it was, of course, because I had asked Kirillin to my home in London. It was lovely. We sat and talked in a tiny little flat where he and his wife and child lived. Kirillin is one of the Vice-Premiers of the Soviet Union and an eminent scientist. We sat in his little library while the meal was being laid and we ate together, then he showed us home movies of his trip to England and having snowballs thrown at him by the children.

It was a marvellous evening and afterwards he told us stories of Azerbaijan Radio, a great joke in Russia. Azerbaijan Radio apparently invites listeners to write in with questions like, ‘Why do the Americans produce better automobiles than the Russians?’ Azerbaijan Radio replies, ‘Why do the Americans persecute the negroes?’ indicating that there is no good answer.

Artsemivitsch, who is a leading nuclear scientist, was interesting. ‘Science, we say in the Soviet Union, is defined as “Satisfying your curiosity at the expense of the State”,’ which is an amusing definition.

We talked about fusion. I had great anxieties as to whether we should go ahead with the huge Culham fusion programme which wasn’t producing results. Artsemivitsch said, ‘Well, ten years ago we said it would take us twenty years to make fusion work and we still say it will take twenty years to make fusion work, so we haven’t altered our view in any way!’

Thursday 20 April

I went to the Institute of Cybernetics and met Academician Glushkov, one of the most brilliant cyberneticists in the Soviet Union and a member of the
American Computer Society. We had a Ukrainian lunch with them and at the Institute I was shown a computer they had built. I wasn’t, of course, in a position to judge how good their technology was, but Ieuan Maddock, who was with me, said it was many years behind Western standards. They showed me one computer which had been specially programmed to put together every day of the week with every day of every year back to 1700. They said to me, ‘Minister, tell us when you were born and we’ll tell you what day of the week it was.’ So I told them I was born on 3 April 1925. The computer creaked and groaned and produced the reply that it was a Friday. I said that was quite right, because I knew the day. So they asked, ‘How do you know that it is correct?’ and I replied very flippantly, ‘Well, I don’t remember 3 April, but I remember how excited I was on Thursday 2nd.’ This was translated into Russian and then back into English and into Russian again and they thought it was rather a flippant joke for a senior Minister to make.

Sightseeing in Kiev and shopping with Mme Santalova. Then we caught the sleeper back to Moscow. On the train, sitting in the compartment next door was Academician Kornichuk, who is the President of the World Peace Council. I went in and introduced myself to him and Academician Glushkov, who happened to be in the train, came into the compartment and translated. We all sat and talked and I asked Kornichuk about the work of the Peace Council and how he was getting on in bringing the Israelis and the Arabs together. He replied, ‘Ah they are impossible, impossible. We tried very hard but the Arabs walked out when the Israelis appeared.’

He was very drunk. He was on his way to Moscow to be given the Lenin Prize for a play that had made him famous, which he had written during the war. He was a sort of Kingsley Martin of Russia – an old intellectual on the left with an international reputation. He started attacking computers in exactly the way that John Betjeman might attack them. Glushkov translated, ‘My comrade says that if computers are in general use they will destroy man’s genius and his spirit and his imagination.’ Glushkov, who was a young chap, laughed and was very amused by it. It was great fun.

There was a lot of champagne and singing in the corridors and Kornichuk and Glushkov and I ended up joining in, with some British songs included to make me feel at home. I was of course stone-cold sober and getting rather tired by this time.

Friday 21 April

The train arrived in Moscow at 9 o’clock and I had a very discouraging telegram, which I might have predicted, from the Foreign Office, signed by George Brown

Tommy Balogh was waiting at the hotel to see me said that we must have a discussion together before the final talks with the Russians. I said, ‘Well, look, I am all tired and dirty,’ so he came into my suite and sat on the bidet in
the bathroom while I was quietly having a bath and he told me what he hoped to achieve and how we must plan it. It was only later that I realised we had disregarded all the warnings in the security briefings. The Russians would have photographs of me in a bath and the Government’s economic adviser sitting on the bidet! We had a laugh about that.

Final talks and drew up the protocol with Kirillin. Then we drove to the airport and got back to London in three and a half hours.

Saturday 22 April

I went to see Harold about the Russian visit and he was very pleased with what had happened. I told him the story about my bath but he didn’t think that was very funny.