The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (33 page)

Monday 24 April

I was debriefed on the USSR. Otto said to me, ‘You must remember, Minister, that our trade with Russia is only 1 per cent of what it is with Denmark, and it is not an important market.’ And that was the attitude of the Board of Trade people throughout – they never cared about this operation. Nor did the Foreign Office.

Sunday 30 April

I went to Chequers, where we had Cabinet all day on the Common Market and we voted by 13 to 8 for an unconditional application. I made a speech which created a favourable impression with the pro-Europeans, who thought me anti-European. I said we had to cut Queen Victoria’s umbilical cord.

Those of us who favoured the application were not too worried about the conditions because we were a defeated Cabinet. Going back to the war, we had tried as a Labour Government to solve the country’s economic problems and we had left in a balance of payment crisis in 1951. The Tories had tried and had left in the balance of payments crisis in 1964. We had tried and had had to put the brakes on in 1966, and we were now looking for solutions to our problems from outside and somehow we were persuaded that the Common Market was the way of making progress.

Wednesday 10 May

In the evening went to the State Banquet at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, for King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.

Had to hurry back to vote in the Common Market debate in the House of Commons and there was a massive vote in favour of application. Almost all the Tories and the majority of Labour MPs were in favour.

Sunday 22 May – Ministerial visit to United States

To Washington and I met the Water for Peace UK delegation and said we were here to describe our own achievements and to sell our products.

Then I went to talk to Sir Patrick Dean at the Embassy, a man I very much dislike – a typical British Ambassador, arrogant and smooth.

I asked to see Robert McNamara at the Department of Defence and was taken to the Pentagon. It is impossible to convey adequately the tremendous respect with which McNamara is regarded in Washington. Here was the great American defence establishment, overwhelmingly the most powerful in the world, and McNamara, one of Kennedy’s men, had come in and established civilian control and crammed through programme budgeting. It was like going into an emperor’s court – the centre of military power in the world.

I said that we in Britain knew of his military achievements but we didn’t know as much as we would like to know of his control of the Pentagon, and I asked him whether he was interested in the Concorde or supersonic aircraft for military purposes. He said he wasn’t.

Tuesday 23 May

Caroline went to Capitol Hill to see the Senate and the White House.

It was the official opening of the Water for Peace Conference at the Sheraton Hotel and Stuart Udall, the Secretary for the Interior, and President Lyndon Johnson attended. President Johnson came round to meet us. He looked absolutely drained of energy, totally exhausted. The only other man I have ever seen who looked quite as white and tired was Kosygin. The leaders of the US and the USSR really do carry a load far beyond the capacity of a single person. What was interesting was the way the American President moved, with no protocol but absolutely maximum security.

He was surrounded by about five or six security men with their backs to him, moving as he moved, and they had walkie-talkies into which they were talking all the time, describing where he was, looking round, saying check this and check that. It was like a Roman emperor with the Praetorian Guard, only the Praetorian Guard was defending him with an electronic network of security, rather than with actual weapons, though I have no doubt the men were armed.

Wednesday 31 May

Melissa came to have a meal at the House and was kissed by George Brown – she was thrilled. She met Barbara Castle, Douglas Jay, Elwyn Jones and Jeremy Thorpe and she was as happy as could be.

Saturday 3 June

Went to the Farnborough Air Show. Met Pompidou briefly and Pierre
Messmer, the Minister of Defence, who was in charge of Concorde. Group Captain Townsend, Princess Margaret’s old boyfriend, was there.

It was a beautiful display. The French do these things in a fantastic way – far better than we do. The Farnborough Air Show is just a pre-First World War country cricket match compared to the Paris International Air Show. Of course the French planes and French technology dominated. The F-111 came over, folding its wings. The paratroopers dropped, the French Hovercraft was available for us to see, the Concorde was presented as a French plane – it was a marvellous example of the glory of France being exploited.

I came home and had my first ever automatic landing in a British aircraft. I saw the pilot with his hands just by the stick but in fact it landed itself.

Wednesday 5 July

Bill Penney came in to talk about the centrifuge separation method for producing enriched uranium. This centrifuge as a way of producing uranium was based on a development by Dr Zipper, a German scientist, during the war. In order to produce enriched uranium, centrifuges have to turn at enormously high speeds, posing a mechanical problem rather than a nuclear one, and once you have solved that, you can enrich uranium without the tremendously expensive and bulky gas diffusion process.

Penney said that the centrifuge project has enormous military implications because the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons is much greater than before. It means that countries like South Africa, which have natural uranium, might be able to develop enrichment plants on a small scale almost completely undetected, near their natural uranium field. I could see that the effect on the Non-Proliferation Treaty and on other areas would be great. Penney told me that all that had held up the centrifuge system from operating was that there had been no parts able to rotate at the required speed without breaking down. So the development of this use of centrifuge was really a mechanical engineering refinement. Our fear was that if anyone knew that the British AEA was using the centrifuge to enrich uranium, then all the work that had been stopped or never started on centrifuges elsewhere would begin with renewed vigour. We ourselves, after announcing that we were going ahead with a bigger atomic programme for peaceful purposes, had stated that we would be expanding Capenhurst for the purpose of enriching uranium by gas diffusion, and everybody was waiting for the second stage of the Capenhurst development to begin. In physical terms, civil engineers and so on were all ready to move in and build it. But it was now unnecessary to expand Capenhurst and we were afraid that the secret would leak out simply because of the fact that Capenhurst wasn’t going ahead. Anyone who knew the score would be able to read into that the fact that the AEA had the centrifuge. It would mean that Britain could meet its own enriched uranium needs without being so dependent on the Americans
and that the big French plant at Pierre Latte would be the most expensive piece of junk ever.

The Dutch had boasted that
they
had found a better way of enriching uranium and that they were using the centrifuge, but the Dutch had no nuclear know-how and nobody believed them. The Germans were thought to be involved. When I visited the Julich reactor with Stoltenburg earlier in 1967, this was where the Germans were working on it.

It was so important that I went to see Harold at 11.45 that night to tell him the news, and explain to him the implications of it all, which he took on board. Then I went home and I worked till 3.30 am.

Wednesday 19 July

Cabinet meeting on public expenditure, during which there was a sonic boom. It was very funny. I told the Lightning jet crew to fly over London at 12 noon as we were sitting in Cabinet. It was a tremendously hot day and all the windows were open. I was afraid that there would be a frightful din so I passed a note to Harold saying that there would be a sonic bang at midday and should I tell the Cabinet? He said, no. So I sat there dreading it. At 12 o’clock, which we heard on Big Ben, there was a great sound like a clap of thunder. It did cause a shock, and was different from subsonic noise but it wasn’t as bad as one had expected. But Miss Nunn, who was in the Cabinet secretariat, hadn’t known what was happening and went very pale.

Friday 4 August

Because of unemployment in the North East, we were anxious that Swan Hunter should tender for two container ships which were on order, and I had had authority to offer a subsidy for this purpose to Sir John Hunter, who hadn’t bid for it on the grounds that it wouldn’t be profitable.

I called in the directors of Swan Hunter and as quick as a flash they realised that we had to give them the money for employment reasons, so they simply stuck out for more. I think originally we offered them half a million. They stayed for three hours and we tried to arrange it so that we could supervise the accounts. But in the end they went away with a million quid. Absolute bribery.

Saturday 16 November

Cabinet decided to devalue.

Spent all morning in a package of cuts while I had this terrible guilty secret, which I had to keep quiet until it was announced.

Saturday 18 November

Devaluation from $2.80 to $2.40 announced. A great moment of defeat for the Government but I felt cheerful about it as a matter of fact, because this was, after all, what we had tried to prevent for three years and this delay was
itself a great defeat for Harold. The following day he did his absurd broadcast on television saying, ‘The pound in your pocket won’t be devalued.’

Monday, 11 December

To Paris in the HS125. Collected Sir Patrick Reilly, the Ambassador, in Paris and went to Toulouse for the roll-out of the 002 Concorde. It was icy cold.

Chamant met me and I made a little speech. I didn’t speak in French, but I did say that as a tribute to this occasion we would now in future have a British Concorde which would be spelt with an ‘e’. There was great cheering. I said, ‘That is “e” for excellence; “E” for England and “e” for “
entente concordiale
”.’ This went down very well.

In fact, there was a hell of a row about this. The press said it was a capitulation to de Gaulle, whom had I consulted, and so on. When I sat and thought about it I realised that this wasn’t taken as a joke. I had an angry letter from a man who said, ‘I live in Scotland, and you talk about “e” for England but part of it is made in Scotland.’ I wrote back and said that it was also ‘E’ for ‘Ecosse’ – and I might have added ‘e’ for extravagance and ‘e’ for escalation as well! I then discovered that the British Concorde had always been spelt with an ‘e’, but after the French vetoed British entry into the Common Market in the early sixties, the Government gave an order that the Concorde was to drop the ‘e’. So I had only reinstated the original spelling.

But it was a great day and, except for the icy cold, it was well worthwhile. It was nice to see Concorde out of the hangar. After worrying so much about Concorde, you wondered if you would ever see it.

The immediate problem confronting the Labour Government in 1968 following devaluation of the pound, was the mounting pressure for further public-expenditure cuts, and early in the New Year a succession of Cabinet meetings was held to find the money from different departments.

Defence expenditure was a target particularly the commitment east of Suez and the defence equipment budget, notably the proposed purchase of fifty American F-111 aircraft which had been ordered to replace the TSR-2 after Labour came to power. Concorde was also under threat.

In 1968 Tony Benn began the practice of dictating his diary on to a cassette and, for the first time, recorded Cabinet meetings in detail.

Wednesday 3 January 1968

To see Denis Healey, who was surrounded by some of his senior people who were in a very angry mood, and his language was full of f . . . this and f . . . that. He said that the defence cuts were mad; that they were just being done to make it possible to introduce prescription charges; that the whole thing was crazy. He did not intend to offer or accept any reduction in the F-111
commitment. He was also strongly in favour of retaining Polaris. I asked him about Concorde and warned him that if cancelled, this might lead to the cancellation of the Anglo-French military package. He thought that Concorde should go but if I supported the F-111, he was prepared to let others take the lead on the Concorde issue. This was really very crude politicking and I listened attentively and left without any sort of commitment.

In the evening we went to the Crossmans, where we had dinner with Tommy Balogh, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle. We started with a great gripe about the absolute exclusion of Cabinet Ministers from important decisions.

Barbara is very departmentally orientated and is terrified that her major road programme is going to be cut by Roy Jenkins. We managed to get her off that and agreed that a small group of five Ministers – that is to say Harold in the chair, the Foreign Secretary, the Lord President, the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs – should form an inner Cabinet (which would be politically balanced, as it happens), and that other Ministers should be invited to come along as and when it was necessary to air their views on particular issues. But it is unlikely that Harold will agree to this, Harold now being full of euphoria about his success last December in preventing the South African arms deal and not feeling sufficiently threatened to call in his friends.

I am simply not prepared to accept the Treasury’s right to dart into individual Ministers’ departments and find savings to suit their particular policies. Whether or not this argument will survive tomorrow, I do not know. I put forward some powerful alternatives to the educational and health cuts proposed, and Caroline is working with her Comprehensive Schools Committee Group to give me an alternative list of proposals that would reduce government subsidies to private education and save as much without affecting the school leaving age, which is absolutely essential for comprehensive reorganisation.