The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (27 page)

In the end, with only George Brown, Dick Crossman and Eirene White, from the Women’s Section, against it, the Executive decided to accept this resolution which effectively puts paid to what Crosland is planning. I was delighted. We also agreed to accept a composite resolution in favour of comprehensive education which included a reference to the active discouragement of streaming.

Wednesday 29 September

This morning we had the foreign-affairs debate at the Conference.

Harold Wilson came to wind up. All I can say about his speech was that it failed to rise to the occasion. He made jokes about the Tories, he was funny, but also in a way cheap. He quoted himself several times and although there was nothing in particular that you could put your finger on, and he did give an effective answer to much of the criticism that has been directed against the Government, it just failed to be more than a party answer. It didn’t give a vision or an analysis. The main resolution criticising the Government on Vietnam was defeated by 4 million to 2 million after a card vote which Ray Gunter tried to resist.

We had lunch at the hotel with Gerald Gardiner and Elwyn Jones and the usual gang. Gerald was extremely funny. ‘I was once told, years ago, that Cabinet Ministers were allowed to see their own MI5 files,’ he said. ‘So I asked my department to get hold of mine, thinking that this would give me a
good opportunity to judge the efficacy of MI5. After all I would be able to judge what they said about me in comparison with what I knew about myself. However, the civil servants hummed and hawed a lot and so I kept saying to them every week or so, “Where is my file?” In the end I said I wanted it by tomorrow and they said I would have to see the Home Secretary. Frank Soskice was embarrassed and said that he couldn’t agree and that he wasn’t allowed to see the files either. When they wanted to show him anything, they photographed a page and gave it to him but he never saw the complete file. He was so upset about it that I just let it drop.’ Gerald went on to say that he had heard that someone who had insisted on seeing his complete file had been told that it had been destroyed the day before.

It was a most amusing story because not only did it reveal the essential naïvety of Gerald Gardiner but it was a direct confirmation of what one suspects: that there is no political control whatsoever over the security services. They regard a Minister – even the Home Secretary – as a transitory person, and they would feel under no obligation to reveal information to him. Indeed I do not know how the Home Secretary could physically get hold of an MI5 file short of sending a platoon of policemen along to take it out of the filing cabinet without the consent of those who were responsible for guarding it. It also said an awful lot about Frank Soskice as I can’t believe that a Home Secretary could be fobbed off with just a page from an MI5 file if he insisted on seeing the whole thing. I had assumed that my difficulties in the Post Office were because I was not the person responsible for security. But I can see I would have a fight if ever I were sent to the Home Office. That is a job that does need cleaning up and where a tough Minister is required to take control.

Friday 1 October

Back from Conference. Caroline and I went out in the evening to the party given by Shen Ping at the Chinese Embassy to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of China by the Communist regime. It was a splendid party and clearly the Chinese are moving more and more into the diplomatic world. I talked to the candidate from Luton, who told me that he had been in China and was much impressed by the genuine participation of people in the life of the community. He thought the rule that top management had to spend one day a week doing manual labour was a good one and I wish I could introduce it in the Post Office. But somehow I don’t see myself as a cleaner or a postman without the thing becoming just a huge press gimmick. Certain techniques are applicable to a revolutionary society which are not applicable to an established society. But the idea is a good one and even if I didn’t learn anything about the job it would certainly help to maintain a closer contact between top and bottom.

Sunday 3 October

Worked most of the day dictating, and writing to members of the Executive
to see if I can win some support for a new look at organisation, finance and publicity. I know Bob Maxwell is intending to do serious research and he is a potential ally. The big struggle with Maxwell is whether you allow him to use you or whether you use him. My firm intention is to keep some sort of control myself. But when you’re wrestling with a millionaire you do start with something of a disadvantage.

Friday 8 October

Caroline and I went off by car about 10.15 and got to the Post Office Tower well before eleven for the official opening. Among the guests who came were Clem Attlee, who is our oldest and most senior ex-Postmaster General, Charles Hill, Lord Normanbrook, Sir Billy Butlin – who will be running the restaurant – and of course the top brass from the Post Office. Despite the grave Rhodesian crisis, which is reaching its climax today with Harold Wilson’s last meeting with Ian Smith, Harold arrived with Mary Wilson, Sergeant Kelly (their detective), Marcia Williams and Brenda Dew, Peter Shore and Derek Mitchell.

Thursday 14 October

To the Aberdeen Head Office this morning about 9 after spending yesterday visiting Edinburgh.

In fact the real news today didn’t come from my trip in Scotland at all but from a letter written by Mitchell at Number 10 to Wratten about stamp design. It was an astonishing letter for any civil servant to have written for it contains within it a clear statement that the Queen might under some circumstances ‘reject the advice of her Ministers’. This of course does not come directly from the Palace but Adeane had conveyed this impression to Mitchell and Mitchell had conveyed it to the Prime Minister, who has decided to frighten me off by conveying it to me.

There are many angles of this letter which require a great deal of thought. The first is that it looks as if my new stamp policy has been torpedoed. Whether or not the Queen cares personally about it, Adeane and all the flunkies at Buckingham Palace certainly do. Their whole position depends upon maintaining this type of claptrap.

Realising that they were dealing with somebody who didn’t intend to be bullied and couldn’t be flattered, Adeane decided to get at me sideways by going to Harold Wilson and threatening political controversy, which he knew would be sufficient to effect an order by Harold to me to stop. This is exactly how the Palace works. It doesn’t want to appear unpopular, yet at the same time it does not want certain things to happen and it uses the threat of controversy to stop any changes from going too far. Whether or not Adeane will go so far as to say to Heath or Salisbury or Home ‘You’d better watch that Postmaster General, he’s trying to take the Queen’s head off the
stamps’, I don’t know. They certainly aren’t gentlemen when it comes to political in-fighting. But, at the present, Adeane obviously thinks this is the best way to operate.

For my part, particularly after all the unfavourable press comment that I have had, I am not sure how far I would want to go with the new stamp policy. It is only peripheral and I would be prepared to give it up if I could get out of the Palace an official order to stop it. For a piece of paper written in that way would be of priceless constitutional interest. What I am not going to do is to allow myself to be stopped without getting that particular order.

This evening I began to turn my mind to the best way of dealing with this letter. I do not intend to raise it with Harold Wilson. It is too unimportant to worry him with and I don’t want him to give me orders to do anything. I want them directly from the Palace.

Sunday 17 October

A usual family day at home. I went to see Mother this morning. After lunch, we all went to the park and sat in the hot October sunshine. It was far better than days in June or July. The boys played football and Melissa played with a balloon. It was a lovely day.

Saturday 23 October

Surgery at Unity House, Bristol, this morning. It went on for two and three-quarter hours. There was a woman who’d had a miscarriage while on holiday in Austria and had had to pay the hospital bills; a philatelist whose first-day cover had been ruined; a Post Office engineer who said he had been passed over for promotion; an architect with a planning problem; an upholsterer whose factory had been burned down and who had now got into trouble for putting up a portable building one-twentieth of which was outside the building line and wanted help because he had an important export order. There was a manufacturer of ladders who was worried about rising British Railways charges; a woman who had fallen in the street and wanted to claim damages from the Corporation; a real working-class Tory who had come to argue about compulsory-purchase procedures; and there was a telephone call from someone who wanted to know whether educational welfare officers had any part to play in the new Home Office family service courts. In fact it was a perfectly representative surgery.

Tuesday 2 November

At 5 o’clock I went to see Harold in his room at the House of Commons, with my stamps. I thought he was a little uneasy to begin with and this was no doubt because Mitchell had told him I was being difficult. I opened all my stamps and showed them to him and he was absolutely captivated by them. The ones he liked best were of the old railway trains. I should have guessed this since he wrote his thesis at Oxford on the early days of the railways. In
fact he was absolutely certain that I had had these specially designed to win his support. He overrates my political sense. He also laughed very hard about the sporting prints, which he agreed were the best way of presenting new ideas to the Palace.

With regard to the Queen’s head, he said that he had spoken to the Queen personally about it and that she didn’t want her head removed from the stamps. ‘She is a nice woman,’ he said to me, ‘and you absolutely charmed her into saying yes when she didn’t really mean it.’ He went on, ‘I don’t think you ought to go back and argue it out with her again because I’m sure you would win and she really wouldn’t be happy.’ He thus disposed of my claim that the network was operating to prevent this from happening. For my own part, I suspect that Harold more or less invited her to say no in order to keep in with the Palace. But, coming from him, there was no argument and I told him that it would create no problems as I could put a head on every stamp and showed him the cameos. He relaxed and realised that this would present no political difficulties for him.

Marcia came in at this stage and so did Brenda and they looked at the designs and were delighted with them, especially with the costumes. But when Marcia heard about the Queen’s view she burst out and said it was a scandal that in modern England the Queen should have any say about anything at all, and why did she choose the stamps, what had it to do with her and couldn’t Ministers reach their own decisions. I told her that I agreed with her entirely but if there was likely to be political trouble it wasn’t worth it, and I would accept this. I do like Marcia, she’s got all the right instincts and she does Harold a great deal of good.

Anyway, Harold said he would be seeing the Queen tonight at his audience and would tell her that we’d made great progress and probably the right thing to do would be to go along for another audience soon.

At 8 o’clock I went back to Downing Street for dinner with Dick, Gerald, Peter, Tommy and Marcia. Mary waited for us in the living room in the flat where they live and she was sad at having to live away from home. She really doesn’t want to be the Prime Minister’s wife and would love to be the wife of an Oxford don. This is not an affectation, it’s perfectly genuine. She is a nice and unaffected woman.
Private Eye
are bringing out ‘Mary Wilson’s Diary’ as a book and we discussed whether any action could be taken to stop it. Harold said that nobody had read
Private Eye
for over a year now as it was so scurrilous! It’s one thing to run a comic column called ‘Mary Wilson’s Diary’ and it’s another thing to publish a book which many innocent people will think has been written by Mary Wilson. I think some legal action is called for and would succeed.

Harold came in straight from his audience with the Queen and told me that he had been there for an hour and a quarter. ‘We spent ten minutes on Rhodesia, and an hour and five minutes on stamps,’ he said. I’m sure this reflects the proportion of the Queen’s mind which is devoted to Rhodesia as
compared with stamps. He told me that she was perfectly happy to accept a silhouette, and to accept the rulers of Britain, including Cromwell and Edward VIII, but that her head had to appear on everything and the press was not to see any stamps without her head.

Anyway there it rests. The plain truth is that the Palace has won on the main point and I have been defeated by Palace pressure exercised through the network on me, using the Prime Minister as an intervening force. Harold, who is so busy using the Queen on Rhodesia and wants it to be known that he enjoys the closest possible relations with her, is prepared to sacrifice this for a quiet life, and freedom from political criticism. Within its limited power the monarchy and all it stands for is one of the great centres of reaction and conservatism in this country.

I heard a little bit more about Derek Mitchell’s attempt to get Marcia Williams out of Number 10. There is a big tussle going on. Marcia is infinitely the most able, loyal, radical and balanced member of Harold’s personal team and I hope he resists efforts to dislodge her.

Thursday 18 November

I worked over lunch and at 2.30 Dr Konrad came to see me. He is a psychologist who had done a report for the Post Office on alpha-numerical codes covering telephones and postal coding. The Office want to do a postal coding system which will consist of two parts: the first for despatch or outward sorting, consisting of postal districts in London and a simple extract code for other cities, the second part for inward sorting or despatch and they suggested that one digit followed by two letters would be best [eg WIA 4WW]. In my opinion this is confusing.