The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (28 page)

Downes and Wolstencroft had been at lunch with him and no doubt stoked him up on their side. In the end he was prepared to accept that it might be the subject of further research. Mr Downes said that if there was a change now it would set them back for six months and the coding in Croydon would have to be stopped, an argument that they had never used before, having previously told me that the coding could be organised in any way that suited Dr Konrad. I decided to drop my opposition to it.

Saturday 11 December

This evening Stephen had a party with his friends. They just bumped about and giggled like a lot of colts. The record player blared out and I could see my ceiling rising and falling by about two inches with the dancing above. Meanwhile I dictated letters and brought my diary up to date.

Wednesday 15 December

The pirate radio letters are continuing to flood in and there must now be 2,000 or more. I decided to make it clear that there would be a gap between the warning and the prosecution of the pirates and I think the prosecutions
cannot begin until after the White Paper on broadcasting. But it was necessary to make a statement about prosecutions in order to take the heat off the Foreign Office, which is under heavy pressure from European countries.

Wednesday 22 December

Back home about 7.30. The Cabinet reshuffle was announced this evening. Barbara Castle is to be Minister of Transport in place of Tom Fraser and Roy Jenkins Home Secretary. I am quite happy to be at the Post Office for a few more months to carry out the changes that I have started. Yesterday I sent a long letter to Harold reporting on the Post Office and giving him an idea of what was coming in 1966. It didn’t call for any decisions but I thought there was no harm in making a private report to him.

Tuesday 28 December

Up early this morning and drove to Stansgate. The place was icy cold and within a few minutes of getting there the main electricity fuse went. So we had no light, heat or power. I rang the Electricity Board and they were there within three hours. After that we huddled round electric fires we’d brought from London and managed to get the central heating going, which gradually took the chill off the house. The place was in a terrible muck and we more or less camped but it was pleasant to get away from London and Stansgate is about the only place where I can relax and forget about the Post Office and politics and almost everything else.

Thursday 3 February 1966

To the Commons to see George Brown. He now claims that he is planning to settle the railway strike and is being stopped by Ray Gunter and Barbara Castle. He behaved monstrously to his officials, sending a senior civil servant out for bottles of gin and whisky and five minutes later ringing his own department in Storey’s Gate to find out where the poor chap had gone. He really showed off. George is completely erratic and irrational and an impossible old boozer – rarely being sober after lunch.

Sunday 6 February

Peter Shore came to collect me to take me down to Chequers. If he hadn’t done this I certainly shouldn’t have got there.

The place was crowded with the whole Cabinet and National Executive – about sixty in all. Harold started by saying that all options must be kept open. We were not there to discuss the date of the Election.

Then George Brown gave a general introduction to the document that had actually been prepared by Peter but for which Terry Pitt was most elaborately praised. Tom Driberg queried whether there would be a statement on overseas policy. Then Jack Jones asked whether it would be
possible to cut defence costs and asked whether one could divorce defence and foreign policy from economic policy.

After that we came to part one of the document, which was on the state of the economy. Jim Callaghan said that the debt problem was not insoluble but he did not expect that the growth rate could be up to 4 per cent before 1968/9. He asked us not to be impatient and said we would have to have priorities within the public sector. He warned us that public expenditure was going up 9 per cent this year and we had to keep our promises in the Election within limits. He predicted that tax rates might have to go up and said that personal taxation was already too high. He rather pooh-poohed the idea of abolishing the rates because of the burden on the Exchequer.

We broke for lunch and I sat opposite Tony Crosland, who admitted that he now had some doubts about the binary system for higher education and rather regretted the philosophic speech he had made in defence of the binary system when he had only been at the Ministry a short time.

After lunch Dick made a most effective speech about the need for a policy covering the whole physical environment and the need to share social furniture between different groups. He thought it was ludicrous to have a large playing field for a school and then find the local authority wanted more open space for general recreation, etc.

Barbara then made a speech about transport in which she said that we must democratise car ownership and extend it more widely, spend more on the roads and get the physical integration of freight traffic on rail and road. She wanted to get away from the concept of paying our way in transport.

We then moved on to the social services, where Douglas Houghton talked about the need to re-examine family allowances and to rationalise social payments with fiscal policy. He warned us that social security – especially pensions – was mainly concerned with women, since 5.5 million out of the 7.5 million pensioners were women. Crosland said a word about school building and how difficult it was to provide new schools to replace old ones with his present budget. He broadened it out to say that we needed to have a poverty programme covering housing, social services and education under a separate agency – rather taking a leaf out of President Johnson’s book. He went on to say that he was sure that there was more money that could be raised by taxation and that we were not at all at the limits of it as compared with other European countries.

Next came Kenneth Robinson, who again complained of the great difficulty in meeting needs under his present budget, which would have to be expanded two and a half times in order to provide for all the hospital beds required at the end of the century and to replace the pre-war hospitals.

We had tea and afterwards Jennie Lee spoke about the University of the Air and Peggy Herbison reported on pensions progress.

Marcia came round and whispered that Harold wanted ‘the group’ to stay behind – Dick, Peter, Gerald and myself. Tommy Balogh, of course,
was not at Chequers. We had a meal with Harold and discussed the Election strategy. It is pretty apparent that the Election will come soon and we were told to come to Chequers again next Sunday by which time Peter Shore has to prepare a draft manifesto.

Home about midnight, feeling extremely tired and full of flu.

Sunday 13 February

Peter Shore turned up at 8.30 this morning and drove me to Chequers.

The manifesto should be a very good one. Harold was rather tired but we had an amusing time. I thanked him for bringing my Post Office reorganisation forward.

We talked at lunch about George Brown and Jim Callaghan and how both of them would like to be Leader of the House of Commons and got as near as we could to discussing various other changes. When the question came up of who would succeed Harold if he were knocked down by a bus, I asked Harold outright and he said that he would want to know who had paid the man who drove the bus.

Home in time for tea with the family.

Sunday 20 February

Collected Peter Shore this evening to go to Number 10 at Harold’s request to go over the manifesto. It is obvious that the Election is imminent, although Harold pledged us to deep secrecy and didn’t actually say so outright.

He began talking about his colleagues. Harold is terrified that if Jim Callaghan became Leader of the House of Commons he would conspire against Harold and weaken his position and we tried to reassure him that he was all right and had nothing to fear. It is extraordinary how a man in his position should have anxieties on that score.

He was incredibly indiscreet and it was interesting that every reference he made to his colleagues referred to their weaknesses. Caroline thinks, and I am sure she’s right, that the way in which he manipulates people is by concentrating on their weakness. I must say I found the evening extremely unattractive. My opinion of Harold was lower tonight than it has ever been before. He really is a manipulator who thinks that he can get out of everything by fixing somebody or something. Although his reputation is now riding high, I’m sure he will come a cropper one day when one of his fixes just doesn’t come off.

Thursday 24 February

To the Cabinet, where it was decided, after a short debate, to go over to decimal currency in 1971.

News from Ghana today that President Nkrumah has been deposed by a military coup. Everyone here is cheering because Nkrumah was such a
hated figure. Much publicity is being given to the release of the political detainees. But of course they will soon be replaced in prison by Nkrumah’s supporters. However wild and uncontrollable the cult of personality has become in Ghana I feel sure that history will treat Nkrumah much more kindly than now appears from the British press. It is hard to escape the conclusion that a newly independent country requires a tough leadership and a focus of loyalty, and although he has no doubt been corrupt and wasteful and has isolated himself from the people, I suspect that in terms of fundamental development Ghana has not done too badly.

Wednesday 2 March

One amusing incident today. I saw Marcia just before I went in to see Harold and told her that I had dreamed about her on the previous night. She told me that she had dreamed that Harold was dead and had not believed it until she had been shown the body. She said she hadn’t dared to tell Harold this story. But then Harold had told her this morning that last night he dreamed that Hugh Gaitskell had been sitting in at a committee – all white. What an extraordinary combination of dreams.

Sunday 6 March

To Number 10 for a final look at our manifesto and also for a strategic discussion about the Tory manifesto, which was published today. This includes a great war on the trade unions, the remodelling of the Welfare State, strict control of immigration and pledges for greater increases in expenditure, coupled with the determination to cut taxation. We discussed the best way of handling this.

Monday 7 March

To Transport House this morning for the meeting of the Executive at 10.30 to go through the manifesto. We got through it quickly, with the minimum of discussion about the prices and incomes policy, which had been carefully worded to avoid trouble. There was some discussion about the nationalisation of the docks but the general view was that we should include a pledge on this. The only actual disagreement was over the phraseology of the sentence dealing with our entry into Europe. I voted with Mikardo and Tony Greenwood and Barbara Castle and one or two others against the firm commitment that ‘Britain should be ready to enter Europe’.

Sunday 13 March

After having started extremely well in the Party and attracted people from left and right to his leadership, Harold has, since he’s been Prime Minister, appeared to be too cunning and crafty and smart, and to be somewhat lacking in principle. It may well be that these are the qualities needed to be a Prime Minister – and to win Elections. I am not expressing my own opinion
about this, but I think it’s interesting to put on record that the more successful Harold Wilson becomes the less attractive he is to the sort of people who campaigned most actively for him as Leader of the Party when Hugh Gaitskell died.

Thursday 31 March

Polling Day. To headquarters at about 9 and from 9.30 am to 6 visiting all the polling stations and committee rooms. We had lunch at the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ and then went out again with our loudspeaker, doing final knocking-up. After the polls closed we cleared up the headquarters, went back to the hotel and began watching the BBC Election programme. It was evident that a big Labour victory was coming, although the size of the majority was predicted in the first place as 150 and began falling.

At 11.30 we went to the St George Grammar School for the count and wandered round. They count terribly slowly in Bristol.

Friday 1 April

From the time we got to the count till our result at 1.35, we wandered round with a radio and an earpiece hearing the victories pouring in. At 1.35 am the result was announced and my majority had increased by 1,600 to almost 11,500. But it was only a small swing to me because of all the new housing. Then we had the traditional ritual with the car pulled up to the Walter Baker Hall, where a television set had been installed. I met and talked to my supporters and then went off to do an interview for Welsh television. Bed at 4 o’clock.

Up at 8 and drove to London. The results continued on the radio in the car and it was clear that we had won the General Election with a majority in the mid-nineties.

One of the most interesting things about the new Parliament is the inrush of new Members, most of them young, many of them professional, and all of them keen and eager. They will be very different from the old Left and from the solid trade union members. The Labour Party is in the process of transforming itself into a genuine national party.