The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (63 page)

I said, ‘Look, I have some acupuncture needles and I’ll come and stick them into him any time you like. Then you can have a new outfit.’

Madame Kato asked me if I had heard of pressure points. I said I hadn’t and the Ambassador told me that it was part of Zen Buddhism. Madame Kato began to press my hand and pull my fingers, saying, ‘This will help your heart, this will help your stomach, this will improve your eyesight,’ and we had a good old laugh. It was most unusual because the Japanese are generally rather formal.

Jack Rampton came to see me and we had a helpful talk. I said, ‘While we’re on staff matters, I’m a bit worried about Bernard Ingham.’ He told me Bernard had gone to see him, saying he feared that he’d lost the confidence
of Ministers. I said, ‘I think that’s true but it’s a much deeper problem. He doesn’t seem to take an interest and isn’t very helpful.’

‘He’s an energetic chap,’ Jack said. ‘He has an idea of what a Minister should do and he bullies him until he does it.’

I said, ‘On the principle that everybody does best what they most enjoy doing, wouldn’t it be a good idea to give him a full-time job on energy conservation?’

‘That might be one way of doing it or else I could have a word with Douglas Allen of the Civil Service Department and see what can be done.’

Wednesday 26 November

Hilary’s twenty-second birthday.

The
Western Daily Press
had a marvellous headline, ‘Benn and Son Lead New Market Attack’ and said, ‘Mr Tony Benn, Energy Secretary, and his son Hilary, together with other Cabinet Ministers . . .’ It was because Hilary was on the list of sponsors of the Common Market Safeguards Committee. I was really pleased.

Thursday 21 November

The press reported that Reg Prentice had been rejected by the NEC on his appeal but that some attempt at conciliation was going to be made; Reg has now said there are a number of Trotskyite Labour MPs in the House of Commons. He is doing himself terrible damage and I think his prospect of recovery is slight.

Cabinet, and the first item was the problem of pay beds in the NHS. Barbara Castle said she was faced with militancy by the consultants and the unions and she wanted the Cabinet to agree that she could legislate to phase out pay beds and establish control herself over all private hospitals with more than seventy-five beds in case there was a flood into private hospitals.

Harold Wilson said he didn’t mind that (though he had doubts about it) but there would have to be real consultation and there were some things he couldn’t say now because they would leak. I guessed that, for the first time, he was talking about Harold Lever leaking to the doctors. On every issue Harold Lever always supports the Right, the rich and the powerful against the Labour Party and all it stands for.

Harold Lever himself said he was against a general holding power, and he thought there was great danger in putting such power in the hands of a Minister. There was a risk of bringing the Government down because there would be a Labour revolt in the House of Commons on private pay beds, and he said there was a lot of Trotskyite pressure on the Health Service.

At the end, Harold Wilson said, ‘Don’t let’s decide anything today. Just empower Barbara and me to see the doctors and we’ll have a little miscellaneous committee of Ministers to consider it.’

Listening to the discussion, which could in a way herald the end of the
Health Service, I was reminded that the key question is: Whose interests are you looking after? As a Cabinet it is our job to look after the 90 per cent of the population who use the Health Service and not to worry about the 10 per cent who don’t.

Friday 28 November

Up at 6.30 and with Caroline to visit the Bedwas Colliery.

After lunch we headed off down the pit. There had been a great fuss about whether Caroline could come. Ronnie Custis had told us that superstition prevented women being allowed down the pits. So I made the most scrupulous enquiries and could find no trace of this.

Anyway, they decided to send a young nurse from the pit hospital down with Caroline and a party of about twelve of us set off in all the gear – woolly underpants, a blue shirt, a great orange boilersuit, a donkey jacket, socks, boots and a scarf. It was an old pit opened about 1912. We went down about 2,500 yards into the roadway below and sat in a little train which took us up the roadway. Then we walked in the dark with the lamps on our helmets to guide us. We had to crawl about 300 yards along the coalface to see the coal-cutting machine in action.

One of the dangers pointed out to me by the manager was a break in the chain pulling the machine along, and in fact it did break. We could hear a lot of talking and shouting over the loudspeaker system but they were all very polite. Later I realised the reason they didn’t want Caroline to come down was because they were afraid of the bad language. In the social club later in the evening, I said, ‘That explains why when the chain broke, I could hear the miners up and down saying, “Oh bother it, dash it, golly, it’s broken!”’ The miners roared with laughter.

We were underground for about two and a half hours. Then we came up and had a shower and a cup of tea. The characteristics of the mining industry that make it so remarkable are that most of the colliery managers, under-managers, overmen, deputies and shot-firers all started at the pit and worked their way up and therefore there is no management brought in from the outside. There is no real parallel with the rest of British industry in that sense.

The nation is not remotely interested in the mining industry. If there is a pit disaster, they are heroes; if there is a wage claim, they are militants, but as to the rest they simply don’t want to know.

Afterwards at the social club we met Neil Kinnock and his wife Glenys, a sweet woman. Arthur Hayward, the chairman of the Lodge, welcomed us. ‘Tony, we greet you as a friend. Many of us came over to help you last year because we felt you were a good man and we wanted to assist you during the Election; and we want to make a presentation to you. We want to make you an honorary member of our Lodge in the NUM.’

Afterwards, I was given an overman’s stick and all the miners signed it for me – a lovely reminder of the day.

Thursday 4 December

When we came to Foreign Affairs and the EEC, I said, ‘Can I ask one question about passports? On television I saw a picture of our blue British passport disappearing and a purple European Community passport being substituted. That really hit me in the guts. It is quite unnecessary. Everybody knows that Britain is in the Common Market. You could put European Community on the back of the existing passport, you could stamp on page 3, “This man is a European whether he likes it or not.” But we have got to be careful: like metrication and decimalisation, this really strikes at our national identity and I don’t like it.’

Harold Wilson said, ‘I don’t need to be lectured on Kipling.’

I said, ‘Well, Harold, if you can talk to the Commission and keep the common touch, I shan’t worry.’ Everybody laughed but it, is a serious concern.

Saturday 6 December

There was a very funny item in the
Guardian
this morning called ‘What Makes Tony Benn Run?’ by Martin Walker. It estimated that on my eighteen pints of tea a day for forty years, I would have drunk 29,000 gallons, used 20,000 KW hours of electricity and a ton and a quarter of tea, etc. It quoted what doctors said, what the Tea Council said: that the Jockey club would argue that this was a higher rate of caffeine addiction than was permitted for racehorses.

Tuesday 9 December

Ron Vaughan told me this evening that government drivers had been told to take Ministers a different route home tonight because with the Irish terrorists holding two hostages in Marylebone (the Balcombe Street siege), there is a real fear that the IRA might try to kidnap Ministers to trade them off. I spoke to Stan Orme, who said that his government detective is desperately worried. I rang Caroline to tell her to bolt the front door and close the shutters and not let anyone in. What an extraordinary time.

Tuesday 16 December

At 4, Arthur Hetherington and Denis Rooke, the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the British Gas Corporation, came about appointments to the Gas Board and I agreed to Don Ryder and the three industrialists they wanted. Of the trade unionists, I wanted Hugh Scanlon and Terry Parry of the Fire Brigades Union. Hetherington said, ‘Well, as far as Scanlon is concerned, I want to be sure that the man we have is loyal to the country.’

The background to this is that Rampton has written a note that security
would not allow Hugh Scanlon to see any documents that are Confidential or above – in effect saying he’s a security risk. I had this with Jack Jones, and the NEB last year. So I insisted that I see the security report which led Rampton to write that minute because unless good evidence is produced, I’m not prepared to rule that he’s ineligible. But I’ve no doubt that Number 10 will ban him anyway.

The truth is that Hetherington just does not want Hugh Scanlon appointed to the Gas Board at all.

We came on to the appointment of a woman member. I said I wanted Marjorie Proops from the
Mirror
, a very tough, down-to-earth woman. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘let’s have the Duchess of Kent.’ That really summed it up. They wanted the Duchess of Kent, a Tory industrialist, and two right-wing trade unionists. I wasn’t having it, but was good-natured about it all.

Monday 22 December

I had a brief word with Rampton, cleared the BNOC appointments, agreed to put Brian Tucker on the board of the AEA, then we went on to the Gas Board appointments. Rampton told me that I couldn’t see the security services report on Scanlon and it would have to go through Number 10. Well, this is the first time I have ever been denied information from the security services. I am now (and perhaps all Ministers are) in a category that is not allowed to see security reports. Since Committees of Privy Councillors are supposed to be able to interrogate security officers about these matters, it is an astonishing drift away from accountability. Anyway, I sent a minute to Harold setting out the details and said that, subject to his approval, I thought Scanlon should be appointed.

When I think of all those bloody businessmen on nationalised industry boards who hate nationalisation and, if they are merchant bankers, invest their money abroad, and these guys have the cheek to say that because Scanlon is a bit left-wing, or for all I know he may have been a Communist at one stage of his life, that his loyalty is in some way suspect, it makes my blood boil. What they are really saying is that Scanlon might convey information to enemy forces; of course there is nothing secret in the Gas Corporation except the laying of pipelines and the idea that Scanlon is a sort of pre-war traitor with blueprints is ludicrous.

Thursday 25 December

Stephen and June, Hilary and Rosalind and their sheepdog, Wellington, came round and we all exchanged presents. Our home is a great family centre and it is all a result of Caroline’s love, her care, her attention to detail. She is a remarkable woman. No man is more fortunate than I.

Monday 5 January 1976

We left this morning for Tehran and in the party were Peter LeCheminant, my new Private Secretary, Frances Morrell and Bryan Emmett.

The visit is becoming an interesting one because the Shah is in financial difficulties as a result of the liftings of oil having fallen, so he’s now pushing us to increase our purchases.

Tuesday 6 January

Tea at the Residence and at 4 I went to see Jamshid Amouzegar, the Minister of the Interior. He was involved in the hijacking by Carlos of the OPEC Ministers in Vienna. He said that Kreisky was weak and that Carlos had boasted that Kreisky would certainly concede to the demands of the hijackers, which he did of course.

Carlos had apparently talked completely openly and indeed boasted his view. He had broken with Arafat and had expressed his hatred for Yamani, who he claimed had sold the Arabs down the river. He had remained calm and collected throughout, although for forty-four hours he didn’t sleep at all. Carlos said that sometimes he had gone for seven days without sleep. Amouzegar asked him how he managed it and Carlos said he had ski-ing holidays and that he only did a job like this every six months.

Amouzegar said some of the young terrorists who were with Carlos were very nervous and their hands were shaking. They sat facing the Ministers, with machine guns in their shaking hands. He thought Carlos was a split personality, a Jekyll and Hyde. He gave autographs, asked the Venezuelan Minister to post a letter to his mother, waved to the crowd, and when I suggested that he was a bit of a Robin Hood, Amouzegar agreed that was a fair description. He wanted to be loved, and he felt that he was doing it for the poor.

Wednesday 7 January

The Charge d’Affairs George Chalmers took me in his car to see the Shah and on the way he said to me, ‘I suppose the Shah is really like Mussolini in his early days – with a vision and an idea – before he became involved with Hitler.’ He also said the previous Empress had been completely corrupt, she’d had affairs with young men and with women. She’d done terrible damage but the Shah had been infatuated with her. He said the new Empress was liberal and popular and one had to take this into account.

We were met at the Palace by Vahidi and Etemad, and shown to a waiting room lined with photographs of Podgorny, Brezhnev, Mao, the Queen with Prince Philip behind, and various other heads of state – almost all of them signed To His Imperial Majesty. Then at 11.30 we were shown into a beautiful room with marvellous arms and glittering crystal decorating the walls, and an exquisite view of the snow-covered mountains. There was the Shah looking neat and well groomed. He is fit and well preserved but of course he does look older than he appears in photographs. Every office has
an oil painting or a photograph of him and the Empress. He beckoned me towards him and someone with a movie camera took pictures. George Chalmers, Peter Le Cheminant and Bryan Emmett were all present, Bryan sitting writing notes.