The Benn Diaries: 1940-1990 (78 page)

But fortunately, or unfortunately, as we were moving in that General direction, someone told us that Princess Anne wanted to meet us. So we went over to her. She is interested in anything to do with horses. So I asked her about royal carriages and how they were built, and their springing, and whether they made you travel-sick.

We slipped away, avoiding Prince Charles, and sat on a couch, and at that moment we saw the Queen and the Duke just talking to each other. Caroline thought they were going to come over but the equerry swooped on them with Judith and Tony Hart.

Audrey Callaghan came up and had a long talk with Caroline. Then Mary Wilson came up; I gave her a big kiss – I do like Mary. She said, ‘I am so pleased about your speech on the Common Market; the one hope for Labour in the next Election is if we fight against the Common Market.’ So I said, ‘Don’t tell Harold that’, and she announced she had told Harold what she thought of my speech and he didn’t mind at all. She looks so happy since Harold has given up the premiership, and somehow the fact that I am in a continual struggle, even now, with Harold doesn’t really affect our relationship. She is an extremely nice woman.

Audrey invited Caroline for lunch at Chequers on 26 June while the Cabinet are there for political discussions.

We slipped out of the Palace. They hadn’t given the drivers anything to drink and Ron had just been sitting in the car for two and a half hours. Very inconsiderate.

That reminds me: one of the flunkey equerries in uniform was bowing and scraping as he brought us in and Caroline said, ‘It is awfully cold in here’, to which he replied, ‘I am afraid the temperature of the boiler is set by those who work here and they wear a heavy uniform of livery and they think
it is too hot.’ So Caroline said, ‘Well, that’s all right because I am all for working conditions being determined by the shop floor. If that’s what it is about, then I understand.’

Saturday 11 June

Edinburgh. At 9.45 we went down to catch the bus to the Miners’ Gala. It was about 34º Fahrenheit and pelting with rain; we froze for most of the day.

At 11 we marched out with Mick McGahey, Bill McLean, General Secretary of the Scottish Miners, Peter Heathfield, Secretary of the Derbyshire Miners, and Ray Buckton of ASLEF, and several pipe bands. We marched through Edinburgh, down the Royal Mile, through the courtyard of Holyrood House and the beautiful park overlooked by rocky high hills, and finally on to the stage. We were covered but there was no shelter for the audience; it was still freezing and raining, but it didn’t deter them. The people gathered out there, many of them old retired miners, must have had an agonising time.

After a thrilling morning, despite the weather, we were picked up and driven to Bannockburn for tea with Dennis Canavan, the MP for West Stirlingshire. We arrived early, so we went to the Golden Lion Hotel in Stirling and looked in vain for a warm radiator.

We rounded off the evening in the Thirteen Fourteen pub, within a stone’s throw of the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, where Robert the Bruce beat Edward. I went into the lavatory and an old man came in, a bit the worse for drink, saw me, poked his finger in my chest and said, ‘You’re bloody like Benn.’

‘I’m not surprised – I am.’

He shook me by the hand, pumped it indeed, and limped off.

By God, we were tired by the time we caught the sleeper, but it was warm.

Sunday 12 June

One interesting thing at the moment is the way the flamethrower of the press is being turned on me again as it was during the Common Market referendum campaign. They have five lines of attack: that I am mad, ambitious, incompetent, a hypocrite and a red. This week I appear to be all of them at once. Alan Watkins describes me as a boy inventor – the next thing to a mad professor.

Monday 13 June

At 2 Red Adair came to see me – the great Red Adair from Texas who handled the blowout at Ekofisk. He was a modest guy, and with representatives from the UK Offshore Operators’ Association (his biggest customers) also present he was not prepared to be too critical of their standards. He said, ‘Minister Benn, they are doing the best they can, and I
don’t want to tell them what they ought to do.’ Unfortunately he declined to have his photograph taken with me!

Thursday 16 June

Cabinet, and another discussion on the direct elections Bill. Then foreign affairs, and David Owen paid a tribute to Jim’s brilliant chairmanship of the Commonwealth Conference, at which point David Ennals said, ‘I met twelve presidents and heads of state recently, and I must say it was absolutely brilliant, absolutely brilliant, your leadership, Prime Minister.’ I do really dislike David Ennals. He is so obsequious.

Came home and worked late. Caroline came down at midnight precisely and reminded me that it was our wedding anniversary.

Friday 17 June

Yesterday Julie brought in the most fabulous birthday cake in the shape of an 80 for Mother, who is having a party at the House of Commons this afternoon.

Steve and June, Hilary and Rosalind and Melissa and Josh, who by the way has passed his driving test, all turned up and went off in the car with Mother’s present. Got to the House and about 180 people turned up for the party. It was pouring with rain, and cold as anything, so there were heaters in the marquee on the terrace. Elsie Chamberlain, whom Father appointed as first woman chaplain to the armed forces, was there, and the Chief Rabbi, the Lord Chancellor and his wife Polly Binder, friends from the Council of Christians and Jews, the Council for the Ministry of Women and the Congregational Federation; really it was so friendly and Mother was marvellous. Father’s old secretary, Miss Knox, came – I hadn’t seen her since I was six.

Monday 20 June

At lunchtime we had a Private Office party financed by what is loosely known as the slush fund; when I travel abroad I get a living allowance but I never spend a penny of it – I never buy a bottle of whisky or cigarettes or anything. So the allowance goes into the Private Office fund. There were about forty people there.

Wednesday 22 June

At the House this evening, Audrey Wise told me all about the strike of the women workers at Grunwick. She had been down there supporting the strike and she saw a policeman pulling a girl’s hair, so she put her hand on the policeman’s arm. He immediately released the girl and said to Audrey, ‘You’ll do, love’, bundled her into a Black Maria and charged her.

She was shocked; she had never been in an incident like that in her life and she didn’t know what to do. She was discussing how she should handle
her defence, and I said, ‘Why don’t you try saying you were arresting the policeman for assault and battery?’ Brian Sedgemore is helping her to find a good lawyer.

I should mention that the fighting this week on the picket line at Grunwick has been on a massive scale. The police have been behaving abominably, plucking people out of the crowd. It has attracted thousands of people from all over, including five MPs today. Roy Grantham, General Secretary of APEX, thinks it is getting out of control. Some of the police are just National Front men, and it is alarming because it is reminiscent of the 1930s.

Then Jim Sillars came up for a talk. I hadn’t spoken to him for a long time. His Scottish Labour Party in fact is a non-event.

Sillars is a proud man with charisma and appeal; he knows how to use the press, and of course he has been taken up by the media. He thought he would be Prime Minister of Scotland, but actually the press are only interested in him because he split the Labour Party. It shows how easy it is to go wrong, mainly by being misled by a sense of your own importance.

Friday 24 June

Home, and I found that the BP share offer had been oversubscribed within one minute of opening because of the discount. Every single BP share could be sold in Britain. This means we don’t have to sell them in America, but of course we feel committed, so the jobbers will be refusing British bids for BP in favour of New York. The National Iranian Oil Corporation, ie the Shah, is trying to buy I per cent so he can get a foothold in the North Sea. We have handed some of the most valuable assets of this country to the Shah, to the Americans and to private shareholders, and I am ashamed to be a member of the Cabinet that has done this. I am going to put in a full report to the Cabinet so they know exactly what we have done. We have provided a blueprint for selling off public assets in the future and we will have no argument against it. It is an outrage.

Wednesday 29 June

Had a long talk to John Davies, my predecessor at Industry – the ‘lame duck’ Minister, as he was known. John told me that even during the last Tory Government of 1970–74 Maggie Thatcher and Ted Heath loathed each other – so the hatred is not born out of her becoming Leader but is deep-seated. I daresay Heath doesn’t like women and she probably doesn’t like men who don’t like women.

Sunday 3 July

Dinner with the Baloghs, the Shores, the Harts and Jill Foot. Judith was very sharp, directing criticism, I thought, at me.

We talked about Tom Driberg’s book,
Ruling Passions,
for which Michael Foot has written the Postscript. Tommy Balogh said one night when he was
in Malta he stopped in a club for a drink and there was Tom Driberg chatting up a sailor at the bar.

Monday 4 July

To a meeting on the Falkland Islands at Number 10 after Questions. David Owen has suggested a sellout because of our great defensive weakness: ie give Argentina an economic zone of 200 miles around the islands, and keep the islands on a three-mile fishing limit. Then we would just hope that the problem could be resolved peacefully.

My department has briefed me strongly against this on the technical grounds that, if we concede a difference between the economic zone of 200 miles and the land mass of the Falkland Islands, that could be used against us in our median line disputes with the French and the Irish over the Scilly Isles and the Channel Islands.

But the plain truth is that if the Argentinians wished to attack the Falkland Islands they could easily crush them. Fred Mulley pointed out that the Argentinian Government, a ghastly Fascist military dictatorship, had ordered £700 million of warships from Vosper Thorneycroft, so they would be crushing the Falklands Isles with British warships.

The Argentine Government is determined to get hold of the islands, even though they are 400 miles away, and the arms trade, the total spinelessness of the Foreign Office and the general decay of Britain will have combined to put us in a position where we will be unable to do anything to defend the 1,950 people who live there.

Tuesday 5 July

I went over to the Palace for the coffee-pot presentation. It was a beautiful sunny day, not a cloud in the sky, and we drove through the Palace yard while the guards in their red jackets were conducting their manoeuvres. There weren’t as many soldiers as there used to be, but it was fun. There are tourists all over London and it makes the centre of London impossible for ordinary travellers.

We gathered and talked a bit, then we all lined up in a great semicircle and the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came in. The coffee-pot was on the table and Jim stood there and said, ‘Ma’am. The Cabinet considered how we should record your Jubilee with respect – and affection, if I may say so. We decided to give you a gift and I looked up the precedents, and on Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 the then Prime Minister, the Marquis of Salisbury, decided to give her a portrait of himself.’ Everyone laughed.

‘This time,’ he said, ‘we thought it would be better to give you something useful and although Tony Benn wondered whether the coffee-pot would leak, unlike the Cabinet’ (laughter), ‘we thought this would be what you would like.’

The Queen, who can’t say good morning without a script, referred to a bit
of paper and said, ‘Prime Minister, thank you very much indeed. I feel sure the coffee-pot will be more useful than a picture.’ More laughter.

We had all been correctly positioned in strict pecking order – that is to say Foot, Healey, Elwyn Jones, David Owen, Shirley Williams, myself and so on. In the Palace protocol is everything. Shirley gave a low curtsy.

After the presentation we were chatting, when Jim came up. ‘Come and have a word with the Queen.’ He ushered Shirley and me over to her. She didn’t look frightfully well; her face was pale and she said she had a cold, possibly pneumonia. Roy Mason was also standing there and, in a booming voice, he declared, ‘Ma’am, the whole of Yorkshire is looking forward to your visit.’

I said, ‘Do let me ask you this. When were Privy Councillors’ uniforms last worn at Privy Council?’ Well, she didn’t seem to know much about the Privy Council. I added, ‘I think they are the House of Windsor uniforms, Windsor jackets and livery with knee breeches and a sword and so on.’

‘I don’t think my father wore it,’ she said. Well, of course her father wouldn’t have worn a Privy Councillor’s uniform. But in the Thirties Ramsay was always photographed at the Palace wearing it with a cocked hat and a sword.

Then Shirley said, ‘Ma’am, I have often thought that, in addition to reading the papers, which we know you do so carefully all the time, you might occasionally have audiences with Ministers, say two or three Ministers every few months, and then you would understand Ministers’ policies. Because of course, Ma’am, you are so much closer to the people than we are, you know how the people feel, and you may like to know how Ministers feel as well.’ The Queen said she read the papers very carefully.

I remarked jokingly, ‘The only interest my officials seem to think you take in our activities is when we leave the country – because Private Secretaries always come in hot foot and say, “The Queen has given permission for you to go to Brussels.”’ I said she must be frightfully busy. She told me that she did take an interest.

Then the Duke of Edinburgh joined us and I told him that Shirley Williams had been persuaded of his idea, which he had voiced ten years ago at a lunch at Winfrith, that the Queen should attend Cabinet and that the Ombudsman should be a member of the royal household.