Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [156]
Michael Foot, who beat him, was not constructed to be a party leader or potential prime minister, and should not have been elected to the leadership. He was and is a marvellous man. For years he and I used to meet at the Hampstead bus stop from which we travelled together, I to the university, he to the House of Commons or the office of the journal Tribune, an increasingly stooped, casually dressed old man with a limp and a fine profile, shaking his white head of hair with passion. Walking – he belonged to the generation of the great hiking British intellectuals – and public transport were his forms of locomotion. Since he became a government minister only briefly in the 1970s, the official car was not part of his ego.
He was and is a Labour politician who attracts genuine love, as well as admiration for patent moral integrity and for his considerable talents and literary culture. He had eloquence of the kind that belonged to the era of mass meetings and great House of Commons occasions, before the days of the small TV screen: the oratory of the flashing eye, the gesture, the elocution reaching to the last row. He was a highly professional journalist of great rhetorical power, superb at denouncing injustice and reaction. He was a voracious reader and easy writer of some style, never tired of singing the praises of those he admired most, Jonathan Swift and William Hazlitt. Perhaps his capacity for enthusiasm, or his unwillingness to hurt, made him too uncritical. His life of Aneurin Bevan, the great leader of the Labour left, whose parliamentary seat in the South Wales valleys he inherited and in due course passed on to Neil Kinnock, was too hagiographical, his numerous book reviews, including those of my own books, not critical enough. I cannot think of anyone who actually disliked him.
He seemed, even to his contemporaries and colleagues, to belong to an older, almost a pre-1914 generation, the first from the old dissenting provincial middle class to abandon their traditional loyalty to the Liberal Party for the cause of the workers. He was not built for authority but for opposition, a ‘tribune of the people’ who defended it against the presumption of its rulers. For almost all his career in the Labour Party he was the spokesman of the left against the leadership, although they could always rely on his utter loyalty to the movement – notably in 1964, when the left had Harold Wilson’s first Labour government with a tiny majority of three at its mercy. He was not an organization man. He lacked the unfortunately useful gifts of intrigue and horse-trading that give the term ‘politician’ a bad name, and the sense of egoism and personal ambition that drives so many of the most formidable of them. The three years of his leadership were a disaster.
Tony Benn, a good and honest man who almost brought the party to ruin, lacked neither ego nor ambition. After all, he had spent a great deal of time and energy fighting for the right to disclaim his title as a hereditary peer to win the right to shorten his name and to enter the real politics of the House of Commons. In some ways he was extremely well fitted to be what he plainly wanted to be more than anything else, namely leader of the party and, in due course, prime minister. Handsome, looking remarkably young, physically robust – politics is an exhausting game like rugby or chess – and eloquent, he was and remains one of the few faces and voices almost immediately recognizable by the general public. Even his air of eagerness, like a Boy Scout looking for an occasion to do a good turn, his trademark pipe, his proletarian preference for mugs of tea, were assets. Though he had no great political profile in the past, he was moving left in the 1970s. Had he wanted to, he would almost certainly have been able to hold the Labour Party together and see it through difficult times. He looked like winning the leadership sooner or later, and, like many others, I thought he was probably the best man for the job – until