Truly a “champion of the powerless”, as British Labour leader Ed Miliband has described him, Antony Wedgwood Benn, or Tony Benn, who died at 88 on Friday, was what politicians tend not to be, especially in a place like India, and especially in the election season, nor for that matter in Britain nowadays.
Tony Benn would long be remembered as an icon of British, even European, public life, even if some of his views were deemed divisive and controversial in a land that was moving to Right-wing capitalism. They, nevertheless, sprang from an original mind that insisted on interrogating power and the powerful. Not for nothing has Mr Miliband called Benn a “conviction politician”.
Twice Cabinet minister — under Wilson and Callaghan — the brilliant orator, writer, ceaseless diarist, and a man endowed with courtesy and charm, the late leader of the Labour entered Parliament at 25 back in 1950. Formerly the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, he renounced his peerage on the death of his father, calling himself “the perennial commoner”, and refused to take a seat in the House of Lords, preferring to go to the Commons. He once called the House of Lords “the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians”. As minister, Benn worked on the Concorde, and as a force to reckon with in the Labour Party, he ensured reforms that would make party MPs answerable to their constituencies. This is an idea that continues to elude us in this country.
