'THIS is the first time I've ever been in this place," I heard one man saying to another last Wednesday evening. He was standing in the foyer of the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow. He looked round admiringly, taking in the busy bar, the seated space with every table occupied, the crowd filling all available standing room. Maybe he thought all this was familiar to everybody else. But the specialness of this evening's event had no doubt brought others who, like himself, weren'
This was an evening with Tony Benn. I wondered what made it quite so busy, why so many people had turned up to listen to a retired politician of 83. Maybe some of them had come, like me, out of a sense of feeling politically disorientated, to try to
understand how the past we thought we knew had brought us to today's strange political landscape where Labour had metamorphosed into New Labour, a creation which Margaret Thatcher has called her greatest achievement. Maybe like me they were hoping he might conjure up the Ghost of Labour Past, something we recognised.
If so, who better than this man to summon up that old spirit? As a child he had been given a chocolate biscuit by Ramsay MacDonald. ("And I've been suspicious of Labour leaders and chocolate biscuits ever since.") At the age of three he had met Oswald Mosley when Mosley was a Labour politician and then again seven years later when he had become the leader of the British Union of Fascists. He had been in the forces at the end of the war, occupied many important government posts, contested the leadership of the Labour Party more than once and been called "the most dangerous man in Britain". He had shaken hands with history.
No wonder we all filed in with an air of expectation and sat staring patiently at two empty chairs on a lighted stage. Let the conjuration begin.
He walked into the light slightly shakily, as if his ageing legs were testing the ground. But once he had taken off his jacket and dropped it on the floor and sat down, he seemed to settle into assurance. He told them to turn up the house lights. This wasn't a show. It was a conversation.
But it was one which began as a solo performance. He talked for half an hour or so about his abiding interests, touching on many matters, including the evil of war, his connections with Scotland, the transforming speed of technological advances. Then he summoned an assistant from the wings, Mark, to help him to take questions. The reason for the help was that he is getting deaf and he might need someone to relay the questions. There were a few questions, then the interval, then the rest of the evening was devoted entirely to questions.
The whole experience was like travelling on an express train through fascinating places. He is effortlessly interesting but he moves fast. He is so utterly polite that he sounds like the least dangerous man in Britain. He often says he hopes he is not offending anyone.
This excessive niceness threatened to backfire on occasion. Most questions were sensibly succinct. But from time to time a questioner arose who seemed to have confused the concept of the question with the concept of a personal manifesto on the meaning of life.
Poor Mark was sometimes faced with a problem similar to having to summarise War And Peace in 30 seconds. One particular man went on so long in a kind of mysterious monologue that some members of the audience, which was after all Glaswegian, began to shout things like "When's the question cumin'?" and "Get tae the question," and "Come on!" It was a tricky moment. The sound of approaching tumbrils could be heard.
Finally chastened, the questioner resolved his filibuster into conciseness: "The question is, how do we resolve these contradictions?" Since no one had managed to decipher what the contradictions referred to might be, laughter was heard. But Tony, remorselessly polite, said, "That's a very interesting question." And I suppose it was. The incomprehensible can be very interesting. And then he answered it. I think. At least I understood the answer.
But none of these opaque diversions affected the pleasure of the evening. Tony Benn can talk riveting sense about many serious things. That touches people, especially people of the same persuasion. A father and daughter in front of us (I know that's the relationship because I heard them talking during the interval) were constantly in quiet communication with each other, nodding and smiling in recognition of shared truths. It was a kind of Scottish Pentecostalism. Instead of shouting "Hallelujah!", you nod and wink.
Tony Benn can also turn hard-earned experience into wry humour. Consider these: "There's always been some Socialist in the Labour Party, just as there are some Christians in the church." "When I left Parliament, I said I was leaving to devote more time to politics." "My life now is a permanent by-election, except that I'm not a candidate and I don't want anyone to vote for me." He's good.
So the evening was a great success. We gathered in the foyer afterwards while he signed some of his books and the bar was busy enough. We were a small, temporary community against the dark outside. The old necromancer had delivered.
It was over. But, like Baldrick, I had had a cunning plan. I had asked to talk to him before the event and he had kindly agreed. I left with the recording of our conversation in my possession. It was like taking the green room home with you.
When I listened later, my sense of him became clearer. The private man and the public man are unmistakably the same. This is admirable. This man has one face for all people. Even many of the exact expressions he used in conversation would be repeated on stage. I don't think this is because he performs even in private but because he has thought over these matters so much and so often that his responses to questions are almost reflexes. But this brings a problem, since reflexes tend to banish the doubt where new thought grows. It is perhaps this which makes him so determinedly upbeat. He has a practised optimism, which is fine, but it is so practised that it tends to ignore obvious fractures in its own logic.
Referring to Alistair Darling's recent statement about our economic situation being the worst it has been for 60 years, Tony Benn suggests a more accurate reference point. "It takes you back to the Thirties. I think we're in a situation where all sorts of things can happen. But then out of the Thirties came the demand for the Welfare State." This is meant to give hope, but I find the hope dramatically diminished when I consider the current enfeeblement of working-class protest and the absence of any political party inclined to try to harness it. Where we are now seems to me to equate with the Thirties in only the most superficial way.
Again, he says: "There were only 50 MPs left in 1931. Fifteen years later it was a landslide for Labour. So as I get older I realise there's no final victory and no final defeat. Every generation has to fight the same battles again and again." This is a fine rallying call but I wonder who will hear it nowadays above the din of the X Factor and Big Brother. Haven't the troops who might fight those battles been demobbed into a culture of social isolation and spectacular incoherence?
Still, I'm glad I heard him talk, a small light in a dark time. I am these days, like many others I should think, an itinerant socialist looking for a home. The Citizens' Theatre last Wednesday wasn't it. But it was at least a kind of variant of Hemingway's "clean well lighted place" along the way. It was good to have stopped there for a while.
The full article contains 1360 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
