Even by the standards of politicians, Tony Benn was remarkable for his lack of hinterland. He had, by his own admission, no interest in music, art or theatre. Nor, until his final years, did he have much interest in sport or TV. He enjoyed films as long as they had happy endings; Love Actually was a favourite. But he was so uninterested in food that his diaries frequently record him eating nothing but bananas.
Even his reading was limited. Invited to the Cheltenham Literature Festival to talk about his favourite books, he confided to his diary that he was “terribly nervous because . . . I haven’t read many books”. He seems to have known almost nothing about fiction or poetry. Meeting Stephen Spender, he congratulated him on an obscure volume for the Left Book Club in the 1930s. In his late forties, he started learning, for the first time, about the English Revolution and discovered to his astonishment the Levellers and their belief in universal male suffrage.
Content from our partners
