Even before I first met him in the mid 1990s, Tony Benn was always a source of endless fascination for me. I remember buying a volume of his diaries from a second hand bookshop in Cambridge and being transfixed. By the time I met him I had bought all the other volumes and I remember taking them down to the House of Commons for him to sign. He got out his red pen and put a different personal message in each of them. This became particularly poignant last November when I met him for the last time. We were sitting in the living room of his flat, just round the corner from the Holland Park house which he and his beloved Caroline had spent their whole married life in. I had just done a 25 minute interview with him, which had clearly tired him greatly. I produced three more volumes for him to sign. He started signing them and then instantly fell asleep. It was a rather touching moment. I couldn’t decide what to do, so I just let him have a little snooze. He woke up after a couple of minutes and carried on as if nothing had happened. His writing had become very spidery and almost illegible. I felt very sad as I bid him farewell. I just knew that it would be the last time I would see him. Over the years he had become a friend. He always called me his “favourite Thatcherite entrepreneur”, not that I am sure he knew very many others. We had so much in common, yet politically so much divided us.

Tony famously said it politics was all about the “ishoos”, not personalities. Yet, either knowingly or unknowingly, he cultivated a bit of a cult of personality. He loved the hero worship he would attract during his one man theatre shows. He adored people coming up to him in the street and paying their respects. He craved the approval of the crowds he would address up and down the country. I think he had convinced himself it was all about the ideas he was propagating, but in reality they came to see him because of his personality, not necessarily because they were waiting to be convinced by his latest political thoughts. The theatre audiences were a mix of out and out left wingers, but the majority were middle class Tories who came out to see someone they believed to be a conviction politician. He was fond of saying that you could divide politicians into two categories – signposts and weathervanes. He liked to think of himself as a ‘signpost’ and in many ways he was, although he did change his mind on many great issues of the day including nuclear power.
In his later years he was known predominantly as an anti-war campaigner. His stance on military conflict was at least consistent and he was a prominent supporter of CND throughout his life.

As a politician in government I am not sure he could be described as an unalloyed success, but I’ll leave others to evaluate his time in Harold Wilson’s cabinets. From his diaries he was never far away from resignation but could never quite bring himself to do it. He knew if he did he would become a marginalised figure with no real power, and one thing Tony Benn understood very quickly was that if you were in power, you had to wield it and lead public opinion.

In some ways Tony Benn successfully transformed his reputation from the ‘most dangerous man in Britain’ to the nation’s favourite political uncle. And it was quite a transformation. When I was a teenager in the 1970s to me, politically, he was the devil incarnate. He represented all that was wrong about the left of the Labour Party. His flirtations with the extreme left ensured that the Labour Party remained fractured throughout most of the 1980s and it is not an exaggeration to say that he was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the SDP in 1981. Some believe he was the single reason Labour was out of power for 18 long years in the 1980s and 1990s. That is inevitably somewhat of an exaggeration, but all exaggerations have a kernel of truth about them.

The Tony Benn I knew was a kind man. A family man, who idolised his children and grandchildren. He was tickled pink to see his granddaughter Emily stand in the last general election while still a teenager. He was so proud of his son Hilary when he made it into the cabinet. He positively beamed with pride, and it shines through the pages of his diaries. He went out of his way to help people and was always available to impart his words of wisdom to a pliant media.

I did several interviews with him. Apart from the most recent one for LBC back in November 2013, the one which sticks in my mind is one I did for Total Politics in 2009. I spent more than two hours with him in his basement in Holland Park and the result was an intensely personal exchange, which I wrote up verbatim in an In Conversation format. The whole time he puffed away on his trademark pipe. I remember walking out of the house after the interview thinking I had interviewed someone who was a truly great politician. But was he one of the political greats of the 20th century?

I’m not sure. I think he was certainly one of the great political personalities, but apart from serving in three cabinet positions and being an inspiring figure what did he actually achieve? He failed in his bid to become deputy leader in 1981, split his party and left parliament in 2001 to “spend more time on politics”. I don’t mean to diminish him as a figure of political importance, but if you drew up a list of top 20 post war Labour politicians, I wonder if he would really feature on it.

I was proud to know him. He enriched my life. I felt I was sitting at the feet of someone of historical importance and often found myself hanging on his every word. We agreed on more than we expected to. He developed an interesting strand of euroscepticism in later life and we shared common ground on many constitutional issues. But Tony was not a massive original thinker in his later years. He adopted and championed many causes, but in terms of changing the political weather, those days really ended in the 1980s.
In my Total Politics interview I asked him what he’d want as his epitaph. This was his reply.

“All I’d want on my gravestone, would be: HERE LIES TONY BENN: HE ENCOURAGED US”.

Note: You can hear my last interview with Tony Benn, recorded in November 2013 HERE

You can read my extended In Conversation interview with Tony Benn from 2009 HERE