Michael White's Blog, page 44

Armchair warriors in the Commons form the Charge of the Lite Brigade

An unlikely popular front of MPs urged foreign secretary William Hague not to rule out military options over the Crimea crisis

Impotence is rarely a very dignified position, either in public or in private life. But MPs bombastically tried to persuade themselves that the West's flaccid response to Russian banditry in Crimea is a Churchillian stiff upper lip, though it was Churchill the realist who signed away half Europe at Moscow in 1944 with a tick of Joe Stalin's blue pencil.

For a man who knows his trousers are round his ankles the foreign secretary, William Hague, made a half-decent job of pretending Britain and its cash-strapped war-weary allies can do much to prevent Vladimir Putin from reincorporating Chekhov's sunny peninsula into Mother Russia. There was talk of cancelled summits, travel visas and ship visits, which will not trouble the Kremlin much. Defence export licences may be canned, Christmas card lists savagely trimmed. That will hurt.

It was not enough for armchair warriors on both sides. An unlikely popular front consisting of Labour's Chris Bryant and Aldershot Tory Gerald Howarth (in normal circumstances he would want Bryant arrested) urged Hague not to rule out military options. Both armchair warriors are rejoining their regiment, the Habitat Lite Infantry (Catering Platoon). Press releases are being mobilised and soundbites reloaded, just in case.

With arch-realist Sir Peter Tapsell leaving the chamber early (Sir Peter is old enough to have endorsed his friend Catherine the Great's capture of Crimea in 1783) it left the poorly-attended debate in the clutches of backbench hawks. Yet halfway through the Charge of the Lite Brigade something unexpected happened. Vermillion-faced Edward Leigh, a near-extinct volcano from the Thatcher era, erupted in a brave, if unheroic, contribution.

Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) had just urged Hague to hit the Russian oligarchs where it hurts – in their London palazzos and at their kids' school (Etonski, of course). Laura Sandys (South Thanet) told him to whack their ill-gotten bank holdings in Cyprus and the City. Dominic Raab (Esher) asked: "Do we want to be a safe haven for international mafia lords, London to be a haven for their dirty money?"

For some years now, the correct realist's answer has been "yes please". But no one said so. Instead Raab argued that Britain needs its own Magnitsky Law to hound suspected killers of the murdered Moscow banker. A perfectly good idea, so Andrew Lansley later rejected it, though he is willing to contemplate imposing health reforms on Russia as a punishment.

Steady on, protested Leigh, whose wife is some sort of White Russian, her ancestors shot by the Reds, Liverpool fans to a man. I am not pro-Russian or pro-Ukraine, but we should understand Russia's feelings towards Ukraine: "It is not just tyrant Putin invading a foreign country,'' it was much more complicated, the MP protested. "There is no point in the House of Commons if we all agree with each other all the time."

Naturally this went down badly with MPs who can usually make a virtue of disagreeing all the time. They had just spent an hour nit-picking over Putin-esque plans by Chris Grayling, the minister for rough justice, to cut lawyers' fees and electronically tag pro-EU Tory MPs, those targeted by No 10's extremist taskforce. Grayling is also contracting out the probation service to the KGB whose rehabilitation programme has impressed ministers. Few offenders are ever heard of again.

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Pro-Europe Tories break their vow of silence on Brussels

When Conservative Mainstream launched a leaflet in favour of EU membership, Ken Clarke showed up to reminisce

When Tory MP Laura Sandys announced she would not be seeking re-election after just one term in parliament, speculation was rife. Was her decision simply prompted by family factors, by gender bias in Dave's Britain, or even by the Ukip menace in her Kentish constituency, birthplace of Viagra? Yesterday all became plain.

Reckless woman that she is, Sandys turns out to back government policy on Europe. Shock, horror, she wants to reform the EU and then to STAY IN, much as Dave secretly does. Worse, the plucky MP is prepared to say so, publicly and in daylight without police protection from revolving-eyed colleagues who want to cast off Brussels much as Alex Salmond hopes to shed London.

In a provocation worthy of Russian special forces in Crimea, Sandys summoned a Westminster press conference in her capacity as chair of Conservative Mainstream, a group of Tory moderates who have taken a Trappist vow of silence for fear of upsetting the Daily Beast. To get round their vow some Trappists have produce a pro-EU pamphlet in favour of continued British EU membership. It contains enough long words to discourage a wide readership in Fleet Street. This column will not reveal their identities. They include vulnerable, young MPs with their whole lives ahead of them, some with wives or loved ones (in some cases both).

Speeches were duly made to the general effect that in a world of big trade blocks 60-million-strong Britain might have more clout inside a 500-million-strong market for its goods and services. It was also asserted that the moon is not made of green cheese, as sometimes claimed on the Taliban wing of the party.

As the only survivor of Ted Heath's long march into Europe (1961-73) Ken Clarke arrived late and sat at the back, waiting to be called to tell war stories to young colleagues who were doing GCEs or squeezing zits at the time. He duly obliged, casually duffing up Cameron's (aged six when Ted signed up for Brussels) renegotiating strategy in passing.

Warming to the futility of bogus renegotiation, Clarke recalled that "sole responsibility" for Britain's 1975 referendum on EU membership lay with Tony Benn ("whom we are all lamenting"). Cynical nonsense it had been too, he added. Within six months of being trounced 2 to 1 by the yes vote, Benn was "taking no notice of the result because he wanted a centralised socialist state".

All this was uttered with cheerful disdain by the Nottingham watchmaker's son. It contrasted sharply with the lachrymose tone later adopted by the speaker, John Bercow, when he drew the attention of any MPs who might have missed it to the fact that Benn Senior had died. More than that, Mr Speaker announced that party leaders would get their chance to pay tributes at PMQs on Wednesday, MPs (on all sides!) in a special session on Thursday. There will also be a book of condolences.

This was distinctly odd. Monarchs and long-gone prime ministers get the VIP treatment when they die. Nelson Mandela was accorded a similar and unprecedented outpouring in December at the close of his heroic and forgiving life. An MP for 50 years, Tony Benn was also widely admired, a middling cabinet minister who last held office in 1979, controversial even in his own party. It is not quite the same. Don't MPs have a day job, apart from paying tribute to their own?

Apparently not. Mr Speaker kept referring to "Tony" as if they were old chums. It seems unlikely, since Bercow was still an obnoxious rightwing brat when Benn left the Commons in 2001, his break with Thatcherite Toryism yet to come. By comparison, Tony Benn's leap to the left was barely a hop. Where will it end? With a lying-in-state for Paul McCartney or Simon Cowell? A book of condolences for George Galloway?

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Moscow's Crimea success could lead to it redrawing Ukraine's eastern border

Risk for west is Putin's ambition to reclaim Russian-speaking majority areas to create a rival counterbalance to the EU

Vladimir Putin is a KGB professional who shows every sign of being a bad man, quite possibly a prodigious thief as well. Offensive though it is to the memory of millions of Russians murdered by Hitler (far more even than his hero Stalin killed), Putin's orchestration of Crimea's defection from Ukraine offers a disturbing comparison with the German annexation of the Czech Sudetenland with Neville Chamberlain's connivance in 1938.

But Putin and the joyful Russian-speaking citizens of Crimea do have a case to which outraged western denunciations make little concession despite their diplomatic impotence and military passivity. "We are not talking about military options … this is not a Crimean war," the foreign secretary, William Hague, said on Monday morning. He invoked economic sanctions which will hurt Russia (and us), but he spoke in the spirit of Chamberlain.

Well, that's good. Most wars are more easily started than ended as we should remember in this 1914 anniversary year. The Anglo-French Crimean war of 1853-56 was an ill-conceived shambles, not forgotten locally. So were some of our more recent interventions, notably Iraq and Afghanistan, which many players in the international game of selective moral indignation regard as being as illegal as this month's manoeuvres on the Crimean peninsula.

In a bad-tempered, despairing article in the Guardian last week, Marina Lewycka set out some of the historic context of this troubled region with its hard-to-defend borders, vast and fluid. As a Sheffield-based novelist and lecturer of Ukrainian origins – on both sides of the ethnic divide – Lewycka has earned her right to denounce our petulant ignorance as well as Putin's cynicism.

As she reminds us all, fearsome and traumatic things have happened in Ukraine well within living memory, which is why some western Ukrainians, Catholics who were once part of west-facing empires and many ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces so mistrust and abuse each other when a political crisis turns bad. Try the Yale history professor Timothy Snyder – or here on Cif for a different voice on the bloody past.

It helps to explain why Moscow's glib claims of a "fascist" takeover in Kiev resonate with so many Russians. It's a familiar theme, the Soviet equivalent of "reds under the beds" in the west, especially in the American heartlands far from oceans and the wider world beyond. Kiev has made enough mistakes and has enough grubby bedfellows – not many, but clearly enough – to make the charge credible. So what happened in the popular overthrow of Moscow hack and klepto-president (both sides agree on that detail) Viktor Yanukovych was a pro-western coup, right comrades?

It's all much more nuanced than that. A Crimean referendum staged under what amounts to Russian military occupation – navy and soldiers – and boycotted by the minority Ukrainians and (12%) Tatars (expelled and butchered by Stalin) is pretty bogus. But it doesn't change the fact that Crimea is an anomaly, Russian since 1783 and transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 – possibly when the Soviet leader was drunk, says Marina Lewycka.

Steve McQueen, the Oscar winner, might note in passing that up to two million Russians and Ukrainians were sold into slavery in the nearby Ottoman Empire when Crimea was still under Mongul Tatar control. That's another local bit of folk memory which may help explain deep mutual fears.

Certainly Krushchev's quixotic gesture was an odd one, made in circumstances when the USSR still thought of itself as the wave of the future, when those ethnic divisions not dissolved in blood by Stalin would melt away in the brave new world. As nationalist leaders today – Nigel Farage and Alex Salmond among them – show, nationalism is as potent a brew as ever. Even mature democracies like ours find the issue tricky. Whose side would a Murodch-owned Sunski be on today if it was published in Crimea? Precisely.

Moscow's clumsier versions of the Sun have been in overdrive. No wonder that most ethnic Russians in Crimea have voted this weekend for Mother Russia over the relative freedoms they enjoyed in Ukraine. Germans living on the Saar coalfield between France and the Third Reich did exactly the same in their 1935 referendum: they voted for Hitler.

And that's the real risk the world faces now. President Putin is the sort of leader in the sort of regime which likes to get the advice it wants to hear. The Kremlin must be thrilled with its recent string of diplomatic successes, making the West look even more feeble and divided over Syria than it actually is, staging the Sochi Olympics without those widely predicted (by us) terrorist attacks – and now calling Nato's bluff in Crimea.

The risk is surely that this success will embolden Moscow to redraw Ukraine's eastern boundaries to reclaim Russian-speaking majority areas, Sudeten-style. Not too much we can do about that either. Then what? Putin has ambitions to create a rival counter-balance to the EU, recreating a form of the old Czarist/Soviet multinational empire that crashed after the Berlin Wall, the tragedy of his life.

When Nato and the EU rapidly expanded to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact bloc in the 90s – into Hungary, Poland (etc) and the Baltics, later into Bulgaria and Romania too – I could see the short-term rationale, but feared the long-term consequences. Russia ( "always too weak and too strong" in the old saying) would feel encircled and strike back when it could.

In response, America would not honour its hastily-given pledges, even without a timid president, born in Hawaii, to whom Estonia must be "a far away country of which we know little", as Chamberlain said when selling out Czechoslovakia. The EU can no longer punch holes in a paper bag. Putin must sense opportunity. It is hardly surprising that the Poles (the most successful EU adopters) and the Baltic mini-states are jittery about Crimea. If the west does impose its threatened sanctions it may give Putin – who fears his internal democratic movement, as the Guardian's editorial points out – an excuse to squeeze vulnerable neighbours.

As in 1914, the risk of miscalculation is huge. US and EU electorates are fed up with costly foreign wars which do not deliver the peace and stability they were supposed to bring. But they will react with alarm if Russia turns off its gas taps without the kind of alternative sources of supply that Berlin is already talking about. Qatar, anyone?

Moving any pieces on our interconnected global chess board has consequences. Leaders who are seen to be weak (Barack Obama) and those who rejoice in being seen as strong (Vlad the bare-chested) while actually vulnerable economically, are both capable of compensatory error.

Global markets, which dislike uncertainty, are already punishing Russia via falling share prices, suspended investment and a declining rouble. Oligarchs are nervously shifting ill-gotten billions out of banks where their assets may be frozen. It will all unsettle even further a world order that is fragile. Should we stage a referendum to return Kensington to Mother Britain while the locals still retain a non-Russian majority there and before un-badged soldiers with snow on their boots start coming off EasyJet flights from Moscow?

Don't laugh. That's what Krushchev probably did when a far-sighted adviser warned him not to give away Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 and found himself locked up for his pains. And that's another thing. Has anyone checked the small print of Washington's bargain of the 19th century – it paid two cents an acre for the Alaska Purchase from Russia in 1867?

At the time the Czar was strapped for cash (his Crimean war with Britain had been expensive) and sold it. In a fluid, opportunist world, some sharp-suited Kremlin lawyer may be about to suggest oily/icy Alaska is Russia's equivalent of the Parthenon Marbles and ask for it back. Nothing is for ever. Ask them in Crimea.

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Tony Benn: 'a giant of 20th century politics' - video

Guardian writers Giles Fraser, Seumas Milne, Anne Perkins and Michael White pay tribute to Tony Benn who has died at the age of 88

Seumas MilneMichael WhiteAnne PerkinsPhil MaynardElliot SmithGiles Fraser

Tony Benn: the establishment insider turned leftwing outsider

The upper-middle class nonconformist radical had a tireless reformist zeal and was loved and loathed in equal measure by both the right and the left

Tony Benn was one of the most mesmerising and divisive figures in the mainstream of postwar British politics. An establishment insider who became a rebellious leftwing outsider, a cabinet minister turned street protester and reviled prophet of capitalism's demise, he nonetheless managed in old age to become something of a national treasure. "It's because I'm harmless now," he would explain.

In the course of a 60-year career in public life which left a more lasting impact on the constitution than on the direction of governments or their policies – first as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, briefly as Viscount Stansgate, and from 1973 as plain Mr Benn – he was both loved and loathed in equal measure by countless voters who had never met him.

As such Benn stood in a long line of upper-class, nonconformist radicals with a moral crusader's unsettling zeal, as recognisably English as a character out of Anthony Trollope or even PG Wodehouse. His former Oxford tutor, later his Notting Hill neighbour and cabinet colleague, the cerebral Tony Crosland, was devoted to him even though he accused Benn – known to some intimates as "Jimmy" – of working so hard that "he creates endless crises". Crosland would say affectionately: "Nothing the matter with him except he's a bit cracked."

It was a lack of any direct dealings with their troublesome, often self-righteous colleague which characterised many of "Jimmy's" more ardent admirers in the opinion of detractors less forgiving than Crosland. To them he symbolised disastrous and rancorous splits in the 1970s and 80s, a decade of unrealistic self-indulgence made worse when fellow-leftwingers, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock led the party. Between the left and Roy Jenkins's rightwing SDP split, it cost them power for 19 years.

Surviving Bennites and their leftwing allies in the unions and grassroots labour movement were quick to counter criticism with praise for his far-sighted warnings against globalisation or unaccountable corporate power and his resilient optimism, after Benn's death at 88 was announced on Friday. With the possible exceptions of Aneurin Bevan and Arthur Scargill on the left and Margaret Thatcher or Enoch Powell on the radical right, no mainstream postwar political figure aroused such partisan loyalty – or fear.

Benn diaries

Throughout his adult life Benn was also a prolific keeper of what became nightly diary notes, later tape recordings, the basis of eight very readable volumes of diaries, the last published in 2013 as A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. They provided insights into both his happy family life – married for 50 years to Caroline, an American of similar outlook – and Benn's take on the politics of the day, both high and low, plus gossip. In old age, the diaries were augmented by live performance on stage and TV, where he was as much a hit in the Tory home counties as in Labour heartlands. Even his worst enemies did not deny he was an excellent mimic who could be very funny.

The final diary entry concludes on a characteristically upbeat note that (also characteristically) merged both streams of the narrative: "I'm now waiting for the great-grandchildren to come along, as I think every younger generation brings fresh ideas into the world." By this stage his son Hilary had achieved the rare dynastic feat of becoming a third generation Labour cabinet minister and one granddaughter, Emily Benn, had already been a Labour parliamentary candidate at 20.

Lasting impact

With hindsight Benn's most lasting impact on politics has been his leading role in giving party activists – even in a reluctant Conservative party – a role in choosing their leader and in making "jobs for life" MPs more accountable via routine reselection procedures. Potentially of more significance in the future is another of his campaigns, to introduce referendums, a device that had previously been despised in Britain as a tool of despots.

Not for the first or last time, the practical outcome of his initial success – the 1975 referendum on UK membership of the then European Economic Community (EEC) – proved less satisfactory to him. Despite his prediction of victory on the morning of polling day, the cross-party No campaign, in which Benn was one of seven cabinets ministers to oppose Harold Wilson's Yes campaign, lost by a margin of 2-1. Benn's switch from youthful pro-Europeanism to hostility remained unswerving until his death. For him, as for Tory Eurosceptics, the core issue was national sovereignty.

Among other successes he also brought about the right of hereditary peers such as himself to renounce their inheritance. Aware that he would be debarred from the Commons when his father died (Tony's admired older brother Michael had been killed in the war) he also sought a change in the law. A three-year battle from 1960-1963 saw an election court declare a Tory "win" in Bristol SE when the peerage rules had declared the seat vacant: as Labour's defiantly readopted candidate Benn had won more votes, but was debarred as Viscount Stansgate. The showdown ended in victory though – as often with Benn's campaigns – the law of unintended consequences kicked in. Within months of Benn's reform it had allowed the 13th Earl of Home to renounce his peerage too and succeed Harold Macmillan as Tory PM. He ran Labour's Wilson very close in the 1964 election.

The pattern would recur. In his wider political campaigns Benn was usually less successful, sometimes even counter-productive. British voters did not opt to reject nuclear weapons or US military suzerainty, to leave Europe or embrace the "siege economy" alternative to both postwar social democracy and Thatcherite free markets. It was a strategy which came to a head in the traumatic IMF loan crisis of 1976 when the cabinet's leftwing members opposed the Jim Callaghan/Denis Healey cuts but was itself divided. Years later the former chancellor Healey admitted he had been wrong: the IMF loan was not needed.

Ministerial career

Repeatedly defeated by events and the electorate over the big issues, Benn enjoyed lesser ministerial successes, including a key role as minister for technology (1966-70) with the merger of ailing car firms into British Leyland (1968). It was part of an interventionist strategy that saw a similar solution in ICL, the new national champion created from computer mergers. As postmaster general (1964-66) he oversaw the introduction of the Girobank and famously commissioned some stamp designs that did not include the Queen's head. She inspected them without complaint, but No 10 phoned with a veto as soon as Benn was back at his desk.

When energy secretary (1976-79) he obtained better terms from the new North Sea oil companies than his Tory predecessors. He had been switched from the industry brief (1974-76) after a series of clashes with colleagues and officials, not least over his support for workers co-ops as an alternative to closure. He later claimed that during the 1974 election Whitehall had prepared three files for their incoming minister: one Tory, one Labour, the third marked "Labour, if not Mr Benn."

Concorde man

Always a keen gadget man, as a precaution against hostile editing, Benn taped all media interviews from mid-career and once claimed to have overheard a TV studio technician say "Remind me, are we lighting for or against tonight?" The story illustrated both his cultivated sense of paranoia and his humour. But even his greatest gadget, the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde which Benn enthusiastically embraced as minister for technology in the late 60s, eventually crashed and burned like so much else. Cynics linked his enthusiasm for the project to the constituency jobs in Bristol which went with it.

Yet the greatest paradox of his career was that his early reputation as a wholesome, media-savvy Labour moderate-cum-moderniser (he called himself "the Peter Mandelson of the 1959 election") could have put him on an irresistible course to become party leader had he not swung so sharply to the left in the 1970s. Civil servants, bankers and industrialists backed by the mainstream orthodox media ("like the power of the medieval church") all conspired to thwart an elected reformist government, he concluded. So did the top-down nature of party leadership. "Industrial democracy" via workers control – an old syndicalist impulse – would be the answer.

Catalyst for change

Friends said the workers occupation of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) yards in Glasgow in 1971 was the catalyst which convinced Benn that under-performing British industry needed more radical remedies than postwar Croslandite social democracy offered. A decade later newly elected François Mitterrand briefly flirted with a similar strategy in France. By that time the industrial militancy and social disorder of the 1978-79 "winter of discontent" had already delivered to Britain the Thatcherite option.

Enemies such as the chief whip, Michael Cocks, viewed Benn as a cabinet member disloyally destablising his own minority government with barely-coded speeches and briefings. Cocks would later write that Benn threw his lot in with the hard left – including the highly sectarian Trotskyite Militant Tendency, "entryists" who had infiltrated Labour's ranks – only because he realised he could never win the leadership without wresting the election process away from Labour MPs alone. One result was the 1981 electoral college which Ed Miliband currently seeks to reform. Another was the Liberal-SDP alliance, now the Liberal Democrats and now in coalition with David Cameron. Activist participation in policy-making, another Bennite demand much changed in the Blair era, remains to this day.

Personal frustration

Whatever the mixture of motives the results were personally frustrating. After the disappointments of the Kinnock years, for which Benn took much blame, produced a pragmatic reaction which led to three Labour election wins under Tony Blair and disappointments of a different kind. By widespread consent Benn's only rival as a communicator with Labour voters has been Blair, whom Benn ended up having to denounce impotently from the sidelines.

The fateful turn came in 1981 when he insisted on challenging Denis Healey for deputy leader a year after Foot, the "unity candidate" narrowly beat Healey to succeed Callaghan. Foot himself and young leftwing allies such as Robin Cook begged him not to further divide an exhausted party, but Benn announced his campaign in the dead of night and, from his power base on the National Executive Committee (NEC), lost by a whisker only because Tribune Group MPs such as Kinnock, Jeff Rooker and Joan Lester abstained rather than support him. Tribune, which Benn had only lately joined, duly split to create the Campaign Group.

Cocks earned his revenge in 1983 when he saw off Benn in a redrawn boundaries fight over their seats in Bristol. Defeated in marginal Bristol East, the activists hero – usually topping polls of the period – was therefore unable to fight the vacant leadership contest. In the wake of Labour's traumatic 143-seat defeat – in which it only narrowly saw off the SDP threat – the leadership was won by Foot's protegé, Kinnock. Benn got back via a byelection in Chesterfield in 1984, but by then Kinnock was starting to turn the tide against the left's "impossiblism". One prime example had seen Benn make a speech to the 1980 conference in which he promised that a future Labour government would nationalise key industries, control capital, abolish the Lords and repatriate all powers from Brussels "within weeks" of taking office.

Miners' strike

By now Benn was supporting Sinn Féin and a united Ireland, seen by many as equivocal over intimidatory tactics within Labour ranks and elsewhere. When another NEC leftwinger, Michael Meacher, delivered the swing vote against supporting Scargill's strategy for the miners strike of 1984-5, he said "May God forgive you." Scargill duly lost. In 1988, Benn stood against Kinnock for party leader against strong advice ("even from my wife," he told friends) and won 11.4% of his beloved electoral college. It was slightly less than the 11.8% he had got from MPs in the 1976 contest against the most talented field ever - Callaghan, Foot, Healey, Jenkins and Crosland.

Ahead of the 1992 election in which Kinnock lost against all expectations, Benn, still a Tory bogeyman, campaigned to replace the monarchy with a written constitution for a "democratic, federal and secular commonwealth". It was music to the ears of republicans, but there were not enough of them. In 2001 he stood down in Chesterfield (which turned to the Lib Dems), wittily announcing he was leaving parliament "to spend more time on politics".

Though never a pacifist, Benn opposed the Falklands war (and was lectured by Margaret Thatcher, an exact contemporary who had ducked war service, as he had not), visited Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf war to help release hostages, and opposed Nato's military intervention in Kosovo (1998-99). It was inevitable that he accepted the presidency of the leftwing Stop the War Coalition over Iraq in 2003 and again visited Baghdad. He took part in the million-strong London demo, as he continued to do into the Miliband era, sometimes carrying a deckchair into Hyde Park from his home nearby. No longer the focus he could be guaranteed affectionate attention. "He was so good at it he completely fooled people," frustrated old rivals, much less loved, would explain.

Improbable journey

At almost every turn it had been an improbable journey. Both Benn's grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as was his father, William Wedgwood Benn, though he defected to the rising Labour party and briefly served in the cabinets of both Ramsay MacDonald and – as Lord Stansgate – of Clem Attlee. A privileged child of the progressive upper-middle class, one influenced more by his mother's religious moral compass than by leftwing economics, he met VIPs (including Gandhi ), attended Westminster school and read PPE at Oxford before joining the BBC via wartime service as an RAF pilot officer in Africa.

It was Tony Crosland who helped "Jimmy" to the 1950 byelection seat at Bristol SE. Initially he was a centre-right moderate in the 50s battles between the Bevanite left and Hugh Gaitskell – for whom Benn voted as leader in 1955. Even when both were ministers Benn the good mimic would ring him up pretending to be a post office engineer or voter. Later he would be accused of naively idealising the working class.

Yet clues to his future radicalism has been there from the start. Benn was fiercely anti-colonial, joined anti-nuclear CND early and abandoned Gaitskell during the leader's doomed attempt to abandon Clause IV, Labour's commitment to nationalisation. It was the exact battleground on which Blair fought, and won, 40 years later.

It was a favourite Benn maxim that "issues not personalities" matter in politics, though year after year his own vivid personality – complete with trademark pipe and mug of tea – undermined the assertion. In a managerial era where the ideological battles embodied by Thatcherism versus Bennery have lost potency, he was almost the last of a disappearing species.

Tony BennLabourConstitutional reformHouse of LordsHouse of CommonsMichael White
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David Frost: that was the wake that was

Host of stars and 2,000 wellwishers pay respects at memorial for Stakhanovite broadcaster, who died last August

Sir David Frost pulled off his last big showbusiness coup on Thursday, albeit posthumously, when a memorial plaque to the broadcaster's 50-year career in television was unveiled in the floor of Westminster Abbey in the presence of the Prince of Wales and 2,000 other members of the Frostie fan club.

Not bad for a Methodist minister's son from Kent who never slept a night away from home or touched alcohol until he went to Cambridge. As Greg Dyke, Frost's old boss at both TV-am and the BBC, observed in his address from the pulpit, he made up for it afterwards. "White wine is a non-alcoholic drink," was a Frost saying.

Frost's career always had an improbable aspect to it, no more so than on Thursday when the dean of Westminster, Dr John Hall, led a star-stuffed congregation through a memorial service that revelled in some of those improbabilities. Turned down as unsuitable for television by Anglia TV when he was still an undergraduate, he was a star two years later as host of That Was the Week That Was, the groundbreaking satirical show (just 37 episodes before the BBC lost its nerve) from 1962-63.

Frost started when he was 23 and he was still on air somewhere until close to his fatal heart attack at 74 on a cruise liner last August. At one particularly frenetic stage he was doing five shows a week in New York and three in London. No wonder, Dyke recalled, that a cabin attendant on his beloved Concorde once said: "So sorry, Mr Frost, it's caviar again." Usually his shows' titles included his own name: it made it harder to sack him.

Yet Dyke and others – speakers ranged from Tony Hall, the current BBC DG, Joanna Lumley, Ronnie Corbett and Michael Parkinson to David Owen and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor – insisted in various ways that the restless Stakhanovite was most proud of his family and most concerned to be "half as good a dad" as his own father. Miles, Wilf and George, Frost's three sons by Carina Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the 17th Duke of Norfolk, pitched in too, with a homemade poem in George's case.

It was Carina, posh but frugal, who tried – and failed – to rein in Frostie's (always Frostie to family and friends) extravagant habits, helicopters, champagne, foul cigars and Arsenal FC. But it was his optimism, energy and likeable human curiosity that kept the show on the road, they kept explaining in the ancient Abbey, built when the Venerable Bede was the nearest thing England had to a media celeb.

It also ensured that he got interviews with eight PMs (David Cameron was absent in Israel yesterday), seven US presidents, assorted villains and Nelson Mandela, who danced on one of his shows. The monitor screens showed highlights, Richard Nixon finally expressing contrition for Watergate (Frost only covered his costs on Frost/Nixon with the 2006 play and film), Margaret Thatcher wriggling over the sinking of the Belgrano, Tony Blair flinching when asked if he and George Bush prayed together. "Do we pray together?"

The abbey heard about Frost the early TV entrepreneur, Frost the host and Sunday footballer, Frost the man who not only couldn't handle new technology, Dyke revealed, "he couldn't handle old technology either". Do you know how to use that thing? he once asked at an ATM machine. He stopped driving after he parked the Roller in a field with 10ft of hedge attached.

Is your fiance religious, the very Catholic duke had asked his daughter. "Oh yes, he thinks he's God," came the reply. But it was Lumley, reading a "sonnet of sorts" she wrote for the occasion with Richard Stilgoe ("Shall I compare thee to Sir Robin Day?"), who got a bigger laugh. She predicted Frost's forthcoming big interview on Paradise TV would begin: "Hullo God, good evening and welcome."

Private Eye, which has been cheerfully persecuting Frostie as a lightweight and chancer for 50 years with no impact at all on his career, will have one last fling with the minister's son's improbable swansong: Frost at the Abbey.

Sir David FrostGreg DykeTony HallTelevisionMichael White
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Politicians' sex lives: where to draw the privacy line? | Michael White

The Nigel Farage allegations and Roy Jenkins revelations suggest in some political cases a little prying may be warranted

Distinguished biographer John Campbell's revelation that a youthful Roy Jenkins had some sort of sexual relationship with Tony Crosland when the future Labour cabinet ministers were war-time students at Oxford finally surfaced on Radio 4's Today programme this morning.

About time too, you may say. Juicy extracts from Campbell's biography have been steaming in the pages of the Daily Mail ("slightly picked up by the Mail", says Campbell as if his agent's lucrative serialisation deal was nothing to do with him) since the weekend. Several papers "picked up'' on them, as well they might.

Though the glamorous theoretician of postwar social democracy who died in office as foreign secretary in 1977 was the dominant, older figure at Oxford, Jenkins outstripped him in the end, becoming chancellor in 1967 (a good, if austere one, blamed for Labour losing power in 1970) when Crosland expected the job – as well as a famously reforming home secretary (twice) and distinguished biographer and essayist. He later fled to Brussels and returned to split Labour – via the SDP – in what ended up as the merged Lib Dems.

Does the young meteors' youthful sex lives matter? Is its disclosure long after both are dead justified in the public interest? I certainly think so in this instance, but it's tricky, always is. Today's papers pose a more urgent version of the dilemma. In the European parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday former Ukip MEP Nikki Sinclaire (now an independent) alleged under the cover of parliamentary privilege that Nigel ("Mine's a pint") Farage had kept both his wife, Kirsten, and his alleged former lover and Ukip PR, Annabelle Fuller, on the EU taxpayer's payroll.

The story is denied by Farage, and by Fuller, who talks about "false allegations". That hasn't stopped much of Fleet Street writing: the Mail has another field day. And students of Ukip's ways know the party has long enjoyed a reputation for partying rather than hard work in Europe.

But is it an unwarranted intrusion into Farage and Fuller's private lives by an ally turned enemy? It can be justified, I think, because Ukip stands charged (again) with misuse of EU funds and of hypocrisy in attacking EU waste while doing its fair share of wasting.

My usual line on sex stories when the tabloids hound a footballer or hack a film star's phone calls is "No. We're only interested in Wayne Rooney's feet, not his willie, in Hugh Grant's acting, not his tedious private life."

Priggish, I know, and the Guardian's editorial line is usually even more priggish than mine. It hesitates to rush into print with such yarns. But where does intrusion stop? Tabloid bullying in tandem with prurience can ruin innocent lives. A pity they didn't have the guts to take on Jimmy Savile and other predatory celebs – tabloid mates, most of them – instead of hounding randy sports folk on the spurious grounds that they are "role models" with commercial sponsorship deals.

Politicians' sex lives are an easy target too. Sometimes it's warranted, sometimes not. Cyril Smith got away with it as his Liberal party leader, Jeremy Thorpe, did not. Alan Clark didn't care, David Mellor was a humbug. Jenkins, who broke emotionally with Crosland after meeting the future Jennifer Jenkins in 1941, was a tremendous pork swordsman, despite his long and apparently happy marriage. The Mail had a crack at this angle too, not to mention the Welsh miner's son turned future SDP leader's famous taste for grand living.

Friends' wives were among "Woy's" conquests in "civilised" affairs that were not widely known at the time, but seeped out gradually – not least via Michael Cockerell's stylish BBC TV portraits of prominent public figures, Jenkins included. I think I vaguely heard about some of it as a young political reporter. Not our business was the prevailing view at the time when Rupert Murdoch may still have been married to wife No 1.

But a gay relationship, that's a new one on me. We can see why the Mail wants to expose Labour leaders, dead or alive, as wicked and hypocritical people, the paper's election campaign has started early, as if the coalition's five-year rule – it's 7 May next year, not this 7 May, chaps – had never been enacted. But is it legitimate to do so as a matter of public interest, as distinct from what the public might be interested in.

I think it is. Crosland is a hate figure on the right because, as education secretary in the 1960s, he promoted comprehensive education at the expense of grammars (though not as much as Margaret Thatcher later did). He was more authentically posh than Jenkins – they and the (posher) Tony Benn were all close neighbours in then less trendy Notting Hill – and racier. He later married the American journalist Susan Barnes, who exuded a decidedly heterosexual aura.

But Jenkins remains the right's big target: alleged father of permissiveness whose home office regime oversaw – in varying degrees of proximity – an end to stage censorship and hanging, legalisation of abortion and gay sexual acts, race relations legislation, liberal divorce laws and much else which has shaped modern British society.

Farage said at Ukip's recent party conference that he feels he is in a foreign land – but he too seems to enjoy much of the ardently pro-European Jenkins's political legacy and sybarite tastes. Unlike some – Harold Wilson was always photographed with a pint, but preferred brandy – Jenkins did not pretend to be a puritan, but did not flaunt his lifestyle either.

Farage will have to fend for himself and probably do so with his usual flair. How Jenkins, who died in 2003, would have loathed it. But those who favour Jenkins's reform legacy and those who hate it are surely entitled to know and speculate about the impact this youthful experience, one of many in his complicated youth (including an ambitious mother), helped shape his future attitudes towards toleration of humanity's differences within the law.

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Media Talk podcast: can the BBC regain the initiative?

Hugh Muir sits in for John Plunkett to digest the week's media news, including the BBC's new plans for the iPlayer.

In an announcement on Tuesday, Tony Hall revealed new exclusive content from comedians Frankie Boyle and Bob Mortimer, plus documentaries by Adam Curtis. But will this online adventure damage the BBC's case as it looks to keep TV licence fee evasion a criminal offence?

MediaGuardian writer Maggie Brown and Folder Media creative director Matt Deegan outline the challenges facing the BBC as it threatens to cut services if charter renewal doesn't link the annual fee to inflation – and Michael White offers some context from Westminster.

Also in the programme, the panel discuss the vox pop that went wrong for Channel 4 News and share their own memories of being sent out to canvass opinion. Plus, Getty Images goes free online – what will it mean for photographers?

Sam Wollaston is also on hand to review Astronauts: Live in Space and Shetland.

Hugh MuirMatt HillMichael WhiteMaggie BrownSam Delaney

Miliband bores for Britain in Europe: three cheers! | Michael White

Trying to hide the European scapegoat in the long grass until the angry crowd has passed is sensible for Labour and the UK

Ed Miliband's new policy towards a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union is both boring and ambiguous enough to generate conflicting headlines in rival newspapers. Excellent.

Boring is just the European policy this country needs in the runup to the 2015 general election. David Cameron's EU policy is perilously unboring, the equivalent of playing tennis on the central reservation of the M1.

Ukip's "policy" – attitude is a better word – is one of playing tennis in the fast lane. Whoops, here comes a German juggernaut. Splat!

Trying to hide the European scapegoat in the long grass until the angry crowd has passed is only sensible for Labour, whose lead in the Guardian's ICM poll today is a modest 38% to 35% (Lib Dems 12%, Ukip 9%), pretty disastrous in my opinion for the main opposition party after four years of unpopular coalition, though many Labour stalwarts are confident of victory.

ICM confirms that Labour still gets most blame for the bankers' reckless recession – even more than it deserves – from voters who dislike George Osborne's austerity strategy while also embracing it because it mirrors their own struggle. That means Labour still has work to do to restore public confidence. I remain unconvinced that voters will warm to Ed Balls's proposals – some quite sensible – set out here yesterday.

The fact that Balls was among those shadow cabinet members advocating a different approach – matching the Tory referendum pledge – reinforces my hunch that Miliband has got it right this time, even with a modest fudge.

But it's the economy that matters. Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, was right this morning to say what all sensible people do – and the polls confirm it – that voters are chiefly concerned about jobs, investment and pay rates, and are right to be so. "It's the economy, stupid," as Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign team told each other.

Europe is not No 1 even among Ukip voters and – so much analysis confirms – even then it is a surrogate for concern about social exclusion and alienation from modern, metropolitan and multicultural Britain. "Immigration" is the shorthand word such voters use, though "Europe" sounds less crude.

Voters are entitled to feel sore about the downside of immigration – the pressure on public services, jobs and houses. It's not just the poor who moan about it any more either. All those over-rich and over-educated foreigners grabbing the goodies in the posh bits of London are unsettling the strong sense of entitlement long enjoyed by the locals.

You won't read much about it in London's paper, the Evening Standard, because it's owned these days by a Russian oligarch, but I meet refugees from Kensington in the suburbs all the time.

"Stop the continent, I want to get off" Europhobia ("scepticism" is too mild and rational a word) does not offer an analysis that addresses more than fragments of these complex issues.

As Boris Johnson famously admits, if we left tomorrow we would wake up next day with all the old familiar problems, plus a few. That approach comes dangerously close to making David Cameron Nigel Farage's understudy as the Alex Salmond of Brussels – a panacea politician using the chimera of "national sovereignty" as the magic wand that cures our ills.

In his fudge (the Mirror makes too much of it) Miliband promises an in-out referendum if Brussels proposes a further transfer of powers from nation states to the centre. In the present mood of economic gloom, financial insecurity and political paralysis – just look at the EU's response to the crisis in Ukraine – that's unlikely, as the Labour leader admits in today's FT article.

But Angela Merkel made it equally clear during her kind-auntie visit to London the other day that Cameron should not expect much dramatic movement in the direction of his one-man crusade to repatriate EU powers either.

That's Cameron's gamble. He promises a renegotiation and referendum, much as Harold Wilson successfully did in 1974-75 when – sorry about this, Dave – the PM was eight. It was a transparent manoeuvre then (I voted yes to Europe as a port in a storm without illusions) and is fraught with far more uncertainty now. Cameron lacks the goodwill Wilson enjoyed (he won by two to one) in both Europe and among voters.

So Miliband's boring call for boring reforms in Europe makes more sense, not least because he has not put a gun to his own head and told Chancellor Merkel: "Do what I want or I may have to shoot myself."

Despite declaring himself unequivocally pro-EU the Labour leader is already being accused of cowardice and stupidity by Tory MPs and Ukip MEPs who can barely spell either word.

In too many cases their careers have been built on pandering to prejudice, not challenging it.

You don't see off a canny operator like Nigel ("Mine's a pint") Farage by pandering, but by dismantling him, pint by pint.

Nick Clegg, with whose EU views and Miliband's are now aligned quite neatly, is bravely preparing to do an hour-long TV debate with Farage ahead of the 22 May European elections, which Labour or Ukip will win. He'd better be good.

But George Soros, the banker who bet against sterling in 1992 and won a fortune, was surely right today when promoting The Tragedy of the EU, his new book on Europe's weakness. Britain currently has the best of both worlds: we're inside the EU trade area but (thanks to Gordon Brown) outside its highly deflationary currency zone. Best not to get carried away and forget that. Miliband hasn't.

Ed MilibandEuropean UnionEuropeUK Independence party (Ukip)David CameronNigel FarageMichael White
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New Stephen Lawrence revelations add balance to lopsided Macpherson report

Injustice over teenager's murder shown to be a result of police incompetence and corruption as much as institutional racism

I read Sir William Macpherson's inch-thick report on the Stephen Lawrence murder at Easter 1999 because it had quickly become a political football and I wanted to form a first-hand opinion. The annotated pink volume is on my desk today because I sensed it might come in handy. So it does, yet again, with the publication of the Ellison review. With Theresa May announcing another judicial probe amid renewed dismay, I plan to hang on to it.

At the time I thought that Macpherson's report had got the balance wrong in heaping so much of the blame on what it famously called "institutional racism" (a phrase adopted from the US Black Power movement) in the police and wider British society. It did so at the expense of the other two components of his inquiry, theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds