Postscript: Tony Benn, 1925-2014

Mr. Maddocks, the metalwork teacher at my high school in Leeds, didn’t think much of Tony Benn, the left-wing English politician who died, on Friday, at the age of eighty-eight. “Gets his orders straight from Moscow, that fellow,” Mr. Maddocks said one day, when Benn’s name came up. Many right-leaning folks agreed with him. During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Benn was a left-wing bogeyman, a gift to the Fleet Street tabloids, and, to some people who shared his background, a class traitor. (Having inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate, he renounced it in the early nineteen-sixties and shortened his original name, which was Anthony Wedgwood Benn.)

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