RIP Tony Benn

The last of the principled politicians.

I admired him a lot.

RIP Tony.

Another one of the very best gone.

He was my dad's childhood MP. They met once in the 90s and my dad was telling him about the street where he grew up. "Oh, yes," said Benn, "left out of Labour's offices, second right..." and so on. He never forgot his principles, either, or stopped fighting for them.

Your dad was from Chesterfield, Torgo? My husband grew up in Calow. Small world, again.

Tony Benn will be much missed here. I am sad to see him gone.

(David Cameron's tribute to him on the BBC news yesterday seemed somewhat churlish to me: he said he disagreed with Benn's politics, and praised him only as a writer, not as a politician: petty, I thought.)

Old Hack said:

Your dad was from Chesterfield, Torgo? My husband grew up in Calow.

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Bristol South East actually - his first constituency.

Aha! I thought it was unlikely: you don't seem like a Chesterfield boy, but there's been so much coverage, here, from his Chesterfield constituency that I didn't stop to think he'd MPed elsewhere.

mirandashell said:

The last of the principled politicians.

I admired him a lot.

RIP Tony.

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Yep, he always seemed to really care about people.

I particularly loved this thing he did

I didn't know he'd done that! That's fantastic!

Not just that one either, it seems, and quite illegally, because:

If one walks around this place, one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum.

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Now that's a politician I can respect






And that's not a sentence I thought I'd ever type....

Me neither!

There's few politicians I've ever respected but he's one of them.