Tony Benn fought for the right to stop being a viscount
When his father died in 1960, Tony Benn inherited a peerage he did not want, and with it lost his seat in the Commons. He campaigned until Parliament passed the Peerage Act 1963 letting him renounce the title, then spent decades trimming his name down to plain Tony Benn.
Benn was born in Westminster on 3 April 1925 into a political dynasty: both grandfathers were Liberal MPs, and his father, William Wedgwood Benn, crossed to Labour, served as Secretary of State for India and was made Viscount Stansgate in 1942. As a boy Tony was offered a chocolate biscuit by Ramsay MacDonald and shook hands with Gandhi in 1931. His mother Margaret, a theologian and feminist rebuked by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1925 for backing women's ordination, taught him to side with the Bible's prophets against its kings.
He trained with the Home Guard from 16, joined the RAF in 1943 and made his first solo flight in Southern Rhodesia. After reading philosophy, politics and economics at New College, Oxford, where he led the Oxford Union, he won Bristol South East in 1950. Proposing to the American Caroline DeCamp nine days after they met, he later bought the park bench where she accepted and put it in their garden.
Under Harold Wilson he was Postmaster General, opening the Post Office Tower, and then Minister of Technology; in the 1974 to 1979 government he ran Industry and later Energy. First seen as a moderate, he moved left after leaving office, and Bennite became shorthand for that politics. He lost a leadership challenge to Neil Kinnock in 1988 and influenced a later generation including Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. In all he sat for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years to 2001.
Benn described himself as a Christian agnostic who followed Jesus the prophet rather than Christ the king, and said he had not read the Communist Manifesto until his fifties, yet he wanted the Church of England disestablished. He progressively struck his private schooling and titles from Who's Who, at one point listing his education as still in progress. After Parliament he led the Stop the War Coalition until his death on 14 March 2014.
Source: Tony Benn
