Benn and gone

The recently late trade union boss Robert Crow was a fierce anti-monarchist, believing that we should have Anthony Wedgwood Benn as our president, because this scion of the aristocracy (alright, I concede, his father was the first to nobbled, I mean enobled) who renounced his title (didn't save nobility in Revolutionary France) would be representative of ordinary, working people.  Of course, Tony Benn was a radical left-winger, living the paradox of a class-warrior desiring a classless society yet obsessed with class (in an inverse way to the toffs he abandoned), yet always cunning enough to describe his oratories and diatribes as encouraging (Lenin could have said the same thing had the October Revolution never come to pass).
The eulogies from acolytes, friends and foe are flowing, from those who are still alive at least for Benn lived to a prodigious age.  He proved the adage that, along with whores and buildings, that age brings respectability.  I must say he came across to me as a national treasure but I only really knew Benn after he had ceased to be active politically.  It was almost two-fingers up at the Labour party 'modernisers' that when he stepped down from his constituency seat in Chesterfield, it was taken by the Liberal Democrats, though ironically it was the activities of Benn and the Militant movement that ultimately led to the creation of the Lib Dems when the Social Democratic Party broke away from a Labour party that seemed to seek political oblivion, SDP later merging with the Liberals.  Though ridiculed in the exultant Tory press as the height of triviality, the campaign for deputy leader of the Labour party proved a turning point because with Benn's defeat, the Labour party could leave the wilderness and return to the centre ground and electability (at a general election).  Every party must have 'conviction' politicians to shake things up a bit (though everyone has convictions of one hue or another), to set out an opening position on political philosophy.  But politics requires compromise and that opening position must be bartered to a point where it can find some common ground with an opposing philosophy.  This is why modern democratic parties have to be broad churches.  Tony Benn did find a cabinet post yet found it stifling.  A standard conviction locks you up, taking you away from affecting society and Benn chose a personal prison rather than achieve half a loaf (not as good as a full loaf but better than nothing).  Again in another irony, though he scorned dynastic pretensions, he perpetuated a political dynasty (after his father and grandfather), finding its current apogee in his son Hilary Benn (who was a lot more reasonable and thus eminently forgettable but so useful in the service of the ship of state and now providing a credible opposition).
I always remember Benn most not through his television or radio interviews and speeches but something more personal as a second-hand source.  My paternal grandmother when she was still alive, fondly recalled Wedgey Benn when she worked in Millbank as a personal secretary in the 1960s, how she often shared a lift with him and his pipe.  She never said that they held a conversation of any consequence and she didn't always agree with his politics but as they ascended the building, what she expressed about him - though not in such words - was that he had presence. She may have genially mocked him as Wedgey Benn but the respect was always there and Benn earned that from the country at large.