Skip Kite (2014)

It’s immediately clear from the melancholy, reverential music (by Michel Duvoisin) that Skip Kite’s film is a prospective eulogy of its subject.  It’s sad that, by the time Will and Testament premiered at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, the nature of the eulogy was no longer prospective:  Tony Benn died in March 2014, a few weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday.   Benn is the narrator of his own life story here.  He’s is filmed mostly in the kitchen and one of the other rooms of the Holland Park house he shared for many years with his wife Caroline, who died in 2000 (a plaque on the front of the house commemorates her residence there), and where the couple’s four children grew up.  Skip Kite has also constructed a set which extends domestic reality into metaphorical landscape:  a fire burns in the hearth; autumn leaves are falling; giant tabloid front pages illustrate the kind of press vilification to which Tony Benn was subjected, especially during the 1980s.  If you look further to the left (oddly enough), there’s barbed wire and a giant golden dollar sign, suspended in darkness.  The set is offensively crude and sentimental, as a representation of both Benn’s personal circumstances and his political views, and it does him a disservice.

Benn is virtually the sole talking head in the film.  Kite has conducted no interviews with others to get their views although the voice of Harold Wilson is heard early on, delivering his famous comment that ‘Tony immatures with age’.  It’s fortunate that Benn is a greatly engaging guide.  His description of his first meeting with his future wife in Oxford in August 1949 (he proposed nine days later and they were married before the end of the year) and of her death, fifty-one years later, is moving.  He’s funny when, after wryly lamenting his media transformation from ‘most dangerous man in Britain’ to national treasure and the harmlessness that implies, he expresses pleasure at recently receiving a death threat:  ‘I hadn’t had one for ages …’  I had only a sketchy idea of the events around Benn’s renunciation of the peerage that he inherited on his father’s death in 1960, and this part of Will and Testament is particularly interesting.  (Benn’s elder brother, Michael, who should have inherited the peerage, was killed in World War II.)  The coverage of the 1984-85 miners’ strike is often predictable (and leads to a clip from Brassed Off – introduced as ‘Tony’s favourite film’).  It’s hard not to be impressed, though, by Benn’s predictions, recorded in television interviews of the time, of the longer-term effects of the Thatcher government’s industrial policies, on the social fabric of mining and other communities.

Because of his latterday reputation as the principled scourge of British governments, Labour as well as Conservative, I’d wondered how much coverage would be given in Will and Testament to Benn’s own time in government:   as Postmaster-General, then Minister of Technology, in the two Wilson administrations of 1964-70; as Secretary of State for Industry, then for Energy, in the Wilson and Callaghan cabinets of 1974-79.  In fact, there’s plenty and Benn is very clear about what caused his shift to the left during the 1970s.  He was increasingly dismayed to discover that the Labour governments of which he was part accepted their role as trying to improve things within a system that they could not change – rather than legislating to reform the system itself.  He recalls putting a paper to his colleagues in cabinet, around the time of the IMF bailout in late 1976, proposing a more left-wing agenda than the one the Callaghan government chose to follow.  He attributes the loss of the 1979 General Election to what he sees as this loss of left-wing nerve.  He doesn’t mention that the Callaghan administration was already virtually a minority government and would have lost heavily had Callaghan gone to the country, instead of negotiating the ‘Lib-Lab Pact’, in 1977.

Benn is, for the most part, long on assertion and short on substantiation, and this is true from the very start of Will and Testament.  He immediately assures us that he’s not afraid of death, that his late wife taught him how to live and how to die, that Caroline regarded death as a ‘tremendous adventure’.  There’s no explanation of what she meant by this.  (Did she expect a post-mortem existence?  It’s hard to see how annihilation could be an adventure but perhaps Caroline was referring to dying rather than death?)  Tony Benn’s own religious beliefs continue to be somewhat uncertain.  He explains eloquently in Will and Testament his inheritance of socialist ideals from his father and Christian ones from his mother (in case we forget this, a bible and, below it, a book with ‘Keir Hardie’ lettered on the spine are repeatedly picked up by the camera).  In an interview Benn gave to the Daily Mirror in August 2013, his answer to the question of whether he thought he would be reunited with his wife was, ‘Well, you just don’t know … [but] you hope so, yes’.  According to the churchman Giles Fraser’s obituary of Benn in the Independent, he ‘wasn’t a believer, although he was surprisingly reluctant to admit it’.

Whatever kind of Christian he might have been, Tony Benn was primarily a political idealist.  Aided by Skip Kite’s choice of film clips, he deftly skirts tricky moral territory in Will and Testament.  He admits that ‘I’ve made a million and one mistakes in my life’ but gives only one example:  he was seduced by President Eisenhower’s comments about the potential uses of nuclear energy into believing it could be a good thing (‘swords into ploughshares’, Benn thought), before changing his mind in the 1970s.  At one point, Benn says that what’s crucial is to fight for what you believe in – that winning or losing is less important than fighting.   You hope this may lead to an admission that Benn has been more comfortable speaking from a socialist pulpit than on behalf of a Labour government – and that he recognises a tension between socialism and electability.  Instead, he goes on to say that its leaders, from Neil Kinnock onwards, have been obsessed by the need to present Labour as a party of the centre rather than the left.  Benn suggests that it’s the Labour right wing, rather than the left wing of the party, which has always been the cause of problems.  (Cheap shot cut to Kinnock falling over on the beach at Brighton.)  ‘Problems’ in this context appears to mean dilution of Labour values to an extent that disappoints the left wing:  to that extent, it’s hard to argue with what Benn says.  He insists that a left-wing agenda doesn’t make it more difficult for Labour to be elected – that all that counts is ‘that people believe what you say’.  He doesn’t discuss the implications of people not believing, or disagreeing with, what you say.

Since the 1945 General Election, which was fought in wholly exceptional circumstances, the evidence of British electoral history – from what I know of it, the modern electoral history of other advanced Western democracies too – strongly contradicts Benn’s claim that Labour can win power on a socialist manifesto.  If you didn’t know otherwise before seeing Will and Testament, you might assume that Neil Kinnock was elected Labour leader following the 1979 General Election rather than the 1983 one, when the Labour manifesto was perceived to be leftist, the party suffered its worst result of the post-war era and Tony Benn lost to the Conservative candidate.   There’s no mention of any of these things unless you infer the last from the coverage given to Benn’s returning to parliament in the Chesterfield by-election of the following year.  (Skip Kite has a generally very odd idea of what the cinema audience does and doesn’t need to be told.  Until it appears at the start of the closing credits, you’re never informed when Benn was born nor are there dates attached to footage of the Bristol South-East by-elections he contested, before and after the enactment of the 1963 Peerage Act.  Several famous figures are deemed to need no introduction but a clip of the Queen informs us that this person is ‘Constitutional Monarch, 1952-present’.)

Ed Miliband, when he loses the 2015 General Election, will fuel the kind of argument that Benn makes here but Miliband is an unfortunate new phenomenon in Labour Party history, combining centrist policies with personal unelectability to a greater degree (in both respects) than Neil Kinnock.   Benn is, needless to say, tough on Blair, tough on the causes of Blair.  We see a clip of Tony Blair speaking, shortly after Labour was returned to power in 1997, in which he stresses the responsibility placed on him and his new government not to disappoint expectations.   Slip Kite then cuts to footage of Iraq and ‘Stop the War’ demonstrations – rather than evidence of the effects of New Labour’s disappointing domestic political agenda.  Even though it wouldn’t seem too difficult to find examples of the latter, they can’t compete with Iraq for instant condemnatory impact.  Kite has assembled a remarkable collection of newsreel film, photographs and what I assumed were genuine home movies of Tony Benn’s life before he entered government in 1964 although Peter Bradshaw notes in his Guardian review that ‘a final acting credit for “young Tony Benn” appears to indicate that reconstructions have been used’.  If so, they’re skilfully done.  Once the story moves on to the 1980s, the archive illustrations of Thatcher’s Britain are standard issue.  So is the library film in most of what chronologically follows.

When he stood down as an MP before the 2001 General Election, Tony Benn famously said that he was leaving the Commons ‘to devote more time to politics’.   Those witty words – suggested, he says, by his wife – aren’t fully explored in Will and Testament.  Benn was a clever, admirable and lovable man but it’s entirely fitting, for a more problematic reason, that he’s a hero to many traditional Labour supporters.  (The audience in Curzon Soho was modest but there was plenty of applause at the end of the film.)  He epitomises a quality that I partly envy and partly despise:  a commitment to what are seen as inalienable political values and a belief that these are far more important than mere political power.  The Blair years were extraordinary, not only in that Labour had found the knack of winning big parliamentary majorities but also in that the Conservatives, for the only time in my lifetime anyway, became more concerned, as evidenced by their choice of leaders, with asserting their ‘values’ than with regaining power.  I think many Labour supporters (as well as many Tories) were deeply uncomfortable with that arrangement.  It’s right that Tony Blair and other New Labour figures should be held to account for their preoccupation with getting elected and re-elected and, as a consequence, for virtually ignoring traditional Labour tenets and constituencies.  But Tony Benn also had a responsibility to grapple with the morality of political compromise.  You feel he must have discussed it with his son, Hilary, who served in the Blair and Brown cabinets, but there’s no acknowledgement by Benn in this film of how difficult an issue it is, of the possibility that it might – given the alternative – be ethically right to position yourself in such a way as to gain power and to make changes for the better that fall far short of what you’d like to change.  Early in Will and Testament, Benn notes the influence on him of his mother’s theology:

‘The stories in the Bible were based around the struggle between the kings, who had power, and the prophets, who taught righteousness.’

Many Labour supporters love their prophets – especially their prophets in the wilderness.  It’s no coincidence that, among Tories too, Tony Benn inspires greater affection than Tony Blair.

8 October 2014