Superbly entertaining tapes

Radio: THE BENN TAPES Radio 4

Just as a whole generation has grown up not being able to remember the country under anything but Conservative government, so there must be millions of people under the age of 25 who have no idea that Tony Benn was once Britain's foremost dangerous left-wing loony - somebody the tabloids once used to scare their readers into voting Tory. This generation, if they know anything of him at all, will have learned it through Radio 4's broadcasts of extracts from his diary tapes. What must they think of him?

For one thing, you realise, listening to the second volume of The Benn Tapes, they must have no idea that his ideas were ever regarded as extreme. It's not simply that in his accounts of all his disputes, with colleagues in the Labour Party, with civil servants, he comes across as far more reasonable than his opponents; it's that so many of what were once his hobby-horses (the demand for open government, the distrust of centralised power, the suspicion of Europe) are now commonplaces in political debate. Indeed, arguments which are in important respects identical to his are now being put forward by candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party.

In fact, if you had no prior knowledge of Benn's place in the political spectrum, you could easily mistake portions of the diaries for the grumblings of some disgruntled Thatcherite. It's plain that Benn has a good deal of fellow-feeling for radicals of the right - they share a distaste for the class system, and for the old-fashioned politics of consensus. There's a rather touching account here of Benn's meeting with the late Keith Joseph in an empty first-class railway compartment: the maverick of the left and the guru of the right get on famously, talking intensely for two solid hours, all the way to London, discovering that they are in complete accord in their analysis of the nation's problems; it's only the solutions they can't agree on.

For the innocent listener looking to understand why it was that such a prescient thinker spent so much time in the political wilderness, though, that story makes a good starting-point. It ends with Benn's boast that as far as argument goes, he could knock Joseph into a cocked hat (though given Joseph's reputation for brilliance, we can be a little sceptical). But when they get to Paddington, it's Joseph who offers him a lift home in a ministerial car, not the other way about. Benn can't seem to grasp the point that being right doesn't do you much good if you don't get elected.

In the end, though, perhaps The Benn Tapes are Benn's final, knockdown argument. Lucid, funny, hopelessly immodest yet superbly entertaining, they mean that when the history books are being written, his point of view will look sharper than anybody else's. Maybe he's won after all.

n 'The Benn Tapes 2' are released on cassette on Monday, price pounds 7.99.