How did Stephen Benn come to take the place in the House of Lords renounced by his father?

Tony Benn fought to shake off the hereditary principle; his eldest son fought (not very hard) to resume it, writes John Rentoul

The Bennite wheel has turned full circle (Getty)

What a parable of Labour times: Stephen Benn, eldest son of Tony, has taken up the peerage renounced by his father and restored the family, via a by-election, to the upper house of parliament. So much of the Benn story consists of the hereditary principle, radicalism and by-elections.

The story starts with William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal MP who was a kind of hereditary politician from the start, being elected to represent the St George’s division of Tower Hamlets in 1906 – the seat previously held by his father, Sir John, between 1892 and 1895. But William was also a radical, and, as the Labour Party displaced the Liberals, he switched, resigning from parliament in 1927 and re-entering the next year under the Labour banner at a by-election in Aberdeen North.

He served as secretary of state for India in Ramsay MacDonald’s second government, from 1929 to 1931, but stayed with the Labour Party when MacDonald formed the national government with the Conservatives. During the Second World War he gave up his seat in the Commons for a peerage, as Viscount Stansgate, because Labour was short of working peers in the Lords. He then served briefly in Clement Attlee’s postwar cabinet as secretary of state for air.