Tony Benn

Tony Benn was born in London in 1925 into a political family; his father, a former Liberal, became a Labour cabinet minister and was made Viscount Stansgate. After RAF service in the Second World War and a spell as a BBC radio producer, he was elected MP for Bristol South East in 1950. When his father died in 1960 he inherited the peerage and was barred from the Commons. After a three-year campaign the Peerage Act 1963 allowed him to renounce the title, and he returned to Parliament. He served as Postmaster General, Minister of Technology, Secretary of State for Industry and Secretary of State for Energy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He narrowly lost the 1981 contest for Labour's deputy leadership to Denis Healey, lost his Bristol seat in 1983 and won Chesterfield in 1984. He stood for the leadership again in 1988, retired from the Commons in 2001 and spent his later years writing, speaking and campaigning. He died in 2014.

Supporters remember Benn as a great parliamentarian and orator, a defender of the rights of the Commons and a lifelong campaigner for socialism, peace and democracy, and his diaries are a major record of postwar British politics. Critics argue that the Bennite left divided Labour in the early 1980s and contributed to the departure of MPs who founded the SDP and to the party's heavy defeat in 1983. Some opponents in the press called him the most dangerous man in Britain, and some commentators judged that his ideas changed little after the mid-1970s. In later life he became a widely respected figure across party lines.