First viewed : 27 September 1981
I wouldn't normally be watching a party conference at the tender age of 16 but this one was different. The whole family were in the room to watch one of the most pivotal moments in recent political history.
Ever since Labour's defeat to Margaret Thatcher in 1979 one figure had dominated debate within the party, our friend Anthony Wedgewood Benn. He had led the movement to change the rules under which the party leader was elected in 1980. Jim Callaghan promptly resigned to allow his succcessor - Dennis Healey he hoped - to be elected before the changes came into effect. Having been heavily defeated in the leadership contest of 1976 Benn decided to bide his time and support venerable old leftie Michael Foot instead. Foot won and Healey had to settle for the deputy leadership , a very poor consolation prize. Who now remembers Edward Short, Harold Wilson's deputy from 1972 to 1976 ?
Nevertheless once the new rules were in place in 1981, Benn made the momentous decision to challenge Healey, ignoring an invitation from an incandescent Foot to directly challenge him instead. That set the stage for a furious internecine contest out of all proportion to the paltry prize on offer. Healey had the support of most of the MPs and Benn was the darling of the activists so both men went after the third part of the electoral troika, the unions' block votes, to decide the winner and as many saw it the fate of the party. A third candidate, the obnoxious John Silkin , threw his hat into the ring but was never a serious contender.
With excitement at fever pitch, the NEC decided to start the Party Conference a day early and get the count and announcement of the result out of the way before the Conference proper began. The Newsnight team moved in to cover the declaration live on BBC2 that Sunday evening.
In an atmosphere of unbearable tension the chairman ground his way through the figures to announce the narrowest of wins - less than one percentage point - for Healey. What had made the difference was the decision of a number of Labour MPs on the so-called "soft" Left to abstain , most notably everyone's tip as heir apparent, Neil Kinnock. Far closer to Benn on policy, they had walked to the brink of the abyss with him and then drawn back.
Benn was finished and he knew it immediately. You can see it in that extraordinary grimace as the result was announced. He'd taken a high stakes gamble and lost. His influence in the party didn't vanish overnight but thereafter he was always fighting a rearguard action. He suffered a further blow 18 months later when boundary changes meant he wet down in Labour's rout at the 1983 General Election. Without a seat in Parliament he had little influence in the leadership contest that year which brought his assassin Kinnock to power. He got back in at Chesterfield 6 months later ( I played a very minor part in the Liberals' by-election campaign ) but a front bench role under Kinnock was unthinkable. Instead his championship of Arthur Scargill and the Militant Tendency simply pushed him further to the margins. In 1988, dismayed by Kinnock's rightward drift , he launched a last desperate bid for the leadership against the advice of all his former acolytes and was thoroughly trounced. He remained an impotent backbencher right through to Tony Blair's first term before retiring in 2001 "to spend more time on politics". This witty epigram was actually suggested by his dying wife as cover for his real wish to be with her throughout her last days. After her death, the great bogeyman became a sort of cuddly uncle figure , still doggedly preaching his romanticised version of socialism on lecture tours. It became hard to recall how terrifying he'd seemed back in the day. He died a couple of years ago aged 88.
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