Ben Pimlott’s death is a personal loss to many of us, as is his now rare kind (once more common) to the whole Labour movement. Of his great scholarly achievements there is no possible doubt whatever; but political influence is harder to assess.
His biography of Hugh Dalton was an extraordinary achievement both of research and what became Ben’s trademark cool, good judgement.
Dalton was one of the towering figures of the 1930s and 1940s. It would have been easy to fall into an amusing dismissive mode because of his subject’s indiscretions, bullying manner, unconcealed old-Etonian sense of noblesse oblige, passionate advocacy of his friends and intolerance of easily made enemies.
Ben, however, while not disguising Dalton’s warts, brought out his great intelligence, his complete dedication to the Labour movement, his enthusiasm for economic and political theory, and his shrewd grasp of political realities. Justifiably, the book won the Whitbread Prize for biography in 1985 – the first award for political biography of a modern figure. I can imagine literary and historical noses cracking out of joint.
I first became aware of Ben through reviewing his Labour and the Left in the 1930s in the Guardian in 1977. I was editing The Political Quarterly jointly with John Mackintosh and we were both fed to the teeth with the pretentiousness and lack of political reality of the Labour left. At that time the left was coloured by the myths of the 1930s propagated by those who called themselves ‘Labour historians’, in the sense that for them the only true history was the history of socialism.
Ben showed that the political left of the period was stronger on rhetoric than on policy and was relatively ineffective in the debates on unemployment, public ownership or control and foreign policy. They were more of an irritant and a drag on the leadership than either a stimulus or an influence.
Yet he plainly stood for radical reform. In terms of the politics of the 1970s, he appeared as rightwing Labour, but now I would see him rather as dead-centre old Labour. Not, however, Old Labour in the sense that New Labour has used too freely in trying to persuade the public and the press of a break from the past; rather he was dead-centre in the old tradition of the Labour movement.
It was relevant to me in trying to puzzle out where Ben stood politically to learn that, while at the University of Newcastle, he had stood three times for parliament. He came near to winning at Cleveland and Whitby in the second election of 1974 (only 1,500 votes behind Leon Brittan). But whether he seriously wanted to get into parliament or was in youthful public spirit only running for the sake of the cause (as some had done in 1945 and others in 1997 and, to their astonishment, found themselves MPs, not always to their best career advantage), after the third attempt he returned to academic life.
He moved from Newcastle via a two-year research post at LSE to my old department of politics and sociology at Birkbeck, where he wrote his massive biography of Harold Wilson, published in 1992.
During the Thatcher years he was a scathing critic of both the new market Conservatism and of the Labour left, whether Bennite or Marxist.
He was on the executive of the Fabian Society (chairman for 1993-94) and helped it recover the independence of mind that it had somewhat lost in the Wilson days, when too many of it secretaries seemed to see it as a springboard to parliament and were too uncritically supportive of the leadership.
To the surprise of many of us, after the great accolade of being elected to the British Academy in 1996, he left Birkbeck to become Warden of Goldsmiths. We at Birkbeck were surprised because while at the college, with its unique dedication to mature students, Ben had done well for the students in his own modern politics and history seminar. But he had shown little interest in the wider life of the college, nor would he share in that self-administration that used to be a hallmark of academic life in a small department.
Ben seemed the last person in the world to want an arduous seat of power for its own sake, especially when it would inevitably mean giving up any further major political and historical studies. I had long thought that either he or Kenneth Morgan should and would write a much-needed scholarly history of the rise of the Labour party.
But perhaps the alternative life surfaced, thinking back to those early attempts to enter parliament. A socialist, particularly of the centre, should be interested in having power to do good. And Goldsmiths is an admirable, socially diverse place in which to enhance an on-going good, as Richard Hoggart knew when he became warden.
Ben had written of a Labour tradition of a party full of conflict, but full of intellectuals of both left and right (and don’t forget many points of departure and perspective in between). And perhaps it was a tradition that most of the office-holders of New Labour wished to forget, or if not forget entirely, only to honour selectively to emphasise the break. Few of our leaders now have time or inclination to read, still less write, political policy books or history. They’ve done their reading at university.
I say all this only to try to answer the question that Kenneth Morgan raised in his exemplary Guardian obituary:
‘It is astonishing that the Blair government saw no need to call on Ben, or some of his Fabian friends, for assistance or advice after the 1997 election. Perhaps this reflected the instinctive apprehension of New Labour towards academics, however distinguished, who were felt all too liable to stray unpredictably ‘off message’ into dangerous pastures of independent thought.’
Yes, indeed. That might – to his great credit – particularly apply to Ben Pimlott, who did not suffer fools gladly nor bend his integrity to the judgement of others, especially those in office. But I think also the subject matter of his writing was not favoured. To write of the Dalton, Attlee, and Wilson period, and the small host of thoughtful, diverse, outspoken intellectual politicians who circled around them – such as Crosland, Crossman, Benn, Castle, Healey, Jenkins – all this is something that New Labour wished, as far as possible, to forget or avoid so as to mark the break from the past.
But a realist like Ben Pimlott could never play the populist. He believed in reason and rational persuasion, not spin and rhetoric. He had a clear sense of an historic mission of a Labour movement – Sidney Webb’s ‘inevitability of gradualness’. I believe such integrity, rather than excessive loyalty, whatever happens, is beginning to be needed and to be appreciated. To reject the old hard left is not to blind ourselves to the political and moral danger of too great a break from the past.
Ben stood in the position to which many groups and journals of 1997 ilk, who were totally Blairite at the time, are now beginning to return. Leadership will be stronger if it can re-engage such a loyal but critical following. Some people remain, like Ben, who are willing and able to think back as well as forward, as did Ben, not losing the old vision of an egalitarian society under the burdens of short-term contingent opportunities.