The worst possible insult that can be paid to the life of Tony Benn is to turn him into a national treasure. On the morning of his death, people were queuing up to praise his courtesy, politeness and conviction. That is how the establishment sanitises its opponents: it drowns them in honey.

The fact is that Benn’s extraordinary political life is riven with contradictions and paradox. The memories most of us will have of him will be from rallies and demonstrations, always marching at the front. Yet his commitment to every kind of extra-parliamentary activity, from Greenham Common to Occupy London, was counterpoised by his overwhelming commitment to parliamentary democracy. He is the perfect example of what Ralph Miliband called the Labour party’s ‘devotion’ to the system. He loved parliament. He renounced a peerage to win his place in the Commons, and fought a by-election in Chesterfield in 1984 to return after losing his seat in Bristol. He used his ex-member’s pass to the parliamentary estate, and often popped in to chat to anyone who happened to be free, from ministers to the cleaners.

He famously ‘immatured with age’, becoming more associated with leftwing causes including CND and Palestine, yet he had been an effective minister. He brought an energy and drive into ministerial life which hugely discomforted and upset the civil service. He challenged their every assumption. His legion diaries are full of insights into the mindset of a civil service unused to socialists. As a minister, he was asked to attend a meeting of the Socialist International. His civil servants refused to countenance the idea. They thought he meant the International Socialists, the forerunner of the Socialist Workers’ party. Yet as a minister he got things done, and, as part of the modernising Wilson government, played his part in everything from stamps with pictures on them, to the iconic BT Tower, to Concorde.

As a communicator, he was peerless. His reputation rests on his oratory. Yet he was one of the first politicians to master television. His first appearance on Question Time was the early 1950s. He could time his soundbites for the TV news to the second, counting in his head as he spoke, guaranteeing their broadcast. He advised Hugh Gaitskell on his TV appearances in the 1959 election. He was the Peter Mandelson of his day.

As someone so famously obsessed with ‘issues not personalities’ his personality, not his issues, are what attracted people. He built a persona based on the diaries, and later the one-man shows. I have seen sedate audiences of Conservative and Liberal voters cheer his stories about the Levellers and Suffragettes, before returning to their apolitical lives. It is a head-scratcher. The views he espoused from the 1980s onwards – unilateral nuclear disarmament, no military intervention anywhere, repeal of all trade union laws, a united Ireland, support for the PLO, nationalisation of the top companies, removal of the Queen as head of state, withdrawal from the European Union – these are not issues many people, even in the Labour party, would sign up to. ‘Bennism’ is a pretty eccentric collection of unappealing policies.

So why was Benn so appealing, so attractive? Why are so many so sad at his passing today? I think there are several factors at play.

First, he was genuinely interested in people and their views. His diaries are full of encounters on buses and trains, after public meetings or in the street. Despite being a public school-boy and son of a peer, he had an authentic common touch. Unlike many politicians, he liked people. That is why today everyone has a Tony Benn story. I will not bore you with mine.

Second, he had passion matched by intellect. His arguments were presented with verve and supported by evidence. It was the combination of what Aristotle called pathos and logos. Benn probably learned that at Westminster School. His writings are thought-provoking and original, which is why his Arguments for Democacy and Arguments for Socialism, both edited by Chris Mullin, were best-sellers. His writing was being taught on my university English course by the mid-1980s.

Third, he has a direct link to a radical past. His stories about meeting Gandhi or Ramsay MacDonald always went down well with his audiences. They would be dusted down whenever the ‘greatest hits’ came out. But his connection to the English radical tradition, from the peasants’ revolt to the English civil war to the Chartists to the trade unions: that’s what was exciting and inspiring. It made us feel part of something deeper and bigger.

Fourth, he was a Labour man. His father had joined, from the Liberals, but he was born into the Labour party, and passed it on to his sons and daughter like an heirloom. He always said he was born into the Labour party, and would die in the Labour party, and so it proved. Never, unlike Arthur Scargill, or Roy Jenkins, or George Galloway or the rest, did he put himself above the Labour party which had given him a platform all his life. His disputes with its leaders, and the schisms he provoked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, must not mask his deep commitment to the Labour party as an institution, weapon and way of life.

I have lots of signed Tony Benn books. Some he signed in my presence, for example at a Benn for Leader rally at the AEU building in Salford in 1988. Others I have picked up along the way. But the last time I saw him, in Eastbourne at his one-man show, I asked him to inscribe a copy of his Letters to my Grandchildren, not to me, but to my two sons. I do not suppose I am alone in wanting my children to know about this extraordinary man: complex, controversial, paradoxical, yet special and always, to the end, one of us.

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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival: The Modernisers’ Manifesto. He tweets @LabourPaul

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Photo: pryere