Losing the written record

This week has been sewn together by a lot of threads and I thought I might unravel a little bit of my thinking about events. First, you need to know that I have been in Oxford, England. It is a grand place of academics and history; full of museums and bookshops and tea shops. It is elegant and quaint at the same time.

So last week I wrote about political speeches particularly about Hilary Benn’s speech in the British Parliament that concerned the airstrikes in Syria. Benn, who is a Labour MP, made an impassioned plea to support the Conservative government’s bill to bomb Syria.

I was making the point that political speeches are an important part of the parliamentary tradition.

Benn’s speech continues to make a stir here.

Anyway, in the days after my column appeared, my friend emailed me to let me know that Hilary Benn is the son of the famous British Parliamentarian, Tony Benn.

I knew this only because of the fuss that was being made about Hilary’s speech.

Scottish parliamentarian Alex Salmond said that: “Tony Benn would be birling (which means spinning) in his grave” over the pro-bombing speech.

Benn’s granddaughter called for Salmond to retract the statement but Salmon refused.

All of this back and forth and political wrangling had me thinking about the long legacy of the Benn family in British politics and then, by complete serendipity, I popped into an Oxfam shop and there, for a mere 2 pounds 99 pence, I discovered the political diary of Tony Benn.

Actually this is an understatement because there are many, many political diaries of Tony Benn that have been published over the years and this is just one: Tony Benn Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001.

Of course I grabbed the book immediately and when I got home I started to read it in the usual way I read an autobiography... I just open it up to any page to ponder upon a life lived or a life in progress. It is a bit unorthodox but it makes for interesting reading.

At one point, I fell into the section quite near the end in the days when Benn’s wife passed away.

It was here that I realized a critical reason for reading and studying autobiographies and diaries: they have a marvelous way of humanizing the politician and giving context to a life lived in public service.

Among all the entries about a day in Parliament, Benn shares the moments of delight of the times he spent with his grandchildren who exhausted him so much that he had to go to sleep in the afternoon “in bed.”

Benn even comments about ordinary things like having taken breakfast.

Yet, among the mundane and the personal, there is the political. There is the obvious frustration of being in government, of having an opinion that is different from others and of not always being heard.

There are entries about meetings and policies and protests and daily observations.

The diary is only one man’s perspective but still it gives us a view of the world in a particular moment: what it was like, right then, to be there and to be contributing.

As I read, I wondered what the scholarship on diaries says about their usefulness to us as political analysts.

I went digging and found an older piece from 1999 in which Dennis Kavangh makes a muted case for using political diaries which, he says, can show us: “the mood and the atmosphere.”

In fact, Kavangh cites, among others, the Benn diary as an example of “an important source of data” on the Harold Wilson years. He was (twice) the British Prime Minister.

I was then struck by the worry that that we are no longer the diarists we used to be – nor the letter writers – and I was thinking about how the digital age may cut us off from this personal and reflective sort of history.

I expect my Christmas season will be spent in perusing all 738 pages of the Benn diary.

It might not make me a better political analyst but it might give me a better understanding of the personal experiences that anchor a public servant.