Today there are aspects of Tony Benn's alleged "extremism" which seem to be the unifying concerns of ordinary people. He may have retreated from the back benches, but he is now regarded rather as Grandfather Oracle. "I do miss my constituents, and the tearoom ladies here keep asking if I'm getting enough to eat." It's a concern made poignant by the death of Benn's wife, Caroline, two and a half years ago. "We were married for 51 years. She was from Cincinnati, Ohio, and we met in London in 1948."

"For the past four years of her life she went through absolute hell from cancer, and when she died I was so relieved for her." With much anxiety, he wrote about that illness in his most recently published memoir, worrying that the tone mightn't be right or the details too personal. "I found it very difficult, but it all just came out and has been kindly received by others who've had a similar experience."

Not at all a gloomy man, Benn would like his headstone to read: "He encouraged us." That, after all, he says, is the job of the old. "Old men who talk about the past are boring. Old men talking about the present are intolerable. Old men who try to run everything are a bloody menace." But when the time comes Tony Benn intends to present the Almighty with a CD-rom of his diaries: 15 million words and growing.

Good job God created eternity.
Glasgow Herald