LONDON — Tony Benn, a committed British socialist who irritated and fascinated Britons through a political career spanning more than five decades and who renounced his aristocratic title rather than leave the House of Commons, has died. He was 88.
His family said in a statement that Mr. Benn died peacefully March 14 at his home in west London. It did not give a cause for death.
Labor Party leader Ed Miliband praised Mr. Benn as an ‘‘iconic figure of our age’’ who will be remembered as a ‘‘champion of the powerless.’’
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Mr. Benn clung unswervingly to his leftist beliefs while his party, in opposition, moved to the center and reemerged to take power again as New Labor. The change left Mr. Benn out of step with his party’s new, younger leaders....
They mean Tony Bliar (sic).
Mr. Benn favored abolition of the monarchy, British withdrawal from the European Union, and any strike that was going....
He was over time transformed from the demonized figure of the 1970s and ’80s to that often-treasured English archetype: the radical dissenter.
‘‘He had this wonderful vision of the working class,’’ former left-wing Labor lawmaker Joe Ashton recalled in a 1995 BBC television documentary. ‘‘It was almost like the noble savage and sometimes we had to bring him down to earth.’’
Born in London on April 3, 1925, Anthony Wedgwood Benn was the second son of William Wedgwood Benn, a Labor Cabinet minister, and the former Margaret Holmes, a scholar in Greek and Hebrew studies....
Went to Oxford, had a brother killed in World War II.
Mr. Benn was devoted to politics and family, and the pipe he was forever smoking. He never tasted alcohol and was a vegetarian....
No setback ever seemed to depress him. Not five failed attempts to become Labor leader or deputy leader; not getting dumped from the party hierarchy in the 1980s; not the emasculation of the labor unions by Thatcher; not Labor’s transformation; not the personal criticism.
‘‘Many of Tony Benn’s ideas were crazy. He sacrificed the prospect of being leader by pursuing these crazy ideas,’’ commented Roy Hattersley, a former deputy Labor leader and near-contemporary.
Mr. Benn shrugged it off.
‘‘The five lines about me are: You’re an aristocrat, you’re a multimillionaire, you’re a hypocrite, you’re mad, you’re ill,’’ Mr. Benn said in a 1994 newspaper interview. ‘‘It took me a while to realize that their purpose was to discourage people from listening to what I am saying.’’
Mr. Benn retired from the House of Commons in May 2001, after 51 years in Parliament, to ‘‘devote more time to politics.” By then he was the longest serving Labor MP in the history of the party, which he joined in 1942.
If anything, Mr. Benn lived more in the limelight after he retired. He became a regular broadcaster, and his 2002-3 speaking tours of Britain entitled ‘‘An Audience with Tony Benn’’ never failed to sell out. He was unsurprisingly extremely outspoken in his opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq, and days before the final commencement of hostilities traveled to Iraq to interview Saddam Hussein....
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