Hilary Benn kept a low media profile today as the Labour leadership tried to heal the wounds left by its damaging split over whether to back David Cameron’s plans for air strikes against Isis in Syria.
But the shadow Foreign Secretary was still the man of the moment after he electrified a 10-hour Commons debate with a powerful plea to back military action.
Labour MPs who want to depose Jeremy Corbyn hailed Mr Benn as the king over the water they had lacked. “Until this week, Hilary did not have a gang of followers in the Parliamentary Labour Party – he has certainly got one now,” said one MP. “His speech has given us hope that there will be life after Corbyn.”
Yet Mr Benn has also made enemies. One Corbynista described him as “vain” and accused him of “grandstanding” in a deliberate attempt to overshadow the Labour leader.
Left-wing activists who still revere his late father Tony believe his son has betrayed him. And Alex Salmond, the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman, has claimed that Tony would be “burling in his grave hearing a speech in favour of a Tory prime minister wanting to take the country to war”.
That prompted a dispute with Emily Benn, who is Tony’s granddaughter, Hilary’s niece and a Blairite Labour councillor. She told Mr Salmond: “Your comments are both deeply offensive and simply untrue. I hope you reflect and retract them.”
The relationship between Benn Jr and Mr Corbyn would now be awkward enough; the Labour leader’s close relationship with Benn Sr can only make it even more difficult. With long hair and a bushy beard, Mr Corbyn was an acolyte of Tony Benn when he led an attempted takeover of Labour by the left in the 1970s and 1980s which the Corbynistas are seeking to re-run today. Mr Corbyn attended political discussions at the Benn family home in London which Hilary, four years younger than Mr Corbyn, remembers well. “I grew up in a household where we talked about the state of the world over breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he once said.
Mr Corbyn describes Tony Benn as “a legend in many, many ways”. Together they were leading lights in Stop the War and had many other causes in common.
But Hilary was always his own man, “a Benn, not a Bennite” as he put it. He and his father were close and never aired their political differences in public. The differences were real, notably over Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. While Benn Jr voted for the war, his father marched against it alongside Mr Corybn. “You can have a fundamental difference of view but… it does not affect the relationship we have,” Hilary said later.
He backed Andy Burnham for the party leadership this year. But when Mr Corbyn won, Mr Benn admitted that his father would have been “absolutely thrilled” to see his protégé lead the party.
Although the Corbynistas now view Mr Benn very warily, friends insist he is not plotting for the top job. Indeed, when it was his turn to run for deputy leader in 2007, he was seen as the frontrunner but, according to Labour MPs, lacked the hunger needed and was beaten.
