How desolate it must feel, at times, to be the famous, independently successful child of an even more famous parent. You are a figure whose achievements would be enough, in normal circumstances, to generate a certain respect, if not admiration. But because of the previous generation, you will always be second best. Zak Starkey played drums with Oasis and the Who, but his dad did the same with the Beatles, so beat that. Poor Ernst Freud was a successful architect, but his dad invented psychoanalysis – then, to make it worse, his middle son, Lucien, became arguably the greatest British artist of his generation, and his youngest, Clement, a politician who was actually popular, by virtue of his constant presence on Radio 4 panel shows.
Last week, I wondered what Hilary Benn was thinking. He had been busily standing up for his belief that British air strikes on Syria were a necessity, even as Jeremy Corbyn told Labour MPs how strongly opposed he was to the same course of action. There we had it: the shadow foreign secretary and his party leader in open disagreement. For the inevitable few on social media, however, that wasn’t quite enough to be remarkable. Instead, Benn’s position became a betrayal of his father. He was advised to watch Tony Benn’s speech opposing the Iraq war. The tone was clear: you are a disgrace to his memory.
It was an ordeal Ed Miliband would have been familiar with: damned by the Daily Mail for being the son of the communist academic the paper called “the man who hated Britain”, and surely subject to some genetic political inheritance, while simultaneously excoriated from the left for not living up to Ralph Miliband’s teachings. At least Hilary was only getting it in the neck from one side; even the Daily Mail would find it hard to paint him as a revolutionary wolf in sheep’s – or, more accurately, hawk’s – clothing.
The truth is that families are unknowable. They are hard enough to fathom from the inside, let alone from without. All we can know is what we see: the public face. We might see the parent doting in public; perhaps they are neglectful at home. We might compliment someone on their delightful, articulate, polite child, the one who spits fury once the front door is safely closed. We comment on a family seemingly loving and attentive to each other, not knowing one parent is crippled by depression, the other seething with rage at having to bear all responsibility for family life, while one of the kids is self-harming and the other has an eating disorder. That’s the point, though: we don’t know the reality, and we never can.
Children have always been judged against their parents and always will be. There’s always the kid in the playground whom parents don’t want to welcome into their homes because their mum and dad have always seemed like trouble, and that trouble gets projected down a generation. Equally, there are the transgressive youngsters whose behaviour gets excused because their parents are respectable, the right sort. Sometimes it turns out to be right, sometimes it turns out to be wrong, but it’s a playground sort of character judgment – instantaneous, irrational and emotive. It says more about the people making the judgment – and, yes, I do it myself, sometimes. Don’t we all? – than it does about the person being judged.
When it comes to politics, there’s something particularly asinine about judging one generation against another. It might be understandable from a conservative perspective, in which the name is the clue – the child who rejects their parents’ politics is breaking from the past, the very opposite of conservatism. But from a supposedly progressive position it seems spectacularly odd: a vote for the status quo, for the hereditary principle. It doesn’t matter that Hilary Benn appears to be more rightwing than his dad; it’s that he shouldn’t have to ape him. If Tony had been a staunch socialist who had happened never to have preached his message outside the saloon bar, no one would judge Hilary’s politics against his father’s – not only because they would be significantly less likely to know of any apparent schism, but also because his ancestry wouldn’t be called on to represent anything.
And that’s the real thing that the people who cry betrayal forget. Tony Benn wasn’t a symbol to his children, and nor was Ralph Miliband. They were fathers. Parents and children disagree about politics all the time. They might scream at each other over the kitchen table, but then they stop, and they talk about Auntie Harriet, or when the bus stop is going to reopen. They tend not, if they are in any way normal, to enter into ideological warfare. They love each other, no matter what.
When the House of Commons paid tribute to Tony Benn after his death, Diane Abbott spoke of Hilary giving his maiden speech as an MP: “Tony Benn sat a few benches in front of him, and as Hilary spoke, his face streamed with tears. It was the most moving thing.” I bet his face wasn’t streaming with tears of rage as he barely suppressed the urge to scream “Traitor!” at his son. He wasn’t disgraced; he was proud. Were he alive, he might argue vehemently with his son about Syria, but he would probably still be proud.
