Tony Benn

"It's the complicated ones I enjoy the most." Matthew Parris

Ellie Gibson picks Labour politician Tony Benn, who was a rock star politician in older age, but a divisive figure in his own party.

Tony Benn, MP from 1950 to 2001, packed so much into a long career.

He renounced the peerage inherited from his father, served in the Labour governments of both Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, led the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 and became pretty much the country’s pre-eminent rock star politician in older age.

Comedian Ellie Gibson says she was a Tony Benn groupie and saw him speak many times. A brilliant orator and prolific diarist, he was by the 1980s distrusted by many in his own party, and a bogey figure in the right wing press.

Contributors include ex-Labour MP, Chris Mullin, and his biographer, Jad Adams.

Plus rare early archive of Tony Benn himself talking about his constitutional fight to give up his inherited peerage.

Ellie Gibson is one half of the Scummy Mummies podcast duo.

Produced at BBC Bristol by Miles Warde.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2023.