When New Labour gets the jitters in the final hours of the campaign, who does Tony Blair call? The other TB, of course. Tony Benn, the oldest Old Labour campaigner of them all, was yesterday drafted in to telephone ordinary voters and urge them to stick with Labour.
The 80-year-old former cabinet minister yesterday swallowed huge doubts about the Iraq war to spend three hours talking to a list of wavering voters provided by Labour campaign headquarters.
Mr Benn, ostracised as a socialist eccentric by Mr Blair for nearly 10 years, was rung by sheepish Labour officials at his London home. He said the call was a sign that Labour was in recovery. "To have them ring me to help them out, well it shows this election means Labour is returning to what it was."
He admitted that his calls to a list of potential switchers had been hard going. "I am president of the anti-war coalition so there is no point saying Iraq has been anything but a disaster. I have been campaigning for 63 years and I will always support Labour. It is a trade union party and socialist party. It has done good things."
Mr Benn stressed the internationalist credentials of the Labour party in what might be seen as a coded reference to the work of his son Hilary as the international development secretary. "I am voting Labour and hope others do the same," he said. His loyalty to his party is in stark contrast to the actions of his old colleague Brian Sedgemore, the former MP for Hackney South who chose the middle of the election to defect to the Liberal Democrats.
In his message, Mr Benn said: "I am supporting Labour candidates up and down the country." He said the vote for Labour was necessary because it was the only party that could help to solve the problems of the world. He added: "My own opinion is that the Labour government is the right thing."
He went on: "I disagreed and still disagree with the government over the war in Iraq, but I have never even considered leaving Labour."
In the Guardian last December, Mr Benn wrote that the Iraq war, which had been justified by "a blatant lie about Saddam's possession of WMDs and opposed by more than half of the electorate, can now be seen to have been not only illegal under the UN charter, but deeply immoral and unwinnable. And the continuing subservience of Downing Street to the White House is unpopular, because the US might lead us into more wars".'
He also complained about the "shift, by stealth, towards privatisation in health, housing and education, including the proposed cutbacks in civil service employment described as modernisation but actually a throwback to the Victorian era, when the marketplace and not the polling station ruled our lives".