Tony Benn, veteran Labour politician

Veteran leftwing Labour politician who went from being 'the most dangerous man in Britain' to a national radical treasure

British obits make for wonderful reading, indeed.

Benn in 1961. For an American that is a great shot: the person, the Thames, Parliament.
Tony (Anthony Neil Wedgwood) Benn, politician and diarist, born 3 April 1925; died 14 March 2014

Born Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, he entered parliament in 1950 as MP for Bristol South East, becoming the youngest member of the house at the age of 25. He had to leave the Commons a decade later, as the death of his father, a Labour peer, meant he inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate. However, he campaigned for a change in the law and returned to his seat three years later after renouncing the title. During his 50-year parliamentary career, Benn served as minister for technology, industry and energy under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He also campaigned against EU membership and oversaw the development of Concorde.

After a successful cabinet career under Wilson in the 70s, he swung to the left politically and challenged Denis Healey for the Labour deputy leadership – only losing by the narrowest of margins after one of the key unions switched sides at the last minute. He then became instrumental in using Labour party machinery to develop a leftwing manifesto on which Michael Foot fought the 1983 election.

His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916. Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). In 1942, he reluctantly gave up his Commons seat when called upon to bolster the wartime coalition's Labour contingent in the Lords, accepting a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate.

After second world war service in the RAF (1943-45) he returned to Oxford, graduating in 1948, spent some time in the US, and worked as a BBC radio producer (1949-50). He was known formally as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie by friends and family, till in 1972 he settled on plain Tony Benn. However, the change of name could not disguise the fact that he was the product of an elite background. As he once said: "My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they're up to."

In 1949, he married a wealthy American, Caroline Middleton DeCamp, a socialist, educationist and biographer, and they, too, built a happy domestic life in a large house in Notting Hill, west London. Their daughter, Melissa, and three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, were all active politically, with Hilary becoming a Labour cabinet minister. Caroline's wealth matched Benn's own inherited capital, derived from the Benn Brothers publishing firm.