Tony Benn died today. I remember seeing him at Queen Mary College, London in the early 1990s. He was everything the thrusting young ideologue about town could have wished for: insightful, fluent, mannered and absolutely devastating on the stump.
As must always have been the case when he turned up to speak, the room was evenly divided between his implacable political friends and foes. This meant he was rounded on a times during the evening. In response to these attacks, he was at his best. He never lost sight of the essence of the question, or his logically-rigorous rebuttal to it. Uniquely for a politician, he never meandered or obfuscated. And the reason for this was that he divorced his work from his ego. I've always believed that the transcending of the ego that marks out the true artist, and TB was certainly that. Incidentally, this is why most the YBAs are terrible: they're always so concerned by the esteem of the public and their peers that you can see their thought processes in the work. It's like leaving the scaffolding on a building. It's inelegant and unworthy of scrutiny.
Anyhoo, watching TB was exhilarating stuff, like watching a gifted musical improvise. We won't see his like again, I'm sorry to say.
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