Tony Benn: The Left and the Honourable

Click on the post title to read all about Great Britain's greatest MP who found time to meet with me and which was wonderful!!)
"So you found me in Wikipedia? Well, I took the opportunity and Googled you," said Tony Benn with an expedient flourish as he welcomed me into the lovely Notting Hill home he's lived in for over 54 years. Having just turned 81 on Monday, Tony Benn is ageless, endlessly knowledgeable and astonishingly current. "So you're a blogger, are you?" He mentioned reading my interview with Rachel Fuller. "She likes cigarettes, does she?" I explained to him all about her song "Cigarettes and Housework." Tony, as a contented pipe smoker himself, found this charming. I also told him about Pete Townshend's futuristic and multi-cultural novella about London, "The Boy Who Heard Music," a London that Tony Benn himself helped to shape in his unparalleled career in both Parliament and other sectors of British politics that spans over 50 years.

When you find yourself having pizza with a man who interviewed Saddam Hussein twice
while he was president of Iraq ("He had a revolver strapped to his hip and at one point actually held it and I wondered if I'd gone too far..."), you start to get very eager and curioiusand ask many questions. Tony at once wanted to know about me, where I grew up, what religion my parents raised me with etc. It was our mutual affinity for Paul Robeson that had been the reason for our meeting. The Left and Honourable indded!