Farewell to last of the firebrands, Tony Benn

A gentleman even at the age of 88, he stood up to greet me, although I wondered if he was well enough for the interview.

He seemed much frailer than I had thought he'd be, even with his advancing years. I'd been expecting the twinkly-eyed darling of the Left, the man who had a hand in Labour's 1983 election manifesto, branded the 'longest suicide note in history', and to my generation one of the only people to have made Ali G look like the stupid one in an interview.

In June last year I had wanted to talk to one of the most popular politicians of all time, a man who had gone to Iraq to ask Saddam Hussein face to face if there was still hope for peace and was even now still insisting on an end to nuclear weapons as an alternative to welfare cuts.

The shelves of the sheltered housing flat not far from London's Notting Hill Gate were filled with volumes of his diaries - dozens of folders of the unedited ones and the collected editions that have been published as books chronicling his time as a Labour MP, minister, backbencher and beyond. A large proportion, probably about a quarter of the books on show at first glance, were either written by Mr Benn or members of his family, including his late wife Caroline.

But he was struggling to remember the name of the country Saddam Hussein had previously invaded. Looking at the blanket draped over the back of the chair I wondered if I should perhaps just bring the interview to a close. He was being so polite in having me in but he did not seem up to it.

Then something clicked. "Do you mind if I get my pipe?" he asked.

I was hoping he would. No photograph of Tony Benn would have been complete without it. This was last June. And he was sporting a beard I had not seen in any other recent pictures because, as he put it, 'I got fed up of shaving'. He kept it ever since.

As he filled one of the several pipes around the flat in the affluent part of the capital, near Holland Park, it all began to flow.

That famous fluffy voice, spoken through teeth clamped around the pipe, recalled how he he had gone to Iraq as Tony Blair prepared the case for war 'prove that things were not as we were being told'

He looked the dictator in the eyes and asked him outright whether or not he had such weapons and whether there was hope for peace.

The former Iraqi leader, unsurprisingly, denied it.

"I didn't know what to believe", Mr Benn, who was president of the Stop The War Coalition, said, "but of course as we would later discover, he didn't have any.

"Everything he said to me was true and shows that when war is coming you can't believe what people tell you.

"George Bush wanted to get rid of Saddam and Blair said 'I will support you'."

Tony Blair changed Labour forever with the removal of Clause IV from its constitution as he brought the party towards the all important centre ground. The clause talked of securing the 'common ownership of the means of production' but was seen by many as a desire to nationalise as many industries and services as possible.

"New Labour was a mini Thatcherite party and the greatest supporter of New Labour was Margaret Thatcher," Mr Benn said.

The former secretary of state for industry also disputed the need for spending cuts, despite current Labour leader Ed Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls now acknowledging that there will be a reduction in the welfare budget should they come to power in 2015.

"I'm very doubtful about the theory that cuts are the answer to the problem because we've made a lot of cuts and on the whole the economy is worse than it was to begin with", Mr Benn said.

The voice seemed to have a harsher rasping sound developed through a combination of age and tobacco than many would remember from the TV. He had smoked a pipe for 72 years since the age of 16.

As the smoke rose from the pipe he explained he did give up tobacco for a year but had gone back to it recently.

"It's an occupation because you scrape it and clean it and fill it and light it and it goes out again", he said. "It's not an occupation I recommend.

"I thought I had kicked the habit but it was indispensable.

"My father was a member of the Temperance League and he never drank and I never have", he said. "I'm keeping it for my old age."

People's opinions of politics and government were dented by scandals such as MPs expenses. But Mr Benn said: "I think being cynical about politics is a great mistake.

"You should be critical of politicians and what they do but to sit down and say they're all the same, they're all a dirty bunch and it's not worth bothering is very damaging and people have come to that conclusion."

The photographer who had accompanied me, Lucy Young, was enjoying herself immensely.

She was taking close-ups and getting Mr Benn to exhale the smoke so as to create the perfect effect.

And all the time he was chatting happily to her, saying he liked the name Lucy and how he was used to people asking him to pose with the pipe. All the while, he was obliging, interested in people and occasionally sipping from a mug of tea placed by his chair by a member of staff.

Tony Benn was always seen as a man of principles, but people say that political parties are all the same and as bad as each other, I told him.

"That's a product of New Labour", Mr Benn said, in one of his typical swipes at the leadership of the party he served. "It's not true. There's a fundamental difference between the parties and whose side you're on is very important."

He was in favour of a referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union.

"It's a question of whether you are governed by people you elect or whether you are not and Europe is not a democratic structure. There is no president elected by the people of Europe, it's all done by the governments who appoint people and it has a serious democratic weakness."

Tony Benn has topped several polls naming him the most popular British politican. Often, even those who disagreed fundamentally with his politics at least admired him for his principles.

"People will make up their minds on which view to take and if you win support, you get back in for your view," he said.

"If you start arguing for something radical they just ignore you.

"Then if you go on they say you're mad.

"Then if you go on they say you're dangerous.

"Then if you go on they lock you up, like they did with the suffragettes.

"Then after a short period you can't find anyone who doesn't claim to have thought of the change in the first place. That's the way progress occurs."