TONY BENN was in Willington the day before the Durham Big Meeting, an immoveable objective in his diary since 1961. Back then, he said, Durham had 350 pits. He was also due to give the sermon at the miners’ service in the cathedral and had mischievously been toying with New Labour’s ten commandments.

“Thou shalt not steal, unless it is to boost thy profits. Thou shalt not kill, unless President Bush says so...”

It was 2003 and the column supposed him the Old Incorrigible – “engaging, affable, perhaps (perish the thought) even mellowed”. He had retired as an MP, as famously he supposed, to spend more time on politics.

A purple haze surrounded him: not episcopal, more Ogden’s Flake. If not yet a national treasure, we added, he fears that he is in danger of being seen as a benign institution.

He’d been diagnosed in 1989 with chronic lymphatic leukaemia, told that he’d had it five years and might survive another three. Subsequent opinions suggested he’d die with it, not from it.

Back then, he was 78. He contemplated his epitaph – “Tony Benn: he encouraged us” – and edged apprehensively into old age.

“Old men who are always talking about the past are boring, old men who are always whinging are intolerable, old men who run anything are a frightening menace. I am an old man and I want to encourage.”

It was a three-pipe interview, upstairs in the Community Resource Centre.

Three pipes and about five mugs of tea.

He couldn’t have been kinder, more affable or more patient. Perhaps there’d be a paragraph in his famous diaries.

The final entry, he supposed, would read “St Thomas’s Hospital: not feeling very well today.” He died at his home last Friday.

IMPOSSIBLE to let Tony Benn rest in peace without quoting from the Daily Telegraph’s incomparable obituary column, forwarded by David Walsh.

“Benn came from Nonconformist Liberal stock. His grandfather, John William Benn MP, founded the family publishing house and led the London County Council. His great-uncle, the Rev Julius Benn, was murdered with a chamber pot by his son who, on release from Broadmoor, fathered the actress Margaret Rutherford.”