I DO wish red-faced, gin-soaked high Tories from the shires would stop name-calling top socialists as puritanical, dour and sour. For the truth is that many leading Labourites know very well how to enjoy the good things in life – and how!

Take that high priest of Marxism, the late national treasure Tony Benn for example. Benn composed the Labour manifesto for the General Election in 1983: a document which his fellow-socialist Gerald Kaufman called “the longest suicide note in history”.

In it Benn wrote: “Our aim is nothing less than to bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.”

I don’t know exactly where Benn was when he wrote that manifesto, but he was not lacking for choice. He could have sat in a window seat in his fine Regency town house in fashionable Holland Park. Or, if he fancied a whiff of country air, he might have retired to his other property, the spacious and elegant Stansgate Abbey farm estate.

When his wife died in 2000, the great socialist prudently decided to downsize and, at the same time, seek to avoid future tax payments by selling the Holland Park pad for £4.1m which would enable him to hand on money then and there to his children and so decrease the amount which would eventually be due in inheritance tax.

This prudent gesture came from the man who also wrote: “Capital taxes will be used to reduce the large inequalities in inherited wealth. We shall reverse most of the Tories’ concessions on capital transfer tax.” I can just imagine our Tony humming the Red Flag quietly to himself while he composed that noble paragraph on the redistribution of wealth.

Benn’s will was made public last week and shows that he left £5,085,001. Most of it will go to his children.

So you see, the career of Tony Benn shows that at least one socialist of high rank was no grey puritan. He was versatile and ambitious too. Very ambitious, in fact.

In the late 1960s he declared that the Queen’s head should no longer appear on our postage stamps. In 1992, he proposed the abolition of the monarchy. He combined his republicanism with a campaign for Britain’s unilateral nuclear disarmament and, at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign, gave vigorous public support for Sinn Fein.

He found time also to amalgamate several car firms to create British Leyland – the state enterprise that presided over the cessation of mass car production in Britain. He was a vociferous opponent, in parliament and in public meetings up and down the land, of the British task force to recover the Falklands from the Argentinian invaders.

Among all these varied occupations and diversions, Benn never lost sight of the value of true comradeship and he was a loyal and supportive friend of Arthur Scargill.

He was an assiduous, not to say obsessive, diarist and towards the end of his life he wrote: “I try to operate on two unconnected levels. One on the practical level of action in which I am very cautious and conservative. The second is the realm of idea where I am very free.” A cynic might dismiss this versatility in the phrase: “Do as I say, not as I do.” How could he hold in his head such clear contradictions? Was he schizophrenic?

No. The word we are looking for is “hypocritical.”