Last of the pipe-smoking socialists

Old guarded by the Miners' Association, he arrives a few minutes early. "Someone will have to tell me what's going to happen," he says. "I'm a guided missile - unless you set my programme, I go wrong."

The old incorrigible is 78 - engaging, affable, perhaps (perish the thought) even mellowed. If not yet a national treasure then in danger, he fears, of being seen as a benign institution.

In the country, he is regarded with a warmth once unimaginable; in Willington and old coalfield communities like it, he is embraced with an undiminished passion that's both physical and metaphorical.

Left, undoubtedly. Left behind? Maybe he is no longer seen as a threat.

"Just put in your paper that Tony Benn is the most wonderful person in Britain today," insists an old Labour old lady, almost tearfully.

He is in the North-East for the Durham Miners' Gala, a fixture in his diary since his first in 1961 when, he reckons, there were 350 pits in Durham. Last Saturday, he was also due to deliver the sermon at the miners' service in the Cathedral and had mischievously been working on 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...." He is in Willington, at the Community Resource Centre that once was Martins Bank, to unveil a new banner to be paraded through Durham the following day and to be blessed thereafter in the Cathedral.

"We were dead chuffed to get him," says councillor Brian Myers, chairman of the Community Partnership.

Programme set, tea mashing, long applauded, he tells a story about the Queen making Britain's first STD telephone call - Benn is said to have been the first person in Britain with a telephone answering machine - before, automatic pilot, pointing his unilaterally non-nuclear warhead in defence of the colliers.

Pit closures, he says, were "unspeakable", the miners had been treated like enemies, people forgot that the national prosperity had been built upon coal.

The centre is well filled, one or two noses pressed briefly against the outside window in case it's George Best hiding in there. Whilst others dig afterwards into the three foot seam of a buffet, Benn - said to exist on cheese and onion pizza, tea and tobacco - adjourns upstairs to have a chat and to get, as they say, his pipe.

He carries three pipes, seems forever anxious to be ferreting into his baccy pouch, has a portable ashtray but has left it in the hotel. We are in the police room: since there may be a law against it, a more observant journalist would notice where he drops his dottle. "I didn't think it was right to smoke among all those people downstairs," he says.

He was an MP for 50 years - Postmaster General and minister successively for technology, telecommunications and energy. In the 1970s, he put all his eggs into the New Left basket - about as safe as the average company pension fund - whilst The Times also accused him of wanting to swap the Queen for Fidel Castro. Perhaps Cuba disapproved of the arrangement.

His retirement at the last general election is perhaps best remembered by the phrase that he wanted to spend more time on politics. It was coined, he says, by his wife Caroline, whom he met in 1948 - "I was a bit shy, it took me nine days to propose" - and who died from breast cancer in November 2000, remembered on her gravestone as "author, teacher and Socialist".

Beneath her epitaph is room for his own. He hopes it will be: "Tony Benn: he encouraged us."

"I was thinking the other day about what old men do," he says. "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's psychological, like when Montgomery took over the Eighth Army. He didn't say they were a scruffy bunch, he said they were the best fighting unit in the world. It worked."

Caroline suffered terribly, he says, her death a release, her funeral commemorated by his reading of the lines: "Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not dead, I do not sleep."

Work is now his preferred palliative. "It keeps my mind active," he says. "If I'd stayed at home moping, I don't think I could have coped."

Benn himself was diagnosed in 1989 with chronic lymphatic leukaemia, told he'd had it five years and might live for another three. Now they reckon he'll die with it, but not of it.

Whatever else it affects, it's clearly not his bladder. Someone replenishes his tea cup, Ogden's Flake (or some such smoke) shrouding him in a satisfactory, non-episcopal purple. The appearance may not be avuncular, but it's something pretty close.

The photographer, happy snapping, lives wholly in peace with his pipe.

In retirement, spending more time on politics, he has published more diaries - "The last entry will say 'St Thomas's Hospital, not feeling very well today,'" - given hundreds of interviews, stepped up the campaign to re-establish public meetings and embarked on a series of theatrical talk-ins described in The Sunday Times as "a cross between a book promotion, a political rally and a Tom Jones show".

There's even a chap in Brixton ("pleasant guy, very bright") who wants to set some of his parliamentary speeches to rap music. Benn's taking the rap good-naturedly.

Every speech and almost every interview is tape recorded. He reckons thus to have 500 million words stored, each in its cross-referable place. Many years ago, he spoke for Cherie Booth - "I knew her father" - in her own election campaign. "It was pretty radical, hard hitting stuff," he recalls and, years after that, her husband asked for a copy. He obliged at once.

In the upper room at Willington Community Resource Centre, however, the recorder stays in its bag. "Not for you," he says, enigmatically.

He lives alone in Notting Hill, his house - the Mail on Sunday called it a "splendidly shabby mansion" - similarly retentive. Nothing's been thrown away since, at the age of ten, he canvassed in the 1935 general election.

It's said that he even darns his own socks with the "mushroom" folk used during the war.

He declines a secretary, travels second class with a senior citizen's railcard, a flask of tea and a Mars bar; remains in constant touch with his family. Hilary, his son, is a Home Office minister - a fourth generation of Benns in Parliament.

The previous evening, he'd done a monthly television programme with former Tory leader and Richmond MP William Hague, of whom he speaks rather more warmly - "a serious man, not afraid to fight his corner" - than most of the present Cabinet.

His diaries describe Tony Blair as "smooth, chic and frightened", Gordon Brown as "unfit to run a corner shop" and Robin Cook as a "pompous, angry little man".

Blair, he says, had described New Labour as a political party. "I'm not a member of it," he says. "I'm still waiting for the election of a Labour government.

"I don't think people are apathetic, but a lot are angry that no one is listening to them. Anger and mistrust are totally different from apathy."

That morning's Telegraph has a piece about Michael Foot's 90th birthday party at ten Downing Street. Benn's not invited, not bothered and not likely to have read that (or any other morning's) Daily Telegraph.

Instead, he was looking forward to a small part in the Big Meeting, and to a debut in the pulpit. Was he a religious man, then?

"I was brought up by my mother who brought me up with the Bible, but as you get older you have t o work it out for yourself," he says.

"I have never found the mysteries of religion very helpful. It seems to me that the most important thing religion teaches is how to live your life."

That no senior Labour politician will be marching behind the banners is, he says, a terrible mistake. "The Miners' Gala is the biggest event in Labour history," he says. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."

At 5pm, the taxi returns to take them back to the Royal County Hotel and to what, in these excessive days, is probably termed the Gala gala dinner. He has been entirely accommodating, wholly charming. We may not be thanked for saying so.