Kmflett's Blog

Tony Benn’s Christmas Diaries

Tony Benn, who died in 2014,kept a very long running diary. Far from all of it is in the public domain but there is enough to get some sense of how a leading politician of the left spent Christmas from the 1960s through to the 2010s. It provides an interesting social history insight into Christmas’s that are still in living memory but very different to 2025.

Benn left an enduring legacy to the British Christmas. As Postmaster General in 1966 he promoted the introduction of Christmas postage stamps.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in that context Benn was something of a Christmas card sender himself.

On Saturday 12th December 1998 Benn wrote, ‘I stuck labels on the Christmas cards- a terribly time consuming job. We’re only sending a few hundred this year.

By Saturday 4th December 2004 Benn noted that he had ‘bought £100 worth of stamps…signed, stamped and posted well over 350 Christmas cards. However he added ‘I have a wonderful computerised system’.

On 25th December in the same year he received from Cherie Blair a signed copy of her book ‘To Tony who’s been an inspiration throughout my life’. The bearer of the gift had added that Cherie had told them ‘don’t tell my husband’..

The diary also contains (20th December 1992) Benn’s record that he decorated the Christmas tree ‘as best he could’ and then taken the children to a ‘pizza parlour’ in Chiswick.

There are other entries down the decades a fascinating mixture of the personal and political at Christmas