ISBN10: 0826456995, ISBN13: 9780826456991, [publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, London] Hardcover Hardcover. For much of his half-century career in the House of Commons, Tony Benn has been the most loved and loathed man in British politics. He has been idolized by the left, and reviled with equal measure by the Westminster establishment , not least by New Labour. Once tipped to lead the Labour Party, Benn's growing disillusionment with what he regarded as the "democratic deficit" infecting politics, reinforced his resolve to continue playing the role he valued most, as "a good House of Commons Man".David Powell's fascinating new biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty year political career from the day he first entered the House in 1950. He argues that Benn's commitment to the House of Commons was fortified by his experiences during the thirty months when he fought to renounce his peerage and remain an MP; then during the twelve years he spent in government, and finally during the two decades he spent on the back benches, having been defeated in the bruising campaign for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party. Each was to provide him with an insight into the workings of power and cumulatively they were to convince him of the charade that passed for democracy not only in Westminster and in the Labour Party, but in the European Union and in the wider in the global context, with democratic ideals subordinated to the ...