After Tony Benn died in March, at the age of 88, his Socialist Campaign Group co-founder, the Labour MP John McDonnell, gave a personal tribute on the floor of the House of Commons.

‘I want to go back to Labour’s programme of 1982, which was the Bennite programme and virtually all of it was written by Tony Benn. Tony’s ideas in that programme were straightforward — we would undertake a fundamental, irreversible shift in the redistribution of wealth and power. How would we do that? Through a fair and just tax system, tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance . . . That is what he was about.’

I wonder how Mr McDonnell felt yesterday, on reading the news of Tony Benn’s will. The former Labour Cabinet minister left an estate of £5,085,001, ‘reduced after liabilities’ to £5,020,389 according to probate records. It seems that apart from the odd small bequest to carers, all of that has been bequeathed to his four children, one the shadow secretary of state for communities, Hilary Benn.

In his will Tony Benn left nothing to the Labour party, nor to any of the various causes — such as Stop The War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — which he supported so articulately in his lifetime

Nothing appears to have been left to the Labour party, nor to any of the various causes — such as Stop The War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — which Benn supported so articulately in his lifetime.

It is not surprising that his children (now aged between 56 and 63) will inherit close to £1m each after tax. Tony Benn’s family had done well out of a firm called Benn Publishing, subsequently sold to UBM. And he had married a wealthy American — a fellow socialist — Caroline Middleton DeCamp. They lived in two properties, a sprawling house near London’s Holland Park and Stansgate, an Essex pile after which Benn’s father had taken the title Viscount Stansgate — a title which Benn had renounced, but which has now passed to his eldest son Stephen.

Avoidance

You would think that Benn’s children will now face a very large tax bill on their purely monetary inheritance. But it will be much smaller than it might have been.

Details released by the Land Registry showed that in the aftermath of Caroline Benn’s death in 2000 their children became part owners of the Holland Park house.

This change in the ownership of the family’s single most valuable asset would have been part of what accountants term ‘a deed of variation’, a legal procedure whereby a will can be altered posthumously to use up a spouse’s zero-rated death duty allowance.

The property transfer to the Benn children meant that when their father died his estate would be smaller and therefore the inheritance tax bill similarly reduced.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in this. It is completely legal. Any accountants advising a bereaved family with a valuable property would be remiss in not suggesting this manoeuvre. But it IS a manoeuvre: to be precise, it is a tax avoidance measure — exactly what John McDonnell said was Benn’s lifelong aim to prevent the wealthy from doing.

Some might be surprised less by this than by the fact that Benn appeared to have left none of his substantial fortune to charity.

I am not. It is one of the characteristics of the Left that it tends to regard the whole idea of charity with suspicion and even contempt. Rather, it supports the idea of an all-encompassing welfare state — funded by taxation — which would make redundant the very idea of individual giving to the needy.

Perhaps the starkest example of that view was expressed by Gordon Brown in an article he wrote for The Times as long ago as 1988.

The future Labour leader described charity as ‘a sad and seedy competition for public pity’. This remarkable quote was unearthed by the foremost expert on the history of British charitable giving, Dr Frank Prohaska, in a lecture for the Charity Commission last month.

Prohaska went on to point out how ‘government provision depends on compulsory taxation; it is not religious or altruistic . . . It is largely about furthering equality.’

Hilary Benn (above carrying his father's coffin) will inherit around £1m from his father

That was certainly the agenda of New Labour, and in government it swung a whole range of old and new charities behind the ‘equality agenda’ by the simple expedient of funding them directly with ever-increasing sums of tax-payers’ money: and after Labour had been booted out of office a number of its advisors found themselves jobs at the helm of these organisations.

So if our children pay inheritance tax after we die, we will unwittingly have left some of our money to these highly politicised charities — which perhaps is another argument for the sort of canny estate planning carried out by Tony Benn’s family.

I certainly don’t criticise that passionate socialist for his decision to act in this way, however much it appears to jar with his principles and his political programme. He was clearly a devoted husband and father.

Anyone who has read his diaries would know that family was central to his life, the more so as he got older and his political duties one by one fell away.

Many of his diary entries evoke his love for his children and his gratitude for their own kindnesses to him. So of course they would have been absolutely foremost in his mind when he drew up his will ten years before his death, in 2004.

Shame

It is only a shame that he never seemed to stop to wonder if his own political programme was really as humane as all that, since, if it had ever been implemented by a far-Left Bennite government, it would have stopped other families doing for their children what he clearly wanted to do for his own.

Indeed, a Bennite government would have done more than block posthumous ‘deeds of variation’: it would have dramatically increased the taxation of bequests from parents to their children — which can aptly be described as penalising parental love and concern for the family. It is precisely because the public intuitively understands this that Conservative politicians try to win votes by making promises (invariably broken) to eliminate Inheritance Tax.

Of course, Tony Benn could have left all his money to the taxman, the sole legal authority for the ‘redistribution of wealth’, as set out in his 1982 programme. But I would have respected him less if he had shown such consistency of political purpose.

In fact, that would have made me think of him as a miserable, cold-hearted soul — which he wasn’t. But his actions should make others on the Left question their own priorities — and policies.

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As before and after pictures go, it is impressive: Lord Falconer is now down to 11st 5lb, versus 16st 6lb two years ago. The former flatmate of Tony Blair has spoken about his remarkable disappearing act — apparently the result of eating only one meal a day — telling The Sunday Times he decided he could ‘emulate Lord Lawson, the former king of the Westminster weight watchers’.

My father did indeed achieve a similar feat almost 20 years ago — and has managed to keep the weight off since. Yet Charles Falconer says he hasn’t ‘discussed this with Lawson’ because ‘there’s a part of Lord Lawson that doesn’t want to acknowledge that it has happened — as if he was never fat’.

That, presumably, is why my father published The Nigel Lawson Diet Book.

Political heavyweight: Lord Falconer (left) as he was when he served in Tony Blair's administration and as he is now (right)

Diet book author: Lord Lawson of Blaby as he was before he wrote The Nigel Lawson Diet Book (left) and as he is now (right), twenty years later, having kept the weight off

Hidden vice that costs us dear

How many prostitutes work in the UK? We don't know

David Cameron has thrown a theatrical fit at Brussels’ demand that Britain immediately stump up an extra £1.7 billion in membership dues.

Yet it should not have come as much of a surprise. The (exorbitant) EU club fees are linked to a country’s Gross Domestic Product. Ours has recently been subject to a sharp upwards readjustment: Whitehall had decided for the first time to include ‘prostitution and illegal drugs’ in the official GDP figures.

According to the Office For National Statistics, this has added £10 billion a year to the reported size of the British economy.

But can officials begin to measure the black economy, given how often they revise figures even for legal economic output?

I have studied the relevant ONS document: it admits to being largely in the dark. On prostitution, it says: ‘Extensive data gaps have been filled with assumptions, recognising that this area of the economy is very difficult to measure.’

It notes that a body called ‘Europap’ had made an estimate of the numbers of prostitutes in the UK, but then adds pathetically, ‘We were not able to obtain a copy.’