"Some of the Civil Servants used to contribute a lot to counter-briefing directed against Tony Benn on the assumption that he being anti-Europe everything he said should be resisted. I disliked this intensely. This kind of official politicking is one of the most unattractive aspects of the Civil Service... There is a sort of top Civil Servants' mafia. I soon found that they were trying systematically to get pro-European Ministers to gang up against anti-European Ministers. I used to receive briefings from the Foreign Office beginning with: "We expect Mr Benn to say the following..." I made it clear that these briefings about what Mr Benn would say and in the view of officials ought to say should not come from officials in the Department of Energy."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomAnti-war activistsLGBT rights activistsActivists from EnglandDemocratic socialists
Original Language: English
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Sources
David Owen, Personally Speaking to Kenneth Harris (1987), pp. 110-111
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Benn
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Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician and diarist who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between [
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