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THE RIGHT HON. HILARY BENN MP
"Hullo there! Do come in. How are you?" Hilary Benn, 51, Secretary of State for International Development and a key member of Tony Blair’s cabinet bounds from behind his desk, hands outstretched, to greet me with informal warmth and charm. He is tall, whip-thin and fizzing with energy as he directs me to the comfortable sofa from which I am to question him briefly about DFID and Zambia. He is in a hurry and as we sit down he gets in first, to ask about the Zambia Society Trust and when it began. It is clear he has read up on the trust and when I mention the football fund he quotes from a letter that appeared in the spring issue of Spotlight. This impresses, coming from a man who I am told is always either on visits to projects abroad or juggling like mad to keep abreast of a daily diary that embraces 71 countries around the world. And his grasp of the Zambia Society Trust reflects not only Mr. Benn’s evident courtesy, but his high regard for the voluntary sector in general which he describes as an important aid to developing countries, not least “because of its capacity to innovate.” And, one assumes, not least in Zambia, where it offers support to the department’s substantial programme in which DFID’s aid projection for 2004-5 is £30 million, increasing to £35 million in 2005-6. The department’s current fact sheet on Zambia’s background and DFID’s challenge is encouraging, though it refers to the ‘decades of decline’ that have made Zambia one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the world. For as Hilary Benn emphasises, “Zambia is starting to make progress in health, education and combating HIV/AIDS.” He believes that education is of fundamental importance to Zambia’s regeneration and the department has produced figures that provide him with hope, against a global educational background where, he says, “there are 100 million children who do not go to school.” In Zambia for instance, the DFID-assisted Primary Reading Programme has raised school literacy rates by over 400 per cent from 1999 to 2004, leading the department to conclude that ‘the Zambia experience is now a model for sub-Saharan Africa.’ And among the schools benefiting from DFID’s current £20 million investment there is special support in education for orphans and vulnerable children, most of them AIDS orphans. Commenting on Zambia’s recovery from its long decline, DFID cites children as a key target for health sector reforms ‘that are beginning to show progress. Per capita, public expenditure has risen and areas in which decline in outcome has been halted or reversed include immunisation, contraceptive use and antenatal coverage.’ Mr. Benn identifies a key area of DFID’s support of Zambia as good governance, where donor countries work with rather than around governments, and help their people “to have aspirations and expectations of their government.” Responding to questions about the ill effect on Zambia of conflict in Zimbabwe and DR Congo, Hilary Benn emphasises the need for conflict resolution in both and points to a third neighbour Mozambique, where peace has brought renewed prosperity to that country. “Above all, Zambia, like its neighbours, needs investment from outside,” he says. And DFID’s aim is to help make Zambia attractive to overseas investment, by increasing the government’s capacity to deal with its problems, and supporting the many programmes that bear on them. The Secretary of State is the son of the inimitable Tony Benn, whose diaries are legendary and who at 80 has his own website, hosts his own stage show and draws crowds wherever he appears, enjoying a celebrated old age after more than 50 years as an MP who relinquished an hereditary title to enter the Commons. So it is perhaps not surprising that Hilary Benn (whom press reports credit with having described himself as “a Benn but not a Bennite”) has gone the other way: he will not discuss his private life and his large, bright office overlooking Palace Street is unadorned by photographs or signs of personal identity of any kind. The nearest he comes to anything personal is when I mention his Christian name and we touch briefly on its origins in the identity of Hilary of Poitiers, a 4th Century male saint. But he is non-committal, saying only that his parents had planned to call him Hilary whether he had been a boy or a girl. Hilary Benn and his three siblings were educated at Holland Park Comprehensive School, near the family home. He took a degree in Russian and East European Studies at Sussex University in 1974, and went to work for the Labour Party in Ealing, moving through the ranks and gaining wide experience in everything from education and the environment to trade unions and management. His career accelerated with New Labour's 1997 General Election victory, when he was appointed special adviser to David Blunkett, then Secretary of State for Education and Employment. In June 1999 he was elected MP for Leeds Central and in May 2003 became Minister of State for International Development. In October last year Hilary Benn took over as Secretary of State from Baroness Amos, who had herself a few months earlier replaced the controversial MP Clare Short when Miss Short’s differences with the Prime Minister over Iraq led to her retirement from the prestigious DFID job. He appears to have hit the ground running and has already visited, amongst countries world-wide, several of the 14 in Africa that are on DFID’s aid list. He contradicts my suggestion that DFID concentrates on strife-torn countries, saying that he has so far been to Mozambique and Malawi, as well as to Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia and the Sudan. And he hopes to visit Zambia as soon as his schedule allows. Hilary Benn heads a department that has since the 1960s in its various forms been led by many able politicians including Barbara Castle, Arthur Bottomley, Chris Patten and Dame Lynda Chalker. Today it employs over 2, 600 people, 812 of them in the refurbished London offices opened in 2000 by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; they are an amalgam of three neighbouring buildings in Victoria, conjoined under the high glass ceiling of a lofty atrium that forms an attractive communal refreshment area on the ground floor. And the murmur over the coffee cups there is that DFID’s staff members admire Mr. Benn as a committed and highly effective leader. This is a view substantiated by his assured and articulate performance in the House of Commons. Just before I am ushered out of the office on another warm handshake, he returns to the matter of his Christian name - and grins when I am unable to answer a question he poses about St. Hilary. He then says that his mother had always told him that the name meant ‘cheerful.’ And the cap appears to fit. Which must be a helpful characteristic for this senior member of Her Majesty’s government whose immensely challenging brief is to make life better for millions of impoverished people in 71 countries.
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