Tony Benn was a paradox. He was a socialist whose integrity no one questioned, as well as an inspiring, fluent, persuasive and charismatic politician. Yet his three main achievements – the Peerage Act of 1963 (which allowed him and others to renounce their peerages), his securing of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market and his democratisation of the Labour Party (which opened up the election of its leaders to all party members) – did nothing to advance socialism by a millimetre, and only the first was undoubtedly a good thing.

His great strategic ideas – the need for a written constitution, the futility of war in Iraq, investment in public services as a means of curing unemployment – have stood the test of time. His day-to-day judgements, for the most part, have not. During the 1984–5 miners’ strike, he was trumpeting the certainty of victory for the miners and the greatness of Arthur Scargill’s leadership long after most of us had realised that the miners were heading for dreadful defeat and Scargill was tactically inept. His arguments about the EU being anti-democratic have unwelcome parallels in the rhetoric of Nigel Farage. His constant attacks on Neil Kinnock probably contributed to Labour’s 1992 election defeat, which meant that the party’s return to government was delayed for a further five years and that its leader when it eventually won was not Kinnock, who was a socialist, but Tony Blair, who was not.

The best biographies are written by people who admire their subjects, and Jad Adams clearly admires Benn, though not uncritically. His biography, first published in 1992 and now updated and extensively revised to mark the hundredth anniversary of Benn’s birth, is very long and detailed, the sort of book normally