Tony Benn - a condescending old fraud.

News this morning that Tony Benn has died, and more outpouring of sorrow at the passing of another national treasure.
However, at the risk of speaking ill of the recently departed, I thought he was a condescending old fraud, who spent his time grandstanding and heckling on the sidelines, and doing bugger-all else other than perpetrating his own avuncular personality-cult.
His legacy was the rupture of the Labour Party for purely egotistical reasons, the consequences of which were eighteen years of Thatcherism and the ascendancy of Tony Blair and the New Labour project.

So yeah, sorry he's dead and all that, but he did change the face of British politics.
It's just a shame that it wasn't for the better.