Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/38

Tony Benn (1925–2014) was a British Labour politician who was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 47 years and a Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1960s and 1970s. He was educated at New College and served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War before entering politics. With his successful campaign to renounce his inherited title of Viscount Stansgate, Benn was instrumental in the creation of the Peerage Act 1963. Later, in the First Wilson ministry (1964–70), he served as Postmaster General and later as a notably 'technocratic' Minister of Technology. When the Labour Party was in opposition, Benn served for a year as the Chairman of the Labour Party. In the Labour Government of 1974–79, he returned to the Cabinet, initially serving as Secretary of State for Industry, before being made Secretary of State for Energy. During the Labour Party's time in opposition during the 1980s, he was seen as the party's prominent figure on the Left, and the term "Bennite" came to be used for someone with radical politics. After leaving Parliament in 2001, Benn was President of the Stop the War Coalition until his death.