He is currently on tour and at Buxton Opera House on October 14.

Despite retiring as an MP in 2001 after fifty years in the House of Commons a record for a Labour politician he is still out there touring the country, spreading the word, sparking debate and mesmerising audiences with his captivating live show, An Evening with Tony Benn.

In the show, which sells out wherever he goes, Benn gives a short introductory talk in which he regales audiences with illuminating anecdotes from decades of public service, reflects on his life in politics and shares his view of the changes within the Labour Party before taking questions from the audience.

He is evidently thriving on the candid discussion he is able to generate with thousands of people up and down the country at these hugely popular shows.

Benn is full of beans. Bursting with ideas, he exhibits an energy and a curiosity about the world that would shame a man half his age.

As he puffs his trademark pipe and sips his trademark tea – he reckons he gets through a pint an hour – Benn makes for marvellously rewarding company.

He is self-effacing _ at one point, he protests that he would not want his show to be entitled An Audience with Tony Benn: "that sounds like I'm a member of the Royal Family and that you will be 'in the gracious presence of ...'."

Later, he freely admits that while he has made errors during his long life, "I'm not ashamed of mistakes because you can learn from them. The only thing I'd be ashamed of is if I thought I'd said anything to get on _ but I've never done that ... At my age, I've become more interested in everything and less sure of anything."

A man of modest needs, he goes on to point out later that, "my attitude to food is like taking the car to the garage and saying, 'fill her up'. I said that to Nigella the other day, and she looked absolutely shocked!"

Surrounded by the paperwork from many decades of assiduous diary- and letter-writing, Benn underlines how stimulating he still finds life.
Driven

A man who continues to be driven by a rare passion, he could not imagine ever retiring. "I'm very happy," beams the politician, who has been a member of the Labour Party since 1942 and was its chairman between 1971 and 1972. "I still believe that if you make the effort, you can change things. I don't think, 'we don't have to bother, let's go and watch Celebrity Big Brother'.

He observes that, "the show is about thinking aloud and trying to encourage people. When I look back on life, the people I remember in life are the ones who encouraged me, like teachers who said, 'you haven't got that quite right, try this'. Encouraging people is a way of bringing out their capacity to do well ... If you can encourage them, they'll do twice as well as they would have done otherwise."

He concludes that he cannot foresee a time when he will want to stop presenting An Evening with Tony Benn. "The danger is that you end up saying the same things, but with this show you're constantly getting new insights. Anyway, it's the only thing I can do. My profession is listening and talking and encouraging. If they put on my gravestone, 'Tony Benn _ he encouraged us,' I'd regard that as a totally satisfactory obituary!"