TONY Benn appeared "unmuzzled" in front of a respectable festival audience to win over hearts and minds to his "subversive" agenda last Thursday.

The sprightly 77-year-old die-hard socialist took to the stage with folk singer Roy Bailey to entertain and provoke with music and historical texts threaded together to form a lively left-wing polemic.

Benn's warmth and humour were immediately in evidence, as was the powerful voice of his companion as the pair took turns at the microphone.

The highly-principled former MP for Chesterfield, who renounced his title after being born to an aristocratic family, marshalled assorted works from English history to illustrate the long-held dream of utopia.

He reminded the audience England beat Russia, France and America to declare a republic in 1649 with a constitution beginning with the words "We the free people of England..."

Eighteenth century revolutionary Tom Paine and Victorian poet Oscar Wilde, among others, were enlisted to flesh out the recurring theme of the lower classes working their fingers to the bone to finance the upper classes' lavish lifestyle.

I wondered, however, as he hailed the stance of the Luddites and others, whether his beloved industrial working class would ever have come into existence had their struggle succeeded.

But Benn's charm and passion - and the patent consistency and strength of his convictions - proved overpowering.

And by the end of the first half Bailey had the apparently conservative audience singing the chorus of a song celebrating the life of one of the West's most famous revolutionaries.

The second half continued in the same vein with Benn labelling capitalism a religion with management consultants its priests.

Bailey stepped in to lampoon US president George Bush as a man who thought his vice-president, Dick Cheney, must have had a sex change if he had acute angina.

He went on to denounce New Labour, saying its emblem should not be a rose but a condom: "It stands up to inflation, covers a bunch of pricks and screws the next generation."

The only discordant note struck in an accomplished performance by Benn was when he inferred support for the murderous Robert Mugabe.

But as he relaxed between readings and sucked on his trademark pipe, he exuded the contentment of a man thoroughly at peace with his convictions. FA