Today, he sits, his name truncated; his prospects nil

Tony Benn has risen in place. He now sits high on the Opposition backbench, In 1959, he was known as 'Anthony Wedgewood Benn', soon to become, as was the nature of things, Lord Stansgate. Today, he sits, his name truncated; his prospects nil. Were socialism a religion, Tony Benn would be a saint. In a previous incarnation a century back, he would have been an Anglican divine whose erratic progress to the gates of Rome and back would have been the cause of much comment.

J. Critchley, The Palace of Varieties (1989), 114