His biographer, Jad Adams, wrote: "Benn's great continuous achievement is the endurance of his challenge to authority.
(Who else behaves like this?) So it's not surprising that as the eternal war continues to spin out forever, all anyone wants to talk about is how great Hilary Benn's speech was.
Perched on old garden chairs in a corner of the study, which is cluttered with tapes and endless mounds of papers containing the famous Benn diaries, the Benns demonstrate great affection and admiration.
"It was the last great Victorian festival," Benn wrote.
Without question, Mr Benn was one of the great figures of the post-war period.
Benn rose to be a great deal more famous than his father.
The English civil war radicals were great heroes to Benn because they were early advocates of democratic principles.
During the debate, Hilary Benn MP, son of the great socialist campaigner Tony Benn, delivered a 14-minute speech in which he defied Jeremy Corbyn to express his support for an air war in Syria, and seemingly everyone agrees that it was wonderful, statesmanlike stuff.
In July 2008, Benn announced that "after a great deal of consideration", he had decided not to implement a culling policy, and to instead invest £20 million on a new programme of bTB vaccination research, a decision based primarily on the advice of the ISG BBCC 2008).
Mr Benn played a large part in changing that.
His belief in state and co-operative ownership of industry was considered so sinister by right commentators at the time that the Daily Mail's Political Editor, Anthony Shrimsley, warned: "The true menace of citizen Benn is that he has greater ambitions than merely to take over everything that contributes to the industrial and commercial strengths of these islands.
