Benn welcomes the no-lame-ducks Government to the subsidy business with £42 million for Rolls-Royce 'subject to a further check on the figures' — the reckoning arrived eleven weeks later, in the form of the company's bankruptcy.

November 1970, five months into the Heath government's Selsdon phase — 'no more lame ducks', the IRC abolished, disengagement from industry proclaimed — and here is the new administration seeking another £42 million for the RB211, the engine Benn himself had backed for Lockheed's TriStar as Minister of Technology. The speech's power lay in what happened eleven weeks later: Rolls-Royce went bankrupt in February 1971, and the government that preached Adam Smith nationalised the most famous engineering company in the world within days — the first and greatest of the U-turns that defined and ultimately buried the Heath experiment. Benn's 'subject to a further check on the figures' jibe proved the whole story in miniature: nobody, minister or company, knew what the engine truly cost. The debate marks Benn mid-metamorphosis — still the technocratic Minister of Technology in argument, quoting the Scientific American and MITI, but borrowing from Chairman Mao for the jokes; within a few years the ironies here would harden into the full left case for public ownership, and the man himself into the most polarising figure in British politics. The underlying question — what a government owes a strategic company it cannot let fail — returned with the banks in 2008, when both front benches discovered they were Bennites for a fortnight.

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