TONY Benn comes to The Anvil in Basingstoke next week for what he insists is a "public meeting", not The Anvil's billed "audience with".

This important distinction reaffirms the familiar image of a man of serious purpose not a politician turned showbiz chancer with his eye on ticket sales and a yearning for the limelight.

He would probably be just as happy to hold the event in a dilapidated village hall.

Speaking to The Herald from his Holland Park home, where he has lived for 52 years, he is recording our conversation - a practice he's adopted for the last 25 years - having just fetched his cup of tea and pipe.

"They're public meetings really. I talk for 25 minutes and then we have a discussion for an hour and a half. What we need is more public meetings because if you listen to someone on the telly he probably didn't write his speech, he's probably not talking to you anyway and he's probably trying to restore confidence in the British economy or Wall Street, and you can't ask him a question."

When he retired from politics two years ago after half a century as an MP - the longest serving Labour MP in history - he famously said it was to "devote more time to politics", and, judging by his post-retirement itinerary, he seems to have achieved his goal, albeit if outside of Westminster.

"Retirement is the busiest time of my life," he says in his familiar softly patrician tones. "I did a couple of peace meetings - a couple of million in Hyde Park - did three meetings in Glastonbury. That's my life. I did six or eight meetings this week. The letters pour in (about 10 a day, he tries to reply to them all). I haven't got a secretary. I do a lot of broadcasting (400 broadcasts last year), I've just published a book. I'm extremely busy but I don't have to turn up for the three-line whips at the House of Commons and that is a relief."

A Cabinet minister in the Wilson and Callaghan governments, his post-parliament days have given him not less, but a different kind of power. "There's executive power - you can go to war, that's executive power - but in the long run what shapes things is the way people think, and my own impression is that public opinion has shifted substantially.

"I think most people would be happier if the railways were run centrally and efficiently. I don't think most people want public services privatised. I think a lot of pensioners are very, very worried and would want state pensions linked to earnings. I think most people are really anxious about student fees and they don't want to go to war. In a way, the things I've argued for in my life are now very widely accepted."

So he's still a socialist. "Of course, yes. I don't think you can understand the world unless you understand why people do things. Why did Mr Bush want to go to war with Iraq? He wanted oil full-stop."

He believes that people, far from being apathetic, are angry and mistrustful and that the media has dumbed down its political coverage.

Referring to the current brouhaha between the BBC and Alastair Campbell, he says: "It's a clever idea to turn a huge argument about why we went to war into a libel action between a political advisor and a public corporation."

Before the war with Iraq, he spent £4,000 of his own money flying himself to Baghdad for a televised interview with Saddam Hussein, coming in for much flak for what was perceived as a powder-puff interrogation.

"I asked him if he had weapons of mass destruction. He said no and everybody laughed, but they haven't found any. I didn't go to that interview to pretend to be Jeremy Paxman and if journalists conducted diplomacy we'd have a nuclear war every week. The journalists were angry I'd got the interview and they hadn't and because they didn't like the answers he gave."

Arguably, Saddam was one of Benn's two most famous interviews. The other when he found himself the unwitting victim of Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Ali G.

"Channel 4 wrote to me saying they were trying to introduce young people to politics, so they brought Ali G along and I was very polite to him.

"He took me in completely and then he said incredible things like 'Bitches only get pregnant to get benefits'.

"I said 'You can't say that' and then he said men only go on strike to cool off and then he said Margaret Thatcher was a communist. So I started to get a bit suspicious and angry.

"Then I saw the thing and realised he had performed a marvellous function of exploding all the media myths.

"I actually came out better than most people because they didn't dare argue with him and I said what I thought.

"Then he rang me up later and said would I appear in his film. I said 'I can't appear in your film but respec', you're my main man.'"

Benn joined the Labour party when he was 16 but so-called New Labour in his eyes "is a Conservative party". The son, grandson and father of MPs, he renounced his peerage n 1963.

He inherited the title Lord of Stansgate from his Labour MP father, who joined the RAF at the age of 63 "because he wanted to fight Hitler".

Now 78, he was married to Caroline for more than 50 years before her death three years ago. They had four children including Hillary Benn, Labour MP for Leeds Central.

Asked if there is a side to Tony Benn the public doesn't see, he replies: "I'm a tea drinker and a pipe smoker and a socialist and a grandfather with 10 grandchildren and a happy man. What more?"

l An Audience With Tony Benn, The Anvil, Basingstoke, July 17.