My sister was part of a group that offered support to the striking miners of Wales, Scotland and England.

They organised a public fundraiser and invited the politician Tony Benn to speak.

It was one of those peculiar evenings that only politics, in its more eccentric British form, seems capable of producing. A small support group had invited Tony Benn to speak in Worcester. None of them, I should hasten to add, were natural admirers of the Labour party. They also were not fond of Westminster’s parliamentary rituals. They were, however, acutely aware that their guest might require a certain amount of… guidance through the evening. The task fell to me. I was a lifelong Labour member. I had an almost touching faith in the mother of parliaments. Someone, in short, who could speak the same language. They did not quite call me his “minder”, but that was the essence of it. Earlier that day, over dinner and before his speech, I steered the conversation towards his book Arguments for Democracy. I admitted, perhaps a bit immodestly, that I had read it at least three times. I had also borrowed liberally from it in my own career. In particular, I told him that I found one section invaluable. In this section, he sets out the questions. These are questions that any elected politician or minister should put to technologists who propose grand new schemes.

I worked at Sperry for nearly 13 years. It was an American multinational with a distinctly Republican tint. The company had deep ties to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. It also had a reputation for ruthless hire-and-fire management. Somehow, I survived. During those years, I adapted Benn’s questions. He designed them initially to hold experts to account on behalf of the people. I applied them to the different arenas of corporate project boards and organisational stakeholders.

Benn listened, amused. I explained how I had turned his democratic checklist into a tool. It was now meant for interrogating over-confident engineers and ambitious IT directors. To cut to the heart of the matter, here, lightly adapted for a business rather than governmental context, are the 10 questions he believed leaders should always ask of technologists:

1. Would your project, if carried through, promise benefits to the organisation? If so, what are they, how will they be distributed, to whom, and when will they accrue?
2. What disadvantages might flow from your work? Who would experience them? What remedies could correct them, and is the technology for those remedies sufficiently advanced to be available when needed?
3. What demands would the project make on our resources? Consider skilled people, budget, and infrastructure. Are those resources genuinely available?
4. Is there a cheaper, more straightforward, less sophisticated way of achieving at least part of the objective? If so, what would it be, and what proportion of the total goal would we have to sacrifice?
5. What new skills would people need to use the product or system you are recommending? How could those skills be created?
6. What existing skills would be rendered obsolete? How serious a problem would that create for the people who possess them?
7. Is this work being done, or has it been attempted elsewhere in the world? What lessons – good or bad – can we draw from those experiences?
8. If we do not proceed, what disadvantages or penalties might the organisation face? And what alternative projects should we consider instead?
9. If your proposal is accepted, what supporting work will be required? Consider systems, processes, and training. What must be started at the same time to manage consequences? How do you prepare for the next stage? And what, precisely, would that next stage be?
10. Finally, and crucially: if we decide to proceed, how long will the option to stop remain open? How reversible will the decision be at each subsequent stage?

That evening, after the speech, my duties extended to getting Benn to Worcester station in time for the Oxford train. We were cutting it fine. In the hurried scramble, he signed my copy of Arguments for Democracy. It was a treasured scribble snatched amid the panic. However, he realised he had nothing to read on the journey. By happy coincidence, a copy of The Chomsky Reader was on the back seat of my car. I handed it over. He accepted it with a wry smile. We tore through the empty streets of Worcester, arrived with seconds to spare, and he boarded the train. Job done.

Looking back, the evening feels like a minor event, almost a comic footnote to a larger story. It is about the enduring need to subject expertise to democratic scrutiny, whether in parliament or in the boardroom. And about the odd, fleeting alliances that politics sometimes forges. These include partnerships between lifelong Labour loyalists and radical critics of the system.

They united for one night in Worcester and separated again by the closing doors of a late train to Oxford.