Kenneth O. Morgan
MICHAEL FOOT

A LIFE

DEDICATION

For Joseph

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

1 Nonconformist Patrician (1913–1934)

2 Cripps to Beaverbrook (1934–1940)

3 Pursuing Guilty Men (1940–1945)

4 Loyal Oppositionist (1945–1951)

5 Bevanite and Tribunite (1951–1960)

6 Classic and Romantic

7 Towards the Mainstream (1960–1968)

8 Union Man (1968–1974)

9 Social Contract (1974–1976)

10 House and Party Leader (1976–1980)

11 Two Kinds of Socialism (1980–1983)

12 Into the Nineties

ENVOI: Toujours l’Audace

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

NOTES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

Michael Foot has had a very long and colourful life. He was chronicler and participant in central aspects of British twentieth-century history. His first general election found him crusading for Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in 1929. His twentieth and last saw him campaigning for Labour in his old seat, Ebbw Vale/Blaenau Gwent, seventy-six years later. He spans the worlds of Stafford Cripps and Tony Blair. He was a doughty opponent of appeasement in the later 1930s: his book Guilty Men made him famous at the age of twenty-seven. He was vocal in condemning the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He stands, and feels himself to stand, in the great and honourable tradition of dissenting ‘troublemakers’, the heir to Fox and Paine, Hazlitt and Cobbett. He played in his life many parts. As icon of the socialist left, he was custodian and communicator of British socialism. He was the greatest pamphleteer perhaps since John Wilkes, a formidable editor, and author of a glittering biography of his idol, Nye Bevan. He was a scintillating parliamentarian, an inveterate critic and peacemonger as Bevanite, Tribunite and founder member of CND, yet also a belligerent patriot and internationalist from Dunkirk to Dubrovnik. He was a central figure and champion of the unions in the Labour governments of the 1970s, a key player in Old Labour’s last phase. Less happily, he was for almost three tormented years Labour’s leader. Perhaps most important of all, he was a deeply cultured and literate man whose learning was absolutely central to his politics. He was heir to the Edwardian men of letters, the Liberals Morley or Birrell, and politically more innovative than either. Over sixty years he was an inspirational and civilizing force, if a deeply controversial one. His passing will symbolize a world we have lost.

When Michael Foot asked me if I would write a new authorized biography, I was, of course, both excited and honoured. At the same time, I had some doubts. After writing a large biography of one veteran Labour leader, Jim Callaghan, I wondered whether it would be wise to write another, especially on someone so removed from Callaghan’s own wing of the party. Although Callaghan and Foot worked with immense loyalty as colleagues in the Labour government of 1976–79, they were very different as men and as democratic socialists. Someone who worked for them both told me that they were not ‘best buddies’, while Jim Callaghan himself, just before he died in March 2005, showed himself to be a bit wary of my new project. Another point was that, while I had never really been on the right in Labour terms since I first joined the party in 1955, I was not really Old Labour either, despite the stereotypes of amiable journalists who have vainly tried to depict me as its ‘laureate’. On the contrary, I have always been a liberal devolutionist rather than a state centralist (being Welsh may have something to do with that), while on several major issues my views were not those of Michael Foot, notably on CND and on Europe. Although an admirer of Bevan (whose features adorn the sticker on my car window), I was not a Bevanite. And finally, at the start of 2003 I was doing something else, namely writing an academic book on the public memory in twentieth-century Britain. I have always been a historian rather than a biographer; only six of my books have been biographies. I was also an active member of the Lords (dissident Labour), an institution of whose abolition Michael Foot has always been an ardent supporter.

But as soon I began work and began talking to Michael Foot about his career, my doubts immediately dissolved. Having written on Jim Callaghan’s equally fascinating career proved to be a huge stimulus, both in seeing somewhat similar episodes from another perspective, and in finding contrasts and comparisons between two totally different men, each capable of the greatness of spirit to work with someone to whom he was not naturally attuned. The fact that I started from a somewhat different political (and perhaps literary) standpoint from Michael Foot was in itself exciting in trying to examine his principles and his crusades from the outside. Michael himself was typically honourable and honest in recognizing that I came from somewhere else on the Labour continuum, and that in any case I was writing as a detached scholar and lifelong academic. It is characteristic that he has made no effort to read, let alone censor, anything I have written. His view of freedom of expression and interpretation, and the need to pursue them uninhibitedly and audaciously, has been most admirably exemplified in his approach to his own biographer, and I greatly respect that. Even membership of a non-elected House has not, perhaps, been a barrier. And finally, to someone working on the public memory, there is no finer custodian or exemplar of it than Michael Foot, deeply aware, as hardly any contemporary politicians are, of the vital importance of the past – history, legend, memory and myth intertwined – in shaping the present and pointing the way ahead. So writing on Michael Foot has enormously stimulated my earlier interests. As I have moved into my eighth decade, it has given me several new ones: I know far more about Montaigne, Swift or Hazlitt, for example, than I ever did before, and my mind is much the richer for it. In all ways, I have found writing about Michael deeply stimulating. This book has been great fun to write, and it would be nice to think that some readers might find it fun to read. No doubt I shall find out.

There is another personal aspect too. Back in 1981 I received a letter from Jill Craigie, Michael’s wife, in effect suggesting that I might write his life. She invited my wife Jane and me to their house in Pilgrims Lane for a delightful dinner and talk. In fact, for whatever reason, the offer was never actually made – to my relief at that time, as I was then heavily involved with two long books, two small children and a beautiful and dynamic young wife, as well as being a busy Oxford tutor. I was not exactly looking out for ways of filling up my empty hours. I met Jill for the last time in the autumn of 1997 at an event at Congress House, near the British Museum, to celebrate the centenary of Nye Bevan’s birth. She had not been well, and she looked ill and rather sad as she came up to me and (without needing to explain) said quietly that we both knew she should have taken a different decision years earlier. I felt deeply moved, but mumbled something to the effect that I was still very much alive, and that there was still time. Jill died two years later. I would like to think that in writing this book I have been fulfilling a kind of secret bond of trust between us. I well know she would not have agreed with all its contents, but it would have been fun to have been appropriately chastised by this tough, determined but warm, loyal and lovable woman.

My main debt of gratitude is, of course, to Michael Foot himself. Apart from honouring me by asking me to write the book, he was always freely available for formal interviews or offhand chats, always open in making his papers (when they could be unearthed!) available to me, and quite astonishingly kind in giving me some of his own or his father’s books, several of them rare. He is an extraordinarily warm and generous person, a man of unforced, spontaneous learning. Simply to work through his personal edition of Montaigne’s writings, read in Hereford hospital after a serious car crash in late 1963 and covered with his own scholarly pencilled annotations, is in itself an education. Whether at home in his Pilgrims Lane basement rooms or cheerfully installed in an upstairs dining room over the goulash, raspberries and white wine at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, talking to this ever-young nonagenarian has been nothing less than a joy, and I count myself fortunate indeed. I am also greatly indebted to the quite selfless kindness of Jenny Stringer, who has not only looked after Michael but in many ways looked after me as well during the writing of this book. I am also very grateful to Sheila Noble, who allowed me to look through Michael’s papers in her own possession in Clapham. Kay, Baroness Andrews, was kind in making the initial connections, her interest in the book no doubt shaped by her background as a citizen of Tredegar. I am also grateful to Michael’s many nice housekeepers who gave me so many splendid lunches. I particularly recall lunchtime conversations in Welsh with two of them, observed by Michael with amused tolerance. I have never met the authors of two earlier biographies, Mervyn Jones, and Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, but I would also wish to thank them for valuable information in their books which has helped me, especially on the personal aspects.

I am also hugely indebted, of course, to the kindness of Michael’s friends and colleagues. I have greatly benefited from formal interviews with Ian Aitken, Lord Barnett, Francis Beckett, Tony Benn, Albert Booth, the late Lord Bruce, the late Lord Callaghan, the late Baroness Castle, the late Dick Clements, Roger Dawe, Lord Evans of Parkside, Alan Fox, Vesna Gamulin, Geoffrey Goodman, Brian Gosschalk, Baroness Gould, Lord Hattersley, Lord Healey, Lord Hunt of Tanworth, Jack Jones, Dr Hrvoje Kacic, Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, Lord Kinnock, Jacqui Lait MP, Sir Thomas McCaffrey, Keith McDowall, Lord McNally, Baroness Mallalieu, Nada Maric, the late Lord Merlyn-Rees, Lord Morris of Aberavon, the late Lord Murray of Epping Forest, Sue Nye, the late Lord Orme, Lord Owen, Lord Paul, Sir Michael Quinlan, Caerwyn Roderick, Clive Saville, Lord Steel, Sir Kenneth Stowe, Elizabeth Thomas, Hugh Thomas, Lord Varley, Lord Wedderburn, Baroness Williams of Crosby, Vivian Williams and Sir Robert Worcester.

I am also grateful for valuable information gained from, amongst others, Dr Christopher Allsopp, Lord Anderson of Swansea, Sir Kenneth Barnes, Lord Biffen, Lord Brookman, Dr Alan Budd, Lord Burlison, Lord Carter, Lord Corbett, Sir Patrick Cormack MP, Lord Dubs, Lord Eatwell, Robert Edwards, Dr Hywel Francis MP, John Fraser, Baroness Gale, Jadran Gamulin, Lord Gilmour, Baroness Golding, Dr Andrew Graham, Lord Graham of Edmonton, Peter Hain MP, Lord Hogg, Lord Howe of Aberavon, Lord Irvine, Baroness Jay of Paddington, the late Lord Jay of Battersea, Lord Jones of Deeside, William Keegan, Paul Levy, Lord Lipsey, Lord Mason, Mrs John Powell, Professor Siegbert Prawer, Lord Prior, Lord Rodgers, Lord Sheldon, Dr Elizabeth Shore, Robert Taylor, Baroness Turner of Camden, Dennis Turner and Alan Watkins. I am also indebted to Francis Beckett for audio-visual material.

All academic writers are massively indebted to the philanthropic race of librarians. The staff of the House of Lords Library have been extraordinarily helpful, not least their former chief, David Lewis Jones from Aberaeron – diolch yn fawr iawn i ti am dy caredigrwydd. The librarian of the Reform Club, Simon Blundell, has been eternally helpful. I am also much indebted to the staff of the People’s History Museum, Manchester, where Michael Foot’s formal papers are so admirably housed, especially my old friend Stephen Bird. The helpful staff of the New Bodleian Library in charge of the newspaper stacks; my old friend John Graham Jones of the Political Archive, the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Drs Allen Packwood and Andrew Riley at Churchill College, Cambridge; Ms Mari Takayanagi of the House of Lords Record Office; Ms Sally Pagan of Edinburgh University Library; and Ms Rachel Hertz at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, the University of Texas at Austin, have all been kindness itself, while the library staff of The Queen’s College, Oxford, have served me cheerfully as they have done since 1966. I am truly fortunate in my college, its Provost and Fellows, and all its staff.

I am delighted that the Right Honourable Tony Blair allowed me to publish one of his private letters. I am also very grateful for permission to publish material where trustees own the copyright, notably the Beaverbrook Papers in the House of Lords Record Office; to Baroness Jay for material from the private papers of Lord Callaghan in her possession; and to Sir Patrick Cormack MP for showing me the portrait of Michael Foot in 1 Parliament Street as well as to the artist, Graham Jones, for allowing me to use it in illustrating this book.

For the second time, a manuscript of mine has been read by my old friend Professor David Howell of the University of York. His extraordinary learning and attention to detail have both saved me from many errors and much enriched my knowledge on matters ranging from trade union elections to the goal-scoring exploits of Plymouth Argyle. The Dictionary of Labour Biography is in the best of hands. My MS was also read by my daughter Katherine, and she too was immensely helpful for her insights both as a civil servant and as a young person.

I am also much indebted to Alison and Owain Morgan for generously giving me material on and insights into the career of Isaac Foot, whose life they have published with Michael; Chris Ballinger of Brasenose College, Oxford, for great help with the more recent National Archive records; to my colleague at Queen’s, Nick Owen, for giving me material on Indian politics in the thirties; to Clive Saville for sending me fascinating information on his time with Michael Foot in Whitehall; to my old friend Professor Dai Smith for material on Raymond Williams, whose biography he is writing; to another old friend, Professor Roger Morgan, and to John Allinson for sending much helpful information on Leighton Park School; to an almost lifelong colleague, Professor Wm Roger Louis, for help at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas; and to Dr Peter Gaunt, Professor John Morrill and Dr Stephen Davies for informing me about the Cromwell Association. I have also benefited from the learning of Dr James Ward and my Lords colleague Ted Rowlands for guidance on Dean Swift. Indeed the companionship of many gifted and humane colleagues in the Lords has been a boon beyond measure, since I have had expert advice from Bhikhu, Lord Parekh, on Indian affairs, from Bill, Lord Wedderburn, on the complexities of labour law, and from Trevor, Lord Smith of Clifton, with shrewd thoughts on many matters from the benches of the Liberal Democrats. Anne-Marie Motard of the University of Montpellier has always been a reassuring force. My literary agent, Bruce Hunter, has been friend and wise adviser as for decades past, and my editor at HarperCollins, Richard Johnson, has made my first experience with that great publishing house quite delightful, as has my wonderful copy-editor, Robert Lacey. Since one of my unfortunate common experiences with Michael Foot is to have been the victim in a serious car crash, in my case in 2004, I would also like to thank Professor David Murray of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford, for restoring me physically (twice).

Most authors owe much to their families. Partly through adversity, ours is closer than most. I am hugely grateful to my two amazing children, David and Katherine, for their love, moral support, knowledge of word processors and unfailing enthusiasm for their obsessive bookish father; to my lovely daughter-in-law Liz, another writer in the making; and to my little grandson Joseph, a free-thinking, free-walking radical to whom this book is dedicated. This is my first big book since 1973 in which my beloved late wife, Jane, played no part. Yet maybe she was present after all. In 1987, at the parliamentary launch party of my book Labour People, one of the politicians dealt with there (very favourably) ignored the publishers’ invitation. He also ignored us in the Commons corridor as we approached the terrace room. By contrast, Michael Foot had replied at once, and made a very warm and witty speech at the event. ‘No surprise there,’ said Jane with finality. ‘Michael Foot is a gentleman.’ As always, she was right.

KENNETH O. MORGAN

Long Hanborough,

May Day 2006

1 NONCONFORMIST PATRICIAN (1913–1934)

On a fine sunny evening on 14 July 2003, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, hosted a reception in Downing Street. But this was a New Labour event with a difference. It was attended not only by the predictable great and good of the British Labour movement and the associated media, but also by a rich variety of rebels and dissenters, veterans of CND, Tribune and Troops Out, a representative sample of those people that the historian A. J. P. Taylor had christened, in a famous book in 1957, Britain’s ‘troublemakers’. They were there to honour a frail old man of almost ninety, compelled to be seated but full of life and nodding his head in synchronized animation. This was Michael Foot, an almost legendary icon on the Old Left, one-time leader of the Labour Party, long-term oppositionist parliamentarian, editor and essayist, pamphleteer and man of letters, a scourge of Guilty Men in high places ever since he first made his name in that famous wartime tract published just after Dunkirk, sixty-three years earlier. This reception was merely the most spectacular of many events designed to make July 2003 a month of celebration of Michael’s latest landmark. That same week there was to be a massed gathering of his friends at his favourite Gay Hussar restaurant in Greek Street, Soho, at which the eminent journalist Geoffrey Goodman presided and Michael was awarded a shirt of his beloved Plymouth Argyle football team bearing the number 90 on its back. He had, he was told, been formally registered as part of the Argyle squad with the Football League, perhaps to reinforce his team’s left-wing attack. The following week there was another reception in the very epicentre of the establishment, this time the Foreign Office in Carlton Gardens, genially presided over by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Member for Blackburn and successor and protégé of Michael’s old comrade and love, Barbara Castle. He described how Michael had made in the House of Commons in 1981 the finest speech that he, Straw, had ever heard.

But the evening in the Downing Street garden on 14 July, Bastille Day appropriately, was the highlight. It was set, as Foot would have particularly appreciated, in a place steeped in history, where the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had convened his excited ministers in 1945 and Lloyd George’s ‘garden suburb’ of private advisers had once conducted intrigues and manoeuvres from temporary huts set amongst the flowerbeds. People wondered what Tony Blair himself might say about so traditional and committed an Old Labour stalwart. In fact his speech was charming, generous and relaxed. He recalled Michael’s dedication to human rights (though not to socialism), and paid especial tribute to his strong backing of the young Blair’s effort to become candidate for the Sedgefield constituency in 1983 – a reflection no doubt of Foot’s positive response to Blair’s early campaign in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, and also perhaps of his determination to ward off the selection of a hard-left Bennite, Les Huckfield. Michael, in response, spoke at much greater length and with less precision, although, to the joy of some present, he did manage an amiable throwaway reference to George Galloway, a far-left socialist shortly to be expelled from the Labour Party for his support for Saddam Hussein. The whole occasion was entirely relaxed and enjoyable, Old and New Labour as one, poachers and gamekeepers drinking in common celebratory cause. Vocal protests from demonstrators outside in Whitehall directed against Downing Street’s later visitor that evening, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (with which many in the garden sympathized), were satisfactorily inaudible. As they left, people commented on how relaxed Tony Blair looked even at a time of pressure during an inquiry by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee into the origins of the invasion of Iraq four months earlier. This was made especially difficult by the embarrassed evidence from the government scientist, arms expert and apparent whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly. Honouring Michael Foot, himself a vocal critic of the Iraq war, meant for the moment the burying of hatchets all round.

Four days later, the birthday bonhomie disappeared. The body of the tormented David Kelly was discovered in woodland at Southmoor, near his home in southern Oxfordshire. Suicide was suspected. Angry friends accused Tony Blair of indirect complicity. Foot’s birthday party was to prove almost the last happy evening that the Prime Minister would know for many months to come. The shadow of Kelly and the other consequences of the Iraq venture would haunt him right down to the general election of May 2005, which saw Labour’s majority fall by almost a hundred. But whatever these events meant for Tony Blair, they were perhaps not a bad symbol for the career of Michael Foot – loyal acclaim from the party, genial genuflection from the establishment, but an underlying background of conflict, tension and tragedy throughout the near century of which he was chronicler and survivor.

This unique combination of elitism and dissent went right back to Michael Foot’s ancestral roots. His family and forebears shaped his outlook and style more than they do for many public figures. More important, he himself believed that their influence was decisive, and often paid testimony to their historic importance, by word and by pen. It was a background of West Country dissent that dated from the historic conflict between Crown and Parliament under Charles I. Cromwell was very much the people’s Oliver for the tenant farmers and craftsmen of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. But it was also a tradition of patriotic dissent, of dissent militant. Francis Drake was an earlier hero for the community from which the Foots had sprung, his freebooting illegalities discounted amidst the beguiling beat of Drake’s Drum. In August 1940 Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was to give a famous broadcast, ‘Drake’s Drum Beats Again’, comparing the little boats at Dunkirk with Drake’s men o’war. Similarly it was Cromwell the warrior whom Michael and all the Foots celebrated – the victor of the battles of Marston Moor, Naseby and Dunbar, the man who supported the execution of his king and conducted a forceful, navy-based foreign and commercial policy – quite as much as the champion of civil and religious liberties. It is not at all surprising that Michael, ‘inveterate peacemonger’, unilateralist and moral disarmer, should also brandish the terrible swift sword of retribution in the Falklands and in Croatia and Bosnia later on. Like the legend of John Brown’s body, his prophetic truth would go marching on.

The Foot dynasty of Devon were robust specimens of West Country self-sufficient artisans. In the main they were village carpenters and wheelwrights, working on the Devon side of the river Tamar which separates that county from Cornwall. On balance, the Foot dynasty were Devonian English, indeed very English, not Brythonic or Cornish Celts. The earliest traced of them is John Foot, who is known to have married Grace Glanvill in the Devon village of Whitchurch, near Tavistock, on 21 October 1703. Then came successively Thomas Foot (born 1716), another Thomas Foot (1744–1823), John Foot (1775–1841) and James Foot (1803–58), all resident in the hinterland of Plymouth, all Methodists subscribing in their quiet way to that city’s tradition of vibrant nonconformity, and with folk memories of Plymouth’s role as a bastion of parliamentarianism, almost republicanism, during the civil wars of the 1640s. Men recalled the siege of Plymouth during those wars, and the citizens’ proud resolve not to be starved by the royalist armies into surrender. There was a permanent monument to it in Freedom Fields, close to the later home of Isaac Foot and his family. The man who really established the Foot tradition and mystique was Michael’s grandfather, the elder Isaac (1843–1927).¹ A carpenter and part-time undertaker by profession, he moved to Plymouth from Horrabridge in north Devon, reportedly with just £5 in his pocket. He built his own house, branched out as a small entrepreneur and as such took a more public role in the civic life of Plymouth. A passionate Methodist and teetotaller, he was anxious to civilize the somewhat turbulent seaport in which he lived, and left as his legacy a Mission Hall in Notte Street, near the city centre, which he himself had financed and built, along with Congress Hall for the Salvation Army. His son, the younger Isaac (1880–1960), began life with clear expectations of a professional career. He qualified as a solicitor, and after a brief period in London was articled to a solicitor back in Plymouth, married a Scots fellow Methodist, Eva Mackintosh, in 1904, set up his own firm of solicitors, Foot and Bowden, in the same year, and moved to live in Lipson Terrace, a comfortable upmarket road in the northern part of the town. It was in this secure bourgeois enclave that the seven children of the Foot dynasty were born.

Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was the sixth of eight children, of whom five were to live to a considerable age.² He was a memorable personality of dominating influence. As its patriarch, he was passionate in his defence of the Foot family. When he wrote to congratulate Michael on a fine maiden speech in Parliament in August 1945, at the same time he condemned Churchill for not appointing his other son Dingle to the Privy Council after his service at the Ministry of Economic Warfare: ‘I shall never forgive him for that. Now the Foot family move to the attack. When folk attack the Foot family, they are biting granite.’³ His outlook and lifestyle were challenging and highly individual. Of all the seven children of this Liberal patriarch it was Michael who was said most to resemble him. Until his nineties Michael would readily turn to his father’s views on politics and literature, on Cromwell or Napoleon, on Swift or Hazlitt or Burke, to bolster his own line of argument. Isaac Foot had been a radical youth, and at the age of eighteen was attracted to H. M. Hyndman’s Marxist party the Social Democratic Federation (SDF),⁴ but not for long. He was one of many young professional men stirred by the Liberal landslide victory in the general election of January 1906, when both the two Plymouth seats were captured by Liberals from the Conservatives. In 1907 he was elected a Liberal councillor and rose to become Deputy Mayor in 1920, at hand to take an enthusiastic part in the celebrations of the tercentenary of the sailing from the city of the Mayflower. He was basically an old Liberal, committed to the traditional battles with the bishop, the squire and especially the brewer. He shared to the full the nonconformist crusade for civic equality which made Devon, Cornwall and (to a lesser degree) Somerset more similar to the political outlook of rural Wales than to the rest of southern England. But Isaac responded very positively also to Lloyd George’s social radicalism, his ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 with its new taxes to pay for social reform, which the Lords rejected, and the successful battle with the Upper House in 1909–11, resulting in the passage of the Parliament Act. Despite the huge Liberal schism created later by the ‘coupon election’ in December 1918, when Lloyd George and his followers continued in coalition with the Unionists (Conservatives), the Welshman remained something of a Foot family talisman from then on. Isaac Foot actually stood for Parliament in January 1910 as Liberal candidate for Totnes, but was heavily defeated by the Conservative. He stood again in December 1910, this time for Bodmin, a seat held by another Liberal the previous January by the slender margin of fifty votes, and was defeated there by an even narrower margin, just forty-one votes. The turnout was 86.6 per cent in this traditionally hard-fought seat, and Foot stayed on as candidate.

During the war he was among those numerous West Country Liberals who took the side of the fallen Asquith after Lloyd George had ousted the Prime Minister in a putsch involving leading Conservatives and press men like Max Aitken (soon to become Lord Beaverbrook) in December 1916. Isaac Foot had in any case been a strong critic on libertarian grounds of the conscription measure passed by the Asquith coalition that May, and defended many conscientious objectors in tribunals during the war. This was not popular, and ensured his heavy defeat in a second contest for Bodmin in the general election of December 1918; he also failed in a by-election in Plymouth in 1919, after which the successful Conservative candidate Nancy, Lady Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. But Isaac hung on, and eventually won Bodmin in a by-election in February 1922 with a strong majority of over three thousand. He held on to the seat in the general elections of 1922 and 1923, lost in 1924 and was returned again to represent the same constituency in 1929 and then in 1931 when (from 3 September) he served in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government as Minister for the Mines.

Isaac Foot was in every sense a prominent figure in the political and civic life of Plymouth and the West Country. In all he fought Bodmin seven times, and established himself as a powerful politician of charisma and pugnacity. As an orator (and later a broadcaster) he was remarkable, drawing from his lay preaching in Cornish chapels a revivalist style and a vivid vocabulary with which righteously to smite the opposing Philistines. In the 1930s he was to become Vice-President of the Methodist Conference. But for all his devout Methodism and moralism, he showed little compunction in using fair means or foul to make his political points. ‘He fought with the gloves off,’ was his son’s later reflection. He threw himself into electioneering with gusto, taunting the Tories such as the Astor family interest in Plymouth with popular refrains such as ‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’. He was a fund of political and other jokes, and was liable to break into comic songs, sung in a rich Devonian accent.

He showed himself to be equally forceful in following one of his main private interests, the Cromwell Association, of which he was a founder member and which he served as secretary from 1938 and chairman until 1951. Here he would staunchly defend Oliver’s reputation and integrity against all comers. There is reference to Isaac on the monument unveiled in 1939 to mark Cromwell’s great victory at Marston Moor in 1644. Here indeed, as Michael Foot was to describe him, was ‘a Rupert for the Roundheads’.⁵ Episcopal opponents were particularly relished. On 20 February 1949, in his seventieth year, Isaac had a ferocious duel in the Observer with the Bishop of London, who had dared to impugn Cromwell’s reputation as a champion of liberty and toleration. Isaac swept the charges contemptuously back in his face. The Bishop’s accusation that Cromwell had condemned prelacy was, however, joyfully endorsed.⁶ Isaac flung at him one of Cromwell’s contemporaries, who scorned

You reverend prelates, clothed in sleeve of lawn

Too meek to murmur, and too proud to fawn

Who, still submissive in their Maker’s nod

Adore their Sovereign and respect their God.

In Isaac’s mind, old flames of controversy over tithe, church rate, university tests or Welsh disestablishment still burned fiercely. Cromwell’s reputation went through many vicissitudes over the centuries, from Whigs hailing the champion of parliamentary liberties, to Victorians who saw his Major-Generals as the last refuge of military rule in Britain, on to working-class radicals who revered ‘the People’s Oliver’. For Isaac, Cromwell was simply the great liberator, Milton’s ‘chief of men’, in peace and in war. In 1941 he published with Oxford University Press Cromwell Speaks!, a compendium of militant and patriotic quotations from the great man’s letters and speeches, to help in sustaining the national morale at a time of supreme crisis. His Cromwell Association made a point of honouring their hero’s statue on Cromwell Green in front of the Palace of Westminster, a memorial which had been bitterly attacked by Irish MPs in the 1890s. Isaac Foot was a true believer. He celebrated Cromwell and Milton in the same passionate vein as another Liberal politician, the late-Victorian man of letters Augustine Birrell, did in his 1905 biography of Andrew Marvell. John Gross has written that, for thousands of old Liberals, ‘the seventeenth century was alive with an intensity that now seems hard to credit’.⁷ It might have been Isaac – indeed all the Foots down the generations – that he had in mind.

Michael fully inherited this Cromwellian creed, without the roundhead puritanism. Like his elder brother John, he later became a Vice-President of the Cromwell Association, and he gave an eloquent address to it on 2 September 1995, in part a tribute to his father. He had assured the Chairman beforehand (surely quite unnecessarily), ‘My remarks will not be critical in any sense and would not offend members of the Cromwell Association.’ At the age of eighty-two, the ardour of the old believer was quite undimmed. A wreath was laid at Cromwell’s statue (the main theme of Foot’s speech), there were readings from the psalms and the singing of Bunyan’s imperishable hymn, so evocative to a Plymouth pilgrim, ‘He who would true valour see’. As late as September 2005 Michael attended the Cromwell Day service in the chapel of Central Hall, Westminster, and wrote warmly to the Association to convey his pleasure at the event: ‘I trust that several members of our family will be joining the Association soon.’⁸ On the other hand, he was sufficiently the disciple of his friend H. N. Brailsford to recognize fully the force behind the progressive egalitarian doctrines of the Levellers as well. Michael drew from his father not simply a cult of Cromwell, the popular tribune who brought blessings like the abolition of the House of Lords or tolerance towards the Jews, but also the need to defend his heroes with the maximum of pugnacity. When he himself entered Parliament, his father encouraged a creed of fortiter in re, not to confine his blows upon opponents to the regions above the belt, but to fight either dirty or clean as circumstances dictated, and Michael duly responded. Isaac Foot remained a keen observer of all his sons’ political progress, but Michael, who advanced from Cromwellian republicanism into a Labour Party of self-proclaimed levellers, was perhaps the most cherished of them all. Isaac would surely have endorsed Michael’s warm commendation in November 2005 of a book by his own former legal adviser, the civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC. This commemorated John Cooke, who successfully prosecuted the trial of Charles I for treason which led to the King’s execution in 1649. It was an event of which Michael Foot, humanist and opponent of capital punishment, strongly approved.

This bond between father and son was illustrated by Isaac’s splendid lecture comparing Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln given to the Royal Society of Literature in April 1944. Michael Foot’s copy of the published version was inscribed ‘To Michael with love and Cromwellian Salutations from Dad, 23 February 1945’. It seems almost as if Cromwell was a member of the family, a particularly cherished great-uncle. Dingle Foot was to recall that there were twenty to thirty busts or portraits of Oliver in their home. The Cromwellian aspect was obviously well absorbed by Michael. Lincoln, however, he found less appealing, perhaps too conservatively inclined, especially on race questions, and indeed American inspiration generally was less influential on a politician so robustly English. By far the most attractive American for the young Michael was Thomas Jefferson, not so much in his role as an American revolutionary as that of a transatlantic voice for western European enlightenment.

For all his partisanship, Isaac’s cheerful, generous personality won him good friends across a wide spectrum, and indeed these came to include the much-abused Astors themselves. He was always active in the municipal life of Plymouth, and became its Lord Mayor after the end of the war in 1945. He patronized the city’s religious and musical life, and also sporting events in football and cricket: Isaac began a unanimous Foot tradition of supporting Plymouth Argyle FC, based at Home Park and elected to the Football League in 1920. It was a family link that continued from Isaac’s vocal terrace support in the 1920s to Michael’s becoming a club director in the 1980s.

But Isaac’s main influence on his sons and daughters, and especially on Michael, lay not in politics but in books. From his early years he was, as Michael was frequently to describe him, a ‘bibliophilial drunkard’ whose appetite was ‘gargantuan and insatiable’.⁹ He had an obsession for rare and other books of all kinds, especially historical, literary and religious. His collecting began when, as a young clerk in London, he spent as much as he could of his fourteen shillings weekly pay in the second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road. In his later years every room in his large home at Pencrebar, even (improbably) the laundry room, was crammed full of carefully arranged and notated volumes. He would read for four or five hours every day; he would read as he walked to work, he read in his bath, he would have read in his sleep were it possible. Much of his library was sold off to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a surprisingly low figure of £50,000 after his death in 1960,¹⁰ less than £1 per book. Other materials went to Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, so sadly the library was dispersed: it had expanded to perhaps sixty thousand books, including no fewer than 240 Bibles, among them priceless octavo and quarto editions of Tyndale’s New Testament of 1536, and many medieval illuminated manuscripts, along with an immense range of antiquarian works by or about Shakespeare, Montaigne (130 volumes), Milton, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Burke, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Conrad and some unexpected intruders onto the old puritan’s shelves, such as the sonnets of Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The inventory of UC Santa Barbara library listed three thousand English Civil War tracts, over two thousand volumes on the French Revolutionary period, and over a thousand on the American Civil War, amongst his historical collection. A colossal holding on literature included over three hundred volumes on and by Milton, including first and second editions of Paradise Lost and a first edition of Areopagitica. The religious holdings were equally immense, including titles on and by Luther and Calvin, a hundred contemporary Erasmus imprints, vast collections on Richard Baxter’s Congregationalism, and a Quaker collection of more than two hundred volumes. Isaac Foot also ranged around the classics: one especially priceless book was the 1488 edition of Homer printed in Florence.

Somehow all these volumes were crammed into Pencrebar, though only just. Isaac designated a Bible room and a French Revolution room; when he developed an interest in Abraham Lincoln later in life there was an American Congress room. Many books were extremely rare, yet there was apparently the minimum of security against fire or theft. His home was a shrine to what George Gissing had called ‘the shadow of the valley of books’. So extreme was his mania for collection that A. L. Rowse, a historian at All Souls, Oxford, and no inconsiderable bibliophile himself, claimed that Isaac Foot’s second wife was in tears as one room after another was annexed for his literary stockpiling, supplemented by bookcases to occupy what little room remained. ‘He has the obstinacy of a senile fixation,’ was Rowse’s harsh verdict.¹¹ But clearly for the young (and middle-aged) Michael his father’s passion for the printed word was breathtakingly exciting, the key to a civilized life. In return, Isaac delighted in Michael’s own emerging skills as a powerful writer of serious literary books. The publication of The Pen and the Sword in 1957, written after Michael had lost his Devonport seat in the 1955 general election, perhaps gave Isaac more pleasure than any other feature of his son’s career. ‘Let the boy be known for his books,’ he lovingly observed.

Isaac’s influence was profound on all his children, but on Michael most of all. Michael’s journey into the Labour Party, a unique adventure for the Foot family, did not threaten their relationship; if anything, it made it stronger. Isaac responded by offering Michael the example of Hazlitt as the supreme inspiration any real radical could ever want. He gave him a passion for language, written and spoken; Michael’s politics were politics of the book. He spelled out for the readers of the Evening Standard (1 June 1964) his philosophy of life, drawn from the critic Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘To read and to act is not achieved by many. And yet to act and not to read is barbarism.’ It was books, as much as the sufferings of his fellow men, that made Michael a socialist and nurtured his unique brilliance as a communicator. More specifically, it was Isaac who directed him to the unique qualities of Swift and Hazlitt, Michael Foot’s prime allies in his assaults on twentieth-century political opponents, his friends in good times and bad. The more measured influence of Montaigne, the cool, sceptical essayist of sixteenth-century France, but also the mentor of Foot’s hero Swift, was another legacy from Isaac when Michael turned to Montaigne’s essays in hospital after a serious car crash in 1963. Another hero was John Milton, not only a matchless poet but in Areopagitica a timeless champion of a free press.

On the other hand, Michael’s growing love of literature was self-nurtured also. Isaac’s literary enthusiasms were mainly pre-Romantic and shaped by a puritan heritage. Michael’s own passionate temperament gave him heroes of a different kind, in particular his beloved Byron, for whose poetry Isaac had no particular regard and which had been fiercely criticized by one of Michael’s own heroes, Hazlitt. Without Isaac’s affection and inspiration, Michael Foot’s career would have been far less distinctive. But it might also have been less dogmatic and he might have been more open to argument from others. Isaac’s literary giants, it seemed, were almost gods, to be treated with near-sanctity. None of them could be lightly impugned. There was also a curious formality, almost a distance, between father and son. When Isaac ran into debt as a result of his solicitor’s business being disrupted during the war when his offices in Plymouth were bombed out, quite apart from his manic book purchasing, Michael, now with a good income from the Evening Standard, loaned him successive sums of money to help him out, ranging from £110 in May 1940 to £875 in March 1941. Each was accompanied by a highly detailed formal IOU drawn up in legalistic terms by Isaac. An IOU of £2,095 up to September 1942 set out both the capital sum and the interest upon it at £4 per annum as a first charge on Isaac’s estate, a strangely formal arrangement perhaps between a father and a son.¹² Having Isaac as a father was both an inspiration and a challenge, but without doubt he contributed most of the components of his son’s passionate but unquestionably bookish socialism.

Michael Foot’s mother, Eva Mackintosh, was also a powerful personality in her way, even if tending to be swamped at home and in spirit by Isaac’s intemperate bibliophilia. Born in 1878 and a year and a half older than Isaac, she was of Scottish and Cornish background, and a strong Methodist like her husband. Indeed, it was on a Wesleyan Guild Methodist outing that Isaac first set eyes on her. With a characteristic Foot blend of impulsiveness and caution, he proposed to her almost immediately and was accepted, but then remained engaged for three years while he built up his solicitor’s practice. They married in 1904, in Callington, a village a few miles north of Plymouth where Eva had latterly lived. It was a long and immensely happy marriage, ended only when Eva unexpectedly died in May 1946, after which Isaac somewhat disconcertingly for the family married a second time. Eva had traditional non-feminist views, which clearly extended to her two daughters, Jennifer and Sally, both of whom had somewhat restricted lives. Her son John’s egalitarian-minded American fiancée evidently found this disturbing when she first visited the Foot household.

Five of Eva’s seven children, including Michael, were given the second name Mackintosh (an allegedly useful asset when brother Dingle stood as Liberal candidate in Dundee). She wrote occasional letters to the local Western Morning News under the thinly-concealed nom de plume of ‘Mother of Seven’. Hugh Foot wrote in his memoirs of how his mother made them all laugh ‘at ourselves and at each other’.¹³ Eva was not only happy being a warm and spirited mother, but also gave every encouragement to the professional careers of her talented sons. She was thoroughly at home in a political setting, being herself a robust Liberal, and perhaps more instinctively attracted to radicalism of the Lloyd George type than other members of the family. Michael’s defection to Labour in 1934 was a shock for them all, but Eva appears to have taken the news better than some. When Michael campaigned for Devonport as a Labour candidate in 1945, a meeting was interrupted by the delivery of a large Cornish pasty from his mother, a Methodist’s material peace offering and also a signal that her socialist son was no less favoured than husband Isaac and sons Dingle and John, all Liberal candidates in 1945 (and, unlike Michael, all defeated).

The family background of the Foots is of quite exceptional importance: the historian John Vincent once called their home, referring to the Hertfordshire seat of the Cecils, ‘a West Country Hatfield’. There were five sons: the eldest Dingle (1905–78), the second Hugh (1907–90), the third John (1909–99), the fourth son and fifth child, Michael (born in 1913), and the youngest son and sixth child, Christopher (1918–84). All went on to have, to varying degrees, fulfilling professional careers. By contrast the daughters, Margaret Elizabeth, known as Sally (1911–65), and Jennifer (1916–2002), had lives that were domestically confined. Jennifer married, but Sally never did. It was a large and lively household, with much family fun and frivolity and a high degree of competitiveness in the playing of games, especially cricket and football, in which Isaac enthusiastically joined. They lived in Lipson Terrace from 1904 until in 1927 they moved to a large white Victorian manor house, Pencrebar, near Callington, some eight miles north of Plymouth, overlooking the Cornish moorland. With its ‘wide sashed windows, large rooms and wide sweeping lawns and shrubberies’, it became a focal point for West Country nonconformist Liberalism and a much-loved family home, as well as a depository for Isaac’s vast library.¹⁴

It was in every sense a close-knit family which made demands of all the children, but enriched them too. They all recalled a cheerful and secure childhood. Hugh noted that ‘we had and needed few outside friends’. The eldest boy, Dingle, with whom Michael had little to do at first because of the eight-year gap between them, immediately showed himself to be talented. He was thought to be the ablest Foot at the time, and Michael later considered him the funniest orator amongst them.¹⁵ As all the Foot boys did, he went to a private secondary school, in his case Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight, where he was taught by a former Liberal MP, J. H. Whitehouse, who was now the school’s headmaster. Dingle went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he became President of the Liberal Club in 1927 and rose to be President of the Union in 1928, also gaining a second-class honours degree in law. He entered chambers in 1930, becoming a barrister of international distinction, and in 1931 he was elected as Liberal (though pro-government) MP for Dundee, which he represented until 1945. One problem was the physical disability of a tubercular arm. The second son, Hugh, went to Leighton Park, the famous Quaker school near Reading which Michael later attended, and then on to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he showed a notably un-Foot-like enthusiasm for the college rowing club but also became President of the Liberal Club and of the Cambridge Union. There was some fraternal joshing about his alleged relative lack of intellectual sharpness – Michael described him caustically and unfairly in the Evening Standard in 1961 as ‘never considered the brightest of the brood’. But Hugh, like his brothers, ended up with a second-class degree. In fact Michael always had a strong relationship with ‘Mac’, as Hugh came to be known, including a cheerful period as the lodger of Hugh and his wife in the later 1930s. His assessment of his brother concluded: ‘All in all a credit to the family and I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’ With Hugh’s son Paul, the friendship was to be stronger still.

John, the third son and another charming and eloquent Liberal, seemed as talented as any of them. He too went to Bembridge School and Balliol College like Dingle, took a degree in law and also became President of the Liberal Club and the Union, a remarkable dynastic achievement which Michael was soon to extend. He became a solicitor and in due time took over from Isaac as senior partner in the family firm Foot & Bowden. But his political antennae seemed no less acute than those of his two brothers, and he was four times a Liberal candidate, for Basingstoke in 1934 and 1935, and for his father’s old stamping ground of Bodmin in 1945 and 1950. Unexpectedly he failed to win the latter, and ended up as Baron Foot of Buckland Monachorum, though with a radical outlook on social and defence issues very similar to those of his firebrand brother Michael. The two were both Cromwellian enthusiasts, and were very close. Michael would say of John, ‘He was the best speaker of the lot of us.’¹⁶ The two daughters, Jennifer and Sally, as mentioned, were not encouraged to develop their talents, while the youngest son, Christopher, settled down, none too happily, as a local solicitor.

This was the background into which Michael Mackintosh Foot was born on 23 July 1913. It was cradle, crucible and cauldron for him. The tone was set by Isaac. It was distinguished by a passion for both literature and music (the latter less pronounced in Michael’s case until he met Jill Craigie, who introduced him to Mozart), especially Bach’s choral music, and a passionate devotion to the grand old causes of nineteenth-century Liberalism. It was an intimate family whose members kept up warm relations throughout their lives. Michael and his brothers addressed each other in letters or telephone conversations with the words ‘pit and rock’. This private code recalled a famous phrase from the Book of Isaiah: ‘Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.’ Hugh thus communicated with Michael while serving at a tense period as Governor of Cyprus in the late 1950s. Life in the Foot family seems to have been inspiring and somewhat pressurizing at the same time, being conducted at a high level of intensity, both political and religious. One newspaper described the household as characterized by ‘bacon for breakfast, Liberalism for lunch and Deuteronomy for dinner’.¹⁷

One strict rule was abstinence from alcohol until the age of twenty-one, after which the sons would qualify for a small legacy from their grandfather: Michael and John celebrated their release from this thraldom by getting drunk together on a trip to Paris, in pursuit of culture and self-liberation, in 1934. The child Michael, dominated by his three older brothers, Dingle, Hugh and John, was to find a particular kinship with his slightly older sister Sally. A major factor here was that both suffered from severe eczema – a hereditary condition, apparently – and in Michael’s case from growing asthma as well. Outdoor games were to some extent denied him, and he turned naturally to indoor bookish pursuits, where Sally was a natural mentor and guide, with her own unfulfilled artistic and literary talents which later brought friendship, for instance, with Louis MacNeice. Sally introduced Michael to novels and poems which were to stay with him for ever. He would say that she taught him how to read. His lifelong attachment to female relationships, many of a bookish kind, undoubtedly stemmed from his loyal Sally, and his posthumous essay on her, ‘Sally’s Broomstick’, is deeply felt.¹⁸ Her cruel death in the 1960s was a particular blow to him.

It may be that Sally’s presence was a calm refuge in an otherwise hyperactive family. One of the adverse consequences for some of the Foot family was a kind of depressive alcoholism, perhaps a reaction against the dynastic prescription of total abstinence in youth. Dingle ended his career in this sad condition, as did his youngest brother Christopher, whose life ended young, and so too did his sister Sally. Indeed, Sally’s death through apparent drowning may have been more tragic still. Christopher had to give up his solicitor’s work early through some kind of psychological illness. It was Michael, for all his mixed health, who was usually seen as the most stable and normal. So family life was not always as relaxed as when Isaac was telling his stories or Michael was organizing children’s games at parties. Keeping up with the Foots could bring its own pressures.

Every Foot from Isaac onwards showed the influence of family. All shared the unyielding attachment to books, to Cromwell and the West Country, to Plymouth Hoe and Plymouth Argyle. All in important senses remained liberal, or at least libertarian, at heart. Most were political, but with a politics fired in the crucible of Foot family argument, rhetoric and dissent. Nothing showed this continuing tradition more clearly than the sadly posthumous book The Vote by Hugh Foot’s journalist son Paul, long a pillar of the Socialist Worker and a writer of a caustic brilliance equalled only by his cherished uncle Michael.¹⁹ Paul was named after the favourite saint; his brother Oliver derived his name from another cult hero. Paul Foot’s book is on many fronts a debate within the family. It conducts a sporadic, if affectionate, argument with Michael in denouncing his adhesion to a right-wing, disappointingly parliamentary Labour Party. The debate would be continued towards the end of Paul’s life, blighted as it was by illness, on the pavement outside bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, with both bibliophile disputants, uncle and nephew, waving their sticks about to the occasional alarm of passers-by. Paul’s book also engages in a covert dispute with his Aunt Jill, a devotee of the suffragettes, but mainly of the Tory Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, whereas Paul Foot (like most socialists) found the social radicalism of Sylvia Pankhurst, the lover of the Labour Party’s founder Keir Hardie, by far the most appealing.

But the most startling family argument of all for Paul was with his deceased grandfather Isaac, pillar of the Cromwell Association over so many years. Where Cromwell to Isaac (and to Michael too) was the people’s Oliver, champion of liberty, to Paul he was the establishment enemy of the Levellers, who rebutted the dangerous democracy voiced by Rainboro, Lilburne and their friends at Putney in 1647. Paul was indirectly announcing that he was the first Foot to break away from the family shibboleths, that Cromwell was no real hero for the popular, let alone the socialist, cause, and that in the earliest campaign for the vote the puritan establishment was essentially an obstacle. Those political continuities, traced by Liberals over the centuries from Putney to the Parliament Act, were in reality an illusion. Paul Foot’s was an iconoclastic book, but it was notable that it was the family’s boat that had first to be rocked, if not sunk without trace.

His uncle Michael’s early years were comfortable and elitist. The First World War made little direct impact upon him, unlike say the youthful Jim Callaghan down the coast at Portsmouth, whose father served in the navy and fought at Jutland. None of the Foots had any experience of this or any other war. Basically they had disliked every one since 1651. The dominant feature of Michael’s upbringing is the abiding stamp of loyalty to Plymouth itself It symbolized for him Britain’s worldwide mercantile glories, as well of course as embodying an eternal legend of defence against foreign conquest in the great days of Drake. Plymouth, English to its core, was not therefore the natural base for a devotee of European integration. In 1972 Michael spoke strongly in support of his Conservative successor as MP for Devonport, Joan Vickers, in resisting proposals in Peter Walker’s Local Government Bill to merge Plymouth with the surrounding area. There was, declared Foot, a ‘deep lack of affinity between Plymouth and the County of Devon’. In family vein, he went on:

Charles I tried to subdue Plymouth and failed, and Freedom Fields is a monument which bears that out. Charles II tried to subdue the people of Plymouth by establishing a citadel with the guns facing not seawards towards Plymouth sound but inwards, but he, too, failed.

Foot had the joy of representing Devonport in that city for ten years in Parliament, from 1945 to 1955, and hung on as a predictably unsuccessful candidate in 1959, a decision that Aneurin Bevan declared was ‘quixotic’.²⁰ Well into his nineties, journeys with his friend Peter Jones to see Plymouth Argyle do battle at Home Park were a staple of life. Contact with his private secretary, Roger Dawe, at the Department of Employment in 1974 was greatly eased by the latter’s Devonian and Methodist origins, and his being a fellow Argyle supporter.

During the First World War the Foots moved to Ramsland House in St Cleers, on the edge of the Cornish moors. But Michael always identified intensely with Plymouth, the city which was his boyhood home, where his father was Lord Mayor and where he fell in love with Jill. And to a degree Plymouth identified with him, indeed with all the Foots. David Owen, a future Cabinet colleague and Member for Devonport, grew up there in the fifties under the shadow of the Foots as a dominating dynasty. In the 1970s Michael and Jill, somewhat remarkably, managed to persuade the local authority in Hampstead to rename their road Pilgrims Lane, in tribute to his native city’s most famous exports, and the nickname also of its football team. In later life he would recall happy episodes from his childhood, such as visits to the Palace Theatre. One such recollection became memorable, when in a Commons debate in October 1980 during Labour’s leadership election he spoke of a conjuror who smashed with a hammer a gold watch belonging to a member of the audience, but then forgot the rest of the trick. But it remains open to conjecture how far this was a real Plymouth, or rather an affectionate amalgam of fact, legend and folk memory, specific and selective associations from the Armada to the Blitz, ready for instant political mobilization in argument. Michael Foot’s historical reading and personal background formed a highly usable background. This was true of all his interpretations of past scions of the liberty tree, from the Levellers to the suffragettes, and it applied equally to his vision of a post-modernist Plymouth.

That does not mean, of course, that his childhood memories were necessarily entirely benign. Michael’s schooling was delayed by his severe asthma in 1919, which led him to go to London at the age of six to obtain medical advice. Indeed, his awareness of ill-health and fear of being thought unattractive were important threads in his early years: a robust life into his nineties was not what the doctors might have predicted. His first school in 1919 was a local preparatory school, Plymouth College for Girls, perhaps not a total success for a six-year-old boy. In Recitation, his school report commented, ‘His expression is very good; he should speak out more’ – seldom an injunction needed in later life. Another subject was Needlework – ‘Good, but he works too slowly.’²¹ In 1921 he went on to Plymouth College and Mannamead School. Going there was not without its hazards, especially being harassed by local bullies as he made his way across Freedom Fields. In 1923, at the age of ten, he went away to a private boarding school, Forres, in Swanage on the Dorset coast. His brother John was already a pupil there. Michael’s progress was often interrupted by bronchial complaints; nor did the school’s occasional penchant for caning its pupils (including Michael himself for one alleged misdemeanour) appeal to him. But he seems to have developed well, and his headmaster, R. M. Chadwick, wrote enthusiastically when he left Forres in 1927 of the immense contribution he had made, and how his name should be inscribed on the school Honours Board. He was first in his form in every subject from Latin to Scripture, while he had also done well in sport as captain of games – ‘a very good example of all-round keenness’. An earlier report at Christmas 1926 had commended his football skills – ‘Fast and a very good shot at goal. Much more determined than he was last season.’ The headmaster added in his final remarks, ‘We have all grown very fond of him during his time with us and he will leave a big gap. We look forward to making Christopher’s acquaintance next term.’²²

The fourteen-year-old Michael’s next destination was another private school, Leighton Park, the Quaker boarding school near Reading which his older brother Hugh had already attended (as a scholar, unlike Michael). Founded in 1890, Leighton Park was an elitist school in its way, and was sometimes referred to as ‘the Quaker Eton’. Years later A. J. P. Taylor told Lord Beaverbrook, ‘Michael had been educated at Leighton Park, the snob Quaker school, and I at Bootham [York], the non-snob one.’ Beaverbrook gleefully responded (ignoring Taylor’s extremely wealthy cotton-merchant father), ‘You and I are sons of the people. Michael is an aristocrat.’²³ But Leighton Park had much cachet amongst nonconformists in both England and Wales. Its liberal Quaker ethos meant that there was no fagging, no corporal punishment and certainly no cadet corps. Its historian, Kenneth Wright, wrote that it was ‘an unconventional school producing unconventional people who did not fit into predetermined moulds’. It attracted droves of liberal Cadburys from Bourneville and liberal Rowntrees from York, putative pacifists one and all. Michael seems to have found both the teaching and the atmosphere of the school generally congenial. Later on in life he was fiercely to denounce the public schools in the Daily Herald for their atmosphere of snobbery, but clearly Leighton Park escaped this particular contagion. Its school magazine, The Leightonian, gives at that time a cheerful sense of irreverent informality.

At first Michael’s schooling was much interrupted by ill-health. His return for his second term in 1928 was delayed by impetigo and bronchial problems, while his weight was relatively slight. But he soon got into his school subjects with gusto – or at least into those parts of the work which interested him. These clearly did not include a great deal of science. By the spring term of 1928 his science teacher lamented that ‘he has not much aptitude for this subject’ (chemistry). Physics was adjudged to be no better. A year later, science of any kind has disappeared from his schooling, a not untypical instance of the secondary education of the time. By contrast, his mathematics was highly praised for arithmetic, algebra and geometry, with marks in the high eighties in each. But by the end of 1929 that also has vanished from his ken. Michael Foot was never a particularly numerate politician. By contrast, the humanities were going well, especially all kinds of literature, and history, for which he had a fine Welsh teacher. His parents were also pleased to see that he scored 92 per cent in scripture in the summer term of 1928. In the spring term of 1930 his report praised the ‘mastery’ he demonstrated in a paper on the Italian Risorgimento (surely a particularly congenial theme for a romantic young radical), while in European history generally he was thought to be working with ‘considerable intelligence and interest’. The one weakness in his work on humanities subjects appeared to be modern languages. Neither in French nor in German did he distinguish himself French lessons in the spring of 1930 showed that ‘his vocabulary is weak’, and he scored a mere 37 per cent.²⁴ Surprisingly for a man with such a quick and adaptable mind, this remained a weak point throughout his life. He was never a confident linguist; he gloried in the novels of Stendhal and the poems of Heine, but he read them in translation. But in that he was typical of the political generation of his time. He got his School Certificate with honours in 1930, and his Higher School Certificate a year later.

Leighton Park in general seems to have been very good for the teenage Michael Foot academically, and he also flourished in other ways. He was an active member of School House, and in 1930 he became a school prefect. The Leightonian records several of his other activities. He played a role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance as Sergeant of Police. An old boy of the school wrote that ‘Foot’s performance will go down in the school’s history’: the audience got him to sing one of his songs three times, and ‘in each encore he was even funnier than before’. Despite his asthma and eczema he took his full part in school games, and was commended on his performances as a wing forward in the first rugby XV (‘his dribbling is his best feature’, though his tackling was also sound) and especially at cricket – ‘a good forceful batsman, an excellent cover point fielder and a good bowler who keeps a steady line’. He took six wickets for twenty runs against Bedales, and topped the school bowling averages in 1931, with fifteen wickets at an average of 10.73 apiece.²⁵ Years later he was to demonstrate his cricketing skills when playing for Tribune against the New Statesman: the latter’s captain and political correspondent, Alan Watkins, came to realize that asking his fast bowlers to be charitable to an amiable old gent was a big mistake. Tennis and rugby fives were other games at which he represented the school. He also began to display talent in the school debating society, which he restarted, and took part as the Liberal candidate in the school mock election on 30 May 1929. He won with fifty-six votes, against thirty-eight for the Conservatives and eleven for Labour – a more substantial majority than he ever gained at Devonport, and one of relatively few Liberal victories that year.

This was a time of much political energy in the Foot household. Their new home in Pencrebar became a significant salon for West Country Liberalism, with Lloyd George himself a visitor. The young Michael Foot was heard to deliver impromptu speeches to garden parties even at the tender age of twelve. Past divisions between Coalition and Asquithian Liberals set aside, the Foot household campaigned en bloc on behalf of Lloyd George’s last crusade in the 1929 election with its famous Orange Book to promote economic recovery, We Can Conquer Unemployment. The Liberals’ eventual tally of seats was a mere fifty-nine, and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister for the second time, Labour ending up with 289 seats, the largest number in the House. But there was much joy with the return of Isaac again for Bodmin, though with a majority of less than a thousand over Gerald Joseph Harrison, the Conservative who had defeated him in 1924. Isaac took a prominent front-bench role in the new House, and was appointed as a Liberal member of the Round Table conference on India in 1930. Michael’s elder brother Dingle had also made his first attempt on Parliament, but was defeated by a Conservative in Tiverton, despite polling over 42 per cent of the vote. Hugh was now entering the diplomatic service, and would soon embark on a long connection with the Middle East by serving in Palestine. The schoolboy Michael, a vigorous campaigner for Lloyd Georgian Liberalism in 1929 with its multi-coloured cures for economic stagnation, the Green, Yellow and Orange Books, yielded to none of them in the passion of his political commitment. Lloyd George’s battle hymn, ‘God gave the Land to the People’, was a very popular song at Pencrebar. It was always one of Michael’s favourites, next to ‘The Marseillaise’ and ‘The Red Flag’. In The Leightonian (March 1931) he set out his Liberal creed in idealistic terms: ‘The Liberal Party alone had the courage to think out new schemes and the men of vision to put them into effect … It wages a war for liberty, justice and the abolition of poverty.’ The party was no meek middle way, but ‘possesses ideals, unshared alike by Tories who are a little sentimental and Socialists who are a little timid’.

The most distinctive feature of Michael’s political involvement at this time was in the peace movement. This was hardly surprising for a pupil of Liberal background attending a distinctively Quaker school. Leighton Park’s headmaster, Edgar Castle, was a Manchester Guardian reader and a strong supporter of world disarmament. A League of Nations branch flourished at the school, in which Foot was active. He wrote in The Leightonian (March 1931) a sharp critique of scouting as an activity for young people. Its specious militarism and patriotism, and the unquestioned authority of the scoutmaster, were appropriate targets for the seventeen-year-old boy: ‘Scouting must not, hermit-like, shut itself off from the modern world.’ He added one phrase intriguing for the student of his career: ‘We are not meant to play at backwoodsmen all our lives.’

At the age of eighteen, between 7 August and 4 September 1931, in the summer vacation after his last term at Leighton Park, Michael made his most decisive, emphatic gesture yet by taking part in a young people’s peace crusade that took him abroad for the second time (he had had a trip to Holland in May 1931). He went with another boy, L. H. Doncaster, on a John Sherborne bursary which covered all the costs save for £10. They travelled as far as Colmar in Alsace, sleeping rough on ‘a bed of straw in the village schoolroom or a haystack in the cowshed’, though making only limited contact with the other marchers, who were entirely French-and German-speaking. They sang collectively a French song, ‘Nous faisons serment d’alliance’, the words of which were fresh in Michael’s mind seventy-five years later. He paid tribute to their one mobile assistance, a donkey who discharged his duties ‘in a manner which would have put Balaam’s ass to shame’. Michael pressed on to Strasbourg and then to Germany, to the Black Forest. Here, for the first time, he heard the name of Adolf Hitler. It was virtually a holiday, but he enjoyed ‘a pervading sense of self-righteousness’, for all this was done in the cause of peace. The child was father of the Aldermaston marcher. He had enjoyed his schooldays, and his school seemed pleased with its association with him. In the late 1940s the brass plate from his time at Leighton Park was still on display on the door of his old study in School House. In 1990 he spoke at length, wallowing in happy nostalgia, at a school centenary dinner in a private dining room in the Commons. He remained a faithful Old Leightonian to the end.²⁶

The decisive change of life for the young radical was to come in 1931, when he followed Dingle and John in becoming an undergraduate at Oxford. This had long been a cherished ambition for Isaac, despite the considerable sums he was obliged to pay for Dingle, Hugh and John at the older universities. Michael at school showed a quick intelligence and literary flair, especially in his history essays. But his teachers’ assessment of his abilities was sufficiently cautious that he was sent forward for entrance examination not to Balliol, the destination of Dingle and John before him, but to the less prestigious Wadham in the same college group, where the competition for places might be less demanding. He took papers in his favoured subjects of Modern History and English, but his greatest good fortune came in his general paper, in which a question asked candidates what proposals should be made by the current Round Table conference in London considering the future governance of India. As noted, Isaac Foot was himself a Liberal member of that conference, with first-hand knowledge of the views of Gandhi and others on India’s future. The night before he sat the paper Michael had had dinner with his father at the National Liberal Club in London, and Isaac had given him a lengthy briefing on future proposals for an Indian federation, along with discourses on the social and economic problems of Indian Untouchables and others. Michael’s examination answer in Oxford the following day was therefore unusually authoritative. His interview with Wadham’s tutors went equally well, especially a discussion with Lord David Cecil, then at the college. Asked by Cecil which historians he particularly admired, Foot naturally shone. His enthusiastic defence of Macaulay’s History of England, reinforced by some additional warm comments on Macaulay’s kinsman George Otto Trevelyan, saw him comfortably home, a college award-holder as an exhibitioner.²⁷

So it was to Wadham that he went for the Michaelmas term in October 1931. He stayed for the next three years, the first two years in college, the third in lodgings in the city with his close friend John Cripps. It was a dampish house quite near the river, which did not improve his asthma. Foot’s devotion to his remarkably beautiful college henceforth was unshakeable. Half a century later, in his volume of essays Loyalists and Loners, he hailed it as ‘of all places the greenest and most gracious, the peerless and the most perfect in the whole green glory of Oxford’. Wadham’s virtues were innumerable: it was founded early in the seventeenth century by a woman, Dorothy Wadham, it nurtured the philosophical learning of John Wilkins, the seamanship of Robert Blake, the church-building of Christopher Wren, it spanned almost every aspect of Michael Foot’s intellectual universe. He later became friendly with its formidable future Warden Maurice Bowra, famous for epigrams such as ‘Buggers can’t be choosers.’ Bowra was no socialist, but he shared Foot’s eclectic antiquarianism. On one bizarre occasion in August 1962 he tried to act as a kind of peacemaker between Foot and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell when they found themselves, perhaps to their mutual horror, in the same bar in the small Italian town of Portofino, but Gaitskell’s enmity was implacable.²⁸ No honour pleased Foot more than to be elected an Honorary Fellow of the college in later years. Michael Foot was a supreme Oxford man, but also passionate for the collegiate atmosphere of his college. Dorothy Wadham was so admirable a woman that, in his whimsical view, had she lived centuries later she would have applied for membership of the Labour Party.

Foot’s years at Wadham down to June 1934 were enriching in every way. After eighteen years in the evangelical intensity of Plymouth, Pencrebar and Leighton Park, he moved into a different atmosphere and he blossomed in it. Previously somewhat withdrawn and bookish, worried about his health and his complexion, he emerged as an attractive, gregarious young man. He had interesting and intelligent friends (almost all male, as befitted the ethos of the time) of various backgrounds and nationalities, and enjoyed a full social life, quite apart from his ventures into student politics. There were lectures by eminent scholars in the examination schools – G. D. H. Cole’s lectures on William Cobbett he particularly enjoyed – and visiting celebrities of all kinds. One such he got to know personally, and with whom he was destined to have a complex relationship, was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who lectured to the Oxford Liberal Club during Foot’s term as chairman. His book The Conquest of Happiness (1933) had a powerful effect on the young Michael Foot, not only in his views on political matters but also on personal morality.²⁹ Foot, a natural romantic much influenced by his reading of Rousseau, was fast moving on from the Methodist ethic. To apply his own memorable description of Aneurin Bevan, the puritan was an increasingly sensual puritan.

His prime objective, of course, was to gain a reasonable degree. Here the results were adequate, but perhaps no more. Michael had chosen not to read History, the natural choice for him, his passion and hobby for many years past, but the newer school of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, also known as Modern Greats. This was not perhaps the best choice. The Politics papers were fine, not least because they were heavily historical in slant, and were to remain so until the 1960s. He did, however, regret that his passion for late-eighteenth-century history, through liberal authors such as George Otto Trevelyan and J. L. Hammond’s study of Charles James Fox, was diverted to having to focus on Lewis Namier’s structural studies of Georgian politics and his ‘formidable lists of figures’.³⁰ Economics he found less appealing, in part because of his relative lack of interest in maths or statistics. His tutor, Russell Bretherton, a brilliant twenty-five-year-old who taught both economics and modern history, was congenial enough as a staunch supporter of the expansionist economic theories of J. M. Keynes (as understood before the latter’s General Theory of 1936). He was also friendly with the Christ Church economics don Roy Harrod, Keynes’s later biographer. Bretherton was certainly a man of parts. His later publications included Country Inns and Alehouses, while he also developed much expertise as an entomologist specializing in butterflies. After the war he was to become an important civil servant, working under Harold Wilson at the Board of Trade and under Peter Thorneycroft at the Treasury (where he proved to be a strong European). At any rate, Bretherton’s Keynesian doctrines got Foot through his economics papers in the schools. But Philosophy, even in the days before Oxford plunged into the arid realms of logical positivism, he found less than riveting, too abstract and detached from real life. In the end last-minute swotting of a textbook survey by Bertrand Russell, one of his political heroes, saw him stagger through. He told The Leightonian that ‘after two years’ hard work at Philosophy, I know less about it than when I began’.³¹ But his eventual honourable but unremarkable second-class honours suggested that perhaps PPE was not the ideal school for him. Then as always Michael Foot was never a man for socio-economic detail. He was a sounding board for historical mood and movement, and literary interpretation of it, rather than an analyst, still less a desiccated calculating machine.

In every other respect, Michael found life at Oxford great fun. He operated on a broad university basis and soon became a celebrated figure in journals and political clubs. Photographs of the time show a smart young man with neatly trimmed hair, a broad forehead and spectacles, invariably with a serious expression on his face, but evidently with a sense of humour. He played a little gentle soccer for Wadham. His old school magazine was told that ‘in the intervals of debating, politics and work … on occasions he announces pontifically from the depths of an armchair that one should constantly aim at acquiring not knowledge, but the Larger Vision. He also tells us that he has fully recovered from the effects of a recent holiday involving “cricket and all that” in Denmark.’³²

The most interesting of the various social bodies he joined was the Lotus Club, an Anglo-Indian dining club of around fifty members at a time, twenty-five British and twenty-five Indian. It had been formed by an Indian, G. A. Chettur, in the mid-twenties to counter charges that Indians at Oxford were inbred and cliquey, basing their social life on the Majlis. Michael was always attracted to Indians, and at Oxford he made friends with several of them, notably D. F. Karaka, who was to succeed him as President of the Union, the first Indian so to serve, and whose early autobiographical work The Pulse of Oxford, published in 1933, conveys much of the gaiety of university life at that time. The Lotus Club invited guest speakers, and to Michael’s joy one of them was his father Isaac. The club, Michael wrote to him, ‘is a society existing for the promotion of friendship between Englishmen and Indians. Presumably you are supposed to make a speech about India.’ He stoked up his father’s enthusiasm for a visit to Oxford by mentioning a recent successful visit by Lloyd George, with whom Michael had breakfast.³³

But activities like the Lotus Club were really indications that by far Michael’s strongest interests during his three years at Oxford were political. Even measured against the university careers of his brothers Dingle and John, with whom he was constantly compared, his progress was remarkable. He became President of the Liberal Club in 1932, at the start of his second year, and was triumphantly elected President of the Oxford Union in June 1933, at the end of it. In October 1933 the undergraduate magazine Isis made him an ‘Isis Idol’, a supreme accolade amongst the student body. Quite apart from his powerful background in Liberal politics, Michael went up to Oxford at a critical moment which would have stirred any politically sensitive young man. In August 1931, just before he started at Wadham, a huge political and financial crisis in Britain saw the collapse of the second Labour government, and Ramsay MacDonald become, totally unexpectedly, Prime Minister of an all-party National Government. The Labour Party was divided and crushed at the general election that October, while the economy plunged into mass depression and heavy unemployment. For all subsequent Labour leaders, from Lansbury to Foot, MacDonald went down in the party’s annals as a legendary traitor who blackened the very name of leadership in the people’s party. Foot would mention his name darkly when he was a Cabinet minister during the financial crisis of the IMF loan in 1976. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party divided into three after the election: the National Liberals led by Sir John Simon (allied to the Tories), the mainstream followers of Sir Herbert Samuel, and Lloyd George’s family group of just four. Isaac Foot was returned unopposed at the election at Bodmin as a supporter of the mainstream group which followed Sir Herbert Samuel as wary members of the new government, rather than of Lloyd George, who led his family group into permanent opposition. Dingle Foot, returned for Dundee, took the same line as his father, though he later veered somewhat to the right.

Michael, a devoted Lloyd Georgian, did not approve at all of his family’s near apostasy. He chided his father amiably enough in early 1932:

Well, I hope you are feeling thoroughly uncomfortable in your present position. I hope that the responsibility for a niggardly disarmament policy and blustering (?) dealing with Ireland rests heavily on your shoulders. I hope that you squirm in your pronouncement of each tariff order. I suppose you will vote with patriotic resignation for the further cuts and a raising of the school leaving age. I suppose you shout with the best of them when Sir Samuel Hoare exclaims ‘that the dogs bark but the caravan still goes on’. Nevertheless, this is the greatest economic crisis in the history of mankind and national unity must be preserved.

Much love. Michael.³⁴

In fact the Samuel Liberals left the government en bloc in October 1932, when the government introduced tariffs and imperial preference to protect British industry and thus end a century of free trade, so father and son were for a time politically reunited. Dingle, however, remained alarmingly acceptable to the National Government, so much so that he was comfortably returned again for the two-Member Dundee constituency in 1935 without Conservative opposition, in harness with Florence Horsburgh.

Beyond the local vagaries of British politics it was an alarming world, in which democracy and international peace themselves were increasingly threatened. The menace posed itself most sharply when Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. With totalitarian regimes installed in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and the economies of major industrial nations in ruins as a result of the Depression, the relative tranquillity of Foot’s childhood in the twenties had disappeared. However, these were developments about which he read, rather than experiencing them at first hand as did the young Hugh Gaitskell or Denis Healey, say. Certainly they reaffirmed his commitment to liberal values. Unlike some famous Cambridge contemporaries, the siren call of Communism never seduced him.

Michael Foot was at this time still unshakeably a Liberal, albeit a left-wing one. The Liberal Club was then a powerful force in Oxford, with Lloyd George especially, according to Foot’s friend D. F. Karaka, evoking ‘little short of hero-worship’.³⁵ This was no mere youthful staging post: Foot’s Liberalism went to the core of his being. He was a devout free trader and civil libertarian. Although he had effectively lost his religious faith, the popular ethic of West Country nonconformity was still a guiding star. The Oxford Magazine recorded a speech of his at the Union in October 1932 in which ‘he destroyed the case for tariffs, condemned the Tariff Boards and laughed at Peter Pan industries which never grew up’. The writer added wryly, ‘This is the first speech, I think, in which Mr Foot has not mentioned the name of Mr Lloyd George. It was perhaps the best speech of the evening.’³⁶ Foot’s Liberalism remained unflinching throughout his undergraduate years, and he affirmed it in an article, ‘Why I am a Liberal’, published in the News Chronicle in 4 April 1934, commissioned by that Liberal newspaper’s editor, Aylmer Vallance. Liberalism, he claimed, had largely created the ‘social and democratic institutions which this country already enjoys’. Above all, it was committed to the League of Nations and international peace: ‘I am a Liberal, first of all, because of the unfaltering resistance which liberalism is pledged to offer to those twin dangers of fascism and war.’³⁷ There and elsewhere, his undergraduate speeches and articles show the centrality of international issues in underlining his liberalism, but it went to the core of his being. In later years, Barbara Castle would note that referring to his ‘Why I am a Liberal’ article could annoy Michael Foot and move him on to other subjects.³⁸

However, it can scarcely be doubted that essential aspects of his early student beliefs stayed with him thereafter, even after his transformation to left-wing socialism. He always remained a strong champion of human rights, active in the National Council for Civil Liberties or in campaigns against censorship; even more strongly was he the Whiggish champion of parliamentary liberties. His jousting with Tony Benn in the early 1980s testified to his unshakeable commitment to the parliamentary route to socialism. Shirley Williams, a Cabinet colleague in the later 1970s, always saw Foot as a man who was never a statist nor a natural centralizer, a natural champion of devolution and popular participation, in some sense always a Liberal.³⁹ It was a view shared, more improbably, by Barbara Castle, who confided in her diaries her irritation with the basic rationalist Liberalism of ‘the collective Foot type’.⁴⁰ To her he was a kind of conformist amongst the nonconformists.

The centrality of international issues in underpinning Michael’s Liberalism emerged even more strongly in his activities in the Oxford Union. From his first performances in debates in the autumn of 1931 he showed himself to have star quality, and to be a quite outstanding debater even in a House of remarkably talented young men. His speeches were lively and well spiced with humour. In a debate in May 1933 on a motion ‘That this House would prefer Fascism to Socialism’, the President, the future Labour minister Anthony Greenwood, recorded that Foot ‘made a delightful speech which had nothing at all to do with the motion’. He cheerfully moved a frivolous end-of-term motion in December 1932 that ‘This House would hang up its Christmas stocking’. The following summer he ridiculed a government of which its Prime Minister ‘would never rest until German measles was called the pox Britannica’.⁴¹

But his ultimate purposes were always deadly serious, and he could stir heart, mind and soul as very few speakers could. Foot indeed, Liberal as he was, is a central exhibit in the left-wing pacifism widely prevalent in the Oxford of the time. Frank Hardie, a famous President of the Union, wrote later of the sea-change in the attitudes of speakers in debates after the crisis of 1931. A serious tone replaced the flippancy of the recent past. The significance of the famous motion of 9 February 1933 ‘That this House would not fight for King and Country’ (in which Foot, perhaps surprisingly, did not speak, though he certainly voted for it) may have been exaggerated by Churchill and others as a symbol of the feebleness of the public mood at the time, but it certainly reflected important currents amongst the undergraduate population. Foot himself wrote in the Cherwell in October 1933 of how ‘Oxford politics in the past few years have taken a decidedly radical turn’.⁴² The new mood of undergraduates was shown by an anti-war demonstration alongside the Martyrs’ Memorial on Armistice Day in November 1932, which caused much controversy. There were important new left-wing clubs formed, notably the far-left October Club and the Anti-War Committee, whose members came into conflict with the university proctors for its verbal attacks on the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps.⁴³ Attempts at censorship like Randolph Churchill’s ill-judged motion at the Union later on, which tried to expunge the ‘King and Country’ vote from the record, provoked violent reaction. Many of the movers and shakers amongst undergraduates were associated with radical, anti-war positions.

Several of them became close friends of Michael Foot. Among them were men of high talent (women were marginalized in a highly chauvinist university at that time). Frank Hardie, President of the Union in Hilary term 1933 during the King and Country debate, was a charismatic President of the University Labour Club. Anthony Greenwood, President of the Union in Trinity term 1933 and a handsome man popular with women undergraduates, saw the pro-Communist October Club founded in his rooms in Balliol – and later suppressed by the proctors. Paul Reilly of Hertford College, the son of a famous architect, was another young man of the far left, and a long-term friend of Michael Foot. He was later to be an important figure in industrial design and director of the Design Council. Foot’s most important close friendship was with John Cripps of Balliol College. He was a patrician socialist with whom Foot shared a house in his final year at Oxford and with whom he was to visit America on a debating tour in 1934, and who was to become a major figure in countryside matters. Unlike his friends Reilly and Foot, he gained a first in the Schools. It was through John’s father, Sir Stafford Cripps, an outspoken MP and voice of far-left views after the collapse of the Labour government (in which he had served as Solicitor-General) in 1931, that Michael Foot was to secure his first important entrée into the Labour Party.

For Michael the Union, as the focus of Oxford social and political life, was the institution to conquer, and he made astonishingly swift progress. Dingle and John had both been Presidents in the twenties, and as it happened both spoke in Union debates in the Trinity term of 1932. A speech of John’s was described as ‘stupendous’ in the Oxford Magazine.⁴⁴ As for Michael, his brand of revivalist Liberal oratory swept opponents aside. Elected early on to the Library Committee, he was elected Treasurer for Hilary term 1932, then became Librarian, and in June 1933 defeated David Graham, ex-Librarian, in winning the presidency by a large majority. Anthony Greenwood graciously wrote a balanced and delicate appraisal of his election: ‘He would do well to pay a little more attention to the serious parts of his speeches. At present he seldom really deals with the subject. But it was a great oratorical effort and fully justified the result of the polling. I hope that Mr Foot will have a very happy term in the chair which has become almost a monopoly of his family.’ Foot’s election brought much joy. Greenwood wrote privately to congratulate him: ‘I thought your speech last Thursday was first rate, as it was in the Eights Week debate.’⁴⁵ His mother Eva wrote with almost a sense of inevitability: ‘Do you think Graham really thought of getting it?’ Isaac combined paternal warmth with practicality:

The Foot colours have been kept flying high. I send you a cheque for ten pounds and made a further pull in the overdraft. If invested in the Abbey Road it will be worth about eighty pounds at the age of ninety. No swollen head, my lad.⁴⁶

In the event, Michael’s term as President passed by satisfactorily, though inevitably silently on his part. He returned to debating the following term in loud support of a motion that ‘the presence of four hundred and seventy Conservatives in the House is a national disaster’. Towards Tories, Foot observed, he had ‘an inflexible loathing’.

His experiences in the Oxford Union profoundly shaped Foot’s political image. The Union nurtured his particular style of oratory, heavily sarcastic towards opponents, the swift marshalling of key points of an argument, the deliberate focus on the opposition’s strongest point before destroying it, the inexorable advance towards an unanswerable conclusion. Reinforced by ample quotations from historical and literary eminences, Foot’s speeches were hard to rebut. From this time on he was to become celebrated as an incomparable revivalist stump speaker. Equally, the sometimes more measured approach necessary in House of Commons debates, or in television interviews, was much harder to capture. But his unique debating style, with a distinctive rhythm and cadences, and unorthodox changes of emphasis that made him hard to interrupt, was central to his political fame.

The dominant theme of his speeches at the time was always resistance to war. Foot is a good example of the rebellion of the young in the later twenties and earlier thirties, responding eagerly to anti-war works like All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That, using images that exposed ‘merchants of death’, denouncing the ‘system of Versailles’ and calling for a new international order with open covenants openly arrived at. One book on the wartime experience that made a particularly deep impression on him was the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928). Foot’s credo came out very clearly in a compilation of four essays by recent Oxford undergraduates, Young Oxford and War, published by Selwyn Blount in 1934, under the unexpected editorship of a rising Indian politician, V. K. Krishna Menon, and with a brief foreword by Harold Laski.⁴⁷ The authors were a varied group. R. G. Freeman was a Communist and President of the short-lived October Club. Frank Hardie, the former Union President, wrote ‘as a pacifist and a socialist’. Keith Steel-Maitland, whose chapter was easily the most practical and down-to-earth, was a moderate Conservative.

Finally there was Michael Foot, writing passionately as a near-pacifist Liberal. He condemned the rise of militarism in schools and universities in recent years: ‘There can be no real distinction between defence and offence in the modern world.’ He quoted freely from anti-war Union of Democratic Control authors like G. Lowes Dickinson and Norman Angell, author of International Anarchy, a phrase which appeared with much frequency in Foot’s early writings. He applauded the pacifist arguments advanced by Quakers and others, and pointed to the success of German Protestants in, so he claimed, resisting Hitler. Pacifism implied ‘unilateral disarmament’ and argued that evil should not be resisted with evil. The broad pacifist movement was plagued by internal divisions but could focus on ending international anarchy and ‘the elimination of force from the conduct of international affairs’. His was by no means a complete or unqualified pacifist argument. A properly constituted collective peace force to provide a backing of law ‘does not contain the elements objected to by the pacifist’. But instances in which resort to arms could ever be accepted by one of Foot’s outlook seemed hard to spell out in practical terms. It was a young man’s tract, rich in idealism, uncertain in logic, lacking in any kind of practical detail. But it embodied themes that were constantly to recur in Foot’s later career.

Foot emerged from Oxford with a glowing reputation as a potential young politician, even perhaps a future minister, Cripps and others thought. As noted, he announced his release from Oxford life with a trip to Paris with his brother John, spent in part breaking their vow of abstinence from alcohol, in part pursuing in vain a pretty young French girl Michael had met at Pencrebar the previous year. His student days had officially come to an end, but there was an interesting coda that autumn. With his close friend John Cripps he went to the United States for the first time in a debating tour on behalf of the Oxford Union. America was neither a country nor a culture that had impinged greatly on Michael’s early years, although he enjoyed aspects of its artistic life such as the films of Walt Disney and the voluptuous Mae West, and had some emerging interest in writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. Politically, like many young Englishmen, he had much enthusiasm for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, which he regarded as an attempt to shore up social welfare and progressive economics against backwoods Republican reactionaries during the Great Depression, and indeed as an inspiration to the world. But it belonged ‘over there’, and had little directly to offer the young Foot (though this was equally true of young Labour economists like Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay or Evan Durbin at the same period).

It was a gruelling visit, with twenty-two debates between 26 October and 4 December 1934.⁴⁸ They went mostly to universities on the eastern seaboard, ranging from Yale and Penn State to Bates College, Maine. The last two debates took them almost seven hundred miles west, as far as Michigan. Michael Foot and John Cripps, ‘two quiet young chaps wearing glasses’, as they were described in the Atlanta Journal,⁴⁹ were usually given left-wing motions to defend, which they both did with much success, defending trade unions, condemning military training in schools, attacking isolationism in American foreign policy. The old Liberal in Foot emerged in a robust attack on American trade policy at New Rochelle, New York, on 26 November: ‘If you uphold an isolationist policy, you can no longer remain a great creditor nation, you can no longer remain a great exporting nation.’ The result would be the same economic collapse and mass unemployment that were then so visible in Britain. He and Cripps were invariably triumphant in these debating jousts, and a succession of student newspapers wrote in praise of their wit and eloquence. Foot’s ‘brilliant rebuttal’ in a motion on the need for trade unions was praised in Yale News,⁵⁰ although there were some murmurs that the Oxford Union seemed a bit facetious by American standards. There were also random interviews in which Michael told the Americans of the importance of Mickey Mouse to the British view of transatlantic culture.⁵¹ The tour was, in its way, an important episode for Foot. America was never so appealing that it shaped his political or other views: despite his enthusiasm for most aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he was too intensely English for that. But the visit enlarged his vision in many respects. For instance, one aspect he noticed was the apparently much greater prominence of women in higher education in the US, notably in some distinguished women’s colleges at which he and Cripps spoke. The trip took him out of his familiar English radical world for a while, and helped him to grow up.

Michael Foot’s early years made him a distinctive, perhaps unique, kind of politician. He somehow bridged new and old, the brave new world radicalism of the post-war generation alongside the cultural depth of a Victorian man of letters. He was in many ways an old young man; equally he remained an eternally youthful spirit well into extreme old age. He drew from his origins a passionate attachment to the traditions of his family, and of Plymouth and the West Country more generally. He acquired an immense stock of vivid, easily mobilized political and literary influences and allusions. An apt quotation from Foot could spear opponents at will. His political connections were strong, first with Lloyd Georgian Liberalism, though perhaps Stafford Cripps might direct him towards new horizons. As a young debater at Oxford he acquired a fluency and poise in debate, buttressed by a kind of cultural confidence that pushed him towards a public career. He discovered that he could speak and he could write, with passion, conviction and often brilliance. He had all the idealistic fervour of a young anti-war radical at that time. Yet perhaps the abiding legacy from his younger days was an ability to place himself in historical context. When he reflected on current political and social issues, Drake and Cromwell, Tom Paine and Hazlitt, even aberrant turncoats like Edmund Burke, were at his shoulder. He felt himself to be somehow their heir, a past and future king of libertarian dissent, but searching still for a coherent movement to lead or even to join. But, whatever his future, he would share with the inspirational Isaac a demonic energy to pursue great causes. For ‘He trespasses upon his duty who sleeps upon his watch.’ No Foot ever dared do that.

2 CRIPPS TO BEAVERBROOK (1934–1940)

When Michael Foot’s hero, David Lloyd George, came to London as a young man at the age of seventeen in November 1880, he set eyes on the House of Commons for the first time. In his diary he admitted to having ‘eyed the assembly in a spirit similar to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor, the region of his future domain. Oh, vanity!’¹ Five years later he unveiled to his future wife, Maggie Owen, the force of his terrifying ambition: ‘My supreme idea is to get on … I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way,’² and he was as good as his word. Michael Foot, by contrast, felt no such overpowering urge. Although the son and brother of Liberal MPs (and possessed of a good deal more historical knowledge of the Norman Conquest than Lloyd George), he had no driving political ambition. To none of his friends did he suggest that he might consider becoming a parliamentary candidate. Indeed, when he came down from Oxford in June 1934, even when he returned from the United States six months later, he had no idea of what he might do in life. His brothers were finding their feet professionally, Dingle in chambers as a barrister as well as being an MP, Hugh in the Colonial Service, John in the solicitors’ firm Foot & Bowden back in Plymouth. But none of these routine occupations appealed to Michael’s imagination even though he too, in his way, sought ‘to get on’.

In fact he spent his first six months after graduating very much on the move. There was the jolly visit to Paris with John mentioned earlier, on which he spent a small legacy of £50 from his grandfather, a reward for earlier abstemiousness, successfully chasing culture, less successfully chasing girls, gleefully downing his windfall with glasses of Pernod. There followed a far more significant trip for the longer term when he went on across Europe, taking a train to Venice – very much his cherished city in later years – and then a boat from Trieste to Haifa to join his elder brother Hugh (‘Mac’), now serving in the Colonial Service amongst the continuing tensions of Palestine. Hitherto Michael had had no particular interest in the tensions between Jews and Arabs, although most British Liberals, from Lloyd George downwards, had a broad sympathy for the Jews and for the Zionist movement. Churchill’s philo-Semitism when a pre-war Liberal MP was well known. But Michael Foot’s trip in 1934 had a major impact upon him. It was to stimulate the first of many controversial crusades. He first became aware of the qualities of the Jews on the slow boat to Haifa, since virtually all the other passengers on it were Jewish. One of them was an ardent chess player with whom Foot first played serious chess. On this voyage his Jewish friend won every time, but Foot was to become ‘one of the strongest players in the House of Commons’ in later years.³

When he reached Palestine Michael stayed with his brother Hugh at Nablus, in the famous biblical region of Samaria. For one hellfire Welsh nonconformist preacher the very name had been a symbol of communal turbulence: ‘What was Samaria? Samaria was the Merthyr Tydfil of the land of Canaan.’⁴ In 1934 it was no more tranquil, with a small number of Jewish settlers in a prolonged stand-off with a large Arab community scattered throughout desert villages. Michael quickly realized the complexities of the situation in Palestine, a region left in conflict and possible chaos after the ambiguous pledges to both communities made by Lloyd George’s government after the disastrously imprecise Balfour Declaration of 1917. But whereas brother Hugh, like most in the Colonial Service, was a warm sympathizer with the Arabs, it was the plight of the beleaguered Jewish minority that haunted Michael all his life. After a few tense weeks in Nablus he returned home by a circuitous route, including a cheap ship from Beirut, his first flight, from Athens to Salonika, and a stopping train through Yugoslavia and back to England. There followed his debating tour in America with John Cripps. He returned home just in time for Christmas, after which the more practical problems of getting and spending had to be resolved.

The way that things worked out for him had a critical effect on his entire life. In the absence of any attractive alternative his thoughts turned to writing a work of history, in which the present-day moral would emerge. His chosen area was the life of Charles James Fox, to whom he had been pointed by his reading of George Otto Trevelyan and others, and who had interested him when working for prizes at Leighton Park school. Fox had much appeal as a subject. He was a critic of the overmighty authority of George III and his King’s Friends. He was a colourful personality, sexually liberated – usually a feature of Foot’s chosen heroes, including Hazlitt, Byron and H. G. Wells. He was a literate apostle of the Enlightenment. Above all, he championed the ideals of the French Revolution and of civil liberty through dark times in peace and in war. Foot was always a passionate supporter of the revolutionaries of 1789: they drew him to Tom Paine and to Hazlitt in his reading. A fellow chess enthusiast, Charles James Fox inspired Foot as an essential link in a native English radical tradition that bound the Levellers in Putney church to Cobden and Bright and Lloyd George and Bertrand Russell and the anti-war apostles of the Union of Democratic Control in 1914: the relationship of all this to the separate complexities of the socialist tradition was something he had yet to work out. Fox was naturally opposition-minded; he was seen by A. J. P. Taylor as the founder of the dynasty of ‘trouble-makers’ which his 1957 Ford’s Lectures at Oxford celebrated, and whose steps the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament consciously followed. Fox had kept alive the red flame of radical courage during the bleak Pittite years. He was the most natural of subjects for the post-Oxford idealist Michael Foot.

But the book never happened. Foot had no money, no publisher, not even a synopsis to wave around. Instead he found himself trapped in a humdrum office job, which was to change his life. It was to become a central point of self-reference and self-definition in his own later interpretation of his career. This arose from his friendship with John Cripps, which led him to spend much time in vacations at ‘Goodfellows’ in the west Oxfordshire village of Filkins, the squire’s home of John’s father, the famous advocate and by now socialist firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. He also went on holiday with the Cripps family to the Scilly Isles. Foot’s relationship with Stafford Cripps soon became a decisive one. He needed a hero and a patron: in Cripps, as later in Beaverbrook, he found both. ‘Goodfellows’ fascinated him with its array of visiting Labour, trade union and socialist celebrities. He met George Lansbury, Labour’s current evangelistic pacifist leader, whose pacifism appeared even to Foot surreal, but with whom he became friendly in Lansbury’s last years. He was impressed by Ernest Bevin, the Transport and General Workers Union’s General Secretary, as an authentic working-class leader of much strength of personality; much less so by the taciturn Clem Attlee. A far more potent influence than either was one occasional visitor, the young Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan, who was to shape his destiny for ever. There were also young people like Geoffrey Wilson, an idealistic Quaker who was to become Stafford Cripps’s private secretary on his ambassadorial visit to Moscow in 1940. Clearly, amidst such company Foot’s traditional Liberalism would be facing a severe challenge. But Cripps was attracted by his son’s interesting and knowledgeable young friend, anxious to help him forward and to enlist his literary and oratorical talents for his own versions of the socialist cause. Cripps’s brother Leonard, a ship-owner and a director of the Holt shipping firm’s Blue Funnel Line which traded with southern Africa and the Far East, needed a personal assistant. His nephew John had been pencilled in for this post, but John (a caustic critic of his uncle’s right-wing views) suggested his friend Michael instead. Thus it was that on 1 January 1935 the impressionable young Foot began work amidst the cranes and bunkers of the alien shipyards of Liverpool’s docks.

Michael Foot’s time in industrial Liverpool was not a relaxed one, and he left after barely nine months. But for ever afterwards he would give this period a legendary Damascus-like status as the time when he first witnessed social hardship and became a left-wing socialist. It is important to try to establish how far the poverty of working-class Liverpool was pivotal in this conversion, and indeed what kind of socialism it was to which he was drawn. Certainly he found his job in the Blue Funnel Line boring and undemanding. He used as much time as he could in making notes on the back of business correspondence on the career and ideas of Charles James Fox. He had hoped that his new job might entail some overseas travel, for which he had now acquired a taste, but none was forthcoming and he was office-bound. Foot told his mother how heartily he disliked all the people he worked with and for. Leonard Cripps was boring, Sir Richard Holt ‘the last word in malignant density’. Others had ‘stunted intelligences’, while the routine duties were ‘dull as ditchwater’.⁵

But Liverpool, the first industrial working-class city of which he had any experience, was far more compelling. He found lodgings in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish home which his recent visit to Palestine made congenial. He spent time exploring the shabby backstreets of the dock-side areas. He also transferred his footballing interests, at least for a time, to supporting Everton at Goodison Park. He treasured in later life an ‘Ode to Everton’ that he composed in 1935, which was printed in the Liverpool Daily Post. It laid particular emphasis on ‘Dixie’s priceless head’, a reference to the prolific goal-scoring centre-forward ‘Dixie’ Dean.⁶ But crucially, within a month of arriving on Merseyside the old West Country Liberal had joined the Labour Party as an active, ardent crusader and canvasser. (Oddly, in accounts of his career he tends to give 1934, not 1935, as the date of his conversion.) Michael had got religion, and wanted the world to know. Soon he was an energetic participant in the committee meetings and street-corner campaigning of the Liverpool Labour Party. He met congenial comrades here, including two future parliamentary colleagues, Sydney Silverman, an eloquent Jewish lawyer, and the formidable and pugnacious Bessie Braddock and her husband Jack, both ex-Communists. To what extent Michael’s conversion was the consequence of empirical observation might, however, be examined. After all, commentators have wondered how far George Orwell’s famous book of the same period was actually the product of first-hand observation of Wigan Pier. John Vincent once commented in an Observer book review that ‘a man who describes as flabby Lancashire cheese which is crumbly gives himself away at once’.

Without doubt, Michael Foot’s compassionate heart and soul were deeply stirred by the poverty he saw in the dockside community and in Liverpool’s backstreets. It was a maritime city with a weak manufacturing base, and thus very high unemployment, painfully evident on street corners amidst its shabby terraces. Equally clearly, his speeches and articles while at Oxford show a young man moving rapidly leftwards in his revulsion for militarism and dictatorship. His criticisms of socialism in ‘Why I am a Liberal’ are half-hearted questionings of the merits of centralization. Most of his close friends at Oxford – John Cripps, Paul Reilly, Tony Greenwood – were emphatically Labour. And without doubt his acquaintance with Stafford Cripps and the bracing radical atmosphere of ‘Goodfellows’ were a powerful influence too. But, most characteristically, Michael’s conversion came through the medium of books – and indeed not sober works of socio-economic analysis, but imaginative works of fiction. While crawling to his office on Liverpool’s trams, his mind was focused not only on the slums through which he passed but on the books he read on his journey. Arnold Bennett was a particularly powerful stimulant: his How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) made a lasting impact on the young socialist. It is actually a short book, not at all one of Bennett’s masterpieces, but Foot no doubt appreciated the chapter on ‘Serious Reading’, which lavished great praise on Hazlitt’s essay ‘Poetry in General’ – ‘the best thing of its kind in English’.⁷ Foot also read extensively the novels of H. G. Wells, destined to loom alongside Cripps and Bevan as supreme inspirations. Tono-Bungay’s relatively brief account of socialist ideas was exciting to him, more perhaps for its subtle exposé of the immoralities of free-market competitive capitalism. Bernard Shaw was another important influence, though he was less favoured because of his criticisms of Wells’s Short History of the World.⁸ Foot’s was an undoctrinaire ethical socialism, a gospel of words and ideas, similar to that which had impelled young men like Attlee or Dalton into the Independent Labour Party. On more immediate matters, Foot was excited by Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom. Economic theory does not seem to have interested him. At first he was innocent of connections with Marxism, although by 1937 he was instructing the equally young Barbara Betts (the future Barbara Castle) in the intellectual delights of Das Kapital. His ideology, such as it was, kept its distance from the formal programmes of the Labour Party, still in 1935 trying to redefine its policies after the catastrophe of 1931 had laid bare the emptiness of its economic notions, and perhaps also the wider problem of attempting to modify and humanize a capitalist order which it ultimately wished to abolish.

Nor was Michael Foot a Fabian. He had met Beatrice Webb at Stafford Cripps’s home, and did not take to her admonitory style. He did not become a socialist in order to promote orderly administration by a bureaucratic elite; nor, without a background in local government at any level, was he inspired by the heady vision of ‘gas and water socialism’. The first book by the Webbs that he read, and indeed responded to positively, was their Industrial Democracy, which he read together with Barbara Betts at her Bloomsbury flat. Years later, in 1959, he took sharp issue with the Fabian historian Margaret Cole on the Webbs’ vision of socialism: ‘I think there is running through a great deal of what they wrote … a strong bureaucratic, anti-libertarian attitude which often reveals what I think is a real contempt for those who are engaged in Socialist agitation, protest and activities of that nature.’ He pointed out Beatrice’s patrician absence of interest in the great propaganda work of Robert Blatchford, editor of the early socialist newspaper the Clarion (he might have added her contempt for Keir Hardie and George Lansbury as well). For much of their career the Webbs were unconvinced that the Labour movement was the instrument of change, rather than a generally-defined ‘permeation’ and gradualism. Revealingly, Foot added as a criticism the Webbs’ uncritical adulation of the Soviet Union and Communist doctrine, in contrast to the far more critical approach of his old journalist friend and mentor H. N. Brailsford, historian and intellectual guru of the socialist left.⁹ Foot’s conclusions appear to endorse many of H. G. Wells’s assaults on the Fabian high command in the Edwardian period, and the general line of criticism indicated in one of his favourite books, The New Machiavelli. It was a battle of the books which Margaret Cole was most unlikely ever to win. For Foot, then, socialism was a greater liberalism, a doctrine of social and aesthetic liberation. It implied new values and a new society. It made Michael in time the natural disciple of the imaginative crusader Aneurin Bevan and the natural husband of the cultural socialist, Jill.

In this quest, Stafford Cripps seemed at this period the natural messiah. Since the 1931 schism, with the defection of MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden to become allies of the Tories, Cripps had led a sharp advance to the left. He preached a style of socialism that went far beyond the cautious parliamentary parameters within which Labour had grown up. He joined the far-left Socialist League, a movement of middle-class intellectuals, formed in 1932, in large part from the ILP when it disaffiliated from the Labour Party. It was a movement in which Michael Foot was shortly to enlist. Cripps campaigned to promote a new foreign policy in alliance with the Soviet Union: the League of Nations was dismissed as ‘the International Burglars’ Union’. He also pressed for the social ownership of all major industries and utilities, based not on state nationalization but on workers’ control. At the 1933 party conference Cripps proclaimed in Marxist terms that a socialist government would never receive fair treatment under capitalism, with the City, the Civil Service and the establishment all ranged against it. He called for some form of emergency government to entrench socialism in our time. In January 1934 he caused even greater alarm and shock by suggesting that Buckingham Palace would be foremost amongst the institutions seeking to defeat an incoming Labour government. This doctrine horrified leaders such as Dalton, Attlee and Morrison: Beatrice Webb thought him an extremist and his ideas revolutionary. By the 1935 general election Cripps’s erratic behaviour meant that his star was soon to wane. He himself recognized the fact by giving private financial help to Clem Attlee as assistant party leader in Lansbury’s last phase. But to the young Michael Foot, a books-driven evangelist yearning for a cause, Cripps was the most obvious instrument of creating a new socialist society.

Foot’s conversion to socialism was, naturally, a huge shock to his traditionally Liberal family. Nothing like it had ever happened at Pencrebar. What made things worse was that they discovered his conversion to Labour indirectly, when the Daily Herald picked up a short comment in the Oxford undergraduate magazine Isis. But the shock was far from terminal: it was nowhere near as bad as a Foot becoming a Tory (the family’s response to Dingle’s effective electoral pact with the Tories in Dundee is not recorded). Isaac was shaken at first by his son’s transformation. However, he cheerfully told Michael that if he was to move from liberalism to socialism, he ought to absorb the thoughts of a real radical. An even more intense perusal was needed of the thoughts of William Hazlitt (who, among other things, was a republican who voiced public grief on hearing of Napoleon’s deeply regrettable defeat at Waterloo).¹⁰ Even the Labour Party could be better understood by recourse to the bookshelves of Pencrebar. Michael’s mother Eva seems to have been more immediately upset by the news, and he had to write to her explaining his belief that only socialism, rather than any form of liberalism, had the answer to problems of poverty and peace. But in time his mother came to a more complete appreciation than Isaac ever did of the reasons for Michael’s becoming a socialist. Certainly her Labour son’s political advance was as important to her as that of any of her Liberal brood.

Michael Foot’s earliest activities as a left socialist in the streets of Liverpool had, of course, immediate social evils to condemn. But what is striking about his socialism, then and always, is how far this very English rebel, who travelled relatively little until his old age and was dedicated to worshipping the liberty tree of his country’s past, framed his socialism in an international context. This, of course, was common to many idealistic young people in the thirties, with the rise of totalitarian dictatorship and the threat of a global confrontation with the democratic peoples. Foot played his full part in campaigning against fascism, for the Popular Front in Spain, and in denouncing Chamberlainite appeasement. But he had perspectives of his own in relation to two important countries further afield – India and Palestine.

Since his undergraduate days, Foot had had a special affinity with India and the Indians. He liked their food, he admired their culture; perhaps, as Philip Snowden said of Keir Hardie, India ‘appealed to the seer and the mystic in him’. He had listened avidly to his father’s accounts of the views of Mahatma Gandhi during the Round Table conference which explored the future government of India in 1930–31. He had been active in the Anglo-Indian Lotus Club. In the Oxford Union he was friendly with progressive Indians like the sharp young Parsee D. F. Karaka, whose memoirs testified to Foot’s generosity of spirit and enthusiasm for multiculturalism.¹¹ Foot carried on this involvement right through the thirties. Long after Indian independence in 1947, devotion to India was a golden thread in his career. India embodied key political and cultural values that he cherished. A major influence from 1934 onwards was his contact with Krishna Menon, a member of St Pancras borough council until 1947. Menon’s energetic work as chairman of the St Pancras Education and Library Committee, especially on library and arts provision for children, was greatly admired. He first met Michael when he edited the book Young Oxford and War, to which Michael contributed, and Michael was to be much associated with him in campaigning for the Socialist League in London. Krishna Menon was an exciting guru: Foot’s visits to his legal office at 169 The Strand always remained memorable for him. He joined the strongly pro-Congress Commonwealth of India League (previously the Home Rule for India League), of which Krishna Menon had been General Secretary since 1930, and read Indian newspapers avidly. At this period Foot’s instinct was to call for gradualism in the demands of the Congress, and he wrote urging Indian nationalists to cooperate with the authorities as the new Indian constitution was being drafted at Westminster in 1934–35. Krishna Menon’s tendency to build links between Congress and the British Communist Party was something that disturbed Foot later in that decade.

But Indian self-government was a glowing ideal for him throughout the thirties, merged into the Labour Party’s campaigns for social justice and world peace. This was widely true of younger socialists in Britain, contrasting with a relative lack of interest in Africa. Several of Foot’s most admired fellow-socialists were zealous in the Commonwealth of India League. Thus he discussed the subcontinent on long walks with H. N. Brailsford, who had first-hand knowledge of India, was a personal friend of Gandhi and was to write Subject India for the Left Book Club during the war.¹² Harold Laski was another key socialist intellectual much concerned with Indian independence: he had after all served on the special jury in the O’Dwyer v. Nair libel case that followed the dismissal of General Dyer, the perpetrator of the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, and was shocked by the sheer racialism that it revealed, especially from the judge. Aneurin Bevan, shortly to be Foot’s closest political ally and mentor, always gave India a high priority, as did Bevan’s wife Jennie Lee, while amongst Foot’s literary heroes H. G. Wells was another ally on Indian matters: The New Machiavelli was an important text for opponents of the Raj. Amongst Indian leaders, in addition to Krishna Menon, Foot also met Pandit Nehru and heard him speak in 1938 at a meeting on Spain. Foot’s continuing links with the Nehru family – Nehru’s daughter Indira and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi especially – remained important for the next half-century and more.

Foot was always amongst those who encouraged Indian nationalists when war broke out in 1939 to try to work with the British government, certainly not to join the radical nationalist movement associated with Subhas Chandra Bose, who sought aid from the invading Japanese to overthrow the Raj. On the other hand, the authoritarian policies of the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, which saw the arrest of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders following the ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942, aroused Foot’s shock and fury. They made the downfall of empire all the more inevitable. His involvement with Indian nationalism was such that, not for the last time in his career, he aroused the interest of MI5. It sponsored Indian Political Intelligence, a secret espionage body which infiltrated the India Office to keep watch on ‘subversives’ such as Communists, nationalists and ‘terrorists’ (undefined) operating outside India. It reported direct to the Secretary of State for India through the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office, and to the government of India through the intelligence bureau of the Home Department. Thus it reported on a meeting organized by Mrs Rebecca Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer family, in the Savoy Hotel on 28 October 1941 to consider asking the British government to include India within the scope of the Atlantic Charter. The thirty-four people present included intellectuals of great distinction such as H. G. Wells and Professor J. B. S. Haldane, along with Kingsley Martin and the Labour MPs Sydney Silverman, W. G. Cove and Reg Sorensen. There were two Indians present, Dr P. C. Bhandari and Krishna Menon. Michael Foot, still only twenty-nine, chaired this august meeting. After a diversionary protest from a sole Fabian present it was decided to send a deputation to Churchill, to include Julian Huxley, the writer Storm Jameson, Mrs Sieff, Krishna Menon and Michael Foot, though to no effect.¹³

Foot’s passion for India provided an important context for his socialism. He remained on good terms with the notoriously prickly Krishna Menon after Nehru appointed him High Commissioner in London in 1947. There were also continuing links with people like Karaka, editor of a famous weekly, Current, a great admirer of Gandhi in his last period but a critic of Nehru.¹⁴ Foot continued to enjoy fame in India as a man sympathetic to the country even at the time of difficulties with Pakistan in the 1960s, and with close access to Mrs Gandhi during some important visits to the subcontinent in the 1970s. On the long-running dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and the 1975 State of Emergency, Foot always resolutely took the Indian side, even at the cost of much flak from close friends like the journalist James Cameron and his Indian wife Moni. He encouraged Sheikh Abdullah, the Muslim nationalist leader in Kashmir, to promote the cause of integration into India.

Foot retained close relations with leading Indians. An early one was the author Mulk Raj Anand, ‘India’s Dickens’, a well-known habitué of Bloomsbury in the 1930s and a friend of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Foot was especially moved by Anand’s sensitive chronicle of the world of the Untouchables, as indeed was Foot’s friend Indira Gandhi.¹⁵ Another Indian friend and admirer, years later, was the industrialist Swraj Paul, who established a steel mill (opened there by Indira Gandhi) in Foot’s Ebbw Vale constituency after the closure of much of its old steelworks. Yet another was the celebrated Observer cartoonist ‘Abu’ (Abu Abraham), a kind of Indian version of Foot’s friend ‘Vicky’.¹⁶ Foot’s later visits to India between 1973 and 1997 were of central importance for him, not only for Indian matters but also in pursuing the cause of world disarmament. He rejoiced in the Congress’s return to power in 2004, since the new Prime Minister, the Sikh Manmohan Singh, was an old personal friend.

India thus provided an important early dimension of Foot’s socialism, even if he was always inclined to exaggerate the degree to which the post-Menon Congress really had a socialist philosophy. It made him close to socialist authors like Brailsford, Wells and Laski, all much engaged in the affairs of the subcontinent. At the same time Cripps, himself highly knowledgeable about India, became more distant from the Congress as time went on, and the controversial episode of his disastrously ambiguous ‘offer’ of dominion status in 1942 led to a serious breach with Nehru. India, then, intensified Foot’s socialism. But it also proved to be a major factor for him in questioning Cripps’s political judgement, and they quarrelled again, as they had done over the Unity campaign with the Communists in the late thirties. India thus partly led Foot to measure his distance from the man who had been his major inspiration in making him a socialist in the first place. It should also be added that Foot’s deep political interest in India never extended to a serious concern with problems of trade, aid or development in Third World countries. In this, as in other respects, his lack of interest in economic questions limited his curiosity about matters that stimulated his socialist conscience on other grounds.

Palestine was the other country to attract his attention as a newborn socialist. Ever since his visit to see Hugh there in 1934, he had been deeply absorbed by the country. He had by now met Jewish friends like Sydney Silverman in the Labour movement, while the Labour Party considered itself to have important bonds with Jewish Labour figures in Palestine like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. Indeed, there was a small Jewish movement in Britain, Poale Zion, that was affiliated to the Labour Party. Michael’s visit to see Hugh ‘Mac’ in 1934 inspired his intuitive concern, but also a sense of the complexities of the region. An instinctive attachment to Zionism was challenged by a sense of the Arab desperation which broke into open rebellion in the later 1930s. Hugh Foot himself took the strongly pro-Arab line dominant in the Foreign and Colonial Service. In the 1960s, at the UN and in Harold Wilson’s government, he was passionately pro-Palestinian. In 1967 he largely drafted UN Resolution 242, which for the first time attempted to check perceived Israeli aggressive incursions and settlements over the West Bank of the Jordan. Most of the other Foots tended to gravitate to this line also. When Hugh died in 1990, remarkably enough, Palestinian Arab flags were draped over his coffin, at the request of his son Paul.¹⁷ But in this, as in other ways, Michael was a dissenter within his dissenting family.

By the time war was under way, his support for the Jews was a pivot of his political outlook. It became even more pronounced after the war when he, Richard Crossman, Ian Mikardo and others on the left became passionate critics of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s strongly pro-Arab policy. There were important personal factors in shaping Michael’s views: friends in the party like Teddy Kollek, later Mayor of Jerusalem and both friend and foe of Arthur Koestler; and certainly his fondness for Lily Ernst, the Jewish Yugoslav girlfriend/mistress of Lord Beaverbrook. In the war years he met Arthur Koestler, the most ardent of Zionists, who went as far as endorsing the attacks of the terrorist Stern gang on British troops. Foot’s newspaper Tribune was to employ influential Jewish, and strongly pro-Israel, contributors like Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson and its literary editor, Tosco Fyvel. But obviously the dominant element was the torment of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime, even if the dimensions of the Holocaust were not yet widely known. It made Michael Foot a strong champion of a partitioned Palestine with recognition of a Jewish state of Israel. Only much later, in the 1970s, following, among other things, fierce debate on the Palestine issue amongst the Tribune group of MPs, did he come to modify an old entrenched position, and to join others on the left to call for an Israeli withdrawal from settlements on the West Bank. The Jews, he felt, ‘had wrecked their own case’.¹⁸ In any case, a sternly nationalist Likud-led administration seemed far removed from the old comradeship in the era of Ben-Gurion and the socialism of the kibbutz.

Otherwise the new-born socialist followed the standard position of the Liberal-Labour left, endorsing European regimes such as the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in 1936, condemning terrorist dictatorship in Germany and Italy (especially the latter, in the case of one who had many Italian friends and who revered the works of the socialist novelist Ignazio Silone). Towards the League of Nations Foot’s view was a characteristic confusion of pacifism with pacificism, collective security being bracketed with the ending of all wars. After all, the Soviet Union itself was now a member of Cripps’s ‘burglars’ union’ (as he had once called the League of Nations). Only some on the Labour left began to recognize the emptiness of their diagnosis, individual MPs like Hugh Dalton and especially the TUC, concerned for the fate of trade union comrades under Hitler and Mussolini.

One country, however, was never close to Michael Foot’s world view – the Soviet Union. His growing interest in the Marxist interpretation of history never translated into sympathy for Russia under Stalin. He did not share the simple-minded certainties of contemporary young Cambridge intellectuals like Blunt, Burgess and Maclean. It is utterly ironic that in the 1990s disaffected and unreliable informants of MI 5 such as Oleg Gordievsky began to spread rumours that Foot (or ‘Agent Boot’) had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’. right-wingers in the security service who had let genuine spies such as Kim Philby slip through the net actually gave them some credence. On the contrary, Foot rejected with scorn the totally uncritical enthusiasm for Russia shown by the Webbs or Bernard Shaw. He praised H. G. Wells for having a famous dialogue with Stalin in 1934 but in no way being taken in by him. It was a cause of a breach with Cripps that his old icon proved so undiscriminating in his allies in the Unity Front, seeking common cause with the Communists in the later thirties. Foot was quick to respond to news of Stalin’s purges in 1937–38; least of all those on the democratic socialist left could he be accused of fellow-travelling. The simple-minded journalistic claims at the time of l’affaire Blunt that all intelligent young people inevitably migrated towards Communism as the strongest resistance to fascism in the thirties have little substance. A broad-church Labour Party was the invariable destination of almost all of them, even in the pro-Russia climate of the later stages of the war. Like most of his fellow Bevanites and Tribunites, Michael Foot was a redoubtable voice of anti-Communism. Nor did he ever accord to the Russian Revolution of 1917 the special place in his historical affections that was claimed by the events in France in 1789.

By the late summer of 1935, for all the seductive appeal of Liverpool socialism, Michael Foot was restless. He was thoroughly bored in his job with the Blue Funnel Line. His thoughts turned again to writing a biography of Charles James Fox, and publishers were approached about this for a ‘Brief Lives’ series. Another historical subject that appealed to him was English radicals during the time of the French Revolution, a special place being accorded to Tom Paine. He did discuss the possibility of a book on this theme with Harold Laski, whom he heard lecture at the LSE and who was an inspirational force for so many young socialists in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But nothing came of it, and it was politics which seemed to beckon more powerfully. The Labour Party had been making some headway since the dark days of 1931, winning famous by-elections such as that in East Fulham in 1933. Foot himself was active in a by-election in the Wavertree division of Liverpool in February 1935. Here J. J. Cleary won the seat for Labour for the first time, after the Conservative vote had been badly split by an independent candidature from Randolph Churchill, standing on behalf of his father’s distinctly illiberal views on India. Pacifist-inclined though he was, Foot recognized the departure of George Lansbury as Labour leader after the 1935 party conference as inevitable. Who precisely he would have favoured as Lansbury’s successor is unclear. He had no trust in Herbert Morrison, and regarded Attlee as taciturn and colourless. On balance, perhaps, he tended to favour that patriotic (if drunken) Freemason Arthur Greenwood, father of his student friend Tony.

Suddenly in October, right on cue after successful Royal Jubilee celebrations which the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, orchestrated with characteristic deftness, a general election was called. Michael Foot suddenly decided that he wished to be part of it. He travelled down to Labour’s headquarters in Transport House to see the party’s General Secretary, Jim Middleton (whose wife Lucy was to be a fellow Plymouth MP in 1945), and asked if there were any vacancies for Labour candidates. Given a list of long-shot constituencies with no record of Labour strength at all, Michael Foot, for no clear reason, selected Monmouth in south Wales. It had never been a seat that Labour expected to capture, although in a by-election in 1934 their candidate had won 35 per cent of the vote. That evening he took a train down to Monmouthshire, and was seen by the local agent Tom Powell and a handful of local officials. On the last day of October he was formally adopted as Labour candidate at a meeting chaired by Ivor Harries, President of the Monmouth division Labour Party. Polling day was barely a fortnight away. It was a disgracefully short period of campaigning and a forlorn hope for Labour, in a constituency the new candidate had never previously visited or even seen. Still, Michael Foot, at the age of twenty-two, was into serious politics for the first time.¹⁹

Monmouth was the most Tory seat in Wales. Indeed, English in speech, squirearchical in tradition, it was hardly a Welsh seat at all. It lay in what the literary theorist Raymond Williams, a native, was to call ‘border country’. It was mostly an anglicized enclave along the Welsh marches, far more similar to rural Herefordshire or Worcestershire than to the radical or socialist traditions of Wales. Its outlook bore little resemblance to the nonconformist values of West Country England either. It was marked by the remaining influences of great houses – Lord Tredegar or the Dukes of Beaufort. It was strong hunting country, and the Beaufort Hunt was an ancient local institution: here was a pastime that Foot particularly disliked, for social as much as for humane reasons. Monmouth was also an area of immense natural beauty, hailed by early enthusiasts for the ‘picturesque’, along the river Wye and around Tintern Abbey, immortalized by Michael Foot’s much-admired Wordsworth. The South Wales Argus, published in Newport, detailed the placid panorama of rural Gwent ‘from Grosmont to Magor, and from Llanfihangel-Crossenny to Chepstow’.²⁰ There were pockets of Labour strength in the western parts of the constituency close to the mining valleys further west, while there was a strong railway interest around Abergavenny in the north-east, including the family of Raymond Williams. The fifteen-year-old Williams and his railwayman father, an activist in the Labour Party, campaigned for Foot. In fact the youthful Labour candidate did not impress the schoolboy Williams: ‘He was a new phenomenon, straight out of the Oxford Union, who did sound a bit odd in Pandy village hall. I said to my father: “What has this to do with the Labour Party?”’²¹

Monmouth had remained stolidly Conservative/Unionist during the Liberal ascendancy in Wales in the later nineteenth century, until the famous Liberal upsurge of 1906 when Major-General Sir Ivor Philipps captured the seat and held it until the end of the First World War. Since then it had been solidly Tory. In 1931 the Conservative candidate, Sir Leolin Forestier-Walker, held it easily in a straight fight with Labour, with a fourteen-thousand majority and 70 per cent of the vote. Michael Foot’s slender hopes were given an early buffeting at a meeting in Usk when his agent greeted the electors with the immortal words, ‘Here we are again in bloody old Tory Usk.’ The Conservative member since a by-election in 1934 was Major J. A. Herbert, a Tory of imperialist persuasion, later to be Governor of Bengal.

Nevertheless, the fledgling Labour candidate fought a spirited, even sparkling, campaign. Foot’s address and his speeches focused on the twin themes of peace and poverty. ‘The armaments race must be stopped now,’ and the League of Nations must be supported, including in the current crisis caused by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. At home there should be public ownership of all major industries and banks (‘exchange’ had been added to ‘production’ and ‘distribution’ in Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution at the 1934 party conference) together with social reforms, some of which were targeted on farm labourers, including a minimum wage and the abolition of tied cottages.²² His early speeches at Caerleon and Chepstow defied the ethos of the constituency by being uncompromisingly socialist: ‘The community should take into its own hands the factories and land in order that the masses should share in the abundance.’ ‘One small section’ should not be allowed to ‘exploit the masses’ (applause).²³ In an article in the local newspaper he wrote that ‘Labour advocates as the main feature of its programme the national ownership of the factories and other wealth.’ The private owners of the means of production were ‘enemies of society at large’. There were vague echoes of Wells in imprecise calls to adopt scientific methods of production and to promote new inventions.²⁴ At Caldecot he urged that unemployment (rife in many parts of the constituency) should be made a national charge. Always there were assaults on the National Government’s record on international peace and its failure to promote disarmament. He attributed the recent increase in stock exchange prices to the rise in armament shares. He shrugged off criticisms that, at twenty-two, he was too young to be a Member of Parliament. After an evening meeting at Rolls Hall, Monmouth, the press recorded that ‘never before has a Labour candidate received such applause at the close of an address’.²⁵

There were, inevitably, few outside speakers in Labour’s forlorn Monmouth campaign. Foot was assisted by Stafford Cripps’s youthful protégé, the Quaker Geoffrey Wilson, and indeed Cripps came down to pay the young candidate a remarkable tribute, saying that he hoped to see him in an incoming Labour administration after the polls. Cripps was as robust as Foot: the Labour Party ‘sought to get rid of private ownership of production … in order to give the workers a decent life’.²⁶ There was also a resounding eve-of-poll meeting, addressed by two coming stars, Aneurin Bevan and James Griffiths. It rained heavily on polling day. The outcome was a reduced Conservative majority of 9,848. Major Herbert polled 23,262 votes and Foot 13,454. Labour was to remain a relatively weak force in the constituency thereafter, until a passing victory in 1966 and a more sustained period of power in 1997–2005 under the banner of New Labour. But old or new, the Labour Party was never going to find it easy in so traditional an area.

Nevertheless, Foot had fought a spirited and creditable campaign. He told the post-election crowd in Agincourt Square, Monmouth, ‘We shall go on fighting until we are victorious.’²⁷ The Labour poll had increased by three thousand, and was the highest ever in the constituency. The Tory Western Mail, which had left Foot’s campaign virtually unreported, quoted him as saying: ‘I have enjoyed myself in the Monmouth division more than I can say.’²⁸ He never thought of fighting Monmouth again, and in 1938 was to be adopted in his native Plymouth for the Devonport division, not obviously a more hopeful prospect. But he had caught the bug for electioneering. This general election, incidentally, was mostly unfortunate for the Foots. While Dingle, bolstered by an electoral pact with the Tories, romped home in two-Member Dundee, John Foot came eight thousand behind the Conservative in Basingstoke. More calamitous, father Isaac was unseated by the Tories at Bodmin after a ferocious personalized campaign directed against ‘Pussyfoot’. He particularly resented the campaign against him by two neighbouring ‘National Liberal’ ministers, Walter Runciman (Member for St Ives) and Leslie Hore-Belisha (Member for Plymouth, Devonport). Isaac bitterly quoted against them Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem of betrayal, ‘The Broken Covenant’:

And when all men shall sing his praise to me

I’ll not gainsay. But I shall know his soul

Lies in the bosom of Iscariot.

Hore-Belisha, representing part of Isaac’s own Plymouth, was one who would lodge in the collective Foot memory, leaving the entire family eager for revenge. Another sharp critic of Isaac, as it happened, was the author of the ‘Crossbencher’ column of Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. This was a young journalist called Peter Howard – with whom Michael was later to co-author Guilty Men. Isaac was to try to return to Westminster when he fought a by-election in 1937 after the egregious Runciman went to the Lords. Narrowly, by 210 votes only, he lost again.

After the election, Foot had no job and no immediate objective. He lived in lodgings in London, at 33 Cambridge Terrace, near Paddington station, which he rented for thirty shillings a week, and often seemed lonely. Nearly seventy years later, he recalled how on Christmas Day 1935, at the age of twenty-two, he found himself all alone in London with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no girlfriend for comfort. Then he discovered that Plymouth Argyle were playing Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane on Christmas morning. He took the bus to Tottenham and saw Argyle triumph by 2–1, one of their goals being scored by their record goal-scorer Sammy Black, perhaps the finest player ever to don the black-and-green shirt of the ‘Pilgrims’. To celebrate, Foot went to the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly to enjoy his Christmas turkey: ‘Never in the realms of human conflict had two away points been so spectacularly or insouciantly garnered by one man.’²⁹ To add to the joy, the next day Plymouth defeated Spurs again, this time at Home Park. But it still sounds like a bleak and lonely time in an unfriendly metropolis.

In fact, he found a role and companionship for the next year or more through the Socialist League and the patronage of Sir Stafford Cripps. The Socialist League was still a lively force amongst urban intellectuals after the 1935 election campaign, though in retrospect it may have passed such a peak as it attained following defeats at the 1934 Labour Party conference at Southport.³⁰ Certainly it had no mass appeal, and membership was at best a couple of thousand. Its programme consisted of the immediate abolition of capitalism at home, with mass nationalization and the extinction of the rich. It opposed rearmament, called for a general strike against war, and declared socialism to be the remedy for imperialistic rivalries between the great powers. Even at the time, it seemed a programme of remarkable emptiness. The dream of a general strike by workers of all countries had been shown to be a total chimera in August 1914. Nevertheless it was, characteristically, to this fringe movement of intellectuals rather than to the mainstream party that the young Foot now devoted his energies, basing himself on the militant London Area Committee of the League. In 1936 much of his time was taken up with propaganda work, making tub-thumping speeches on socialism in our time on street corners in places like Mornington Crescent and Camden Town in north London, and sometimes on Hampstead Heath. His close friend Barbara Castle has left a striking picture of him at this period – witty, learned and articulate, his spectacles giving him a diffident and myopic air which young women might find attractive, a general air of casualness, perhaps outright scruffiness in his dress, whirling his arms around theatrically in high passion.³¹ More courageously, he often attended Mosleyite fascist meetings, engaging in loud heckling with an almost foolhardy recklessness, but getting away unscathed – unlike Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford, who was severely beaten up and hospitalized after a blackshirt meeting in Oxford town hall.

The Socialist League had some hopes of progress in 1936. Like the Bennites decades later, its adherents felt that Labour’s ability to win no more than 154 seats at the previous year’s general election showed the need for a far more radical, even revolutionary, approach. It based itself on a variety of fragments – former members of the ILP, which had disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932, intellectuals like William Mellor, linked with G. D. H. Cole in his SSIP (Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda), some like D. N. Pritt who were effectively Communists under another name. It was a melange of the English (or Anglo-Scottish) far left. The election of Popular Front governments in France and Spain, with Communist backing, in the summer of 1936, gave the movement some encouragement. But it remained a fringe movement always: Ben Pimlott has cited evidence to show that eight ‘mass demonstrations’ attracted only twelve thousand supporters in total, and that the League’s almost one hundred local committees were extremely small, save perhaps for Foot’s London Area Committee.³² A fatal weakness was the total absence of any trade union base: it was seen as a fringe body of middle-class suburban intellectuals. In 1937 it embarked on a new initiative, the Unity Campaign, which aimed to forge an alliance with the Communists: Stafford Cripps and Harry Pollitt spoke from the same platform. Pollitt indeed, uniquely amongst British Communists, was to become someone Foot particularly admired from that time onwards. A new newspaper was created on 1 January 1937, under the powerful editorship of William Mellor – this was Tribune, of which very much more anon, to which Foot was a founding contributor.

But the League’s campaign soon plunged into fatal difficulties. Internally there was endless ideological and tactical bickering between myriad socialist splinter groups. More seriously, externally the Labour Party’s NEC inevitably reacted strongly to any kind of formal link with the Communists, whose approaches it had always firmly rebuffed. Leading figures like Morrison and Bevin spoke out aggressively against the League. On 24 March Labour’s NEC declared that all members of the League would be expelled. Less than two months later, on 17 May, the League held a conference at Leicester in which anguished debate occurred: H. N. Brailsford, a veteran socialist intellectual and one of Foot’s heroes, wrote that he wished to resign from the League. The decision was taken to disband the Socialist League, and it never re-emerged. Stafford Cripps pursued his crusade for a Unity Front of all on the left on his own, drawing on his own immense funds acquired as a celebrated lawyer, and became a fringe figure, destined in 1939 to be expelled from the Labour Party himself.

Foot’s involvement in the Socialist League was therefore quixotic and fruitless. But it left an important personal legacy in the important friends the lonely young bachelor now acquired. It was in the League that he became close to Krishna Menon, unwell for much of the time but soon to become a local councillor in St Pancras. Another colleague was the Daily Mirror journalist and future MP Garry Allighan, later defended by Foot in 1947 when he was harshly expelled by the House of Commons for breach of parliamentary privilege. But much his most important new friend, who filled personal as well as political needs, was the fiery and distinctly attractive red-haired Bradford girl Barbara Betts, with whom he campaigned for the League throughout London. She had been engaged in left-wing politics since graduating from St Hilda’s in Oxford, and was now deeply involved in a passionate affair with William Mellor, a leading League intellectual and also a married man.³³ But she and Michael Foot took to each other at once. She found his air of intellectual diffidence combined with political passion deeply attractive. Foot was manifestly in love with her, while understanding and respecting her relationship with Mellor. They spent much time in each other’s company, and when Barbara in the course of 1936 rented a new flat in Coram Street, Bloomsbury, Michael was a frequent visitor for whom she cooked many meals. Sometimes they found the money to have dinner together at Chez Victor in Soho. They also paid joint visits to see Cripps in Filkins.

At this time the relationship seems to have been a fairly equal one, with perhaps Foot the more important intellectual force, but Barbara far from docile. Foot, not normally an enthusiast for political philosophy, had recently discovered Marx’s socialist writings. He spent many evenings in Barbara’s attic flat, sometimes on the roof outside, reading passages from Das Kapital to her and discussing their importance, thereby deflecting her from perhaps the more congenial task of reading Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. More alarmingly, he gave her driving lessons in his new car. Eventually, as he gaily commented at Barbara’s memorial service in 2002, his car became a write-off, while Barbara went on to become Minister of Transport. Despite hints from Foot to the contrary in later life and her own lifelong flirtatious style, Barbara insisted that there was never any sexual dimension to their friendship at all.³⁴ When they went on holiday together to Brittany in 1938, at the time of the Munich conference, despite the encouragement of a cheerful landlady they slept in separate rooms, though with a connecting door: the only excitement came when Michael had a severe bronchial attack in the middle of the night and took refuge in his inhaler. For all that, Barbara Castle (as she became when she married the journalist Ted Castle in 1944) and Michael Foot were basic points of socialist reference for each other, yardsticks for each other’s socialist purity. They became less close when Foot came under the spell of Beaverbrook, but the relationship remained strong. Colleagues felt they shared a kind of instinctive closeness that was sublime but asexual. It survived various conflicts – the row over In Place of Strife in 1969, Barbara’s sacking from his government by Jim Callaghan in 1976, even a sharp book review of the Castle Diaries by Michael Foot. Throughout their long lives, she was one of the few who always called him ‘Mike’.

Perhaps, despite the wishes of his mother (who had never met her), Michael could never have married Barbara anyway. He soon became far more confident with young women, and Barbara speculated that he did not find her beautiful enough. He might also have found her relentless ideological nagging tiresome. On their Brittany holiday she ‘lectured Michael relentlessly about world politics’. Michael himself commented that a week with Barbara gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Peace in our Time’.³⁵ Two other personal points may be made. They were both deeply involved with the career of Nye Bevan, a red-blooded Celt who made frequent passes at Barbara which she did not obviously discourage. Also Barbara, who tended not to get on with other attractive young women, never had a friendly relationship with Michael’s later wife, Jill. Indeed, like Jennie Lee, whom Bevan had married in 1934, she positively rejected the central tenet of Jill Craigie’s value system, her unyielding feminism.

Overshadowing Foot’s world in 1936–37 was the erratic but charismatic presence of Stafford Cripps, his point of entry into socialist politics. It was Cripps who directed one somewhat strange venture in 1936, in effect Foot’s first book, though one he chose not to mention in his Who’s Who entry. This was a volume of nearly three hundred pages, published by the left-wing publisher newly set up by Victor Gollancz. It was entitled The Struggle for Peace. Just over 150 pages consisted of a text on international affairs by Cripps; the remaining 127 pages consisted of ‘References’ written by Foot, in effect around forty thousand words of extended notes on Cripps’s text.³⁶ These show Foot in the most intensely Marxist vein he was ever to demonstrate throughout his life. They do not provide a tribute to the young man’s critical faculties, and it is not surprising that he should try to expunge the memory of them thereafter. They focus on armaments expenditure by the great powers, on economic imperialism, on the cruelties and exploitation by Britain of its colonies, in a seemingly mechanical fashion.

In this book, while Foot often quotes from left-wing authors at home, notably Brailsford and Leonard Barnes, most of his sources come from the far left or from Communists, especially the famous Indian theoretician of the Leninist view of empire, R. Palme Dutt, who is repeatedly praised. He is commended for his ‘graphic description’ of world rearmament; his account of the prospects for increasing productive capacity in Fascism and Social Revolution is ‘a brilliant analysis’. As it happened, when Foot met the doctrinaire Palme Dutt later on, he never got on with him.³⁷ Other works cited are even more remarkable. The source for a stated link between military strategy and the profit motive is Bukharin’s article on ‘Imperial Communism’. Most remarkable of all is the work on which a treatment of the economic exploitation of the colonies is based – Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s conclusion that colonial rebellions must inevitably be socialist is endorsed (and a letter from a young African nationalist resident in London, Joshua Nkomo, is thrown in for confirmation). Foot adds: ‘The methods by which the Soviet government has dealt with the colonial peoples reveal a real basis for cooperation with so-called backward peoples as soon as the power of capitalism within the imperialist nation has been effectively broken. This subject is dealt with in the Webbs’ Soviet Communism and Joshua Kunitz’s book Dawn Over Samarkand.’³⁸ At least Foot’s notes are more fun to read than Cripps’s leaden text on such themes as ‘working-class unity is the only true foundation for world peace’. But they too are eminently forgettable. Equally, it is clear that they are quite untypical of Foot’s libertarian and pluralist approach to socialism, and reflect contemporary pressure from Stafford Cripps on his young co-author. Unlike young men such as Denis Healey who joined the Communist Party in the thirties, Foot’s thinking never advanced any formal structural analysis based on the dialectic. He seldom made important reference to Marx in his later writings, other than to say how thrilling his (remarkably vague) vision of a post-capitalist utopia really was. Nor did he find the one contemporary example of Communism in practice at all appealing. He visited Stalin’s Russia for just two days – a stay in Leningrad at the end of a holiday in Helsinki with brother Dingle in 1937 – and disliked it. He was not to go again until an official visit as Labour leader in 1981.

Foot now did show signs of having a clearer idea of his career. For a young man obsessed with words and politics, journalism beckoned as an inevitably appealing career. But it was a slow start. He persuaded Kingsley Martin, editor of the establishment organ of the left the New Statesman, to give him a temporary job on his magazine. He spent almost a year there in 1936–37 to little effect, on a meagre annual stipend of £250. His abiding memory was of sessions every Thursday night with Allen Hutt of the Daily Worker, who taught him about the intricacies of typography as well as stimulating his ideas on socialism and his resistance to fascism. But Kingsley Martin was not over-impressed with his young recruit. Foot, he thought, was ‘not a bad journalist but not A plus’. It seems in retrospect an amazing misjudgement by an often dangerously opinionated and dogmatic man. Michael himself looked back without affection on ‘semi-freelance penury’ in Martin’s offices.³⁹ Martin later realized his mistake. In November 1943 he wrote to Beaverbrook saying that he had heard that Foot was ceasing to be editor of the Evening Standard and asking permission for him to write occasional articles for the New Statesman, but Beaverbrook courteously refused.⁴⁰ Despite much subsequent collaboration, from the Second Front campaign in 1943 to CND in 1958, Foot and Martin, like the New Statesman and Tribune, were never close. In the late thirties, and for much of his career, Martin, like Victor Gollancz, was a sentimental fellow-traveller, liable to suppress material by Wells, Orwell and others which criticized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Contrary to what was sometimes implied by right-wing commentators, that could never be said of the libertarian democrat Michael Foot.

Stafford Cripps ensured that his distinctly hard-up protégé found a more enjoyable job almost immediately. In January 1937, as noted above, the weekly Tribune came into being as the voice of the far left. Its editor was William Mellor, the paramour of Barbara Betts. Michael Foot received a staff post on it, while Barbara also contributed as a freelance. They wrote a column together on trade union matters under the name of ‘Judex’. Foot wrote later of his own role as ‘cook’s assistant and chief bottle-washer in the backroom’.⁴¹ So, in fairly humble fashion, began Foot’s association with this famous organ of the Labour left, which continued for the rest of his life, as editor, director, board member and patron. It was to Tribune rather than Victor Gollancz’s more conventional Left Book Club, let alone the official Labour Party, that he hitched his star.

For a time working on Tribune seemed rather fun. It kept Foot in close touch with Cripps, whose massive private funding enabled the paper, with its few thousand readers, to keep going. Writing twenty-one years later, Foot cheerfully recalled that working with Mellor was ‘like living in the foothills of Vesuvius. Yet, between the eruptions, the exhilaration was tremendous.’ For Mellor, ‘socialist principles were as hard as granite’.⁴² The newspaper had a distinguished editorial board of Cripps (the chairman), Laski, Brailsford, George Strauss, Ellen Wilkinson and an up-and-coming and highly charismatic Welsh backbench MP, Aneurin Bevan, who wrote a weekly parliamentary column. Foot saw him only occasionally at this time, but the ideological and personal spell that Bevan cast was largely to determine the rest of his career. Tribune also brought Foot into contact with influential foreign émigrés, notably Julius Braunthal of the Austrian Socialists, who wrote for Tribune regularly. Foot much admired his later multi-volume history of the Socialist International, and in 1948 wrote a powerful preface to his Tragedy of Austria, a plea for closer cooperation between German and Austrian socialists. Foot was to observe here: ‘No one with any kindred feeling can read the story of Red Vienna without being a better socialist for it.’⁴³ Despite all its writing talent, much of 1937 was occupied for Tribune with sorting out the mess after the dissolution of the Socialist League. There were more promising avenues to pursue as well. One of them was championing the right of constituency parties to be directly represented through election to Labour’s National Executive, which happened at party conference in 1937. But throughout 1938 there were endless strains, to which Cripps was a major contributing factor. They were occasioned, as so often on the left, by difficult relations with other leftish bodies, such as the Left Book Club, whose publisher Victor Gollancz was a distinctly combustible character, and at this time of sentimentally pro-Soviet fellow-travelling outlook. In the background were the show trials and purges in the Soviet Union, of which Barbara Betts wrote quite uncritically under guidance from Intourist, and which D. N. Pritt QC hailed as showing how the rule of law was entrenched under Stalin, but which Michael Foot, ex-Liberal, condemned from the start. He particularly objected to Tribune’s refusal even to mention the show trials of Nikolai Bukharin and other victims.

Tribune reached a crisis point in July 1938. Cripps sought an agreement with Gollancz to merge the journal with the Left Book Club, so that it could pursue an uninhibited Unity Front, pro-Soviet policy. This meant the resignation of Tribune’s editor William Mellor, a tetchy and difficult man for all his personal charm. Cripps offered the post of replacement editor to the unknown twenty-five-year-old assistant editor Michael Foot. It was a deeply attractive offer, and it speaks much for the strength of character of the young man that he promptly refused. In part he resented what he saw as the disloyal, even treacherous way in which Mellor had been presented with a fait accompli. Beyond that, he would be expected as editor to endorse the Unity Front approach, and defend the Soviet Union against its critics.⁴⁴ Both were unthinkable. In a letter which he has not kept, Foot wrote to Cripps resigning from Tribune. Cripps, en route to Jamaica to try to remedy his gastric problems, replied on 25 July kindly but firmly urging him to change his mind. He could not be expected to pay thousands of pounds towards a paper in whose policies he did not believe. Nor could he be ignored as chairman of the board. ‘I only elaborate these points, Mike dear, to try and show you that I am not such a completely negligible political factor in the Tribune as you seem from your letter to think.’

H. N. Brailsford was a man for whom Foot had a high regard, dating from the time when as a young man just out of school he read the left-wing newspaper New Leader, which Brailsford edited. His classic book Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (1913) celebrated the ‘democratical’ radicalism of the French Revolutionary period which Foot most venerated, while his War of Steel and Gold (published in May 1914) was a famous analysis of the economic roots of international conflict. Brailsford now strongly disagreed with the pro-Soviet line that Cripps wished Tribune to take, and had been appalled by the trial of Bukharin. Under Stalin, he felt, the Soviet Union had become ‘a bloody tyranny ruled by terror and lies’. Yet he too wrote to Foot on 6 August, trying to persuade him to change his mind.⁴⁵ He wrote sympathetically as someone who had himself three times resigned during his journalistic career. But he argued now that Foot and Mellor were not standing against the proprietors on a matter of policy (a debatable point), and also that Foot should not capitulate in advance against Gollancz, though he added, ‘Like you, I distrust him and am highly critical of the Left Book Club.’ In worldly fashion he noted that ‘to run a good paper matters more than to perform prodigies of conscience’. He offered to speak to Cripps when he returned, and invited Foot to his Buckinghamshire home for a weekend to talk matters through.

But Foot would not be moved by these senior figures. After hanging on for a few weeks until a new editor, the obscure near-Communist H. J. Hartshorn, was appointed, Foot cut his links with Tribune. Brailsford was to conclude that the young man was right. He wrote again to Foot a few days later, largely agreeing with him: ‘I agree in thinking that Gollancz is a sinister influence. But I have a feeling that the Socialist Left is allowing itself to be driven from all its strategical positions by the C. P. With great subtlety it drove the Socialist League to suicide, & now it is capturing the Tribune. Much as I respect Cripps as a man, I fear he’s a disastrous strategist.’⁴⁶ In this instructive episode, Foot’s judgement and instincts were fundamentally sound. Quite apart from his genuine outrage at the treatment of Mellor, to become editor of Tribune would have compromised him morally at that time, and marginalized him within the Labour movement. Persistent rebel though he was, Foot would never leave the mainstream when a crisis beckoned. Thus it was when he veered away from CND after 1961, when he joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1970, when he stuck to Jim Callaghan’s ailing government through thick and thin after 1976, and when he struck back at Bennites and Militants in 1982. Although he continued to respect Cripps, Foot now saw him as a naïve and highly fallible messiah. At the start of the war Cripps was to be expelled from the Labour Party for pursuing his Unity Campaign again. During the war years he was to come full circle, and now called for an alliance with progressive Tories. Nor did he show up well on India in the end. Foot’s life of Aneurin Bevan (in two volumes, published in 1962 and 1973) is distinctly qualified in its praise: ‘Cripps was a political innocent. He knew little of the Labour movement, less of its history … His Marxist slogans were undigested; he declared the class war without ever having studied the contours of the battlefield.’⁴⁷ Nye Bevan was a different and altogether more convincing prophet.

It was a troubled summer of 1938 for Foot. He had no job and no immediate likelihood of one, though still brooding about possible books on modern history. In December he did acquire a practical commitment since, undeterred by his Monmouth experience, he had been nominated Labour candidate for the Devonport division in his native Plymouth. Presumably this would be contested in a 1940 general election. But since that seat had been held in 1935 with a majority of over eleven thousand and 68 per cent of the vote by a notable National Liberal Cabinet minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, his prospects there looked extremely remote. The European scene that summer was becoming increasingly alarming, with the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia following Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria. Foot was in Brittany on holiday with Barbara when the Munich crisis took place; he returned to find Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s diplomatic ‘peace in our time’ coup with Hitler trumpeted to the skies by publications ranging from Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman to the Express newspapers of the right-wing press magnate and perennial political controversialist Lord Beaverbrook. Foot was unable to share in this euphoria, and sensed a great surrender. Since the civil war in Spain he was a pacifist no longer. Franco’s assault on the Spanish Popular Front, along with Hitler’s military assistance for him, convinced Foot that the democratic powers had to mobilize force in return. But then came a wholly unanticipated opportunity. Aneurin Bevan had privately mentioned Foot’s resignation from Tribune to his friend Beaverbrook. ‘I’ve got a young bloody knight-errant here,’ Bevan was said to have observed. Foot was invited down to Cherkley, Beaverbrook’s Surrey retreat near Leatherhead, to summarize and interpret the latest news. Beaverbrook was immediately struck by him. After lunch that day Foot was made a feature writer on the Evening Standard, Beaverbrook’s London daily, at a stipend of £450 a year, soon to rise higher.⁴⁸ He had exchanged one patron for another, the erratic Cripps for the mercurial Beaverbrook. He had a platform and first-hand access to critical political events. After so many miserable episodes while campaigning on the left, he had made a fresh start. It was to make him famous.

Foot’s close, almost filial, relationship with Beaverbrook has always been deeply contested and highly controversial. Probably its most enduring legacy for him was his close attachment not to Beaverbrook but to his left-wing younger friend Aneurin Bevan, whom Foot now got to know well for the first time. But in the months that led to war, and many of the years that followed, it was the unpredictable Canadian press lord, now aged sixty and seemingly close to retirement, who carved out Foot’s destiny. It seemed at the time – and in many ways still does – a most improbable friendship. Clearly, the real basis was simply personal. In a very few months Foot had become, in his own words, ‘a favoured son’, one of the family. Foot’s essay on Beaverbrook in his book Debts of Honour (1980) breathes the deepest affection in every line: ‘I loved him, not merely as a friend, but a second father even though I had … the most excellent of fathers of my own.’ He pours scorn on the view, widely held on the left, that Beaverbrook was ‘a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one’.⁴⁹ Foot fell for Beaverbrook’s charm, vivacity and mental agility, his rare ability to attract to his circle an extraordinary range of fascinating personalities – Churchill, Brendan Bracken and Aneurin Bevan; H. G. Wells and his Russian mistress Moura Budberg; the Russian ambassador Ivan Maisky; the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy. All in all, the ‘old man’ was simply fun.

It should be added that Foot fell not only for Beaverbrook’s own charms but for those of his glamorous young mistress, the former ballet dancer Lily Ernst. Known to them as ‘Esther’, she encouraged Foot’s interest in Jewish matters. But she interested him physically as well. She was ‘a lively Jugoslav-born Jewish girl’,⁵⁰ and the ever-susceptible romantic Michael Foot, with a penchant for middle Europeans, fell passionately in love with her. It was more than her beauty: she also introduced Foot to one of his cherished poets, Heinrich Heine, a man much influenced by an even greater hero, Byron. Lily Ernst brought him a volume (in English translation) of Heine’s romantic poems, which she and Michael discussed avidly. As was the case with Barbara Betts, she was the partner of another man, and Beaverbrook had actually smuggled her out of Vienna just before the Anschluss. Thus Foot remained caught up, devoted but distant, in another non-sexual relationship. But in 1939–40 Lily Ernst became another major reason for his wanting to keep close to Beaverbrook and his court.

For his part, Beaverbrook evidently delighted in Foot’s personality, his stories, his radical irreverence, and especially his feel for history and literature, with which he used deliberately to beguile the older man. Foot’s admiration could turn into open flattery, historical analogies at the ready. He laid praise on with a trowel when his master became Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, telling Beaverbrook, ‘Gibbon wrote of the Emperor Theodosius that “the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man”. As we read the news of the air battle it seems the same today.’⁵¹ Beaverbrook, whose knowledge of the Emperor Theodosius was probably somewhat sketchy, lapped this kind of thing up. He came to have the highest regard for Foot’s writing for the Evening Standard, as assistant editor and then, from April 1942, as editor. He admired ‘the splendid work that you do in the early mornings in the Evening Standard … It is in the early mornings that I admire you most. When a man is admired most in the early morning he is a great fellow.’⁵² But even more he adored Foot’s warm and witty companionship, which filled a gap in his life. Foot responded with a distinctly sycophantic piece in the Daily Express about the Evening Standard: ‘Cobdenites and anarchists, True blues and pale pinks, radicals and roaring diehards may all make their contribution to this ultra-Conservative journal.’⁵³ The leader column was sternly independent in viewpoint: ‘It doesn’t care a fig for anyone.’

What is one to make of the Foot – Beaverbrook relationship? A man may make friends with anyone he wishes, male or female, and there is no scientific law governing these things. The immediate mutual attraction is understandable, but so too is the sharp political and personal breach after 1945. Perhaps what really needs explanation is why they got together again in 1948 and their continued close friendship thereafter, even as Foot pressed on towards the further reaches of the socialist left. Foot always felt at ease with Beaverbrook, and accepted his many kindnesses without feeling that he was being patronized. He describes with simple, perhaps naïve, gratitude being very soon taken by Beaverbrook on the Blue Train to Cannes and Monte Carlo, the trip being wound up with a stay in the Paris Ritz. It was, Foot explains, all part of learning how to write a good newspaper column. He was to accept Beaverbrook’s frequent comments on the contents of his columns or leading articles – Beaverbrook was notorious as the most interfering of newspaper owners, with his own personal agenda ranging from Empire Free Trade to appeasement of Germany – cheerfully and modestly enough.

Beaverbrook also put a room in his London flat at Foot’s disposal, and Foot sought – and gained – permission to bring a few books, including ‘the heavily-marked works of Jonathan Swift’ along with works by Marat, Bakunin, Cromwell, Stalin ‘and other successful terrorists’. In 1950 Beaverbrook’s kindnesses included a large donation to Tribune when Foot was sued for libel after his attack on Tory press barons, ‘Lower than Kemsley’. It saved the paper from liquidation. It also helped that the Daily Express took out full-page advertisements in Tribune, which cannot have boosted the circulation of Beaverbrook’s newspaper empire. The ‘old man’ also took to Jill, and for some time in the early fifties the Foots lived in a grace-and-favour cottage on the Cherkley estate. Foot always felt confident that his freedom of expression or thought was not compromised in any way by his association with Beaverbrook, certainly not that he was being bought. It should be added that he was only the first of many left-wing journalists to work for Beaverbrook newspapers and to relish the experience. Robert Edwards came from Tribune to become a distinguished editor of the Daily Express. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, who first met Beaverbrook in 1956 after giving a glowing review of one of his books, Men and Power, was another from the left who came to love Beaverbrook; he became the custodian of his collections of private papers, and wrote a highly favourable biography of the old man after his death. Beaverbrook, wrote Taylor of his beloved ‘Max’, was a man ‘who stirred things up’.

But there is still something to be explained. Beaverbrook may well have been a delightful dinner companion and stimulating friend. What he clearly was not was someone at all in tune with Michael Foot’s passionate socialism. Foot has frequently called him ‘a genuine radical’, of which his being a Canadian Presbyterian was a major aspect. He admired a fellow nonconformist outsider like Lloyd George, the centre of a kind of alternative, anti-establishment circle of devotees drawn from all parties and none. Beaverbrook was certainly a mischievous iconoclast. He thought it enormous fun when a dinner-party would end with Michael Foot and Alan Taylor standing to sing ‘The Red Flag’. But he was not in any meaningful political sense a radical. Where Foot was a passionate anti-capitalist of Liberal free-trade background, Beaverbrook was a buccaneering champion of the free market, along with tariffs within a protective imperial system. His Express’s crusader bore the chains of a shackled capitalism throughout the years of the Attlee government after 1945. In international affairs he was foremost amongst the appeasers, a warm supporter of Lloyd George’s lamentable visit to Hitler in 1936, an advocate of Britain leaving the League of Nations, a warm supporter of Munich, an associate of the defeatist Irish-American ambassador to Britain Joe Kennedy, a man who felt that war in September 1939 was a huge error. As Michael Foot became the fierce champion of resistance to fascism in 1938–39, he acknowledged that his employer and patron took a totally different view. Foot rightly claimed that Beaverbrook was an excellent listener to alternative views, and that all viewpoints on the international scene were represented, and powerfully expressed, at his private gatherings at Cherkley.

But listening and tolerating are passive virtues, and not the same as giving positive support. In Beaverbrook’s case they appeared to be an alternative to it, and Foot skirted the point with some delicacy. Readers of Foot’s 1940 book Guilty Men would search in vain for any hint that the wealthy Canadian press baron was ever amongst the appeasers. This does not imply that Foot was a hypocrite, since his advocacy of his own radical views became ever bolder. He did not sacrifice his integrity as a commentator and critic. But it does suggest that the relationship with Beaverbrook was not at all an extension of his own ideas, but something that existed on a totally different plane. For Foot, as to a degree for Bevan, Beaverbrook acted as someone who could transmute revolutionary thoughts and passionate oratory into a private dialogue, detached from key aspects of real life and ultimately harmless. Those who came close to him were always in danger of becoming licensed rebels.

What Foot did gain from his work on the Standard, in addition to a much higher standard of life, was a genuinely stimulating atmosphere in which to work. He progressed rapidly, acting as assistant on the Diary and writing signed historical feature articles on personalities like the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk. He impressed his employer, and in 1940 became assistant editor. His closest friend from day one was the relatively youthful editor of the Standard, Frank Owen, a highly gifted former Liberal MP with alleged Trotskyite tendencies (he was later to write a biography of Lloyd George) and an ardent anti-appeaser.⁵⁴ He combined enterprising journalism with a distinctly raffish lifestyle, marked by vast consumption of spirits and a bewildering array of attractive girlfriends. He hurled himself into a hectic private life as frenetic as his editing of the Standard. In the end it all proved to be too much, and Owen ended up a pathetic alcoholic. He drew Foot, now rapidly shedding the inhibitions of Pencrebar and West Country Methodism, into this way of life, the more so when they shared a flat in wartime London. Owen contrived a series of sartorial signals on a coat-stand if he was seducing or otherwise entertaining a young woman. He was also a man of much fascinating information, specializing in military matters. He had good contacts with Basil Liddell Hart, Orde Wingate and even Lord Louis Mountbatten. On the eve of war he boldly led a staff deputation to Beaverbrook urging him to change his personal stance on appeasement, or at least to allow his editors to endorse war against Hitler. Beaverbrook, a caustic critic of the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s diplomacy, agreed half-heartedly to do so, although Foot describes him as ‘sulking in his appeasers’ tent’ for some time to come.⁵⁵ It was not Lloyd George’s war, and it was not yet Beaverbrook’s either.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 was, of course, an immense trauma for Beaverbrook’s journalists as for everyone else. From the start, Michael Foot was a passionate advocate of total resistance to Hitler. On 9 September his impassioned leader in the Standard, headed ‘No!’, urged that any peace proposals should be totally rejected.⁵⁶ But he could only promote this militant stance through the printed word, since his asthma meant that he was turned down for military service, as was Dingle with his tubercular arm. Unfriendly questions were asked about this by Plymouth Tories in 1945. In the end, John and Christopher were the only Foot boys to see active service. Foot had now joined Owen in writing highly patriotic leading articles for the Standard from a strongly pro-war stance. The paper’s leader as early as 9 September 1939 declared: ‘There will be no quitting here. Britain is pledged to see the finish of Hitlerism.’ Another on 11 November announced: ‘The world knows that we are fighting to prevent this Continent from being transformed into a second Dachau prison camp.’ On 6 July 1940, after Churchill’s elevation to the premiership, another leader addressed its readers in epic terms: ‘You are a member of the nation which stood erect, when all others had fallen or been battered to their knees, against the most black-hearted despotism which ever declared war on the human race.’ A few days earlier, Hitler was warned: ‘He has challenged the toughest people in the world and does not know it. He may even reckon on a breed of Pétainism. He does not know that, if such there are, we shall finish them before he has a chance to finish us.’ However, in the period of ‘phoney war’ that lasted until May 1940, it was difficult to see what the outcome of such stirring rhetoric might be.

Foot’s most characteristic writing came in signed feature articles filling in the historical background to current crises, with themes ranging from Drake’s Drum to the strategic entanglements in the Middle East. Readers of the Standard were treated to learned discourses on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, or even the battles between Carnot’s French Revolutionary army and the Austrians in 1793. He also wrote caustically on the collapse of the Norway campaign in April 1940, comparing it with Gallipoli in the First World War, though taking care not to emphasize the role of Churchill, permanently identified with the Gallipoli disaster, but also widely seen as the only hope of victory now.⁵⁷

Foot also found time to produce his first solely-authored book, Armistice 1918–39, a volume of 274 pages on post-1918 European history published by Harrap, and appearing in March 1940. It came out of a series of sketches of leading political personalities in the press, and the main strength of the book lies in its vignettes of people as varied as the German Communist Rosa Luxemburg, Hitler, Mussolini, Mustafa Kemal, Aristide Briand, Stanley Baldwin, Anthony Eden and Jan Masaryk. The approach is historical, with brief leftish commentary on contemporary issues. The style is brisk and sardonic. The preface gives the reader due warning: ‘No attempt is made at impartiality. Unbiased historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ There is comment on the ‘Young England’ MPs like Bob Boothby, Duff Cooper, Oliver Stanley and Victor Cazalet who flocked to back Eden after his resignation as Foreign Secretary in 1938. Baldwin, ‘standing in lonely eminence like a hillock in the Fen country’, is condemned on Churchillian grounds for promoting party over country.⁵⁸ Churchill himself is criticized over the Russian Revolution and the General Strike, but is relatively lightly handled. Lloyd George gets off more or less scot free. There is a sketchy conclusion. In general the book is not memorable, though fun to read. Its most striking feature is that, despite his enthusiasm for Rosa Luxemburg, the dogmatic Marxism Foot displayed in the notes to Cripps’s book in 1936 has by now totally disappeared. Stalin’s purges do not escape mention. However ephemeral, the book did confirm that the Standard’s leader-writer had the capacity to write sustained work on his own.

In May 1940 there was a national crisis. In the Commons there came the famous Norway debate of 7–8 May, after which Chamberlain’s discredited regime gave way to Churchill’s all-party coalition. Beaverbrook, as mentioned, became Minister of Aircraft Production a few days later, despite his own decidedly equivocal attitude to the fall of Chamberlain. Foot was present at the Norway debate; indeed he and Frank Owen were, remarkably, put in touch by Beaverbrook with the veteran Lloyd George at this time, to encourage him to help in overthrowing Chamberlain and then to offer his services for the new Churchill administration.⁵⁹ But Foot felt the need for a far more direct role than simply being a comfortable journalistic commentator on a war for which others were sacrificing their lives. The architects of appeasement, from Chamberlain and Halifax downwards, were still around, and in key positions in the Cabinet. They must be indicted and removed from power. Since 10 May Foot had been working closely with Frank Owen, a sharp critic of recent military disasters, in penning a series of inspirational leading articles in the Standard to strike a note of defiance. But something much more was needed to shock the national conscience.

There was also another possible colleague, someone that Foot knew less well. This was Peter Howard, previously author of the ‘Cross-bencher’ column in the Sunday Express (with both Isaac and Dingle Foot amongst his previous targets, incidentally).⁶⁰ Howard, a handsome former English rugby captain, specialized in the caustic personal portrait. Foot and Owen were quite unaware that he was about to become a leading evangelist for Dr Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament. This movement was deeply suspect to all democrats, since Buchman’s pronouncements on current events showed an alarming sympathy for Hitler and indulged in a crude anti-Communism. The author Rose Macaulay observed that ‘the Gestapo was riddled with Buchmanites’. But Howard’s religious inclinations, to which he largely devoted the remaining twenty-five years of his life, were not yet known. The three men met in the Standard offices on the night of 31 May. Foot had heard first-hand evidence of mismanagement by the high command from survivors of the mass evacuation of British servicemen from Dunkirk. Something decisive was urgently needed to galvanize public opinion into realizing how incompetent and morally indefensible the conduct of affairs had been for years past, how essential it was to give mass support to the new Churchill government, above all to spell out the atrocious record of the politicians responsible for past errors, and send them packing. Following some convivial sessions in the Café Royal, the three Express group journalists thus hit on the idea of writing an instant book.⁶¹ The precise contents and shape would be left to serendipity and spontaneous combustion. Michael Foot was the main inspiration.

It was he who won the agreement of his old bête noire Victor Gollancz to take it on for immediate publication, he who enlisted Ralph Pinker as literary agent (a disastrous choice, as events proved). Most important, it was Foot who provided a title, in a meeting with his friends in the Two Brewers in the Gray’s Inn Road. Still deep in his reading on the French Revolution, he recalled a popular demonstration at the Convention Assembly in 1793. Those present demanded, they told the convention, ‘a dozen guilty men’. That, Foot believed, was what the British people demanded now, and Guilty Men is the title the book was given.

Since leaving Oxford, Foot’s career had been as haphazard as that of many intelligent young men unclear about their future. The relationship with Cripps, the abortive crusading for the Socialist League and writing for Tribune had been bruising affairs. He had a record of association with some flamboyant failures. His writings were not yet significant. His flight from Liberalism had as yet little positive to show. The most important by-product was a series of strong personal relationships, important as he grew to maturity, with Cripps, Barbara Betts, Aneurin Bevan, Frank Owen, and of course Beaverbrook. At each stage of his life, starting with his father and Lloyd George, Foot seemed to find comfort in worshipping a messiah, a hero-figure, as a supreme point of reference, just as he did in his reading of literature. His psychology appeared to require one. He had unexpectedly lurched into a significant post at the Standard and was for the first time well paid. He had enjoyed an extrovert lifestyle and had lively friends of both sexes which allowed an intense, almost donnish, personality to blossom. But there had been no clear direction or design hitherto to harness his undoubted talents, no big idea to impress a nation enduring a crisis of survival. Now, with Owen and Howard to help, Foot sensed the prospects of a personal statement of a new kind. It would be deeply controversial to denounce government ministers at a time of total war. It might be disastrously counter-productive. But in 1711 such a venture had been a triumph for his and Isaac’s literary icon Jonathan Swift. True, Swift was trying to stop a war and drive a Churchill (Marlborough) out of power, whereas for his admirer in 1940 the purpose was the exact opposite. Still, for him too it could be his finest hour.

3 PURSUING GUILTY MEN (1940–1945)

The three young men wrote their book in four days, from 1 to 4 June 1940.¹ The first two days were spent in Howard’s country home in Suffolk. The last two were spent in the Standard offices in Fleet Street – or rather on the Standard offices, since much of the writing was done on the roof whenever Foot and Owen were not engaged in producing their newspaper. The book was almost literally written in white heat, since the background was air raid preparations around St Paul’s anticipating attacks from the Luftwaffe. Guilty Men was not a long work. It eventually ran to 125 pages, divided up into twenty-four short chapters. These were split up on a rough and ready basis between the three authors, eight chapters each. Foot himself wrote the first chapter, ‘The Beaches of Dunkirk’, based largely on accounts given at the time by survivors. When an author had finished a chapter he read it aloud to the other two, and incorporated their comments and corrections on the spot. On 5 June Foot handed the manuscript to Gollancz, who matched the high tempo of the authors by reading it and accepting it for publication the same day. Proofs were rushed through, and a month later on 5 July Guilty Men was on sale. Foot was uncharacteristically nervous about it, and wondered whether it would achieve the desired effect. But it was from the very outset a sensational success. It was the most influential wartime tract Britain had known for over two hundred years, and the best-selling ever.

The tone of the book is caustic and satirical. It makes no attempt to be even-handed. The purpose was to pillory and to condemn the National Government. Left-wing sympathy for ideas of appeasement was simply ignored. Guilty Men assailed leading political figures, many of them still in the Cabinet, including the previous Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, for a catastrophic failure to defend the country or prepare it for war. It did so with a relish that went far beyond that of media interrogators like Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys in a later age. There had been nothing like its uninhibited venom since the Regency period. Guilty Men was Gillray and Rowlandson in breathless prose. It is a remarkable tribute to the survival of traditional liberties in wartime Britain that it appeared at all.

The book consists of a series of brief vignettes of key episodes or personalities, the latter invariably foolish or dishonest. Of Foot’s eight chapters the first was the most powerful, and it set the style for what was to follow. He condemned Dunkirk as ‘a shambles’, and drew powerfully on oral testimony from survivors. It was ‘flesh against steel’; ‘they never had a fair chance’. ‘It is the story of an Army doomed before they took the field.’ The soldiers were heroes all – and so too were the sailors and civilian seamen who braved the perils of German bombing to bring them safely home. The son of Plymouth was the last to neglect the naval glories of the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’. The second chapter, apparently written by Frank Owen, went back to the origins of appeasement as the authors saw them – the miserable conspiracy that saw the National Government formed in 1931. Ramsay MacDonald is reported as telling Baldwin on Crewe station as early as the 1929 election, ‘Well, whatever happens, we shall keep the Welshman out.’² Lloyd George is indeed a hero in the wings throughout, and Churchill enjoys similar status during this ‘regime of little men’. In asides that the book made famous, MacDonald emerges to express his joy at the delight of aristocratic wives like Lady Londonderry at his success; Baldwin is lazy and inept as he pronounces that the bombers would always get through.

Each subsequent chapter has a named cast list, each member of which is a contributor to tragedy and dishonour. Chamberlain is obviously the chief villain, and the account of his surrender at Munich, probably written by Foot, is drenched with sarcasm at the expense of the ‘umbrella man’, as is the treatment of the ‘Golden Age’ of the subsequent six months before Hitler occupied Prague in March 1939 and the state of Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. The later chapters consist of a series of satirical studies of government ministers, and the book winds up dramatically with Hitler’s blitzkrieg in France, Dunkirk and the downfall of Chamberlain. The final three paragraphs are printed in capital letters, as suggested to Gollancz by Rose Macaulay. They end with a plea that ‘the men who are now repairing the breaches in our walls should not carry along with them those who let the walls fall into ruin … Let the guilty men retire.’

Despite the joint authorship and the breathless haste with which it was composed, the book does hang together remarkably well as a chronicle of passion and patriotism. Foot contributed some of the key chapters. Frank Owen wrote much of the military and naval detail, including the final chapter, where his particular expertise lay. Peter Howard, the sharpshooter of the ‘Crossbencher’ column, wrote many of the individual character studies on ministers like Leslie Burgin, Sir Horace Wilson, the Tory Chief Whip David Margesson, Lord Stamp, W. S. Morrison, Reginald Dorman-Smith, Lord Stanhope at the Admiralty and above all Samuel Hoare, ‘the new titan’, appointed to the Air Ministry for the third catastrophic time. Howard’s most famous target is the pre-war Defence Minister Sir Thomas Inskip, speared for all time as ‘Caligula’s horse’, depicted as a complacent, stupid, ‘bum-faced evangelical’. One of Howard’s known chapters is that which includes Bevin’s demolition of the pacifist Lansbury at the 1935 Labour Party conference. Foot, an admirer of Lansbury’s socialist crusading at Poplar and elsewhere, nevertheless felt that ‘in that Howard was justified’. Foot himself supplied one of the briefer character sketches, of Ernest Brown, the minister dealing with unemployment, which he attributed in large measure to wet weather: ‘He was still lamenting the weather when he was removed from his office – to another post.’³ The fact that Brown was one of the Simonite National Liberals who were anathema to Isaac Foot gave Michael’s ironic dismissal a special relish. Another incidental target was Walter Runciman, whose visit to Prague in August 1938 as Chamberlain’s emissary was an especially shoddy prelude to surrender: he too was a National Liberal who had helped to undermine Isaac Foot in Bodmin. The book sped along, but its overall theme had a kind of Platonic unity which justified the use of a single pseudonym for its authors. This was ‘Cato’, the populist Censor of ancient Rome who to Michael Foot was an appropriate model as ‘a good republican’. Along with ‘Cassius’, his pen name when writing The Trial of Mussolini, and ‘John Marullus’, his later nom de plume in Tribune, Cato was a memorial to Foot’s classical interests. Of course, writing a book in Beaverbrook’s offices in work time made anonymity essential.

The book is an obvious patchwork, but a pungent and powerful one. Foot himself later felt that Guilty Men had been overrated, and that it had less merit than his next book, The Trial of Mussolini (1943) – which, of course, was his work alone. There is a moving introduction, a brisk, highly personalized scene-setting, then a series of mostly effective personality studies, and an upbeat finale. Government ministers are skewered in turn; a digression is the treatment of the Civil Service head Sir Horace Wilson, chief appeaser and responsible for the fact that ‘the dead hand of bureaucracy grips us by the throat’. There is a catchphrase or anecdote on almost every page. Many of them have had eternal life in popular memory ever since. It was Guilty Men that first drilled permanently into the public consciousness Chamberlain’s umbrella, Baldwin’s ‘appalling frankness’, ‘peace in our time’, faraway countries of which we know nothing, Hitler ‘missing the bus’. They are as much part of the essential cultural equipment of British people now as are nursery rhymes or pop songs. Appeasement is guaranteed always to be a dirty word.

The broader public interpretation of the thirties, of course, is owed to Churchill, maker of history during the war, writer of it subsequently. But Churchill’s majestic, if often misleading, volumes were offered to a public whose images were already set in stone. The leftish journalists had blazed the trail. Everyone knew who the villains of the thirties were, and why they could never be forgiven. Since the heroes of Guilty Men, apart from Churchill, were really the ordinary British people, seen as citizens no less than as subjects, the book fostered a natural sense of a people’s war which should be followed by a people’s peace. Successive polls of historians designed to assess the rating of twentieth-century British Prime Ministers always saw Neville Chamberlain close to bottom of the poll, his considerable achievements in promoting economic recovery in the thirties set aside even by scholars. If the purpose of popular tracts is to create a demonology, Guilty Men was an outstanding success.

Like any popularized version of historical fact, its simplistic analysis has since been seriously undermined. As the pre-1939 public records became available, revisionist scholars such as David Edgerton showed that the rearmament record of Baldwin and his colleagues over warships and aircraft production was far more commendable than the Express Newspapers journalists allowed. They have even been given credit for encouraging a mood of national defiance after Munich. Chamberlain, of course, has had many defenders. So have Hoare, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood and his predecessor John Simon. Even Thomas Inskip’s entry in the new version of the Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 concluded that he was far from hopeless; in coordinating defence he showed the, perhaps unheroic, qualities of ‘weighing evidence and drawing unemotional conclusions’. Halifax has been the subject of a sympathetic biography (1991) by Andrew Roberts – though oddly the Foreign Secretary makes no appearance at all in the pages of Foot and his colleagues. But of course Guilty Men was concerned not with timeless verities but with transforming the public mood. This it did with great brilliance and brio. It would not have done so if its arguments were historically worthless. The combined learning of subsequent scholars like Donald Cameron Watt, Alastair Parker, Richard Overy and Martin Gilbert suggests that the verdict on Britain’s political leadership in the thirties still strongly favours the journalistic critics rather than the academic dissenters. Parker’s brilliant Chamberlain and Appeasement (1997) fatally undermines the counter-revisionists and lists all Chamberlain’s calamitous miscalculations. Watt’s definitive How the War Came (1989) is a shattering indictment of Chamberlain and his ministers. Guilty Men, a rough-and-tumble polemic of no scholarly quality at all, has been proved right in its instincts, and the British public knew it to be so.

From the start the book sold by the tens of thousands – over 200,000 by the end of the year, and 220,000 in all. It went through no fewer than seven reprints during July 1940 alone. Gollancz and Foot’s nervousness about gambling on so daring a book at such a tense time was shown to be baseless.⁴ Many technical obstacles in marketing were successfully overcome, notably the wilful refusal of W. H. Smith’s and Wyman’s bookshops to have it on their shelves (a far more serious problem then than it would later have been). Other shops showed great caution in confessing that the dread work was actually in stock. Most unusually for him, Gollancz had to distribute it on a ‘sale or return’ basis. Thousands of copies were sold not in shops at all but on street kerbs. Foot and friends pushed barrowloads of the book for a quick sale in London’s West End. Their sales pitches in Soho and Leicester Square caused some excitement among prostitutes and their clients, who thought it was an instruction manual on sex. Sales swept on and on; Guilty Men went through more than thirty impressions in six months, and received plenty of reviews. In an excellent diversion, the anonymous book was actually reviewed by Michael Foot himself in the Standard, where he inevitably found points for disagreement. No one had any idea who the author might be: journalistic licence seems to have been more restrained in those days, though of course the book had been produced in unusually secretive circumstances, and without secretarial help. Some wondered whether the former First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper, who had famously resigned from the government after Munich, might be responsible, but the prose style would surely quash such an idea. Only slightly more plausible was the suggested authorship of Randolph Churchill. Not until a good deal later, via sources still unclear, did the truth sneak out.

Guilty Men was the work of a trio, but it has always been Michael Foot with whom it has been identified. As Frank Owen and particularly Peter Howard retreated from the public eye, Foot’s continued prominence, and continued identification with its message, meant that man and book were inextricably linked for ever. Crises in the Falklands, Croatia or Bosnia, involving alleged surrender in foreign affairs, made the connection all the firmer. The book did not make him rich; unfortunately the authors lost serious money because Pinker, their agent, appears to have run away with some of the proceeds. But Foot gained something more precious – what Gibbon called ‘everlasting fame’. It was a mixed blessing in some ways, as it was hard to have a satisfactory career after peaking so young. It also meant that Foot was typecast as a partisan polemicist, a caustic critic rather than a constructive politician. This diminished his public image. It could also make him seem a dated figure, stuck in a time-warp. Analogies with the bad old days of the thirties would continue to come all too easily to him, to the point of self-parody. Even during the 1983 general election campaign he was still returning to the themes and personalities of Guilty Men.

As a publicist and commentator Foot would henceforth stand on a pedestal all his own. His work chimed in with a sense of 1940 as a climactic moment for the national identity. He was a socialist, but also manifestly a patriotic one, admired across the spectrum. At the age of twenty-seven, or at least when his identity was known, he became at a stroke almost the most celebrated journalist of his day, quite as famous as Brailsford, Lowes Dickinson or others of the anti-war writers he had so admired in his youth. In a wider sense, his identification with the thesis of Guilty Men moved him on to a new level of authority. Popular contempt for appeasing dictators became a theme endlessly fanned in the media over the next sixty years through the obsessive interest of the British in the Second World War – on stage, screen and television. Heroic young men fighting the Battle of Britain, escaping from Colditz, blowing up the Mohne and Eder dams, would follow the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. ‘The Dambusters March’ rivalled ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as an alternative national anthem. There were endless uncritical historical sagas on Churchill, as well as several magisterial biographies. Popular polls found Churchill to be the greatest Briton of all time, leaving Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin trailing in his wake.

But in a way Foot had already pointed the way for him, like a socialists’ John the Baptist. His timeless journalism had become an essential part of the triumph over Nazism. The message stuck, and in unlikely places. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush, on whose study desk a bust of Churchill reportedly stood, repeatedly cited the perils of appeasement of dictators, as shown by British policy in the thirties (when, incidentally, the United States was made almost inert by its policy of isolation). Bush urged that Saddam Hussein be resisted as uncompromisingly as Hitler had been. Tony Blair, whose own rhetoric became increasingly Churchillian as he neared a pre-planned war (presented as a response to an alleged threat to national security from non-existent weapons), took the same line. Yet one of their mentors in their subconscious (or those of their speechwriters or spinners) was none other than the aged socialist peacemonger and Hampstead sage, himself a fierce opponent of the Iraq war, who addressed the massive anti-war march in London on 15 February 2003 to that effect. Since Saddam Hussein was manifestly no Hitler, and he had no Mein Kampf on display, perhaps Foot’s grasp of logic and of the historical facts was more robust than theirs. At any rate, as his old friend A. J. P. Taylor would have said, here was one of history’s ‘curious twists’.

After the publication of Guilty Men, Foot’s work for Beaverbrook on the Standard continued to flourish. In May 1941 he took over the influential ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column. Then, in April 1942, still well short of his thirtieth birthday, he actually became the newspaper’s editor when Frank Owen was called up to serve in the RAF. Beaverbrook himself had not known at all about the authorship of Guilty Men: it was technically in breach of contract for Foot and the others to write their book while employed by him. But when he did discover the truth, he showed no particular concern. Indeed, he was cheerfully to tell Halifax, who had asked about his personal finances, that he lived comfortably enough from the royalties from Guilty Men.⁵ In any case, far from being attacked in the book as the appeaser he was, he had received honourable mention at the end, along with Churchill, Bevin and Morrison, as one of the four strong men in the new government who could rescue the nation.

Foot had no crises of conscience about writing leading articles or otherwise producing copy for a newspaper owned by a right-wing capitalist he was to denounce in 1944 as an ‘ante-deluvian monster’. In fact Beaverbrook himself agreed entirely with Standard campaigns such as that to promote a second front in western Europe, and became strongly supportive of the Soviet Union long before it was invaded by Hitler. His own wartime career also fitted in comfortably with his newspaper’s challenging line. His appointments, first as Minister of Aircraft Production and then Minister of Supply, fulfilling a role somewhat similar to the one Lloyd George had played so brilliantly at Munitions in 1915–16, were exactly in line with the strong executive leadership for which the Standard called.

Relations between editor and proprietor, then, continued to flourish. Foot’s letters, which had begun with ‘Dear Lord Beaverbrook’, now started with ‘Dear Max’. Beaverbrook himself seemed generally pleased with the way his young protégé was handling matters. Later on, addressing the Royal Commission on the Press, he did appear to make some slightly dismissive remarks about Foot: ‘He is a very clever fellow, a most excellent boy. And then suddenly he was projected into the editorship of the paper before he was ready for it … Michael Foot believed that I made him a journalist.’⁶ But Beaverbrook offered these views in March 1948, when he and Foot were estranged politically. There is no evidence that he felt any major concern in the two wartime years when Foot sat behind the editor’s desk. There were those who surmised that Foot was getting too comfortable in his editorial role. Beaverbrook’s right-hand man E. J. Robertson, the long-term general manager of Express Newspapers, wrote in August 1942 that ‘On a number of occasions I have noted that Frank [Owen] is jealous of Michael Foot.’ Owen feared losing his editorship for good as a result of being called up by the RAF, but put up a façade to cover his anxieties. Whether these fears were justified is impossible to say although the prospect of Owen’s possibly standing as an independent candidate in the Maldon by-election two months earlier had ruffled some of Beaverbrook’s feathers. In the event Maldon was captured by another Beaverbrook journalist standing as an independent, Tom Driberg, who appeared in the pages of the Express as ‘William Hickey’. Foot and Owen actually remained very good friends. Owen went on to serve as Press Editor in South East Asia Command later in the war, and apparently turned somewhat against Beaverbrook in 1945, as did Foot. His later decline into penury and alcoholism elicited a good deal of sympathy from Foot, who took up his case to receive benefits with the social services while serving as a Cabinet minister in 1977–78. Owen’s death in 1979 was marked by a particularly warm tribute from his old comrade, appropriately in the columns of the Evening Standard they had both once edited. In addition, Foot wrote a vivid celebration of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.⁷

Beaverbrook, as was his wont, continued to take a keen interest in the contents of his newspapers, and Foot received occasional queries, which had to be handled carefully. In September 1942 he vigorously rebutted complaints from George Malcolm Thomson, Beaverbrook’s ghost writer on foreign affairs and general sidekick, about the Standard’s campaign for a second front in 1943. Thomson’s remarks on Germany’s 1914 Schlieffen Plan to invade France through Belgium betrayed ‘a gross historical ignorance and give me much pain’. Thomson would have to ‘find other grounds for his sinister campaign against the second front’.⁸ In November 1942 Foot dealt no less vigorously with Beaverbrook’s own murmurings that Standard leaders were damaging relations with Franco’s Spain. Foot responded that almost any honest report on Spain, detailing the well-known German influence there, would be used as a pretext for saying the British press was stirring up trouble, and trying to censor it.⁹ This Beaverbrook steadfastly refused to do. Foot also defended comments about the Finns. While expressing sympathy with them for being invaded by the Soviet Union, he insisted that the Standard had always resisted ‘giving them assistance which would land us in difficulties with the Russians’.

More serious were Beaverbrook’s reservations about three articles in May 1942 signed by ‘Thomas Rainboro’, the name of the famous Leveller of 1647. These appeared not in the Standard but in a very different paper, Tribune, with which Foot retained an unofficial personal connection. They consisted of stinging attacks on Churchill, called ‘the modern War Lord’, for major strategic errors including the failure to protect Greece and resistance to a second front. Remarkably, these were written from an RAF camp in Andover by Frank Owen, recently called up, and drew on his military expertise acquired from Liddell Hart, Wingate and others. Beaverbrook, as Mervyn Jones has shown, evidently knew the secret of their authorship, and indeed agreed with their main thrust, but then became alarmed at possible consequences; he demanded that any future articles be suppressed, and Foot drove to Andover to ensure that they were.¹⁰ His only direct connection with the articles had been to write an erudite explanation in Tribune as to who the original Rainboro was. As regards the Standard, one area where Foot was willing to concede error was when Beaverbrook turned to matters of literary style amongst his columnists, and to phrases that ‘will not do’. He instanced ‘generations yet unborn’ and ‘bore his burdens bravely’ as infelicities; we might simply see them as journalistic clichés.¹¹

But on wider matters, until well into 1943 Foot’s Beaverbrook connection remained brisk and effective. His employer warmly approved of his consistent support for the Soviet Union before and after Hitler’s invasion: on 22 June 1941 Foot, who was staying at a house party at Cherkley at the time, went downstairs in the morning and played ‘The Internationale’ on the gramophone at high volume. He warmly applauded his old patron Sir Stafford Cripps for his work in fostering Anglo – Soviet friendship in his time as ambassador in Moscow up to the start of 1942. Beaverbrook gave moral support to this. Indeed, his tolerance for his young editor was remarkable. He learnt without apparent dismay of Foot’s presence at meetings shared with Communists like Harry Pollitt on behalf of the ‘Russia Today’ movement in 1941, urging a firm Anglo – Soviet alliance in full Popular Front mode. Russia’s involvement in the war greatly excited Foot. He and Frank Owen had frequent sessions in Owen’s Lincoln’s Inn flat in 1941 with Harry Pollitt, the British Communist Party leader, for whom Foot had especial admiration. Jon Kimche was another important link with Communist activists like Wilfred McCartney. Bevan and Jennie Lee, however, also in contact with the Communists in ‘Russia Today’, were far less ‘forgiving’ than Foot was inclined to be.¹² By contrast, the entry of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor did not excite anything like the same obsessive enthusiasm from Foot and his friends. Roosevelt the war leader seemed less captivating than Roosevelt the New Dealer, while in any case America was never a country that captured Foot’s sustained attention.

Under Foot the Standard became a more radical newspaper. It also became a more high-quality one. He drew to its columns a wide range of eminent contributors. A highly influential one was H. G. Wells, whom Foot saw as a prophetic figure and who had enormously influenced his conversion to socialism in his Liverpool days. Foot became personally friendly with Wells, and equally so with his Russian partner Moura Budberg, ‘the magnificent Moura’, whose colourful life had included being the long-term mistress of both the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart and the great Russian writer Maxim Gorki. A learned Polish follower of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, wrote for the Standard on contemporary themes. So did Jon Kimche of the ILP, an ardent Zionist and another émigré, later to edit Tribune. He owned a socialist bookshop near Ludgate Circus and shared to the full Foot’s literary enthusiasm for Hazlitt and others, but he also supplied essential military expertise for Foot’s paper, which had been somewhat lost when Frank Owen left the editorship. Kimche’s role illustrates the close links between Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and Tribune at this time, for which Foot and indeed Owen were in large measure responsible. The two publications worked closely in covert ways, notably over the campaign for a second front or affairs in Greece. The Standard’s coverage of international affairs greatly gained from expertise gleaned through people writing for Tribune. In addition to Kimche on military matters and Deutscher on eastern Europe, there was also excellent analysis of Franco’s Spain by the Spanish socialist historian A. Ramon Olivera.

A more exciting journalistic recruit still was Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew and ex-Communist. Foot first met him when Koestler was wearing the uniform of the Pioneer Corps, albeit in the comfortable ambience of the Savoy Grill. A previous place of residence for him, as an ex-Communist immigrant, had been Pentonville prison. His breathtaking book Darkness at Noon (1940) had exposed the Stalin show trials in unforgettable language, and explained his earlier conversion to Communism in terms of a psychoanalytical theory of political neurosis. In Loyalists and Loners (1986), Foot later described the book’s indelible impact upon him: ‘I can recall reading it right through one night, horror-struck, over-powered, enthralled.’¹³ Koestler on his side was much attracted by Foot as a highly intelligent, literate socialist ‘whose projection about the future was untrammelled by a sense of guilt about the past’.¹⁴ Despite Koestler’s notoriously combustible, even violent, temperament, he and Foot struck up a strong political affinity. They also shared an enthusiasm for chess and for Foot’s girlfriend from 1942, Connie Ernst (no relation to Lily). Koestler’s biographer has commented that Koestler was important for Foot, and later for Richard Crossman, for ‘unshackling their socialism from the Soviet incubus’, but he was very much pushing at an open door on that front. Foot helped him in introducing him to a rich range of socialist writers, intellectuals and activists, and their relationship was often very close. However, Koestler’s relations with the Standard came to a shuddering end when he revealed a darker side of his personality. A series of articles in the Standard in June and July 1942, ‘The Idle Thoughts of Sidney Sound’, supposedly conveying the reveries of ‘typical’ figures on the London underground, caused alarm for their erotic quality, and they were wound up.¹⁵ Foot remained on warm terms with Koestler for several years, and worked closely with him in promoting the cause of the Jews after the war. But this other Koestler, with an almost sadistic approach to young women, was eventually to reveal himself to Foot, to his personal anguish. He was startled later on to hear that Koestler had been involved with British espionage work, and lamented his sympathies with ideological anti-Communism, what Crossman was to call Koestler’s ‘entry ticket into McCarthyite America’.

Koestler was one of three remarkable writers who imposed themselves on Foot’s sensibilities at this time, and was the one with whom Foot was most intimate. The other two were George Orwell and Ignazio Silone.¹⁶ As it happened, two of this trio, Koestler and Silone, heartily disliked one another. After the war, at the international Congress of Writers in 1949, Silone advocated ‘spiritual resistance’ towards Communism, whereas Koestler urged an aggressive head-on confrontation and sneered at Silone as a pacifist. Koestler and Silone were two of the six famous ex-Communist, though still left-wing, writers who contributed to the famous volume The God that Failed after the war, while of course Orwell’s anti-Communism became legendary from his account of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia (1938) onwards. Their influence is essential to the understanding of Michael Foot as a public figure; they also demonstrate the foolishness of attempts by shadowy agents in later years to depict Foot as any kind of Communist dupe. Foot got to know Orwell through Tribune, where he wrote a famous column, ‘As I Please’, which was often attacked by the Tribune management for being over-critical of the Soviet Union, but was always defended by Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. These wartime years saw Orwell at his greatest, in Foot’s view. He was thrilled by The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, and the way it uniquely captured ‘a patriotic English socialist moment’, in the words of their joint friend Tosco Fyvel. But Orwell had left Tribune by the time Foot became editor after the war, and disappeared to a remote Scottish island. Michael and Jill were closer to Orwell’s controversial widow Sonia in the decades after his death. Later revelations that Orwell, like Koestler, had been providing information about his friends to MI 5 did not increase Foot’s affection for him, though he remained an admirer of his writings, including Animal Farm and (to a degree) Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latter, however, he claimed had been taken by American cold warriors (and the Daily Mail) to be more of an anti-Soviet document than was in fact the case. In Loyalists and Loners Foot wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four leaving a ‘taste of sourness, even defeatism’. He applauded Bernard Crick’s fine biography (1980) for showing that Orwell, to his dying day, was a democratic socialist.

Perhaps the biggest impact on Foot’s literary and political sensibilities, however, came from the third of the trio, the Italian ex-Communist Ignazio Silone, at the time in long-term exile from Mussolini’s Italy in Switzerland. He had joined the Communist Party when very young in the 1920s, but soon found its intellectual tyranny unbearable and was expelled in 1931 when he refused to denounce the ideas of Trot-sky. Foot first became aware of Silone’s work when he read a translation of the social novel Fontemara, originally published in Zürich in German in 1933. It remained an iconic work for Foot all his life, and in 1984 he wrote a foreword to a new English-language edition which explained how Silone’s taut but passionate prose enshrined the idea of democratic socialism for him. At this time Silone was little known in the English-speaking world, and Foot played a major role in familiarizing the British public with him after 1945. Most of Silone’s books, including perhaps the most famous, Bread and Wine, were novels, but the one that made the most intense impression on Foot was a work of non-fiction, School for Dictators (1939), a vivid account of the horrors of Mussolini’s fascism and the persecution of the Italian left during his period of power. Foot’s introduction to Fontemara even compares School for Dictators with Machiavelli’s The Prince. After the war Foot found Silone’s affirmation of socialist values inspirational, and quotations from him appeared frequently in Foot’s writings thereafter, including the famous story about Saint-Simon, ‘Get up M. le Comte, you have work to do.’ By the time of his death in 1978, Silone had become an honoured figure in the literary canon of the socialist left. He was a central figure in Foot’s political odyssey. The first of Foot’s three meetings with him in Rome in 1949, when Foot was on a Labour National Executive delegation, was among the most memorable encounters of his life. Most movingly, he quoted Stendhal in relation to Silone as a thinker: ‘Only a great mind dares to express itself simply.’

One way and another, the Standard years meant that Foot was having a thoroughly good, comfortable war. Jill Craigie was later to twit him as a ‘Mayfair socialist’. He had built up an impressive social reputation as a man worth knowing. He moved in attractive intellectual and literary circles, friendly with a rich array of writers like Koestler, Orwell, H. G. Wells and Moura Budberg and others. Koestler’s friend Dylan Thomas, then living in Chelsea and hanging around its pubs, was also a visitor to Foot’s top-floor flat at 62 Park Street, Mayfair, keeping pace with Koestler in drinking the drinks cabinet dry. As a younger man Foot kept up an extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyle – no exercise, little fresh air, a good deal of drink, mainly of spirits, and smoking sixty to seventy Woodbines a day, which did not help his asthma. But he remained remarkably energetic nevertheless. He also acquired a new, much closer girlfriend, Connie Ernst, a dark-haired Jewish New Yorker working in London for the US Office of War Information. With her he had a serious relationship from 1943 onwards, and he was to propose marriage on a visit to New York in 1945. They became for two years a consistent partnership, and would invite friends to dine with them at the White Tower, a Greek restaurant in Soho. Through Connie he got to know other American intellectuals, notably Ernest Hemingway, whom he greatly liked, and his second wife Mary Welsh. It was Mary who helped him in renting the flat in Park Street (drawn to his attention by Connie Ernst). Here he could live in some style, pore over Swift and Hazlitt, listen to music, play chess with Koestler and others. Nor was the rent crippling – just thirty shillings a week. There he stored some of his precious wartime literary purchases, many bought from Kimche, including a first edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To the joy of Isaac, Michael’s rising salary enabled him to pursue his literary enthusiasms further, and to buy S. S. Howe’s famous library of volumes of Hazlitt. The master essayist’s thoughts gripped him with ever greater intensity (and as a result often featured in the columns of the Evening Standard). Foot was later to tell Edmund Blunden how being a ‘worshipper’ of Hazlitt led to a strong interest in Leigh Hunt and his Examiner, subjects of two of Blunden’s own books which Foot enormously enjoyed: ‘My criticism of your book on Leigh Hunt was that Hazlitt did not come out as well as his blindest admirers insist he must. But that is a mere trifle compared with so much on the other side.’¹⁷

In many respects there was a remarkable ferment of intellectual life during the war. It was one of the great formative periods in modern British history, when creative writers, commentators, planners, economists and artists came together with new blueprints for reconstruction and new dreams of renewal. Michael Foot, man of words and putative man of action, was a pivotal figure in it.

But by late 1943 it was clear that his somewhat unnatural base in the Tory Evening Standard, and his filial relationship with Beaverbrook, were undergoing a change. After all, Foot was Labour candidate for Plymouth, Devonport, and a post-war election was perhaps on the horizon. In addition, he was increasingly restless for a wider crusading role, far beyond the editorial desk. His book published by Gollancz in late 1943, The Trial of Mussolini, written once again in breach of his editorial contract with the Standard, was a sign of this and caused Beaverbrook some anxiety. He remained keen to retain Foot’s services, and offered him a new role instead, as feature writer and book reviewer. Foot’s generous, even affectionate, response on 1 November 1943 suggested that a parting of the ways might not be too far off. He suggested two possible courses of action to Beaverbrook. The first was continuing to act as editor of the Standard for just one more year, since he intended to fight Devonport for Labour at the next general election: ‘I certainly intend to become a politician and to devote what energies I possess to the annihilation of the Conservative influence in politics.’ The second was that he continue to write for Beaverbrook newspapers on such terms as their owner proposed, so long as ‘I am not required to do anything in defiance of my views and that I have freedom to engage in such nefarious activities as I choose in writing books or on the platform’.¹⁸ They chose the first course, amicably enough, but things were getting progressively more difficult, especially after D-Day the following June, which made the ending of the war a far more proximate possibility.

So Foot wrote a letter of transparent honesty and integrity to Beaverbrook a few days later:

The main idea I have is that your ideas and mine are bound to become more and more irreconcilable … There does not seem to be much sense in my continuing to write leaders for a newspaper group whose opinions I do not share and some of whose opinions I strongly dissent from … The leaders which I now write are hardly worth writing since they are non-commital and from my point of view I am associated with a newspaper group against whose policies (but not against the proprietor) I am resolved to wage perpetual war. Somehow things were different before. The compromise worked and certainly greatly to my advantage. But I do not see how it could work very much longer.

Foot felt, ‘as an ambitious and intransigent socialist’, that he could find another newspaper in which to express himself He did not see how Beaverbrook could reasonably run a column by him: ‘At the present I am engaged in writing stuff in which I have no particular interest, and I would like to do something different.’ He therefore asked Beaverbrook to release him from his obligations to newspaper and owner.¹⁹ Beaverbrook did release him, in tones of sadness and regret. It was a deeply civilized break-up on both sides. But it was a peculiarly sharp one. In a few months Foot was denouncing his old patron’s right-wing views with fire and fury in newspaper columns and speeches. Much more completely than before, he was his own man.

He now threw himself into an even more frenetic range of activities than before. Chief amongst them, given his now perceived talent as part-author of Guilty Men, was inevitably the writing of books. He produced two short but effective tracts in the later wartime period, both highly partisan in a way that the earlier book never was. Each was written at Pencrebar. The Trial of Mussolini, as noted, appeared without Beaverbrook’s knowledge and caused him concern. It was written, Foot told him, to protest against the hypocrisy of those who denounced Mussolini at his fall but had upheld his views for twenty years previously. The idea came to him at the time of the removal of Mussolini and the appointment of Marshal Badoglio as potential peace-making head of the Italian government in July 1943. Foot visualized the forthcoming post-war trial of the dictator and, using the same theatrical method as in Guilty Men, cast the various pre-war British ministers who had appeased him as witnesses at the tribunal. He had been given much information on circumstances in Italy by the son of Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister during the 1919 Paris peace conference.²⁰ A more profound underlying influence was Ignazio Silone. But the book would really be about British foreign policy, not Italy. He offered the idea once again to Victor Gollancz, who seized it avidly for another of his ‘yellow perils’, as the volumes of the yellow-jacketed Left Book Club were known. He received the manuscript on 20 August, and it was published in October, with a confident print run of 100,000 copies. Foot wrote the book in three weeks. His nom de plume, again, was drawn from classical antiquity – not ‘Cato’ this time but ‘Cassius’, the assassin of an earlier not-so-sawdust Caesar.

The Trial of Mussolini is a short polemic, only eighty-two pages and perhaps forty thousand words long, but it is most cleverly written, with much subtle argument. Its style of dramatic personal confrontation between judge and witnesses meant that it lent itself to being turned into dramatic form by political and dramatic societies. George Orwell praised it as such in his review in Tribune. Foot himself considered it a better and more complete book than Guilty Men.²¹ The conceit of a public trial with eminent witnesses is skilfully sustained throughout. Although the action concerns the trial of Mussolini, the dictator in many ways comes out strongly, giving a vigorous defence of his policies and making short work of any British claims to moral superiority in the area of ‘wars of aggression’. Really it is the witnesses who are in the dock. Successively, Austen Chamberlain describes an amiable meeting with Mussolini in 1924, when Chamberlain was Foreign Secretary. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, relates how in 1928 he stated that ‘Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated that of the early nineteenth century.’ Neville Chamberlain confirms the long-held support of British Tories for the Italian dictator. Lord Simon testifies to British double-dealing over Abyssinia. Sir Samuel Hoare is condemned by counsel as ‘disingenuous’ over his notorious pact with Pierre Laval, the future Prime Minister of the Vichy government, about the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Halifax and Leo Amery offer similar testimony. Special attention is paid to Hore-Belisha, Foot’s target in Devonport, who had visited Rome in 1938 and received a bronze medallion from Mussolini. Even Churchill receives a momentary glance of disapproval. The judge concludes in emotional tones to draw a distinction between the English people and ‘the England of the Chamberlains, the Simons, the Hoares’ and the rest of the Tory Party which consorted with Fascism and connived at imperialist war.²²

The Guilty Men are thus given another pasting, though perhaps in an over-complex way. The Trial of Mussolini sold slightly less well than ‘Cato’s’ work of 1940, but sales still rose to 150,000. It aroused some criticism as being anti-patriotic. Gollancz sturdily defended the author: ‘Michael Foot … would be interested to find himself described as seditious. So would his father, old Isaac … So would the electors of Devonport, who, if they have the wit to understand the true meaning of British honour and British interests, will in a few weeks’ time [sic] be returning Michael to Parliament.’ The reviews, however, were very favourable, especially one from the Conservative Catholic Christopher Hollis. Another, more predictable admirer was Isaac Foot: ‘He is a fine boy and … he has a fire in his belly.’²³ But Foot this time made less of an impact. At least the book made him more money than its predecessor, with no absconding agent this time. It also confirmed his unique skill as a patriotic pamphleteer.

There had been announced another project of Foot’s, to appear in the ‘Searchlight Books’ series published by Secker & Warburg under the editorship of George Orwell and Tosco Fyvel, both active in the world of Tribune/New Statesman left journalism. Ten books appeared in the series in 1941–42, covering various projections for post-war reconstruction, by such notable authors as Sebastian Haffner, T. C. Worsley, Ritchie Calder and Joyce Cary. The series was launched in 1941 by Orwell’s own famous study of the British national character The Lion and the Unicorn, which, rather modestly, sold over ten thousand copies. Michael Foot was announced as the author of a forthcoming work entitled Above All Things – Liberty. But the publishers’ printers at Portsmouth, along with their stock and paper, were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1942, so nothing came of it.

In November 1944 Foot published another squib with Gollancz, this time of overtly party political slant, with an election now on the horizon. This was Brendan and Beverley, a book of just seventy-eight pages. Foot’s name appeared as the author, and he was now formally identified as the writer and co-writer of the two earlier works. This one was a parody of an imagined conversation between two Conservatives, Brendan Bracken, who was close to Churchill and was now Minister of Information, and Sir Beverley Baxter, a right-wing Canadian MP, a strongly imperialist Chamberlainite throughout, and Member for Wood Green and Southgate. In the same month Foot wrote savagely to The Times denouncing Baxter as a pro-Chamberlain appeaser, and dismissing a book of his as ‘a satire on political sycophancy’.²⁴ Brendan and Beverley takes the form of a dialogue between the two Conservatives named in Disraeli’s Coningsby, ‘Taper’ (Bracken) and ‘Tadpole’ (Baxter). They give their different versions of Conservative philosophy, but neither is convincing. Baxter was a particular běte noire of Foot’s, and he is the more obvious target, but ‘Taper’ also gives a poor performance. He defends the Churchill coalition, of which Foot was now a strong critic, ‘since it can do down ideas of reform’. There is a patriotic peroration on Churchillian lines, but it is given to an unnamed Labour politician.²⁵

This book did not sell well: its message was too oblique for the general public, and it anticipated an election which was not yet called. What it did do was confirm the sharp breach with Beaverbrook, who was close to both Taper and Tadpole. Brendan Bracken was a frequent house-guest at Cherkley, and was actively involved with Beaverbrook in preparing the Conservatives’ propaganda campaign in the coming election. Baxter had actually been editor of the Daily Express up to 1933, and was later to serve as theatre critic of the Evening Standard. Attacking them both, as a way of pronouncing anathema on all Tories and their works, was Foot’s clearest possible declaration of divorce.

Foot was now very much a doer as much as a commentator. From 1943 to 1945 he engaged in a bewildering miscellany of protest movements, all characteristic of the rich crucible of the war years. He remained active in the India League and friendly with Krishna Menon. He was now campaigning actively for the Zionist cause, and was prominent on the Anglo-Palestine Committee, chaired by Israel Sieff, managing director of Marks & Spencer, and also including Frank Owen, Kingsley Martin, David Astor and Lord Pakenham. Foot himself addressed it on the plight of Hungarian Jewry in 1944.²⁶ There was the League for the Rights of Man, with which Gollancz was identified and which became more vigorous after the United Nations came into being after the war. He was also a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, founded in 1934, which had kept watch on the preservation of civil liberties during wartime. There were various bodies to affirm solidarity with the Soviet Union. Foot also kept very close to the intense milieu of political and literary protest, the natural habitat of writers like Orwell, Koestler and Fyvel, the world of the Penguin Special, the Left Book Club, Searchlight Books, Cyril Connolly’s literary periodical Horizon, and such transatlantic equivalents as Partisan Review and Dissent in New York. All this protest literature was fundamental to the wartime cultural hegemony of the British dissenting left. Michael Foot, barely into his thirties, was an increasingly influential part of it.

Finally, in this potpourri of leftish idealism, Foot was a member of the so-called ‘1941 Committee’ formed by J. B. Priestley and well described by the historian Paul Addison as ‘a perfect photosnap of the new progressive Establishment rising from the waves’.²⁷ It included not only Priestley himself and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes (both of whom Foot now got to know for the first time) but also Richard Acland, Thomas Balogh, Ritchie Calder, Kingsley Martin, Tom Wintringham and the Rev. Mervyn Stockwood, all of whom were later colleagues of Foot in CND, which it partly anticipated. However, the 1941 Committee was more broadly based, since it also included mainstream Labour figures like Douglas Jay and Christopher Mayhew, and even a one-nation Conservative, Peter Thorneycroft, leader of the Tory Reform Group. It faded away when several of its key figures (though not Foot) joined Acland’s new Common Wealth Party the following year.

Despite all this manifold activity, which began long before his resignation as editor of the Standard in August 1944, the bedrock of Foot’s world was now the Labour Party, albeit via left-wing movements, non-Communist though pro-Russian, kicking hard against the restraints of being yoked in Churchill’s coalition. Foot was never an admirer of Attlee’s leadership, and the wartime years underlined the fact. One protest in which he was involved was the Bristol Central by-election of February 1943, one of many awkward by-elections for the government at this time. Here there was an Independent Labour candidate in the person of Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s wife, who had recently left the ILP but who declined Acland’s invitation to join the Common Wealth Party and ran on an Independent Labour platform to campaign for socialist policies and a break with the coalition. The ILP ran a candidate against her out of revenge. The entire affair was distinctly embarrassing for the Labour Party. However, Foot (despite being editor of the Standard) went to Bristol to campaign hard on behalf of Jennie Lee and against the idea of an electoral truce. Unfortunately Bristol Central, which included the city’s central business area, was the least promising of the five Bristol seats, and there was a very low poll since so many voters were away during wartime. Jennie Lee lost by 1,500 votes to the widow of the former Conservative Member, Lady Apsley, and there was actually a swing to the government, in contrast to almost all other contests at the time.²⁸ This was a solitary venture by Foot, who of course was free to electioneer without inhibition after he left employment with Beaverbrook.

Bristol Central tended to confirm that Foot, having broken with Cripps, was finding another inspirational guru in Jennie Lee’s husband. Going out of his way to campaign for her showed how he was swinging from Beaverbrook to Bevan. He had known Nye for some years, dating from a meeting during the Monmouth election in 1935, and had got much closer to him during his time on Tribune. Bevan, as we have seen, was one of Beaverbrook’s many left-wing associates, and it was he who recommended Foot for a job with Express Newspapers in 1938. He was at this time editor of Tribune himself, though his talents did not really lie in the field of journalism. But in the wartime period, with Bevan emerging as a towering critic of Churchill and the coalition on many issues, Foot became his most intimate ally. In 1944 they collaborated in campaigns on the future of Poland, and especially in attacking Churchill for British military intervention in the civil war in Greece. Foot would be more than his comrade. He would be his Boswell, his Engels, his John the Baptist, and of course his parliamentary heir.

Long after his death in 1960 Bevan remained the most important person in Foot’s life, not excluding Jill. He was central to Foot’s every crisis of conscience, the permanent sounding board for his socialist values. Their difference of view over nuclear weapons was more searing for Foot’s psychology than any divorce could have been. Foot’s passionate admiration for this brilliant, articulate tribune, who came not from the literate suburban bourgeoisie but from Tredegar in the working-class cauldron of the Welsh mining valleys, was unshakeable. Bevan stood with Foot on every possible issue. He was a citizen of the world. He strongly endorsed Indian independence, a free state for the Jews, friendship with the Soviet Union and an early second front, public ownership as the basis of a socialist transformation, a welfare state, and a free and open society. Foot was excited by the nature of Bevan’s socialism, with its background in south Wales syndicalism and ideas of industrial democracy as opposed to bureaucratic statism. He admired his libertarian Marxism, his natural use of language, his open-mindedness towards other cultures, his brilliance as an orator both on the stump and increasingly in the Commons.

Most of all, he admired his style. Bevan was a vivid, colourful man, with a love of painting and literature; he was captivated by a book like Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir. He shared with Foot a liking for the more exotic versions of liberal philosophy, notably the works of the Uruguayan author José Rodo. He had a genuine love of complex ideological debate, attacking the enemy’s argument at its strongest point. Also, in Foot’s brilliant phrase, he was ‘a sensual puritan’, with a shared love of Venice and an attraction to women that went far beyond his own beguiling but wayward wife. He dressed well, he liked to dine well at the Café Royal, he enjoyed wine, especially Italian. He far transcended the other, more staid Welsh MPs dining on the ‘Welsh table’ in the Commons: Jim Callaghan would say Nye would only join them for a meal when he was in political trouble.²⁹ Bevan straddled the worlds of politics, the arts and journalism. His associates ranged from Koestler to Brendan Bracken, who provoked him by calling him a ‘lounge lizard, a Bollinger Bolshevik’. Bevan was a captivating figure. If often difficult and egotistic, he was also perhaps the most original and visionary politician ever produced by the British working-class movement. In addition he had a range of skills that left his people the National Health Service, Britain’s greatest contribution to civilization in the twentieth century. He proved himself an artist in the uses of power. He loved Michael for his literacy, his integrity and his courage, his love of the romantics. Bevan liked to declaim aloud the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth, and was another enthusiast for Wells, though he could never quite fathom Foot’s regard for Swift. Bevan’s Why Not Trust the Tories?, a brilliant philippic published in 1944, showed a heavy influence from Foot, not least the famous peroration citing Rainboro of the Levellers in the Putney debates. To Foot, nothing more confirmed his low opinion of Attlee and his near-hatred of Gaitskell than what he felt was their conspiracy to remove Nye in 1951. For Bevan represented everything he felt was most worthwhile in this world: ‘More than any other in his age he kept alive the idea of democratic socialism,’ and gave it a vibrant and audacious quality.³⁰ Foot’s own equally audacious biography was to provide him with the most glittering of memorials after he was gone.

After leaving Express Newspapers, Foot needed employment. In fact it had already been guaranteed. In the summer of 1944 he became a regular columnist for the Daily Herald, a post which he retained until 1963. He had not had much regard for the paper in recent years, after its brilliant beginning in the Lansbury years after 1913. It was taken over in 1929 by Lord Southwood, owner of Odhams Press, ‘a small-minded man interested only in profits’, in Foot’s view, and ‘an absurd figure to be in charge of a Labour paper’.³¹ However, Foot did have an immense regard for the Herald’s editor, Percy Cudlipp, a native of Cardiff Like Foot he had been a very youthful editor of the Evening Standard; indeed, he was appointed by Beaverbrook at the even younger age of twenty-seven. Along with his brother Hugh of the Daily Mirror, Percy transformed the popular left-wing press: ‘He could do anything on a newspaper. He could take anybody’s copy and make it better.’ In later life Foot declared that Cudlipp was ‘the greatest of all the popular editors’.³² He was also an autodidact, a man of considerable culture, with a love of music, a flair for light verse and a close friendship with John Betjeman. Cudlipp had long been angling for Foot’s services, and he moved to the Herald immediately on leaving the Standard. He would write two columns a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, for less remuneration than on the Standard, but with more scope to do other things, including write for Tribune. Cudlipp would prove to be a stout defender of him when he later got into trouble with Transport House.

The newspaper introduced Foot as ‘the brilliant young left-wing author and journalist’, and his first column appeared on 15 August 1944. After an initial appeal to idealism, it dealt with the congenial theme of the need to avoid any secret treaties that might pervert a post-war settlement. His columns gave Foot ample scope to cover a vast swathe of topics, mostly international, succinctly and even violently, with ample use of historical analogy and literary quotation. On 25 August he hailed the liberation of Paris, with much citation of Fox, Tom Paine, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and others from his Valhalla of heroes. He took time out on 15 September to rebut Bernard Shaw’s characteristically perverse clarion call against all political parties, and advised him to look at the reconstruction needs in Plymouth which the Tory caucus was trying to wreck. Two weeks later came the cry that ‘only the international faith of Socialism can win the final triumph – Shout it from the housetops!’ There followed a lengthy series of familiar assaults on individual Tories, ‘guilty men’ one and all – Leslie Burgin, W. S. Morrison, Lord Woolton, Lord Linlithgow (the Viceroy who had imprisoned Nehru), Lord Croft. There is on 5 December a good Labour kick at the Liberal William Beveridge for wanting industry to remain in private hands and opposing redistributive taxation: ‘He travels on the Queen Mary yet believes he is Columbus!’ Over the new year he is denouncing the ‘tragedy’ of Britain’s intervention in Greece, though also challenging far-left critics by condemning Russian involvement through the Lublin government in Poland: ‘Will the Poles have liberty?’ On 20 March 1945 he is drenching with ridicule the hapless National Liberals like Ernest Brown. The opportunity is predictably seized to stick more darts into the Member for Devonport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, ‘a lonely giant’ who not only received a medal from Mussolini but also voted to remove Churchill from office in 1942, while Rommel was close to Alexandria. On 5 April there is a moving tribute to a genuine Liberal, David Lloyd George, whose great life had come to an end, but whose career was marked by tragedy because he had been compelled to govern with the Tories (this, of course, at a time when Labour ministers were still entrenched in Churchill’s coalition). It is lively, knockabout stuff, but fierce, even vicious, with skilful one-sided argument and a populist approach for the voting public.

But his most serious enterprise was becoming an MP, and Plymouth therefore called him more and more. A seat Labour had never looked like winning, Devonport was located in a part of Britain in which, as Andrew Thorpe has shown, Labour was traditionally very weak. It was clearly going to be a tough contest. Isaac had anticipated this with some relish: ‘You didn’t commit yourself to a clean fight, I hope?’³³ Early on, Foot was challenged at meetings there in 1944 about his not doing military service, and had to explain his medical circumstances, the asthma which led to his being given Grade IV. He insisted he had not been a conscientious objector. He was also interrogated about having worked for the right-wing Beaverbrook press. The Standard was a very good paper under his editorship, he said: ‘He had left of his own free will because someone was trying to interfere with his rights as to what he wanted to write in that newspaper.’³⁴ Needlessly, he threw back provocations of his own, including much personal insult (never anti-Semitic) of Hore-Belisha.

The Labour Party had made progress in Plymouth since the early 1930s. The council had a Labour majority, and Foot was later to pay tribute to some of the key local personalities, Harry Mason (the council leader), Harry Wright (its finance officer) and Bert Medland, one of the MPs elected in 1945, and later to serve as Foot’s election adviser in 1950.³⁵ But it was still going to be a very tough contest in a city that had undergone tough experiences. Plymouth, a place with much ancient slum housing, had also been a significant victim of the blitz, as was the fate of all seaports and naval centres. On 20–21 March 1941 there was heavy bombing by Heinkels, as it happened while George VI and Queen Elizabeth were visiting the naval barracks and dockyards. The centre of the city was set ablaze, leaving 292 civilians dead. Worse was to follow on 21–23 and 28–29 April, when many tragedies occurred. Seventy-two people were killed when an air-raid shelter in Portland Square was hit, and so were ninety-six sailors in the naval barracks. In the final assault on 29 April, the Devonport High School for Girls was hit, forty-three sailors were killed on HMS Raleigh, and 100,000 books destroyed by fire in the Central Library. The rebuilding of Plymouth after the war inevitably became a theme of bitter political contention. Foot wrote an article in Reynolds News in October 1944, ‘Plymouth is Betrayed’, condemning the government for refusing to grant national funding to assist the local council’s Plymouth Plan. Lord Astor, the outgoing Conservative Mayor of Plymouth, supported the plan, as did his wife.³⁶ So too did the incoming Mayor, none other than Isaac Foot. But Hore-Belisha insisted that local reconstruction could only be a local responsibility. The entire issue occasioned intense debate. The clerk of a local district council warned Isaac Foot that his son’s support of the ‘extravagant’ city plan, ‘creating unnecessary overspill’, might lose him half his supporters.³⁷ Foot also gave his backing to the plan of the celebrated town planner Patrick Abercrombie for Plymouth in 1943, which would have created a large, multi-purpose Tamarside local authority.

By the early spring of 1945, the end of the war was clearly in sight. Twelve days after VE-Day on 8 May, the Labour Party decided to leave the Churchill coalition. A purely Conservative ‘caretaker’ government took over, to prepare the way for a general election, eventually announced as to be held on 5 July – or rather, it was a government which also included some of the ghostly National Liberals, known briskly to Michael’s brother Dingle as the ‘Vichy Liberals’.³⁸ To Foot’s immense derision, the man appointed as the new Minister of National Insurance in Churchill’s ‘caretaker’ government was none other than Mussolini’s erstwhile acquaintance Leslie Hore-Belisha, perhaps another Caligula’s horse; though not of Cabinet rank.

Michael Foot’s journalism reached a climax now. In mid-April he was sent by the Herald to San Francisco to cover the conference to launch the new United Nations; it was his first visit to America since his debating tour with John Cripps in 1934. He wrote eight somewhat atmospheric articles describing the conference, which were published in the Herald between 17 April and 29 May. He focused mainly on trying to convey the mood of the conference, discussed some of the issues, notably Poland and the Lublin government, and assessed some key personalities including the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, whom he found ‘mysterious’ and who of course he knew as a key figure in the pre-war show trials. He had a number of interesting encounters, notably with the future Australian Foreign Minister Dr H. V. Evatt. In a relaxed aside he noted that at one meeting he sat next to the romantic French film actor Charles Boyer.³⁹

But Foot was anxious to return home. There was a vital election to fight, and time was getting short. He also had an even more pressing reason to get back, something to change his life even more fundamentally than his election to Parliament. He had met Jill Craigie.⁴⁰ Previously his affections had focused strongly on Connie Ernst, who had returned to New York at the end of 1944 and whom he had asked to marry him. He travelled to San Francisco via New York, and was with Connie on 12 April 1945, the day President Roosevelt died. But, to the disappointment of Koestler amongst others, Connie regretfully but decisively declined the offer: she did not wish to live in post-war London. She went on to marry Simon Michael Bessie, a publisher who in the 1960s actually became Foot’s publisher and remained friendly with him, even though his marriage to Connie ended in divorce. Bessie was also to publish in America the works of Jill’s later great friend and heroine Rebecca West.

Jill Craigie was quite a different proposition from Connie. Part Scots, part Russian, she was two years older than Michael. Although only thirty-four, she had already been married twice, and had a young daughter. Her first marriage had ended before the war, and she was now in an unsatisfactory marriage with a playwright and screenwriter, Jeffrey Dell. Jill was a notable example of how London’s cultural life was galvanized by the experience of war. She went into films, and wrote an ambitious documentary, Out of Chaos, in 1943, inspired by the socialist philosophy of William Morris. She focused on the war artists, and got to know eminent figures like Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and especially Henry Moore. She also met the writer on urban theory Lewis Mumford during the war, and the influence of his book The City in History inspired her to make a documentary on the rebuilding of a war-damaged city. A title that suggested itself was ‘The Way we Live Now’, and one possible city for the location of the film was Plymouth, where Patrick Abercrombie was to be part-architect of a post-war city plan.

In the autumn of 1944 she met Michael Foot at a party given at his home in Montpellier Row, Twickenham, by the eminent architect Sir Charles Reilly, the father of Foot’s Oxford friend Paul. Foot invited her to dinner at ‘a very posh restaurant’, the Ivy in Covent Garden. Evidently they instantly attracted each other. Foot was captivated by her charm and beauty. She was ‘a raging beauty thrust on susceptible wartime London … She had the colouring of an English rose but everything else was a romantic, mysterious addition.’⁴¹ He told his mother, who worried about his bachelor status, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ Her attraction for him is very understandable. Apart from her beauty, throughout her life Jill had a sensitive, rapt way of being deeply appealing to men of all ages. No woman listened with more intense attention to the conversation of men, not least Welsh men. But she also had close women friends, including Jenny Stringer in later life. She had in her few years in London attracted the interest, personal as well as intellectual, of an extraordinary group of celebrities: Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Charles Reilly and even the aged Ralph Vaughan-Williams all flirted with her. Another strong admirer was the former Cabinet minister and son of the former Prime Minister, Malcolm MacDonald, who proposed marriage. She looked after his Hampstead house for a time, her neighbour, improbably enough, being General de Gaulle.⁴²

Jill also attracted Michael with her quick intelligence, her artistic flair, her social poise and (possibly) her vigorous feminism. She herself was immediately smitten by Michael, his honesty, his air of myopic charm. It was love at first sight, even if in Michael’s case it was short sight. The severe eczema which had worried him in his relationships with women was of no consequence to her. She and Michael both had unfinished relationships to unscramble. Jill ended matters with Jeffrey Dell and briefly moved into the Hampstead house of a fellow film-maker, William Macquitty: she was a Hampstead personality years before Michael. Meanwhile Michael had to sort matters out with Connie Ernst.

The relationship between Jill and Michael developed rapidly. His still somewhat undeveloped sexual experience flourished under her confident tutelage. She visited her ‘Mayfair socialist’ several times in 62 Park Street, bought him a new gramophone and encouraged his interests in Mozart and in opera generally.⁴³ Most important, she told him of her plan to make a documentary on Plymouth, and came down there to work with him on it. Foot himself appeared in the film, looking unusually well-tailored in a smart dark suit. She promised to help in his election campaign. When he went off to America the prospect of her moving into 62 Park Street, cramped though it would be, was a real one.

The partnership of Michael and Jill is a leitmotiv through the rest of this book. It was a marriage of two strong-minded people, each of whom had powerful relationships with the opposite sex, while remaining faithful and trusting. Each gave the other a kind of radiant confidence that lasted for the next fifty-five years. Jill admired Michael’s socialist passion, his literacy, his lack of affectation, his generosity in personal relationships, his humanity. Without changing his personality or his style, she wanted him to succeed. He admired her dedication to work on the feminist movement, while her artistic interests and many friends in the cultural world greatly developed his own somewhat eclectic interests. They did almost everything together: the constituency visits, the trips to Venice or later Dubrovnik, the joint reading of lyric poetry or the prose of Wells or Conrad. Just Plymouth Argyle remained for men only. For Michael, a romantic, passionate man, Jill was the perfect partner.

To what extent her tastes fitted in with his kind of politics is another question. She was not a person with naturally strong political understanding, even though she would respond to great campaigns and was as committed a supporter of nuclear disarmament as Foot himself In old age they crusaded passionately together about the plight of Croatia and Bosnia after the collapse of Yugoslavia, when her expertise in film direction was invaluable. Her advice on political matters, beyond the purely personal, could be unhelpful, and her strong views encouraged Foot’s own fierce and unyielding dogmatism. This trait could be offputting for powerful women of similar outlook, notably Barbara Castle and sometimes Jennie Lee. Barbara Castle’s letters would address Jill, in not altogether friendly fashion, as ‘my feminist friend’. She observed of Jill in her memoirs, ‘Michael used to be as brutal with her as he was with me.’⁴⁴ There were other close political women friends of Michael who found Jill difficult to warm to. She was better liked in Ebbw Vale/Blaenau Gwent, Michael’s constituency from 1960 to 1992, than she ever was in Devonport. Many criticized her after they married for not looking after Michael properly and for allowing him to go to work, even as a minister, scruffily dressed, with shabby suits or cardigans worn out at the elbows. But even in politics Jill could be an invaluable ally, smoothing Beaverbrook’s feathers, rebuilding ties with Bevan after the clash of 1957, nurturing links with the labour movement across the spectrum in the troubles of the early eighties. The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.

Foot came back post-haste to Plymouth at the end of 1944, urged to do so by Jill Craigie, who was waiting in the city for him. He was formally endorsed as candidate at Victory Hall, Keysham, on 8 June 1945. He warmed up with yet more abuse of Hore-Belisha, enquiring as to which party he thought he belonged. In the Herald he derided the term ‘National’ which was being appropriated by the Conservatives, and referred to ‘the sheer native density of the Tory mind’. He ridiculed ‘the antics of the Beaverbrooks and the Baxters, the Brackens and the Belishas – yes, and the Churchills’, lumping together friends and foes new and old.⁴⁵ His Herald articles rammed his message home with the aid of old friends from the past – Hazlitt on Peterloo, Paine, Cobbett, the Chartists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, a legendary roll-call of all the saints who for their labours rest. Like other Labour candidates, he raged at the extraordinary campaign being conducted for the Tories by Beaverbrook and Bracken. The first radio election broadcast by Churchill, in which he compared Attlee and his colleagues to some kind of Gestapo, ‘no doubt humanely administered in the first instance’, seemed totally repulsive so soon after newsreels had appeared of the German concentration camps. Attlee won applause in saying that the voice was that of Churchill but the mind was that of Foot’s former patron, Beaverbrook.

On the stump in Plymouth, Foot fought a fiercely socialist campaign. Inevitably he confined himself to his constituency, with the occasional foray to help Lucy Middleton, the Labour candidate in the neighbouring constituency of Plymouth Sutton. Housing and employment were perhaps the major issues. Foot pressed again the need for help for the Plymouth plan, and for financial aid from the Admiralty for an extension of the Devonport dockyard. He had powerful support from Aneurin Bevan at the Guildhall in Devonport. The Tories, Bevan declared, were only puppets of big business: ‘I have seen their limbs twitch as the puppet-masters pull the string.’ He called for the nationalization of coal, steel and the Bank of England. With reference to the Conservatives in the Lords, Bevan demanded, with rhetoric and reason, ‘Why should we have to put up with this antediluvian chamber of pampered parasites?’⁴⁶ Foot himself, for all his neo-pacifist past, strongly upheld the need to refurbish the dockyard and strengthen the Royal Navy (cue for more references to the Spanish Armada and Drake’s Drum).

The hapless Hore-Belisha was battered to the end. He was accused of failing to give the British Army proper equipment in Belgium in 1940, of having contemplated war with Russia, and of genuflection before Mussolini and also Franco. ‘Where, oh where, is our wandering boy tonight?’ speculated Foot.⁴⁷ Hore-Belisha’s brief record as Minister for National Insurance was said to have included refusing full compensation for servicemen and their families, and the idea of family allowances. Credit for the invention of Belisha beacons was omitted. Michael was not the only Foot engaged in these polemics against an old adversary compared by Isaac Foot back in 1935 with Judas Iscariot. Not far away in Liskeard, Cornwall, brother John (‘Major’) Foot repeated, with even greater passion, Michael’s points about the Mussolini medal and the vote against Churchill in 1942 that disfigured Hore-Belisha’s past. He shouted at Hore-Belisha from the balcony of the Liskeard Liberal Club as he passed through the town centre a few yards away: ‘Has such a reckless adventurer ever come into politics and public life who has had [sic] so much folly in such a short time? I hope my brother is going to do a very good job of clearing up and putting this man out of public life for ever.’⁴⁸ The family solidarity of the Foots took precedence over any thought of narrow partisanship.

The influence of Michael Foot and his works was also apparent in Labour’s national campaign. Ernest Bevin and scores of other Labour candidates used ‘guilty men’ themes and vocabulary in attacking the Tories’ pre-war record on foreign and defence policy, and drawing a distinction between Winston Churchill, the war leader, and the party which he was now leading in the election. Labour published a pamphlet on these lines entitled The Guilty Party, while the Conservatives’ riposte, perhaps unwisely entitled Guilty Men?, which focused on such themes as Labour’s pre-war opposition to conscription, tended to have its concluding question mark forgotten.⁴⁹

On polling day, 5 July, the local Plymouth newspaper, the Conservative-inclined Western Morning News, forecast a five thousand majority for Hore-Belisha. It also prophesied that Isaac Foot would ‘sweep’ Tavistock and John Foot would carry Bodmin.⁵⁰ In the Foot household it was agreed that the three Liberals, including Dingle in Dundee, would all get home. The one member of the family who stood no chance at all, despite his plucky campaign, was Michael in his straight fight in Devonport. There followed an uneasy wait of three weeks while service votes were collected. On 26 July the dramatic news came through. The dams had broken. Labour had made over two hundred gains and won 393 seats, a landslide majority of more than 180 over the Tories. The great war leader, Churchill, had been cataclysmically overthrown by the almost anonymous Attlee, on whom Hore-Belisha had poured derision as Harold Laski’s ‘office-boy’. And Devonport had shared in this triumph, as had indeed the other two Plymouth constituencies. A brief tenure of Plymouth Drake in 1929–31 had been Labour’s sole victory in the city before. Now Bert Medland, a retired civil servant who had been Labour’s Mayor of Plymouth in 1935, won the Drake constituency, while Lucy Middleton, the wife of the long-term former party General Secretary whom Michael had met before the 1935 election, captured Sutton as well.

In Devonport Michael Foot had won on a 14 per cent swing, gained on a poll of 71.1 per cent, with 13,395 votes to Hore-Belisha’s 11,382, a majority of 2,013, or 8.2 per cent. The election expenses showed how frugal the Labour campaign had been. Foot had just £30 of charged personal expenses, plus £23.18s.3d. for his agent. By contrast, the defeated Hore-Belisha ran up £148.7s. personal expenses and no less than £106.10s.10d. for his agent.⁵¹ Contrary to forecasts, Michael was in fact the only Foot to be returned amidst a general Liberal collapse everywhere in the country. Isaac, now Lord Mayor of Plymouth, lost to the Tories in Tavistock by nearly six thousand. John trailed by over two thousand in Bodmin. Most stunning of all, Dingle came fifteen thousand votes behind the two Labour candidates (one being John Strachey) in the two-Member constituency of Dundee. In the News Chronicle Ian Mackay noted that Michael Foot was one of several Labour journalists elected, including J. P. W. Mallalieu, Maurice Webb, Haydn Davies, Garry Allighan, Hector McNeill, Tom Driberg, Vernon Bartlett and Konni Zilliacus, a new sociological trend.⁵² After the Devonport result was declared there was mass public rejoicing around the Guildhall in Plymouth. Then Michael and his new love Jill more privately celebrated victory and the new dawn, political and personal, that it would surely bring.

His election to Parliament marked the climax of an extraordinary war for Michael Foot. It had made him a prominent editor, an instantly known countrywide campaigner and a nationally celebrated author. Guilty Men had made him a celebrity of a kind while still in his late twenties. It attached the sheen of patriotism to his socialism. Some critics later surmised that he remained stuck in that war, eternally berating Chamberlain and his acolytes, celebrating El Alamein, Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy, still holding fast to the values and ideas of that increasingly distant conflict. Memories of the Second World War, nourished more avidly in Britain than in any other combatant country, right down to the sixtieth anniversary of VE-Day in 2005, remained an essential framework for the sense of historic identity. They encouraged a vision of a dauntless island race standing alone while other, feebler Continental nations plunged into collaboration or collapse. The memory worked against the sense that Britain was part of Europe. It fostered a long-term anti-Germanism. But it was legitimate, too, to declare that the war had brought not only a great triumph for courage and perseverance, but also a great opportunity to avoid the betrayals of post-1918 which older men like Attlee, Bevin, Morrison and Cripps recalled all too well. After all, it was their victory, just as much as Churchill’s. One government minister, the seventy-six-year-old Lord Addison, had actually been part of that earlier post-war government as Minister of Health, and was well aware of the broken pledges then which had led to his own eventual resignation from the Liberals to join the Labour Party.

For Michael Foot, for all his bewildering changes of outlook and occupation since his Oxford days, it was a thrilling moment, another 1789. As his old friend A. J. P. Taylor was memorably to write in the final sentence of English History 1914–1945, ‘England had risen, just the same.’⁵³ In the columns of the press the new Michael Foot MP recalled the French socialist thinker Saint-Simon asking his servant to tell him every morning: ‘Get up, M. le Comte, because you have great things to do.’ It was a story he had picked up from one of his cherished books, Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators. Foot did not believe in servants, but the mood and the message were no less resonant, just the same.

4 LOYAL OPPOSITIONIST (1945–1951)

Like the legendary shot fired at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, that heralded the American War of Independence, ‘the Election rings around the World!’, Foot excitedly told the readers of the Daily Herald.¹ Labour’s socialist programme, as announced in the King’s Speech, was ‘the Boldest Adventure, the Greatest Crusade’. Labour had become the nation. Historical analogies with past revolutionaries from Cromwell to Garibaldi poured from his pen. In Westminster the new soi-disant revolutionaries, the 393 (shortly 394) Labour MPs, were sworn in immediately. Will Griffiths led a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ in the Commons in which Foot joined enthusiastically. From the very start, dramatic events unfolded: the next four weeks saw the Potsdam conference, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, VJ-Day marking the end of the war in Japan on 15 August, the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease by the Americans on 21 August, the new committee on the use of atomic energy, all of them to colour Foot’s views fundamentally for the remainder of his career. He felt thoroughly at home in his new surroundings. He enjoyed the buzz in the lobbies as a great progressive programme was launched – a National Health Service, nationalization of the mines, independence for India, all part of what the new Chancellor Hugh Dalton called ‘the flowing tide’ of socialism. Foot also liked the parliamentary atmosphere, the chatter and conspiracy in smoking room and tea room, the ready access to Fleet Street friends. He enjoyed too some of the extra-mural activities, especially the group of MPs who played chess. Leslie Hale was his favoured opponent. Foot was recognized as being amongst the best parliamentary players, though it was agreed that the strongest was Julius Silverman. Others of note were Douglas Jay, Reginald Paget, Maurice Edelman and Maurice Orbach, with Jim Callaghan another, less talented, enthusiast. The world’s dominant players were Russian, and Foot met several grandmasters when an international tournament was held in London in 1946.

Best of all, Foot made attractive new friends amongst the Labour backbenchers. All of them, predictably, were on the left, paid-up members of the awkward squad. Four were particularly important for him. Richard Crossman was a didactic former Oxford philosophy don who had written on Plato and Socrates. Foot first met him when Crossman arranged a social event at the Savoy Grill after Parliament assembled. It was Palestine that first drew them together, but they remained intellectual comrades from then on, even posthumously, when Foot was involved in the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Another long-term ally was Ian Mikardo, a bright but prickly left-winger who, unusually for Labour, was a business consultant. He was of rabbinical Jewish background and had strong views on Palestine. It was he who had moved the famous Reading resolution committing the party firmly to wholesale nationalization at party conference in December 1944, when Foot first met him. Mikardo later described his friendship with Foot as ‘one of the most precious things in my life’. Tom Driberg was an old colleague on Beaverbrook newspapers, writer of the ‘William Hickey’ column. Foot remained tolerant of his ex-Communism and particularly conspicuous homosexual exploits, which almost led to his prosecution, and reacted loyally when journalists asserted that Driberg had been a double agent, both for the KGB and MI5. There is no doubt that many of his contemporaries placed less trust in Driberg’s character and reliability than Foot did.²

Perhaps Foot’s most congenial friend was J. P. W. Mallalieu, commonly known as ‘Curly’, a man of many talents. He had been a fine sportsman at Cheltenham College and Oxford, and won a rugby blue as a stand-off half He had an exciting war in the navy, and published a best-selling book about it, Very Ordinary Seaman. He wrote a financial column in the New Statesman, ‘Other People’s Money’, and a weekly parliamentary sketch in Tribune. He became a great admirer of Nye Bevan, while his friendship with Foot was such that for a few months in 1953 Michael and Jill lived with him and his family. However, Mallalieu never supported CND, and actually became a navy minister under Harold Wilson in 1964, which put him beyond the pale for many on the left. Foot’s memories of him, however, were always affectionate. As a sign of it he gave his daughter Ann (later Baroness) Mallalieu a present of a book on fox-hunting, a strong enthusiasm of hers even though Foot detested the pastime.³

These men found other left-wing comrades early on in the new Parliament. Others with whom Foot had close relations were Harold Davies, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler, Will Griffiths, Hugh Delargy and the playwright Benn Levy (along with his beautiful American actress wife, Constance Cummings). Along with them was a friend of far longer standing, Barbara Castle, in the House as MP for Blackburn and the only one of them who had a government job, as PPS for Cripps at the Board of Trade. In his memoirs Mikardo lists some others in their circle: the Australian lawyer and keen European federalist R. W. G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, George Wigg, Donald Bruce and Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, who had been returned as a Common Wealth candidate at the election but then joined Labour. Occasionally they were joined by mavericks like Woodrow Wyatt, or even figures on the party right like the independent-minded barrister R. T. Paget, who simply enjoyed their company on social grounds. In addition, there were one or two incorrigible rebels who flitted in and out but really pursued their own path, like Sydney Silverman, a disputatious Jewish lawyer, and S. O. Davies, ex-miner and Marxist Welsh nationalist who sat for Keir Hardie’s old seat of Merthyr Tydfil and like him supported Welsh home rule. In 1946 came another maverick, Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s Welsh son-in-law who sat for South Ayrshire. He too was almost impossible to tie down.

This distinctly miscellaneous group of around twenty or so formed an identifiable collection of dissenters. Michael Foot was one of its most eminent members, and the most highly esteemed as a communicator. It is difficult to discern any wider influence on the labour movement. Only Crossman attempted to write a statement of political philosophy. Their socialism came across most clearly in their view of foreign policy. Most of them were middle-class journalists: trade unionists (other than members of the NUJ) were very rare. Until the growth of unrest over the anti-Soviet drift of Bevin’s foreign policy the following spring, they were little more than just kindred souls, closet critics in the tea room and the bar. They all favoured strongly socialist policies at home, which meant planning, controls and an uncompromising programme of public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. But in its first two years, the government itself seemed to pursue this policy with such zest that there was little to complain about. It was really in the more difficult period of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ in 1948–50, when the nationalizations effectively came to an end, that complaints arose. Nor did Commonwealth or colonial policy generate any great dissent. The left could justify everything, from the transfer of power in India to an unsuccessful attempt to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika. The major areas of criticism almost entirely involved foreign relations, and were largely offshoots of the early stages of the Cold War. To this should be added concern over Palestine, since almost all of them were passionately pro-Jewish and totally opposed to Bevin’s policy.

The members of the group were all instinctively oppositionists. Not one was seriously considered for government office, nor did they expect (or perhaps want) to be. Men like Mikardo or Driberg had backbench mindsets then and always. Until Bevan’s resignation as Minister of Health in April 1951, their influence upon either government or party policy was minimal, and in inverse proportion to their prominence as journalists. To call them ‘Labour’s Conscience’, as one text has done, seems remarkably inflated.⁴ Foot himself, a highly individual journalist with a past record of campaigns for the Socialist League and employment by Lord Beaverbrook, was considered unreliable, a gadfly, a meteor, the ultimate symbol of a party of protest, not a party of power. His activity was largely focused outside Parliament. The prospect of front-bench status seemed at this stage quite bizarre.

These Labour MPs were soft left, but no more than that. With the possible exception of Geoffrey Bing, a barrister later to be Kwame Nkrumah’s Attorney-General in Ghana, they all felt themselves to be located within the capacious reaches of the party’s broad church – only just, in some cases. They were quite distinct from a much smaller, more extreme group – D. N. Pritt, John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson (all later to be expelled from the party), along with William Warbey, Tom Braddock and Ronald Chamberlain. The French political commentator Bertrand de Jouvenel distinguished in 1949 between what he curiously called ‘the pacifist head’ of Cross-man and ‘the Russophil head’ of Zilliacus.⁵ These hard-left dissentients, consistently pro-Soviet and anti-American, were scarcely within the Labour tabernacle at all. They tended to keep their own counsel. Their role in the party was minute, though they could sometimes ally with Foot’s friends, as in the famous ‘stab in the back’ motion on foreign affairs in November 1946 (see page 121). They might be joined also by virtual pacifists like Rhys Davies or Reg Sorensen. But Foot’s friends were more in the mainstream. Foot himself, like Crossman, had always been anti-Stalinist. He never took the sentimental view that ‘left could speak to left’. From 1948 his attitude towards the Soviet Union hardened, as did that of Bevan. Foot and Crossman were foremost among those inspired by the anti-Communist thrust of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, not to mention those famous tracts against totalitarianism, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, written by the eminent recent Tribune columnist George Orwell. However blurred the boundaries might be on the more sectarian left of the parliamentary Labour Party, a fundamental divide between the future Bevanites and Tribunites, and the fellow-travelling fringe, was always apparent. With the two Communist MPs, William Gallacher and Philip Piratin, Foot had almost nothing to do, although he retained his admiration for Harry Pollitt, whom he considered a more considerable politician. He always felt that Pollitt’s return to Parliament for Rhondda West in 1945 (the Labour candidate, Mainwaring, beat him by just 972 votes) would have been politically valuable.

Foot’s contacts and manoeuvres in the new House were always with other backbenchers. His links with government ministers were mostly tenuous. He had scant enthusiasm for either Attlee or the Lord President Herbert Morrison, and clearly underestimated them both. The former he regarded as colourless and uninspired, and a wartime advocate of coalitionism; Morrison he saw as just a machine man, who wanted to curb backbenchers’ independence – unfairly so, since Morrison had shown much interest in ideas and policy-making before the war. For Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, Foot began with a higher regard. Relations were sufficiently good for Bevin to ask him to go on a fact-finding mission to Persia (Iran) in February 1946. The purpose was to assess Russian infiltration in that country, from which Russian and British troops were due to withdraw on 2 March (in fact the British had already left). There was also anxiety that the Russians were taking root in Persian Azerbaijan, through the Tudeh party. Foot’s colleague was a Conservative ex-brigadier, Anthony Head, which led to predictable jokes about ‘Head and Foot’, and they had extensive talks with Tudeh leaders. Foot was convinced after this visit that there was abundant evidence for Soviet Russia’s intended domination of Iran. He also wrote in the Daily Herald in somewhat prophetic terms about the dangers to Anglo-American oil, including the refinery at Abadan, and made many sensible suggestions about changing the relationship between the British heirs of imperialism and the Persian authorities. But Bevin took little interest, and nothing tangible resulted from what was Foot’s one and only official activity on behalf of a British government until 1974.⁶ But by the end of 1946, Bevin’s robust confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, and even more his blatantly anti-Jewish policy in Palestine, had earned him Foot’s anathema.

Nor was Foot in any sense a protégé of Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and patron of youth, as were centre-right figures like Gaitskell and Callaghan, along with Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey (neither yet an MP), to whom was added for a time Barbara Castle. In one rare exchange, Dalton wrote to rebuke Foot over factual inaccuracies in Tribune over the convertibility of sterling, with particular reference to the precise roles as advisers of Otto Niemeyer, Lord Catto and Wilfred Eady. Foot replied courteously, although he pressed the need for the Treasury to employ ‘more socialist economists’ to assist in ‘carrying out a Socialist policy’.⁷ The only one of the government’s big five with whom he had ever been close was, of course, Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade and eventually Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had shed his links with Tribune and they seldom saw each other now. Cripps replied to a query from Foot about the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 in purely formal terms.⁸

Foot was close to no other minister, with the obvious and seminal exception of Aneurin Bevan. With Foot working closely with Jennie Lee on the editorial board of Tribune, he served as a permanent socialist sounding-board for Labour’s Minister of Health as he pushed through the National Health Service. Their relationship became closer still after 1949, as Bevan found himself increasingly at odds with the drift of foreign and defence policy. Indeed, Foot, while increasingly critical of Attlee’s government, found his special relationship with Bevan made this one aspect of his parliamentary role rewarding, as he pressed Bevan to challenge government policy. Jennie Lee by contrast found the entire experience between 1945 and 1951 frustrating and depressing.⁹

Foot later felt his speeches in the 1945–51 Parliament fell short of the highest standard. They were too complicated in structure, and perhaps too rhetorical. Sometimes the Oxford Union debates did not seem far away. He sounded more like a journalist in Parliament than a parliamentarian; his father was later to express concern on this point. But he began splendidly. His maiden speech, focusing on foreign policy, on 20 August 1945, was a clear success.¹⁰ He complimented the King’s Speech in characteristic terms: ‘Oliver Cromwell could have hardly done a better job himself in the realm of foreign affairs.’ He proceeded with Guilty Men-type attacks on Churchill and other leading Conservatives for their pre-war sympathies with Mussolini and Franco, along with right-wing monarchs like King George of the Hellenes. He declared that Britain enjoyed both a conception of political liberty denied to the Russians and a conception of economic liberty not shared by the Americans. This ‘unique combination of treasures’ gave it ‘the commanding position of leadership if we choose to exercise it’. He wound up with a passionate affirmation of the socialist patriotism common at the time:

At the end of this great war and after this great election, the British people can play as conspicuous a part before the gaze of all mankind as they played in 1940. Hitler has left behind his terrible legacies – racial hatred, love of violence, hunger, homelessness, famine and death. Surely it is the duty of our great country not to be content with some secondary role, but rather to seek the abatement of those evils by the assertion and example of a much more positive democracy. As we look out across this stricken Continent and as we see a new hope in the struggle to be born across this wilderness of shattered faiths, may it not be our destiny as the freest and most democratic and a socialist power to stand between the living and the dead and stay the flames?

The following speaker, the Conservative Ian Orr-Ewing, congratulated Foot in the customary fashion as ‘the sole survivor of a family which has been for many years represented in this House’. Back home, Father Isaac wrote with paternal pride: ‘Congratulations! I knew you could do it. When people have said you had not the [parliamentary] style I said to myself “Just you wait, my lads!” And now you’ve shown the beggars.’¹¹ Journalists also gave Foot a good press. Even The Times gave him some prominence.¹² The New Statesman commented that the speech and its reception showed that ‘the House still likes a first rate verbal pamphleteer’. Hannen Swaffer observed that Foot spoke ‘with the vehemence of a Hyde Park orator’, presumably meant as a compliment, while his colleague Tom Driberg, himself no great orator, wrote in the Sunday Express that Foot was ‘a little too platform but fiery and fluent’.¹³

He made another major speech that autumn, on one of his special themes, Germany – the destruction of its economy, the diminution of its boundaries, the impoverishment of its people. The leitmotiv was obviously the need not to repeat the errors of 1919. But what stamped him as one of the awkward squad of the parliamentary left was the famous vote against the terms of the American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes with much difficulty.¹⁴ There was criticism in Cabinet both of the reduced amount of the loan, $4 billion, and the commercial rate of interest attached to it. But most criticisms focused on two other aspects. They were both part of what Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky has shown was a calculated American attempt to undermine Britain’s financial predominance, with a dogmatic US insistence on free-market arrangements and scant regard for Britain’s post-war difficulties which Keynes called ‘an economic Dunkirk’. The first of these two provisions was an insistence on an immediate multilateral liberalization of trade; the second was that sterling should become freely convertible into dollars, this to take effect in July 1947. Emanuel Shinwell and Bevan had both fiercely attacked these proposals in Cabinet on 5 December, but had been rebuffed.¹⁵

In the Commons, over seventy Conservatives voted against the terms on 13 December: their most effective voice was Robert Boothby, later Michael Foot’s weekly sparring partner on television’s In the News, who called the loan ‘an economic Munich’. They were joined by twenty-three Labour rebels, nearly all on the soft left – Foot, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle, Benn Levy, Raymond Blackburn, W. G. Cove – along with some less likely rebels like Maurice Edelman and James Callaghan. Those on the furthest left like Konni Zilliacus, along with the two Communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, supported the government. Foot did not speak in the debate, but his general view emerged in Tribune.¹⁶ He saw the terms of the loan as reflecting the advice of defeatist economists about a huge balance of payments deficit looming in 1946, and a victory for ‘money power’ which would prevent the payment of sterling debts to India, Egypt, Palestine and other colonized powers. Foot had no expertise in international finance (and he was hostile to the Bretton Woods agreement for international currency stabilization concluded with the US in 1944), but he felt instinctively that the loan was part of a long-term American strategy to destroy British independence in foreign as well as economic policy. He told Dalton of his total opposition to convertibility. Hard-headed economic historians have in the main endorsed the general line of his instinctive criticisms. The catastrophic convertibility of sterling in July – August 1947 lasted barely a month.

The vote against the US loan (which the government won easily) confirmed Foot’s role as a critic. He spoke thereafter on domestic matters many times. On his home base, he dutifully paid due attention to the needs of Devonport and other dockyards, for all his frequent calls for cuts in arms spending. But he made most impact in the House on foreign policy issues. A central one throughout 1946–47 was the condition of Germany, made the more desperate by the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of German refugees from eastern Europe. Here his closest associate was his old publisher, Victor Gollancz, whose compassion was moved by the starvation amongst the German population. He and Foot spoke at a mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 26 November 1945 to raise awareness of the plight of German children. Other speakers were Labour’s Richard Stokes, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (who had almost won Newark for Labour in 1945), and Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Arthur Salter, both independents.¹⁷ Foot also came together with Gollancz and Stokes to form the Save Europe Now (SEN) campaign; Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins were amongst the other committee members, and Peggy Duff was secretary, so there was some overlap with CND later. Others prominent were Lord Lindsay, former Master of Balliol, and the Bishop of Chichester. The campaign went on for two years, attempting to persuade the government to encourage British citizens to either surrender some of their food coupons for the Germans or else send food parcels. SEN saw Foot at his most idealistic and far-sighted.¹⁸

In the House, he described how ‘something like famine’ prevailed in Germany, where food rations had fallen from the starvation level of 1,500 calories per day to as low as seven hundred. His solution for finding the relevant resources was to cease to pay for large occupying forces in Germany, and to make further arms reductions in the Middle and Far East. He pleaded for a discussion of the principles underlying British foreign policy. One ray of light was the compassionate, if short-lived, policy for social reconstruction of Lord Pakenham as Minister for Germany after 1945, which Foot saw as a kind of anticipation of the Marshall Plan. Foot’s view of the German problem was a comprehensive one. He urged the need for a political reconstruction with decentralized institutions, but also warned of the long-term dangers of Germany’s being divided into eastern and western zones. He warned against ‘an anti-German mania’ like the lunatic plan devised during the war by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office for Germany to be reduced to a purely pastoral economy. On the other hand, like other British socialists he found it hard to make common cause with his comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, since their leader, Kurt Schumacher, demanded early German reunification and spoke in alarmingly nationalist terms, with frequent use of the word Reich. Not until 1949, with the impact of the Marshall Plan on its economy and a stable constitution, did West Germany progress, albeit under the long-term rule of Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Christian Democrats, and not under the still notionally Marxist SDP.

An even stronger concern in Foot’s Commons speeches was the growing violence and political disintegration in Palestine. By 1946 the region was in near chaos. There was unending tension between Jews and Arabs; a mounting exodus of Jews to Palestine after the Holocaust, with US support, despite determined efforts by Bevin and the British government to prevent it; and open guerrilla warfare by Jewish paramilitary or terrorist groups, the Haganah and Irgun Zvei Leumi, against the British forces stationed in Palestine. They were reinforced by the violent Stern Gang. The destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, with the loss of ninety-one lives, caused an especial shock to a populace not inured to long-term terrorism.

As a pillar of the Palestine Committee, Michael Foot was among those who hoped that a potentially pro-Jewish Labour government would begin a new departure after the long saga of bitterness following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But he was to be horrified by Bevin’s policy. Britain’s refusal to grant more than a minimum number of immigration visas (a mere 1,500 a month at first), the inhumane efforts to prevent the sailing of the Exodus in 1946 with its refugees from the prison camps, the refusal to contemplate a Jewish state, worst of all what seemed to be the blatant anti-Semitism of the British Foreign Office, caused immense shock. Foot’s zeal for a state of Israel was reinforced by his renewal of contact with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that Foot was now ‘very anti-Bolshie’; Foot helped Koestler by pressing the Home Office to speed up a visa for his aged Hungarian mother. He wrote frequently on Palestine in Tribune, and denounced Bevin for not admitting 100,000 Jewish displaced persons into Palestine immediately. Another strong influence was his new friend Richard Crossman. Previously pro-Arab and, by his own confession, anti-Semitic, Crossman’s membership of an Anglo-American committee of inquiry into Palestine turned him into a fervent Zionist. It urged an immediate agreement to certificates for 100,000 Jewish immigrants: Bevin treated this with contempt, and in effect sought to continue the pre-war policy towards the Jews.

The names of Crossman and Foot were attached to a particularly effective thirty-two-page pamphlet for Gollancz in the autumn of 1946, A Palestine Munich?. In fact much of it, including the entire first section, was written by Arthur Koestler.¹⁹ It detailed the restrictive immigration policy up to 1939 and the rise of Jewish and Arab resistance. The 1939 White Paper, calling for a future Arab Federation in Palestine with highly restricted Jewish immigration, was dismissed as a bribe to the Arabs to prevent their sympathizing with Germany. The pamphlet called for the government to allow full immigration of Jews up to the limit of Palestine’s capacity to absorb them, and not to use force of arms to endorse what Labour ministers themselves had called a Palestine Munich. A promise of early independence to the Palestinian Arabs would mean ‘an Anglo – Jewish war’. The booklet’s political solution, in the absence of one being suggested from the Foreign Office, was a partitioned Palestine free of American military involvement, consisting of a ‘Judean state’ based on large-scale immigration, and an Arab state, with the central mountain region transferred to the Kingdom of Transjordan. At this point Britain would withdraw its forces, and self-interest would compel both the new Jewish and Arab states to collaborate and to come to terms with each other. It was the most cogent statement by pro-Jewish Labour representatives yet written, and it was predictably dismissed out of hand by all Arab representatives. Basically, it reflected Koestler’s totally one-sided Jewish sympathies (he wrote in support of the Stern Gang’s operations), and got nowhere. As it happened, Koestler greatly disliked Israel when he moved there, quarrelled with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and old friends like Teddy Kollek, and rapidly returned to Britain amidst acrimony all round.²⁰

Through Tribune, and to a far lesser extent through his Daily Herald column (which usually was safely loyalist), Foot kept up his campaign on behalf of the Jews in 1947–48. The British government, in which the Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones was given the poisoned chalice of Palestine, offered no way forward. Creech-Jones’s partition proposals collapsed; Bevin’s proposal for five more years of British trusteeship offered nothing new; the United Nations came out with a scheme for immediate partition which Bevin promptly rejected. In the end the British government, harassed by the huge support costs of maintaining troops in Palestine, decided simply to pull its forces out, and withdrew them by 15 May 1948. Attlee quoted the precedent of the withdrawal from India. But there the British government had produced an agreed scheme for a political settlement that would follow. In Palestine there was none. The Foreign Office imagined that the various Arab armies would simply drive the Jews into the sea. The successful creation of the state of Israel in 1949 astonished everybody. Foot, of course, was delighted that a Jewish state had come into being against the odds. In an adjournment debate on 12 August 1947 he had called for the early withdrawal of British forces. The British people themselves were delighted to see their troops withdrawn from a violent land, but it was impossible to see the Palestine settlement as anything other than a shambles and a catastrophe. Foot might hope that the Jewish people would enter a more settled phase after August 1948. In fact, their tragedy was to haunt him and the world for the remainder of his life.

His main concern in Tribune columns and Commons speeches, though, was the deepening crisis in relations with Russia. Throughout 1946, especially in Germany, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the atmosphere seemed ever darker. Of all the commentators on the left, Michael Foot was one of the most outspoken in denouncing Russian policy in eastern Europe after the war. In the press he condemned Russia’s intimidation of the socialists in Poland, its pressure upon Yugoslavia, its totalitarian control of eastern Germany.²¹ Beyond Europe, his visit to Iran had convinced him of Russian dreams of domination in the Middle East as well. On the other hand, he shared the anxiety common on the left at the drift towards a full-scale military alliance with the United States. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March terrified him. Dissatisfaction with Bevin’s policy built up amongst Labour MPs in 1946, and finally spilled over, with a critical letter sent to Attlee on 29 October by a group of twenty-one Labour backbenchers urging that a democratic socialist Britain ought to pursue a genuine ‘middle way’ between American ‘free enterprise’ and Russian totalitarianism. They were far from being a far-left caucus; they included Crossman, Foot, Levy and Silverman, but also Callaghan and Woodrow Wyatt. A few days later Crossman circulated an amendment to the Address which urged ‘full Socialist planning and control’ of the world’s resources, and ‘a democratic and constructive Socialist alternative to the otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet Communism’. In the end, forty-three Labour MPs put their names to it; among them, in addition to Crossman, were Levy, Silverman and Michael Foot. The name of Jennie Lee, Bevan’s wife, indicated that at least one Cabinet minister was unhappy too.²²

Crossman moved his amendment on 18 November 1946, though he lessened its impact from the start by saying he would not call a division.²³ In sharp terms, he asked the government to reject proposals for an Anglo – American military alliance, and asked whether precise arrangements in terms of arms sharing and staff discussions were already under way. Since Bevin was away in New York, Attlee himself replied, mildly criticizing Crossman’s speech as totally one-sided. Two Scottish ILP members mischievously moved Crossman’s amendment to a vote, and the government won by 353 to 0, with several Labour abstentions, including Foot. But left-wing anxiety about British foreign policy moved onto a new stage two months later when the ‘Truman doctrine’ for US military aid to potential victims of Soviet aggression resulted in new American military involvement in Greece and Turkey. Talks at the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York had effectively broken down. Talk of a Cold War, an iron curtain and even a possible third world war became commonplace.

Michael Foot had taken little part in the Crossman amendment debate, and indeed had been under fire himself from the left for being too anti-Soviet in Tribune. He remained so in the Daily Herald, and satirized Molotov’s plans for ‘European confusion’.²⁴ But he also now became a leader of the most significant protest against government policy since the general election. Some left-wing MPs now began to meet regularly to prepare plans: led by Crossman, Foot and Mikardo, they also included Stephen Swingler, Harold Davies, Mallalieu, Benn Levy, Kim Mackay and Woodrow Wyatt. They met against a background of a serious fuel crisis in the severe winter of early 1947, and amidst fears that Labour’s socialist advance was slowing down. The economic crisis of the summer of 1947 was another major factor. The outcome was Keep Left, a pamphlet which appeared in May 1947, in time for the party conference at Margate.²⁵ It was the product of a draft ‘red paper’ worked out with Foot and Mikardo at Richard Crossman’s home at Radnage in Buckinghamshire. It included calls for more socialist planning in domestic policies, but what caught the imagination were the criticisms of foreign and defence policy, its call for Britain to stand aloof from confrontations between America and Russia, to withdraw its troops worldwide, and to demobilize rather than embark on conscription. Some of this was the work of Crossman, especially a chapter on ‘The Job Abroad’ and passages on international affairs more generally. But another key author was Michael Foot, whose contribution focused on the domestic economic scene, notably ‘socialist planning’ and tighter controls on capital and labour. With his other outlets in the press, he was typecast as a symbol of Keep Left from then on.

Foot’s viewpoint was an amalgam of socialism, patriotism and anti-militarism. Britain’s international role would be the product of the success of its socialist achievement at home. It would offer moral leadership. Foot’s answer to the problems of the world was a third force in which democratic socialist Britain would join with comrades in western Europe. Bevan had called for one during the war. It would stand apart equally from the military adventures of both the United States and the Soviet Union: ‘The cause of British socialism and the cause of British independence and the cause of world sanity are indissolubly bound together.’²⁶ The extent to which Foot was identified with a version of a federal united Europe at this time is worth underlining. The later defender of British parliamentary sovereignty against the encroachments of Brussels was in 1946–48 advocating ‘a United States of Europe’. It would build a customs union, and plan the coordination of heavy industries. Most of all, it would conduct its own foreign policy and support the Third World with development programmes, bulk commodity purchase and fair trade.

Foot was never a European federalist to the same degree as Kim Mackay, who was influenced by the constitutional arrangements of his native Australia. He cherished Parliament too much. His vision of western Europe was as a socialist-led Europe: the voice he usually quoted as representative of Continental Europe was the veteran French socialist leader Léon Blum. Along with Crossman, Mikardo and others on the left, Foot continued to champion European unity in this form – even though a major difficulty now was that the left in both France and Italy was preponderantly Communist. In May 1948 he was amongst those disciplined by Transport House for attending the founding conference for the Council of Europe at The Hague, where the main event was a visionary speech by Winston Churchill. A ‘Europe Group’ was formed amongst Labour MPs on 2 December 1946, with Kim Mackay as its chairman. Foot was amongst those, including Crossman, Mikardo, George Wigg and Barbara Castle, who joined in a second wave a few weeks later.²⁷ It conducted discussions on policy with the French and other socialist parties, and remained active until late 1949.

And yet, the impact of Keep Left was short-lived. At the Margate conference the government produced its own counter-pamphlet, Cards on the Table (actually written by Denis Healey of Transport House’s international department). Ernest Bevin crushed his miscellaneous critics with an overwhelming conference speech in which he famously condemned the ‘stab in the back’ and the disloyalty of the Crossman amendment. Its author became widely known as ‘double Crossman’ from then on. In Tribune Foot was sceptical about Bevin’s easy rhetorical triumph, and critical of the ‘listlessness, almost indifference’ of the debates on international affairs.²⁸ He listed key unanswered questions, notably ‘What role are we to play as the foremost European power?’

But in fact it was events which finally undermined the socialist federal argument of Keep Left. Soon after party conference, the US Secretary of State George Marshall announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, his proposals initially covering the Soviet Union as well. Soon the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was working out schemes for the mobilization and distribution of aid in western Europe, to the huge advantage of the ailing British economy. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union became more and indefensible for a democratic socialist like Foot. He became a champion of anti-Communist dissidents in eastern Europe. He particularly admired Milovan Djilas’s work of political theory The New Class (1957), and the Montenegrin intellectual was to be a guest in the Foots’ Hampstead home on several occasions later. In April 1948 Foot argued strongly against the telegram sent to Pietro Nenni, signed initially by thirty-seven Labour MPs (fifteen of whom subsequently disavowed supporting it), backing his left-wing Italian Socialist Party, rather than the right-wing Saragat socialist grouping. Foot, never considered as a possible signatory on any of the lists of possible supporters, wrote in Tribune that the Nenni telegram was ‘an act of sabotage against the declared policy of the party’, and gave the impression that a large section of the Labour Party would welcome a Communist victory at the polls in Italy. Both as a libertarian and an admirer of Silone, Foot could never endorse such a policy. A hysterical letter of protest from the near-Communist Tom Braddock was ignored.²⁹ Other key events in 1948 which reinforced Foot’s anti-Communism were successively the ‘coup’ in February which put Czechoslovakia under Soviet control, the schism with Tito in Yugoslavia (whom Foot solidly defended until his imprisonment of Djilas alienated him from the government of Belgrade) and, most decisively, the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948–49: this last led even Aneurin Bevan to propose that Britain should send in tanks through the Soviet zone to bring in essential supplies. Foot in Tribune and in Parliament symbolized the new mood. He was particularly moved by events in Czechoslovakia; he had Czech socialist friends, and went with Crossman and Wigg on a mission to the country just after the Communist coup. In November 1948 Foot warmly applauded the election of Harry Truman as US President: he had no sympathy for the fellow-travelling left-wing challenge of Henry Wallace.³⁰ The creation of NATO, largely under Bevin’s aegis, in the spring of 1949 was as warmly applauded by Foot in Tribune as by the party mainstream, and he publicly rebuked Mikardo for opposing it.³¹ ‘The Futility of Mr Priestley’ ridiculed a future comrade in CND for regarding the USA and the Soviet Union as equally anti-democratic.

Many of the criticisms of Bevin’s foreign policy from Foot and others were cogent and well-informed. But they are mainly important as anticipations of the later Bevanites. In the 1940s they struck many of the right notes at the wrong time. It was difficult to suggest an alternative foreign policy at a time when Stalin seemed so threatening and so obdurate. The era of post-Stalin ‘peaceful existence’ lay many years off. A socialist-led federal Europe was never more than a pipe-dream; the ‘western union’ which Britain did lead into being in the Brussels Treaty of March 1948 was limited and functional, geared heavily to defence issues, and in no sense a ‘third force’.

These events left Michael Foot with a sense of frustration. Bevin’s foreign policy showed ‘a clean sheet of failure’, yet there seemed no viable alternative. In practice, like his friends and colleagues Koestler and Orwell he trod the path of a regretful but firm anti-Communism. The Keep Left group re-formed (without Foot) in July 1949, and drew on the expertise of Oxford economists such as Thomas Balogh and David Worswick in producing the pamphlet Keeping Left, which twelve Labour MPs signed. But Keep Left had lost impetus, and tended to fragment. It was a highly miscellaneous group at the best of times. The effect of all this on the career of Michael Foot was mixed: because of his greater prominence and articulacy, involvement with the left tended to heighten suspicion of him in the party as irresponsible or disloyal. Some comrades did not like him anyway. Hugh Gaitskell, his later nemesis, writing after the Durham miners’ gala in August 1948, found Foot ‘rather strange. He never seems to talk except when making speeches, and was most silent and reserved all the time.’ Jennie Lee, he added, was ‘a very stupid woman’.³²

And yet there is much to Foot’s credit. On both Germany and Palestine he voiced an unpopular cause with a blend of idealism and hard fact. On the origins of the Cold War, without lapsing into what Marx called ‘infantile leftism’, he raised perfectly proper questions about the robotic confrontation into which Bevin was dragged at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in 1946–47. In questioning Soviet foreign policy, the extent to which it posed a military threat to the West and the viability of Britain’s huge overseas commitments, his judgements became the conventional wisdom years later. Even at the time, they crystallized some of the discontent amongst the left-wing middle-class intelligentsia of which Tosco Fyvel wrote in Tribune.³³ At the very least, Foot was surely right in urging a debate on fundamental geopolitical principles. On Europe, his enthusiasm for closer union was part of a wider critique of British foreign policy, and his vision of a united Europe was distinctly vague. Even so, the European opportunity was an immense gap in Britain’s world view after 1945. Some of the Labour left picked it up more rapidly than many on the right, such as Gaitskell with his uncritical Atlanticism.

The most tentative area of Foot’s analysis of international relations, then and always, was his view of the United States. Unlike his father Isaac, who had been on an extensive morale-boosting lecture tour in 1943, Michael was no ‘special relationship’ man. He had relatively few close American contacts (though he had almost married one of them), and many of them were critics, like the venerable journalist Walter Lippman, the trade unionist Walter Reuther, or the left-wing humorous columnist Dorothy Parker. He was excited by New York City, but rarely visited America, and had limited appreciation of its history or geopolitics. He seldom reviewed books on American history after the time of Tom Paine. His view of America hovered somewhere midway between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, as he veered between ideological suspicion of American capitalism and endorsement of the visionary Marshall Plan and the military necessity for NATO. Nye Bevan was much the same. But at least in 1945–51 Foot could explore a range of options for relations with the US, compared with the confrontational atmosphere of the fifties between East and West, over China and the bomb above all.

On domestic issues, Foot’s Commons speeches followed a fairly unremarkable course in their calls for more socialism. He did not seem to specialize in any particular topic. However, there was one domestic theme on which he took the lead – the influence and political imbalance of the press. Here he was following the lead of his own union, the National Union of Journalists. He launched fierce attacks on the monopolistic right-wing proprietors who controlled at least 80 per cent of British newspapers. Lords Kemsley and Rothermere were his main targets, but Beaverbrook also, his once revered patron, did not escape his barbs. In July 1946 he joined over a hundred Labour MPs, several of them journalists, in asking for an inquiry into the ‘monopolistic tendencies’ in the British press. On 29 October he seconded a motion in the House by Haydn Davies calling for a Royal Commission on the concentration of ownership of newspapers. Almost ritualistically, he threw in personal abuse of key proprietors: he could not understand why the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had apologized to them for using the term ‘gutter press’.³⁴ As it happened, Foot was pushing an open door, since ministers as powerful as Dalton and Morrison lent their support, and a Royal Commission duly went about its work in 1947–49 under the erudite chairmanship of an Oxford classics don, Sir David Ross.

When Foot gave evidence before it on 12 November 1947 he attacked newspaper chains which were taking over local journals (including in Plymouth) and the interference of proprietors with editorial freedom.³⁵ His examples were drawn from his own experience under Beaverbrook. His most startling allegations concerned the ‘blacklists’ which Beaverbrook maintained, including the refusal to review plays by Noël Coward, concerts conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham or the film Proud Valley, which featured the left-wing black American baritone Paul Robeson. Kemsley, he said, also ran a blacklist – for a time none other than Beaverbrook himself was on it! In a second appearance before the inquiry on 18 December, he urged something like American anti-trust legislation to prevent multiple ownership, though this was opposed later by another witness, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst (the father of Foot’s former love Connie).³⁶ Foot gave a confident performance on both occasions, and dealt firmly with a somewhat patronizing enquiry from Lady Violet Bonham Carter. But, predictably, the Royal Commission’s findings were mundane. They saw no danger in the concentration of press ownership, and proposed merely the weak option of a Press Council, run by the newspapers themselves, to consider complaints.³⁷ Tribune denounced the report as ‘tepid and unimaginative’, and the Press Council proved a frail reed over the decades. Aneurin Bevan, who had drifted away from his pre-war connection with Beaverbrook, was to denounce Britain’s capitalist press as ‘the most prostituted in the world’.

Foot’s grievances against the Tory-run daily press continued to fester, not least with Express Newspapers, which pilloried the Labour government mercilessly. But if the Royal Commission had no major impact, his relations with Beaverbrook were certainly affected. The old press proprietor was evidently upset by Foot’s attacks after their close relationship, even though his own evidence to the Royal Commission made almost no direct reference to it. Friends proposed a reconciliation, and Beaverbrook himself wrote to Foot expressing his sadness at their estrangement: ‘The separation that has lasted too long has distressed me. The reunion will give me joy.’ Foot accepted an invitation to a dinner in honour of the old man’s seventieth birthday at the Savoy in early 1949. Invited to speak impromptu, he delighted Beaverbrook with a quotation about a venerable sage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he then revealed referred to Beelzebub. This comparison seems to have been in Foot’s mind for some time: in Tribune on 26 November 1948, ‘Beelzebub Wants the Job’ had compared Churchill to his infernal majesty.³⁸ At the Savoy, though, the magic of friendship was restored, the presence of Jill, whom the old man much liked, being a major contributory factor. Express Newspapers did not change its anti-socialist politics, and neither did Beaverbrook. But his affectionate relationship with Foot was henceforth unshakeable. In all the political crises of the fifties, Foot remained in the closest touch with his former employer, an almost filial and purely personal connection at a time when he was in the bitterest conflict with right-wing comrades in the Labour Party. Each materially helped the other. Beaverbrook helped Tribune with money, and would provide Michael and Jill with a temporary home. Foot was the vital link in introducing Beaverbrook to one of his closest friends, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor.³⁹ And he virtually never attacked the Beaverbrook press again.

With his parliamentary career stuck on the backbenches, and many of his left-wing crusades running into the sand, Michael Foot’s dominant interest in these post-war years lay in journalism. The distinguished labour correspondent Geoffrey Goodman, who first met him around 1950, felt that Foot was generally seen then as a pamphleteer and journalist rather than as an MP.⁴⁰ His natural milieu was having a drink and a gossip in a pub opposite the law courts with the Socialist Journalists group, including Ted and Barbara Castle, Ritchie Calder and Margaret Stewart of the News Chronicle. Younger journalists like Goodman, Mervyn Jones, Ian Aitken and Dick Clements were soon to join them. Foot still wrote for the Herald twice a week. One speciality here, as always, was fierce personal satire. In 1948, on lines similar to Guilty Men, he wrote a series of character sketches of ‘People in Politics’. These turned out to be all Tories, and were nearly all unflattering – Lord Salisbury, Lord Woolton, Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, Oliver Stanley, Sir Waldron Smithers, Alan Lennox-Boyd, Oliver Lyttelton, Ralph Assheton, Harold Macmillan, Richard Law, W. S. Morrison, Lord Hinchingbrooke, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Walter Elliot successively received unsparing attention. Woolton was ridiculed for the huge profits made by the Lewis’s department store over which he presided. Of Eden, it was said that his ‘polite’ resignation from the Chamberlain government in 1938 ‘left not a ripple on the political waters’. Macmillan retained an Edwardian flourish, ‘but the ardours of Young England have gone’. Lennox-Boyd was an imperialist supporter of Franco’s fascist regime who was ‘as unchanging as Stonehenge’. Most exotic of all was the far-right member for Orpington, Sir Waldron Smithers, ‘our best preserved specimen of Neolithic man … No one would really be surprised if he turned up one day in goatskin and sandals.’ The only one of Foot’s victims to be accorded significant praise was Robert Boothby, who sailed piratically ‘under the skull and crossbones’. Foot wondered why he remained a Tory at all.⁴¹

Invariably Foot’s columns for Percy Cudlipp in the Herald were Labour orthodox in tone, and seldom rocked the boat. When in 1949 his column turned to a kind of ‘Any Questions’ format, his responses were mild enough. Some were of later interest. Thus on 21 January 1949 he committed himself to the view that ‘The Labour Party does not believe in unilateral disarmament. It wants the other countries to agree to disarm but until that agreement is reached … it believes in maintaining adequate defence forces.’⁴² Of course he was talking here of conventional forces, not the prospect of nuclear weapons. Still, later on a very different note was struck.

But it was in the columns of Tribune that Foot’s talents expressed themselves most fully. He had been linked with the paper anew, through Bevan, when he left the Standard and joined the Tribune editorial board in 1945. He also became a director. The following year he shared the editorial role with Jon Kimche, but Kimche, after several rows with the board, was eventually dismissed following an unauthorized visit to Palestine. Foot then worked with Evelyn Anderson, a German Social Democrat, as co-editor. She was a woman of ability, but seemed obsessed with Russian perfidy in eastern Europe. With her limited understanding of the British Labour movement, she departed in 1948. Foot then became the senior editor himself, in partnership with Jennie Lee.⁴³ Tribune now became a more important component of the British weekly political press, and Foot’s editorial role added to the mystique that had surrounded him since Guilty Men. Tribune had always been a struggling publication. It had no money, and sales, at perhaps ten thousand copies (so far as the facts could be uncovered), were disappointing under both Kimche and Anderson. What it did have was Michael, charismatic and irreplaceable. From his paper-strewn office at 222 The Strand, he did everything on the newspaper. Keir Hardie had been similarly omnicompetent when he founded and edited the old ILP newspaper, the Labour Leader, in 1894. He not only wrote major articles on long, stuffy train journeys, but also the women’s column under the name of ‘Lily Bell’ and even children’s stories – ‘Donald the Pit Pony’, for instance.⁴⁴ Foot, also an MP, was more active still. His business manager, Peggy Duff, called him, affectionately enough, ‘the great panjandrum, the Beaverbrook of Tribune’.⁴⁵ With his Express Newspapers background, he took a close interest in the technicalities of typesetting. He was also much involved in the strategy of marketing and distribution, an important matter, because large bookshop chains like W. H. Smith refused to sell so left-wing a publication. Robert Edwards gives a memorable portrait of Foot at that time, suffering from insomnia and asthma, scratching his blistered wrists, yawning and smoking almost simultaneously. Enveloped in the debris and the stench of up to seventy daily Woodbines, he seemed almost tormented, older than his thirty-odd years.⁴⁶ Yet he was also inspirational to all who worked with him.

Most crucial of all, he was indefatigable in raising money, including from his own somewhat limited resources. He could not now turn to senior colleagues like Cripps, Bevan or George Strauss, because they were all Cabinet ministers. He got help from sympathetic capitalists, from Jack Hilton, from the Sieffs of Marks & Spencer (for his staunch support for Israel), from the accountant and Labour MP John Diamond, and increasingly from Howard Samuel, property developer and head of the publishing firm MacGibbon & Kee.

He spread his net more widely still. In the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case resulting from a fierce attack on the press baron Lord Kemsley in 1950, not only Tribune but its directors personally, including Foot and Jennie Lee, were threatened with bankruptcy. This followed the issue of Tribune published on 2 March 1950, which fiercely attacked the Evening Standard’s editor Herbert Gunn for scandalously suggesting a link between Klaus Emil Fuchs, the atomic bomb spy, and the Minister of Food John Strachey, a former Communist. Foot headed the article ‘Lower than Kemsley’, an echo of Bevan’s ‘lower than vermin’ attack on the Tories in 1948 and directed against the owner of the Daily Mail, a particular bête noire of Foot’s. Tribune, among other insults, spoke of journalists ‘watching without shame or protest the prostitution of their trade’. But he would find essential help of £3,000 in fighting the case from Lord Beaverbrook (the owner of the Standard, of course), due in large measure to the personal influence of Jill with his old boss. Even so, it was a financial mercy that in 1952 Foot and Tribune eventually won the day in the House of Lords.⁴⁷

Foot took his responsibility for what was a small, struggling newspaper very seriously. He venerated the craft of political journalism: Dean Swift, the nemesis of the Duke of Marlborough in 1711, was a model from the past here. In the more recent tradition of Labour journalism he had two particular inspirations. One was Robert Blatchford of the Clarion (and the Clarion vans which sold it), always a hero despite his fiercely pro-war nationalism both during the Boer War and in August 1914. Foot not only revered him as an editor and writer, but also honoured him in his lesser-known role as a literary critic. The other was George Lansbury’s brilliant Daily Herald in its first incarnation before 1914, which featured some of the most celebrated of writers, including Shaw, Wells and Hilaire Belloc, along with the matchless cartoons of the Australian Will Dyson. Foot had a special admiration for Lansbury’s achievements at the Herald, where he acted at one time both as chairman of the board of directors and as editor, given that he had no training as a journalist at all. At the present time, Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman was a yardstick – but also a competitor. Like Blatchford at the Clarion, Foot wanted Tribune to be well-written, punchy in style, and to a degree fun to read. He hoped to emulate the back half of the New Statesman, directed by its brilliant literary editor V. S. Pritchett. So he had on his staff some highly literate and intellectual colleagues. A star associate was George Orwell, who served as literary editor for a while and wrote a famously anarchic column, ‘As I Please’, for some time after the war, along with many other miscellaneous columns and reviews. There were also Tosco Fyvel, Orwell’s successor as literary editor, and the drama critic Kenneth Bruce Bain, who wrote under the name of Richard Findlater. Soon talented young political journalists were to come in, Robert Edwards and later an industrial relations specialist, Ian Aitken. Another young recruit, who joined the newspaper as a secretary after the 1950 election, was a Cambridge graduate, Elizabeth Thomas. At first she found it difficult to establish a settled relationship with Foot, who seemed shy and nervy, while his incessant smoking was off-putting. But she persevered, worked closely with him on all issues, rose to become literary editor of Tribune some years later, and began a close friendship that lasted well over half a century.⁴⁸ This unusual, gifted man, often distant in manner, with an awkward tendency to call women, even Jill, ‘my dear child’, had also a charm and a cultural dynamism which Elizabeth found magnetic. Women frequently did.

In 1948 and 1949 Tribune under Foot’s editorship kept up its robust commentary on domestic issues. But in general, with an election approaching, it was supportive of the government in its editorial comment. This aroused some anger among MPs of the further left. Tom Braddock accused the journal of currying favour with those in high places (unspecified), while Konni Zilliacus attacked it, only to be denounced for his ‘host of delusions’ in return.⁴⁹ Tribune’s columns featured several articles by Roy Jenkins, a young MP elected in a by-election for Southwark in 1948, praising the government’s economic performance, especially the buoyancy of exports to dollar areas (a yearly rate of £234 million for 1948 was quoted, as against £164 million in 1947). When Cripps was forced to devalue the pound in September 1949, Foot in Tribune staunchly defended the decision as a progressive alternative to Tory policies of wage-cutting, although he acknowledged that its success depended on ‘the understanding and self-discipline’ of the workers. Evidently there were divided counsels on the paper’s editorial board here, since Ian Mikardo expressed doubts on devaluing the pound unless it was accompanied by other policies, notably severe cuts in military expenditure.⁵⁰ But Tribune felt that things were going so well at home – with the buoyant effect of devaluing the pound, and iron and steel nationalization carrying on the tide of public ownership – that a general election could have been called in 1949. Attlee’s decision to soldier on was, however, accepted amiably enough.