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.