3

PURSUING GUILTY MEN
 (1940–1945) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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