Like the legendary shot fired at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, that heralded the American War of Independence, ‘the Election rings around the World!’, Foot excitedly told the readers of the Daily Herald.1 Labour’s socialist programme, as announced in the King’s Speech, was ‘the Boldest Adventure, the Greatest Crusade’. Labour had become the nation. Historical analogies with past revolutionaries from Cromwell to Garibaldi poured from his pen. In Westminster the new soi-disant revolutionaries, the 393 (shortly 394) Labour MPs, were sworn in immediately. Will Griffiths led a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ in the Commons in which Foot joined enthusiastically. From the very start, dramatic events unfolded: the next four weeks saw the Potsdam conference, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, VJ-Day marking the end of the war in Japan on 15 August, the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease by the Americans on 21 August, the new committee on the use of atomic energy, all of them to colour Foot’s views fundamentally for the remainder of his career. He felt thoroughly at home in his new surroundings. He enjoyed the buzz in the lobbies as a great progressive programme was launched – a National Health Service, nationalization of the mines, independence for India, all part of what the new Chancellor Hugh Dalton called ‘the flowing tide’ of socialism. Foot also liked the parliamentary atmosphere, the chatter and conspiracy in smoking room and tea room, the ready access to Fleet Street friends. He enjoyed too some of the extra-mural activities, especially the group of MPs who played chess. Leslie Hale was his favoured opponent. Foot was recognized as being amongst the best parliamentary players, though it was agreed that the strongest was Julius Silverman. Others of note were Douglas Jay, Reginald Paget, Maurice Edelman and Maurice Orbach, with Jim Callaghan another, less talented, enthusiast. The world’s dominant players were Russian, and Foot met several grandmasters when an international tournament was held in London in 1946.
Best of all, Foot made attractive new friends amongst the Labour backbenchers. All of them, predictably, were on the left, paid-up members of the awkward squad. Four were particularly important for him. Richard Crossman was a didactic former Oxford philosophy don who had written on Plato and Socrates. Foot first met him when Crossman arranged a social event at the Savoy Grill after Parliament assembled. It was Palestine that first drew them together, but they remained intellectual comrades from then on, even posthumously, when Foot was involved in the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Another long-term ally was Ian Mikardo, a bright but prickly left-winger who, unusually for Labour, was a business consultant. He was of rabbinical Jewish background and had strong views on Palestine. It was he who had moved the famous Reading resolution committing the party firmly to wholesale nationalization at party conference in December 1944, when Foot first met him. Mikardo later described his friendship with Foot as ‘one of the most precious things in my life’. Tom Driberg was an old colleague on Beaverbrook newspapers, writer of the ‘William Hickey’ column. Foot remained tolerant of his ex-Communism and particularly conspicuous homosexual exploits, which almost led to his prosecution, and reacted loyally when journalists asserted that Driberg had been a double agent, both for the KGB and MI5. There is no doubt that many of his contemporaries placed less trust in Driberg’s character and reliability than Foot did.2
Perhaps Foot’s most congenial friend was J. P. W. Mallalieu, commonly known as ‘Curly’, a man of many talents. He had been a fine sportsman at Cheltenham College and Oxford, and won a rugby blue as a stand-off half He had an exciting war in the navy, and published a best-selling book about it, Very Ordinary Seaman. He wrote a financial column in the New Statesman, ‘Other People’s Money’, and a weekly parliamentary sketch in Tribune. He became a great admirer of Nye Bevan, while his friendship with Foot was such that for a few months in 1953 Michael and Jill lived with him and his family. However, Mallalieu never supported CND, and actually became a navy minister under Harold Wilson in 1964, which put him beyond the pale for many on the left. Foot’s memories of him, however, were always affectionate. As a sign of it he gave his daughter Ann (later Baroness) Mallalieu a present of a book on fox-hunting, a strong enthusiasm of hers even though Foot detested the pastime.3
These men found other left-wing comrades early on in the new Parliament. Others with whom Foot had close relations were Harold Davies, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler, Will Griffiths, Hugh Delargy and the playwright Benn Levy (along with his beautiful American actress wife, Constance Cummings). Along with them was a friend of far longer standing, Barbara Castle, in the House as MP for Blackburn and the only one of them who had a government job, as PPS for Cripps at the Board of Trade. In his memoirs Mikardo lists some others in their circle: the Australian lawyer and keen European federalist R. W. G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, George Wigg, Donald Bruce and Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, who had been returned as a Common Wealth candidate at the election but then joined Labour. Occasionally they were joined by mavericks like Woodrow Wyatt, or even figures on the party right like the independent-minded barrister R. T. Paget, who simply enjoyed their company on social grounds. In addition, there were one or two incorrigible rebels who flitted in and out but really pursued their own path, like Sydney Silverman, a disputatious Jewish lawyer, and S. O. Davies, ex-miner and Marxist Welsh nationalist who sat for Keir Hardie’s old seat of Merthyr Tydfil and like him supported Welsh home rule. In 1946 came another maverick, Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s Welsh son-in-law who sat for South Ayrshire. He too was almost impossible to tie down.
This distinctly miscellaneous group of around twenty or so formed an identifiable collection of dissenters. Michael Foot was one of its most eminent members, and the most highly esteemed as a communicator. It is difficult to discern any wider influence on the labour movement. Only Crossman attempted to write a statement of political philosophy. Their socialism came across most clearly in their view of foreign policy. Most of them were middle-class journalists: trade unionists (other than members of the NUJ) were very rare. Until the growth of unrest over the anti-Soviet drift of Bevin’s foreign policy the following spring, they were little more than just kindred souls, closet critics in the tea room and the bar. They all favoured strongly socialist policies at home, which meant planning, controls and an uncompromising programme of public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. But in its first two years, the government itself seemed to pursue this policy with such zest that there was little to complain about. It was really in the more difficult period of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ in 1948–50, when the nationalizations effectively came to an end, that complaints arose. Nor did Commonwealth or colonial policy generate any great dissent. The left could justify everything, from the transfer of power in India to an unsuccessful attempt to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika. The major areas of criticism almost entirely involved foreign relations, and were largely offshoots of the early stages of the Cold War. To this should be added concern over Palestine, since almost all of them were passionately pro-Jewish and totally opposed to Bevin’s policy.
The members of the group were all instinctively oppositionists. Not one was seriously considered for government office, nor did they expect (or perhaps want) to be. Men like Mikardo or Driberg had backbench mindsets then and always. Until Bevan’s resignation as Minister of Health in April 1951, their influence upon either government or party policy was minimal, and in inverse proportion to their prominence as journalists. To call them ‘Labour’s Conscience’, as one text has done, seems remarkably inflated.4 Foot himself, a highly individual journalist with a past record of campaigns for the Socialist League and employment by Lord Beaverbrook, was considered unreliable, a gadfly, a meteor, the ultimate symbol of a party of protest, not a party of power. His activity was largely focused outside Parliament. The prospect of front-bench status seemed at this stage quite bizarre.
These Labour MPs were soft left, but no more than that. With the possible exception of Geoffrey Bing, a barrister later to be Kwame Nkrumah’s Attorney-General in Ghana, they all felt themselves to be located within the capacious reaches of the party’s broad church – only just, in some cases. They were quite distinct from a much smaller, more extreme group – D. N. Pritt, John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson (all later to be expelled from the party), along with William Warbey, Tom Braddock and Ronald Chamberlain. The French political commentator Bertrand de Jouvenel distinguished in 1949 between what he curiously called ‘the pacifist head’ of Cross-man and ‘the Russophil head’ of Zilliacus.5 These hard-left dissentients, consistently pro-Soviet and anti-American, were scarcely within the Labour tabernacle at all. They tended to keep their own counsel. Their role in the party was minute, though they could sometimes ally with Foot’s friends, as in the famous ‘stab in the back’ motion on foreign affairs in November 1946 (see page 121). They might be joined also by virtual pacifists like Rhys Davies or Reg Sorensen. But Foot’s friends were more in the mainstream. Foot himself, like Crossman, had always been anti-Stalinist. He never took the sentimental view that ‘left could speak to left’. From 1948 his attitude towards the Soviet Union hardened, as did that of Bevan. Foot and Crossman were foremost among those inspired by the anti-Communist thrust of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, not to mention those famous tracts against totalitarianism, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, written by the eminent recent Tribune columnist George Orwell. However blurred the boundaries might be on the more sectarian left of the parliamentary Labour Party, a fundamental divide between the future Bevanites and Tribunites, and the fellow-travelling fringe, was always apparent. With the two Communist MPs, William Gallacher and Philip Piratin, Foot had almost nothing to do, although he retained his admiration for Harry Pollitt, whom he considered a more considerable politician. He always felt that Pollitt’s return to Parliament for Rhondda West in 1945 (the Labour candidate, Mainwaring, beat him by just 972 votes) would have been politically valuable.
Foot’s contacts and manoeuvres in the new House were always with other backbenchers. His links with government ministers were mostly tenuous. He had scant enthusiasm for either Attlee or the Lord President Herbert Morrison, and clearly underestimated them both. The former he regarded as colourless and uninspired, and a wartime advocate of coalitionism; Morrison he saw as just a machine man, who wanted to curb backbenchers’ independence – unfairly so, since Morrison had shown much interest in ideas and policy-making before the war. For Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, Foot began with a higher regard. Relations were sufficiently good for Bevin to ask him to go on a fact-finding mission to Persia (Iran) in February 1946. The purpose was to assess Russian infiltration in that country, from which Russian and British troops were due to withdraw on 2 March (in fact the British had already left). There was also anxiety that the Russians were taking root in Persian Azerbaijan, through the Tudeh party. Foot’s colleague was a Conservative ex-brigadier, Anthony Head, which led to predictable jokes about ‘Head and Foot’, and they had extensive talks with Tudeh leaders. Foot was convinced after this visit that there was abundant evidence for Soviet Russia’s intended domination of Iran. He also wrote in the Daily Herald in somewhat prophetic terms about the dangers to Anglo-American oil, including the refinery at Abadan, and made many sensible suggestions about changing the relationship between the British heirs of imperialism and the Persian authorities. But Bevin took little interest, and nothing tangible resulted from what was Foot’s one and only official activity on behalf of a British government until 1974.6 But by the end of 1946, Bevin’s robust confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, and even more his blatantly anti-Jewish policy in Palestine, had earned him Foot’s anathema.
Nor was Foot in any sense a protégé of Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and patron of youth, as were centre-right figures like Gaitskell and Callaghan, along with Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey (neither yet an MP), to whom was added for a time Barbara Castle. In one rare exchange, Dalton wrote to rebuke Foot over factual inaccuracies in Tribune over the convertibility of sterling, with particular reference to the precise roles as advisers of Otto Niemeyer, Lord Catto and Wilfred Eady. Foot replied courteously, although he pressed the need for the Treasury to employ ‘more socialist economists’ to assist in ‘carrying out a Socialist policy’.7 The only one of the government’s big five with whom he had ever been close was, of course, Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade and eventually Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had shed his links with Tribune and they seldom saw each other now. Cripps replied to a query from Foot about the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 in purely formal terms.8
Foot was close to no other minister, with the obvious and seminal exception of Aneurin Bevan. With Foot working closely with Jennie Lee on the editorial board of Tribune, he served as a permanent socialist sounding-board for Labour’s Minister of Health as he pushed through the National Health Service. Their relationship became closer still after 1949, as Bevan found himself increasingly at odds with the drift of foreign and defence policy. Indeed, Foot, while increasingly critical of Attlee’s government, found his special relationship with Bevan made this one aspect of his parliamentary role rewarding, as he pressed Bevan to challenge government policy. Jennie Lee by contrast found the entire experience between 1945 and 1951 frustrating and depressing.9
Foot later felt his speeches in the 1945–51 Parliament fell short of the highest standard. They were too complicated in structure, and perhaps too rhetorical. Sometimes the Oxford Union debates did not seem far away. He sounded more like a journalist in Parliament than a parliamentarian; his father was later to express concern on this point. But he began splendidly. His maiden speech, focusing on foreign policy, on 20 August 1945, was a clear success.10 He complimented the King’s Speech in characteristic terms: ‘Oliver Cromwell could have hardly done a better job himself in the realm of foreign affairs.’ He proceeded with Guilty Men-type attacks on Churchill and other leading Conservatives for their pre-war sympathies with Mussolini and Franco, along with right-wing monarchs like King George of the Hellenes. He declared that Britain enjoyed both a conception of political liberty denied to the Russians and a conception of economic liberty not shared by the Americans. This ‘unique combination of treasures’ gave it ‘the commanding position of leadership if we choose to exercise it’. He wound up with a passionate affirmation of the socialist patriotism common at the time:
At the end of this great war and after this great election, the British people can play as conspicuous a part before the gaze of all mankind as they played in 1940. Hitler has left behind his terrible legacies – racial hatred, love of violence, hunger, homelessness, famine and death. Surely it is the duty of our great country not to be content with some secondary role, but rather to seek the abatement of those evils by the assertion and example of a much more positive democracy. As we look out across this stricken Continent and as we see a new hope in the struggle to be born across this wilderness of shattered faiths, may it not be our destiny as the freest and most democratic and a socialist power to stand between the living and the dead and stay the flames?
The following speaker, the Conservative Ian Orr-Ewing, congratulated Foot in the customary fashion as ‘the sole survivor of a family which has been for many years represented in this House’. Back home, Father Isaac wrote with paternal pride: ‘Congratulations! I knew you could do it. When people have said you had not the [parliamentary] style I said to myself “Just you wait, my lads!” And now you’ve shown the beggars.’11 Journalists also gave Foot a good press. Even The Times gave him some prominence.12 The New Statesman commented that the speech and its reception showed that ‘the House still likes a first rate verbal pamphleteer’. Hannen Swaffer observed that Foot spoke ‘with the vehemence of a Hyde Park orator’, presumably meant as a compliment, while his colleague Tom Driberg, himself no great orator, wrote in the Sunday Express that Foot was ‘a little too platform but fiery and fluent’.13
He made another major speech that autumn, on one of his special themes, Germany – the destruction of its economy, the diminution of its boundaries, the impoverishment of its people. The leitmotiv was obviously the need not to repeat the errors of 1919. But what stamped him as one of the awkward squad of the parliamentary left was the famous vote against the terms of the American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes with much difficulty.14 There was criticism in Cabinet both of the reduced amount of the loan, $4 billion, and the commercial rate of interest attached to it. But most criticisms focused on two other aspects. They were both part of what Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky has shown was a calculated American attempt to undermine Britain’s financial predominance, with a dogmatic US insistence on free-market arrangements and scant regard for Britain’s post-war difficulties which Keynes called ‘an economic Dunkirk’. The first of these two provisions was an insistence on an immediate multilateral liberalization of trade; the second was that sterling should become freely convertible into dollars, this to take effect in July 1947. Emanuel Shinwell and Bevan had both fiercely attacked these proposals in Cabinet on 5 December, but had been rebuffed.15
In the Commons, over seventy Conservatives voted against the terms on 13 December: their most effective voice was Robert Boothby, later Michael Foot’s weekly sparring partner on television’s In the News, who called the loan ‘an economic Munich’. They were joined by twenty-three Labour rebels, nearly all on the soft left – Foot, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle, Benn Levy, Raymond Blackburn, W. G. Cove – along with some less likely rebels like Maurice Edelman and James Callaghan. Those on the furthest left like Konni Zilliacus, along with the two Communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, supported the government. Foot did not speak in the debate, but his general view emerged in Tribune.16 He saw the terms of the loan as reflecting the advice of defeatist economists about a huge balance of payments deficit looming in 1946, and a victory for ‘money power’ which would prevent the payment of sterling debts to India, Egypt, Palestine and other colonized powers. Foot had no expertise in international finance (and he was hostile to the Bretton Woods agreement for international currency stabilization concluded with the US in 1944), but he felt instinctively that the loan was part of a long-term American strategy to destroy British independence in foreign as well as economic policy. He told Dalton of his total opposition to convertibility. Hard-headed economic historians have in the main endorsed the general line of his instinctive criticisms. The catastrophic convertibility of sterling in July – August 1947 lasted barely a month.
The vote against the US loan (which the government won easily) confirmed Foot’s role as a critic. He spoke thereafter on domestic matters many times. On his home base, he dutifully paid due attention to the needs of Devonport and other dockyards, for all his frequent calls for cuts in arms spending. But he made most impact in the House on foreign policy issues. A central one throughout 1946–47 was the condition of Germany, made the more desperate by the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of German refugees from eastern Europe. Here his closest associate was his old publisher, Victor Gollancz, whose compassion was moved by the starvation amongst the German population. He and Foot spoke at a mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 26 November 1945 to raise awareness of the plight of German children. Other speakers were Labour’s Richard Stokes, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (who had almost won Newark for Labour in 1945), and Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Arthur Salter, both independents.17 Foot also came together with Gollancz and Stokes to form the Save Europe Now (SEN) campaign; Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins were amongst the other committee members, and Peggy Duff was secretary, so there was some overlap with CND later. Others prominent were Lord Lindsay, former Master of Balliol, and the Bishop of Chichester. The campaign went on for two years, attempting to persuade the government to encourage British citizens to either surrender some of their food coupons for the Germans or else send food parcels. SEN saw Foot at his most idealistic and far-sighted.18
In the House, he described how ‘something like famine’ prevailed in Germany, where food rations had fallen from the starvation level of 1,500 calories per day to as low as seven hundred. His solution for finding the relevant resources was to cease to pay for large occupying forces in Germany, and to make further arms reductions in the Middle and Far East. He pleaded for a discussion of the principles underlying British foreign policy. One ray of light was the compassionate, if short-lived, policy for social reconstruction of Lord Pakenham as Minister for Germany after 1945, which Foot saw as a kind of anticipation of the Marshall Plan. Foot’s view of the German problem was a comprehensive one. He urged the need for a political reconstruction with decentralized institutions, but also warned of the long-term dangers of Germany’s being divided into eastern and western zones. He warned against ‘an anti-German mania’ like the lunatic plan devised during the war by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office for Germany to be reduced to a purely pastoral economy. On the other hand, like other British socialists he found it hard to make common cause with his comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, since their leader, Kurt Schumacher, demanded early German reunification and spoke in alarmingly nationalist terms, with frequent use of the word Reich. Not until 1949, with the impact of the Marshall Plan on its economy and a stable constitution, did West Germany progress, albeit under the long-term rule of Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Christian Democrats, and not under the still notionally Marxist SDP.
An even stronger concern in Foot’s Commons speeches was the growing violence and political disintegration in Palestine. By 1946 the region was in near chaos. There was unending tension between Jews and Arabs; a mounting exodus of Jews to Palestine after the Holocaust, with US support, despite determined efforts by Bevin and the British government to prevent it; and open guerrilla warfare by Jewish paramilitary or terrorist groups, the Haganah and Irgun Zvei Leumi, against the British forces stationed in Palestine. They were reinforced by the violent Stern Gang. The destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, with the loss of ninety-one lives, caused an especial shock to a populace not inured to long-term terrorism.
As a pillar of the Palestine Committee, Michael Foot was among those who hoped that a potentially pro-Jewish Labour government would begin a new departure after the long saga of bitterness following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But he was to be horrified by Bevin’s policy. Britain’s refusal to grant more than a minimum number of immigration visas (a mere 1,500 a month at first), the inhumane efforts to prevent the sailing of the Exodus in 1946 with its refugees from the prison camps, the refusal to contemplate a Jewish state, worst of all what seemed to be the blatant anti-Semitism of the British Foreign Office, caused immense shock. Foot’s zeal for a state of Israel was reinforced by his renewal of contact with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that Foot was now ‘very anti-Bolshie’; Foot helped Koestler by pressing the Home Office to speed up a visa for his aged Hungarian mother. He wrote frequently on Palestine in Tribune, and denounced Bevin for not admitting 100,000 Jewish displaced persons into Palestine immediately. Another strong influence was his new friend Richard Crossman. Previously pro-Arab and, by his own confession, anti-Semitic, Crossman’s membership of an Anglo-American committee of inquiry into Palestine turned him into a fervent Zionist. It urged an immediate agreement to certificates for 100,000 Jewish immigrants: Bevin treated this with contempt, and in effect sought to continue the pre-war policy towards the Jews.
The names of Crossman and Foot were attached to a particularly effective thirty-two-page pamphlet for Gollancz in the autumn of 1946, A Palestine Munich?. In fact much of it, including the entire first section, was written by Arthur Koestler.19 It detailed the restrictive immigration policy up to 1939 and the rise of Jewish and Arab resistance. The 1939 White Paper, calling for a future Arab Federation in Palestine with highly restricted Jewish immigration, was dismissed as a bribe to the Arabs to prevent their sympathizing with Germany. The pamphlet called for the government to allow full immigration of Jews up to the limit of Palestine’s capacity to absorb them, and not to use force of arms to endorse what Labour ministers themselves had called a Palestine Munich. A promise of early independence to the Palestinian Arabs would mean ‘an Anglo – Jewish war’. The booklet’s political solution, in the absence of one being suggested from the Foreign Office, was a partitioned Palestine free of American military involvement, consisting of a ‘Judean state’ based on large-scale immigration, and an Arab state, with the central mountain region transferred to the Kingdom of Transjordan. At this point Britain would withdraw its forces, and self-interest would compel both the new Jewish and Arab states to collaborate and to come to terms with each other. It was the most cogent statement by pro-Jewish Labour representatives yet written, and it was predictably dismissed out of hand by all Arab representatives. Basically, it reflected Koestler’s totally one-sided Jewish sympathies (he wrote in support of the Stern Gang’s operations), and got nowhere. As it happened, Koestler greatly disliked Israel when he moved there, quarrelled with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and old friends like Teddy Kollek, and rapidly returned to Britain amidst acrimony all round.20
Through Tribune, and to a far lesser extent through his Daily Herald column (which usually was safely loyalist), Foot kept up his campaign on behalf of the Jews in 1947–48. The British government, in which the Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones was given the poisoned chalice of Palestine, offered no way forward. Creech-Jones’s partition proposals collapsed; Bevin’s proposal for five more years of British trusteeship offered nothing new; the United Nations came out with a scheme for immediate partition which Bevin promptly rejected. In the end the British government, harassed by the huge support costs of maintaining troops in Palestine, decided simply to pull its forces out, and withdrew them by 15 May 1948. Attlee quoted the precedent of the withdrawal from India. But there the British government had produced an agreed scheme for a political settlement that would follow. In Palestine there was none. The Foreign Office imagined that the various Arab armies would simply drive the Jews into the sea. The successful creation of the state of Israel in 1949 astonished everybody. Foot, of course, was delighted that a Jewish state had come into being against the odds. In an adjournment debate on 12 August 1947 he had called for the early withdrawal of British forces. The British people themselves were delighted to see their troops withdrawn from a violent land, but it was impossible to see the Palestine settlement as anything other than a shambles and a catastrophe. Foot might hope that the Jewish people would enter a more settled phase after August 1948. In fact, their tragedy was to haunt him and the world for the remainder of his life.
His main concern in Tribune columns and Commons speeches, though, was the deepening crisis in relations with Russia. Throughout 1946, especially in Germany, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the atmosphere seemed ever darker. Of all the commentators on the left, Michael Foot was one of the most outspoken in denouncing Russian policy in eastern Europe after the war. In the press he condemned Russia’s intimidation of the socialists in Poland, its pressure upon Yugoslavia, its totalitarian control of eastern Germany.21 Beyond Europe, his visit to Iran had convinced him of Russian dreams of domination in the Middle East as well. On the other hand, he shared the anxiety common on the left at the drift towards a full-scale military alliance with the United States. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March terrified him. Dissatisfaction with Bevin’s policy built up amongst Labour MPs in 1946, and finally spilled over, with a critical letter sent to Attlee on 29 October by a group of twenty-one Labour backbenchers urging that a democratic socialist Britain ought to pursue a genuine ‘middle way’ between American ‘free enterprise’ and Russian totalitarianism. They were far from being a far-left caucus; they included Crossman, Foot, Levy and Silverman, but also Callaghan and Woodrow Wyatt. A few days later Crossman circulated an amendment to the Address which urged ‘full Socialist planning and control’ of the world’s resources, and ‘a democratic and constructive Socialist alternative to the otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet Communism’. In the end, forty-three Labour MPs put their names to it; among them, in addition to Crossman, were Levy, Silverman and Michael Foot. The name of Jennie Lee, Bevan’s wife, indicated that at least one Cabinet minister was unhappy too.22
Crossman moved his amendment on 18 November 1946, though he lessened its impact from the start by saying he would not call a division.23 In sharp terms, he asked the government to reject proposals for an Anglo – American military alliance, and asked whether precise arrangements in terms of arms sharing and staff discussions were already under way. Since Bevin was away in New York, Attlee himself replied, mildly criticizing Crossman’s speech as totally one-sided. Two Scottish ILP members mischievously moved Crossman’s amendment to a vote, and the government won by 353 to 0, with several Labour abstentions, including Foot. But left-wing anxiety about British foreign policy moved onto a new stage two months later when the ‘Truman doctrine’ for US military aid to potential victims of Soviet aggression resulted in new American military involvement in Greece and Turkey. Talks at the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York had effectively broken down. Talk of a Cold War, an iron curtain and even a possible third world war became commonplace.
Michael Foot had taken little part in the Crossman amendment debate, and indeed had been under fire himself from the left for being too anti-Soviet in Tribune. He remained so in the Daily Herald, and satirized Molotov’s plans for ‘European confusion’.24 But he also now became a leader of the most significant protest against government policy since the general election. Some left-wing MPs now began to meet regularly to prepare plans: led by Crossman, Foot and Mikardo, they also included Stephen Swingler, Harold Davies, Mallalieu, Benn Levy, Kim Mackay and Woodrow Wyatt. They met against a background of a serious fuel crisis in the severe winter of early 1947, and amidst fears that Labour’s socialist advance was slowing down. The economic crisis of the summer of 1947 was another major factor. The outcome was Keep Left, a pamphlet which appeared in May 1947, in time for the party conference at Margate.25 It was the product of a draft ‘red paper’ worked out with Foot and Mikardo at Richard Crossman’s home at Radnage in Buckinghamshire. It included calls for more socialist planning in domestic policies, but what caught the imagination were the criticisms of foreign and defence policy, its call for Britain to stand aloof from confrontations between America and Russia, to withdraw its troops worldwide, and to demobilize rather than embark on conscription. Some of this was the work of Crossman, especially a chapter on ‘The Job Abroad’ and passages on international affairs more generally. But another key author was Michael Foot, whose contribution focused on the domestic economic scene, notably ‘socialist planning’ and tighter controls on capital and labour. With his other outlets in the press, he was typecast as a symbol of Keep Left from then on.
Foot’s viewpoint was an amalgam of socialism, patriotism and anti-militarism. Britain’s international role would be the product of the success of its socialist achievement at home. It would offer moral leadership. Foot’s answer to the problems of the world was a third force in which democratic socialist Britain would join with comrades in western Europe. Bevan had called for one during the war. It would stand apart equally from the military adventures of both the United States and the Soviet Union: ‘The cause of British socialism and the cause of British independence and the cause of world sanity are indissolubly bound together.’26 The extent to which Foot was identified with a version of a federal united Europe at this time is worth underlining. The later defender of British parliamentary sovereignty against the encroachments of Brussels was in 1946–48 advocating ‘a United States of Europe’. It would build a customs union, and plan the coordination of heavy industries. Most of all, it would conduct its own foreign policy and support the Third World with development programmes, bulk commodity purchase and fair trade.
Foot was never a European federalist to the same degree as Kim Mackay, who was influenced by the constitutional arrangements of his native Australia. He cherished Parliament too much. His vision of western Europe was as a socialist-led Europe: the voice he usually quoted as representative of Continental Europe was the veteran French socialist leader Léon Blum. Along with Crossman, Mikardo and others on the left, Foot continued to champion European unity in this form – even though a major difficulty now was that the left in both France and Italy was preponderantly Communist. In May 1948 he was amongst those disciplined by Transport House for attending the founding conference for the Council of Europe at The Hague, where the main event was a visionary speech by Winston Churchill. A ‘Europe Group’ was formed amongst Labour MPs on 2 December 1946, with Kim Mackay as its chairman. Foot was amongst those, including Crossman, Mikardo, George Wigg and Barbara Castle, who joined in a second wave a few weeks later.27 It conducted discussions on policy with the French and other socialist parties, and remained active until late 1949.
And yet, the impact of Keep Left was short-lived. At the Margate conference the government produced its own counter-pamphlet, Cards on the Table (actually written by Denis Healey of Transport House’s international department). Ernest Bevin crushed his miscellaneous critics with an overwhelming conference speech in which he famously condemned the ‘stab in the back’ and the disloyalty of the Crossman amendment. Its author became widely known as ‘double Crossman’ from then on. In Tribune Foot was sceptical about Bevin’s easy rhetorical triumph, and critical of the ‘listlessness, almost indifference’ of the debates on international affairs.28 He listed key unanswered questions, notably ‘What role are we to play as the foremost European power?’
But in fact it was events which finally undermined the socialist federal argument of Keep Left. Soon after party conference, the US Secretary of State George Marshall announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, his proposals initially covering the Soviet Union as well. Soon the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was working out schemes for the mobilization and distribution of aid in western Europe, to the huge advantage of the ailing British economy. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union became more and indefensible for a democratic socialist like Foot. He became a champion of anti-Communist dissidents in eastern Europe. He particularly admired Milovan Djilas’s work of political theory The New Class (1957), and the Montenegrin intellectual was to be a guest in the Foots’ Hampstead home on several occasions later. In April 1948 Foot argued strongly against the telegram sent to Pietro Nenni, signed initially by thirty-seven Labour MPs (fifteen of whom subsequently disavowed supporting it), backing his left-wing Italian Socialist Party, rather than the right-wing Saragat socialist grouping. Foot, never considered as a possible signatory on any of the lists of possible supporters, wrote in Tribune that the Nenni telegram was ‘an act of sabotage against the declared policy of the party’, and gave the impression that a large section of the Labour Party would welcome a Communist victory at the polls in Italy. Both as a libertarian and an admirer of Silone, Foot could never endorse such a policy. A hysterical letter of protest from the near-Communist Tom Braddock was ignored.29 Other key events in 1948 which reinforced Foot’s anti-Communism were successively the ‘coup’ in February which put Czechoslovakia under Soviet control, the schism with Tito in Yugoslavia (whom Foot solidly defended until his imprisonment of Djilas alienated him from the government of Belgrade) and, most decisively, the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948–49: this last led even Aneurin Bevan to propose that Britain should send in tanks through the Soviet zone to bring in essential supplies. Foot in Tribune and in Parliament symbolized the new mood. He was particularly moved by events in Czechoslovakia; he had Czech socialist friends, and went with Crossman and Wigg on a mission to the country just after the Communist coup. In November 1948 Foot warmly applauded the election of Harry Truman as US President: he had no sympathy for the fellow-travelling left-wing challenge of Henry Wallace.30 The creation of NATO, largely under Bevin’s aegis, in the spring of 1949 was as warmly applauded by Foot in Tribune as by the party mainstream, and he publicly rebuked Mikardo for opposing it.31 ‘The Futility of Mr Priestley’ ridiculed a future comrade in CND for regarding the USA and the Soviet Union as equally anti-democratic.
Many of the criticisms of Bevin’s foreign policy from Foot and others were cogent and well-informed. But they are mainly important as anticipations of the later Bevanites. In the 1940s they struck many of the right notes at the wrong time. It was difficult to suggest an alternative foreign policy at a time when Stalin seemed so threatening and so obdurate. The era of post-Stalin ‘peaceful existence’ lay many years off. A socialist-led federal Europe was never more than a pipe-dream; the ‘western union’ which Britain did lead into being in the Brussels Treaty of March 1948 was limited and functional, geared heavily to defence issues, and in no sense a ‘third force’.
These events left Michael Foot with a sense of frustration. Bevin’s foreign policy showed ‘a clean sheet of failure’, yet there seemed no viable alternative. In practice, like his friends and colleagues Koestler and Orwell he trod the path of a regretful but firm anti-Communism. The Keep Left group re-formed (without Foot) in July 1949, and drew on the expertise of Oxford economists such as Thomas Balogh and David Worswick in producing the pamphlet Keeping Left, which twelve Labour MPs signed. But Keep Left had lost impetus, and tended to fragment. It was a highly miscellaneous group at the best of times. The effect of all this on the career of Michael Foot was mixed: because of his greater prominence and articulacy, involvement with the left tended to heighten suspicion of him in the party as irresponsible or disloyal. Some comrades did not like him anyway. Hugh Gaitskell, his later nemesis, writing after the Durham miners’ gala in August 1948, found Foot ‘rather strange. He never seems to talk except when making speeches, and was most silent and reserved all the time.’ Jennie Lee, he added, was ‘a very stupid woman’.32
And yet there is much to Foot’s credit. On both Germany and Palestine he voiced an unpopular cause with a blend of idealism and hard fact. On the origins of the Cold War, without lapsing into what Marx called ‘infantile leftism’, he raised perfectly proper questions about the robotic confrontation into which Bevin was dragged at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in 1946–47. In questioning Soviet foreign policy, the extent to which it posed a military threat to the West and the viability of Britain’s huge overseas commitments, his judgements became the conventional wisdom years later. Even at the time, they crystallized some of the discontent amongst the left-wing middle-class intelligentsia of which Tosco Fyvel wrote in Tribune.33 At the very least, Foot was surely right in urging a debate on fundamental geopolitical principles. On Europe, his enthusiasm for closer union was part of a wider critique of British foreign policy, and his vision of a united Europe was distinctly vague. Even so, the European opportunity was an immense gap in Britain’s world view after 1945. Some of the Labour left picked it up more rapidly than many on the right, such as Gaitskell with his uncritical Atlanticism.
The most tentative area of Foot’s analysis of international relations, then and always, was his view of the United States. Unlike his father Isaac, who had been on an extensive morale-boosting lecture tour in 1943, Michael was no ‘special relationship’ man. He had relatively few close American contacts (though he had almost married one of them), and many of them were critics, like the venerable journalist Walter Lippman, the trade unionist Walter Reuther, or the left-wing humorous columnist Dorothy Parker. He was excited by New York City, but rarely visited America, and had limited appreciation of its history or geopolitics. He seldom reviewed books on American history after the time of Tom Paine. His view of America hovered somewhere midway between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, as he veered between ideological suspicion of American capitalism and endorsement of the visionary Marshall Plan and the military necessity for NATO. Nye Bevan was much the same. But at least in 1945–51 Foot could explore a range of options for relations with the US, compared with the confrontational atmosphere of the fifties between East and West, over China and the bomb above all.
On domestic issues, Foot’s Commons speeches followed a fairly unremarkable course in their calls for more socialism. He did not seem to specialize in any particular topic. However, there was one domestic theme on which he took the lead – the influence and political imbalance of the press. Here he was following the lead of his own union, the National Union of Journalists. He launched fierce attacks on the monopolistic right-wing proprietors who controlled at least 80 per cent of British newspapers. Lords Kemsley and Rothermere were his main targets, but Beaverbrook also, his once revered patron, did not escape his barbs. In July 1946 he joined over a hundred Labour MPs, several of them journalists, in asking for an inquiry into the ‘monopolistic tendencies’ in the British press. On 29 October he seconded a motion in the House by Haydn Davies calling for a Royal Commission on the concentration of ownership of newspapers. Almost ritualistically, he threw in personal abuse of key proprietors: he could not understand why the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had apologized to them for using the term ‘gutter press’.34 As it happened, Foot was pushing an open door, since ministers as powerful as Dalton and Morrison lent their support, and a Royal Commission duly went about its work in 1947–49 under the erudite chairmanship of an Oxford classics don, Sir David Ross.
When Foot gave evidence before it on 12 November 1947 he attacked newspaper chains which were taking over local journals (including in Plymouth) and the interference of proprietors with editorial freedom.35 His examples were drawn from his own experience under Beaverbrook. His most startling allegations concerned the ‘blacklists’ which Beaverbrook maintained, including the refusal to review plays by Noël Coward, concerts conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham or the film Proud Valley, which featured the left-wing black American baritone Paul Robeson. Kemsley, he said, also ran a blacklist – for a time none other than Beaverbrook himself was on it! In a second appearance before the inquiry on 18 December, he urged something like American anti-trust legislation to prevent multiple ownership, though this was opposed later by another witness, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst (the father of Foot’s former love Connie).36 Foot gave a confident performance on both occasions, and dealt firmly with a somewhat patronizing enquiry from Lady Violet Bonham Carter. But, predictably, the Royal Commission’s findings were mundane. They saw no danger in the concentration of press ownership, and proposed merely the weak option of a Press Council, run by the newspapers themselves, to consider complaints.37 Tribune denounced the report as ‘tepid and unimaginative’, and the Press Council proved a frail reed over the decades. Aneurin Bevan, who had drifted away from his pre-war connection with Beaverbrook, was to denounce Britain’s capitalist press as ‘the most prostituted in the world’.
Foot’s grievances against the Tory-run daily press continued to fester, not least with Express Newspapers, which pilloried the Labour government mercilessly. But if the Royal Commission had no major impact, his relations with Beaverbrook were certainly affected. The old press proprietor was evidently upset by Foot’s attacks after their close relationship, even though his own evidence to the Royal Commission made almost no direct reference to it. Friends proposed a reconciliation, and Beaverbrook himself wrote to Foot expressing his sadness at their estrangement: ‘The separation that has lasted too long has distressed me. The reunion will give me joy.’ Foot accepted an invitation to a dinner in honour of the old man’s seventieth birthday at the Savoy in early 1949. Invited to speak impromptu, he delighted Beaverbrook with a quotation about a venerable sage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he then revealed referred to Beelzebub. This comparison seems to have been in Foot’s mind for some time: in Tribune on 26 November 1948, ‘Beelzebub Wants the Job’ had compared Churchill to his infernal majesty.38 At the Savoy, though, the magic of friendship was restored, the presence of Jill, whom the old man much liked, being a major contributory factor. Express Newspapers did not change its anti-socialist politics, and neither did Beaverbrook. But his affectionate relationship with Foot was henceforth unshakeable. In all the political crises of the fifties, Foot remained in the closest touch with his former employer, an almost filial and purely personal connection at a time when he was in the bitterest conflict with right-wing comrades in the Labour Party. Each materially helped the other. Beaverbrook helped Tribune with money, and would provide Michael and Jill with a temporary home. Foot was the vital link in introducing Beaverbrook to one of his closest friends, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor.39 And he virtually never attacked the Beaverbrook press again.
With his parliamentary career stuck on the backbenches, and many of his left-wing crusades running into the sand, Michael Foot’s dominant interest in these post-war years lay in journalism. The distinguished labour correspondent Geoffrey Goodman, who first met him around 1950, felt that Foot was generally seen then as a pamphleteer and journalist rather than as an MP.40 His natural milieu was having a drink and a gossip in a pub opposite the law courts with the Socialist Journalists group, including Ted and Barbara Castle, Ritchie Calder and Margaret Stewart of the News Chronicle. Younger journalists like Goodman, Mervyn Jones, Ian Aitken and Dick Clements were soon to join them. Foot still wrote for the Herald twice a week. One speciality here, as always, was fierce personal satire. In 1948, on lines similar to Guilty Men, he wrote a series of character sketches of ‘People in Politics’. These turned out to be all Tories, and were nearly all unflattering – Lord Salisbury, Lord Woolton, Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, Oliver Stanley, Sir Waldron Smithers, Alan Lennox-Boyd, Oliver Lyttelton, Ralph Assheton, Harold Macmillan, Richard Law, W. S. Morrison, Lord Hinchingbrooke, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Walter Elliot successively received unsparing attention. Woolton was ridiculed for the huge profits made by the Lewis’s department store over which he presided. Of Eden, it was said that his ‘polite’ resignation from the Chamberlain government in 1938 ‘left not a ripple on the political waters’. Macmillan retained an Edwardian flourish, ‘but the ardours of Young England have gone’. Lennox-Boyd was an imperialist supporter of Franco’s fascist regime who was ‘as unchanging as Stonehenge’. Most exotic of all was the far-right member for Orpington, Sir Waldron Smithers, ‘our best preserved specimen of Neolithic man … No one would really be surprised if he turned up one day in goatskin and sandals.’ The only one of Foot’s victims to be accorded significant praise was Robert Boothby, who sailed piratically ‘under the skull and crossbones’. Foot wondered why he remained a Tory at all.41
Invariably Foot’s columns for Percy Cudlipp in the Herald were Labour orthodox in tone, and seldom rocked the boat. When in 1949 his column turned to a kind of ‘Any Questions’ format, his responses were mild enough. Some were of later interest. Thus on 21 January 1949 he committed himself to the view that ‘The Labour Party does not believe in unilateral disarmament. It wants the other countries to agree to disarm but until that agreement is reached … it believes in maintaining adequate defence forces.’42 Of course he was talking here of conventional forces, not the prospect of nuclear weapons. Still, later on a very different note was struck.
But it was in the columns of Tribune that Foot’s talents expressed themselves most fully. He had been linked with the paper anew, through Bevan, when he left the Standard and joined the Tribune editorial board in 1945. He also became a director. The following year he shared the editorial role with Jon Kimche, but Kimche, after several rows with the board, was eventually dismissed following an unauthorized visit to Palestine. Foot then worked with Evelyn Anderson, a German Social Democrat, as co-editor. She was a woman of ability, but seemed obsessed with Russian perfidy in eastern Europe. With her limited understanding of the British Labour movement, she departed in 1948. Foot then became the senior editor himself, in partnership with Jennie Lee.43 Tribune now became a more important component of the British weekly political press, and Foot’s editorial role added to the mystique that had surrounded him since Guilty Men. Tribune had always been a struggling publication. It had no money, and sales, at perhaps ten thousand copies (so far as the facts could be uncovered), were disappointing under both Kimche and Anderson. What it did have was Michael, charismatic and irreplaceable. From his paper-strewn office at 222 The Strand, he did everything on the newspaper. Keir Hardie had been similarly omnicompetent when he founded and edited the old ILP newspaper, the Labour Leader, in 1894. He not only wrote major articles on long, stuffy train journeys, but also the women’s column under the name of ‘Lily Bell’ and even children’s stories – ‘Donald the Pit Pony’, for instance.44 Foot, also an MP, was more active still. His business manager, Peggy Duff, called him, affectionately enough, ‘the great panjandrum, the Beaverbrook of Tribune’.45 With his Express Newspapers background, he took a close interest in the technicalities of typesetting. He was also much involved in the strategy of marketing and distribution, an important matter, because large bookshop chains like W. H. Smith refused to sell so left-wing a publication. Robert Edwards gives a memorable portrait of Foot at that time, suffering from insomnia and asthma, scratching his blistered wrists, yawning and smoking almost simultaneously. Enveloped in the debris and the stench of up to seventy daily Woodbines, he seemed almost tormented, older than his thirty-odd years.46 Yet he was also inspirational to all who worked with him.
Most crucial of all, he was indefatigable in raising money, including from his own somewhat limited resources. He could not now turn to senior colleagues like Cripps, Bevan or George Strauss, because they were all Cabinet ministers. He got help from sympathetic capitalists, from Jack Hilton, from the Sieffs of Marks & Spencer (for his staunch support for Israel), from the accountant and Labour MP John Diamond, and increasingly from Howard Samuel, property developer and head of the publishing firm MacGibbon & Kee.
He spread his net more widely still. In the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case resulting from a fierce attack on the press baron Lord Kemsley in 1950, not only Tribune but its directors personally, including Foot and Jennie Lee, were threatened with bankruptcy. This followed the issue of Tribune published on 2 March 1950, which fiercely attacked the Evening Standard’s editor Herbert Gunn for scandalously suggesting a link between Klaus Emil Fuchs, the atomic bomb spy, and the Minister of Food John Strachey, a former Communist. Foot headed the article ‘Lower than Kemsley’, an echo of Bevan’s ‘lower than vermin’ attack on the Tories in 1948 and directed against the owner of the Daily Mail, a particular bête noire of Foot’s. Tribune, among other insults, spoke of journalists ‘watching without shame or protest the prostitution of their trade’. But he would find essential help of £3,000 in fighting the case from Lord Beaverbrook (the owner of the Standard, of course), due in large measure to the personal influence of Jill with his old boss. Even so, it was a financial mercy that in 1952 Foot and Tribune eventually won the day in the House of Lords.47
Foot took his responsibility for what was a small, struggling newspaper very seriously. He venerated the craft of political journalism: Dean Swift, the nemesis of the Duke of Marlborough in 1711, was a model from the past here. In the more recent tradition of Labour journalism he had two particular inspirations. One was Robert Blatchford of the Clarion (and the Clarion vans which sold it), always a hero despite his fiercely pro-war nationalism both during the Boer War and in August 1914. Foot not only revered him as an editor and writer, but also honoured him in his lesser-known role as a literary critic. The other was George Lansbury’s brilliant Daily Herald in its first incarnation before 1914, which featured some of the most celebrated of writers, including Shaw, Wells and Hilaire Belloc, along with the matchless cartoons of the Australian Will Dyson. Foot had a special admiration for Lansbury’s achievements at the Herald, where he acted at one time both as chairman of the board of directors and as editor, given that he had no training as a journalist at all. At the present time, Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman was a yardstick – but also a competitor. Like Blatchford at the Clarion, Foot wanted Tribune to be well-written, punchy in style, and to a degree fun to read. He hoped to emulate the back half of the New Statesman, directed by its brilliant literary editor V. S. Pritchett. So he had on his staff some highly literate and intellectual colleagues. A star associate was George Orwell, who served as literary editor for a while and wrote a famously anarchic column, ‘As I Please’, for some time after the war, along with many other miscellaneous columns and reviews. There were also Tosco Fyvel, Orwell’s successor as literary editor, and the drama critic Kenneth Bruce Bain, who wrote under the name of Richard Findlater. Soon talented young political journalists were to come in, Robert Edwards and later an industrial relations specialist, Ian Aitken. Another young recruit, who joined the newspaper as a secretary after the 1950 election, was a Cambridge graduate, Elizabeth Thomas. At first she found it difficult to establish a settled relationship with Foot, who seemed shy and nervy, while his incessant smoking was off-putting. But she persevered, worked closely with him on all issues, rose to become literary editor of Tribune some years later, and began a close friendship that lasted well over half a century.48 This unusual, gifted man, often distant in manner, with an awkward tendency to call women, even Jill, ‘my dear child’, had also a charm and a cultural dynamism which Elizabeth found magnetic. Women frequently did.
In 1948 and 1949 Tribune under Foot’s editorship kept up its robust commentary on domestic issues. But in general, with an election approaching, it was supportive of the government in its editorial comment. This aroused some anger among MPs of the further left. Tom Braddock accused the journal of currying favour with those in high places (unspecified), while Konni Zilliacus attacked it, only to be denounced for his ‘host of delusions’ in return.49 Tribune’s columns featured several articles by Roy Jenkins, a young MP elected in a by-election for Southwark in 1948, praising the government’s economic performance, especially the buoyancy of exports to dollar areas (a yearly rate of £234 million for 1948 was quoted, as against £164 million in 1947). When Cripps was forced to devalue the pound in September 1949, Foot in Tribune staunchly defended the decision as a progressive alternative to Tory policies of wage-cutting, although he acknowledged that its success depended on ‘the understanding and self-discipline’ of the workers. Evidently there were divided counsels on the paper’s editorial board here, since Ian Mikardo expressed doubts on devaluing the pound unless it was accompanied by other policies, notably severe cuts in military expenditure.50 But Tribune felt that things were going so well at home – with the buoyant effect of devaluing the pound, and iron and steel nationalization carrying on the tide of public ownership – that a general election could have been called in 1949. Attlee’s decision to soldier on was, however, accepted amiably enough.
In its views of foreign policy, Tribune at this time was even more loyalist. It was fiercely critical of Soviet policy throughout, especially the blockade of west Berlin, and scornful of fellow-travellers. The views once linked with ‘Keep Left’ disappeared from its pages. Cross-man was moved to declare that Ernest Bevin’s policies, Palestine excepted, were indistinguishable from those of the parliamentary left. There were good reasons for Tribune being especially loyalist at this time, apart from the turn of current events. With the paper in constant financial difficulties, Foot persuaded the Labour Party General Secretary, Morgan Phillips, to buy space for official party propaganda: this helped with the accounts.51 The ‘Labour Party Pages’ were uncommonly boring, but they did seem to locate Tribune in or near the party mainstream. In December 1949 Foot asked Phillips for a larger grant, since Tribune needed to raise its circulation by four to five thousand, but without success.52
Foot was to a degree part of the party establishment himself now, since he sat on the National Executive Committee. After being runner-up in the constituency section elections previously, he was comfortably elected in 1948, displacing a minister, Philip Noel-Baker. In 1949 he came second of the seven elected. Many awkward issues came up on the NEC, especially the party decision to expel a handful of far-left MPs. Foot was never one of life’s witch-hunters, and he supported Bevan on the NEC in April 1949 in urging that Konni Zilliacus’s expulsion be rescinded to give him a chance to state that he would support party policy. But Bevan’s arguments were basically concerned with procedure, and he made no complaint when Sam Watson’s motion to reaffirm the expulsion of both Zilliacus and Leslie Solley was comfortably carried. In fact Bevan later wrote to the Welsh transport workers’ leader Huw T. Edwards that he fully backed the removal of Zilliacus ‘because of his close associations abroad with the enemies of Labour and Social Democracy’. He had ‘passed beyond the bounds of all reasonable toleration’.53 There is no evidence that his good friend Michael Foot dissented from this tough view. There was one great joy for him while on the NEC. In 1949 he went on a party deputation to Rome, and met for the first time one of his great literary heroes, the socialist novelist Ignazio Silone, who delighted him by criticizing the Labour government for being ‘too nervous’.54 But otherwise Foot’s short period on the NEC was, on balance, not a happy one. There was a cantankerous atmosphere, with trade union representatives hostile to middle-class socialist ideologues. Some in the women’s section of the NEC were notably aggressive, especially Edith Summerskill and Bessie Braddock. Foot himself largely stood alone as a symbol of left opinion in the constituency parties, although Tom Driberg did join him in 1949. He left the NEC in 1950 with some relief, and stayed away for over twenty years; it was only when several leading Bevanites came on in the fifties that it seemed to him a worthwhile body.
The latter stages of this Parliament found Foot dissatisfied with his public life on various fronts. He was well-known as a nationwide campaigner and stump orator at miners’ galas and the like. But his speeches in the Commons were making limited impact, and the front bench paid them little attention. The NEC was mostly a chore and a bore. His Tribune, with barely ten thousand people buying it, always seemed to be struggling: the next spring the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case produced a crisis which could have been terminal.
But, more positively, his private life was now settled and happy. He looked older and his health was far from perfect. But the asthma was under control, while a medical treatment recommended by Bevan, the Minister of Health after all, would in time remove the eczema that plagued him. He and Jill were now in a strong, enduring relationship, though the puritanical standards of the day meant that they could not really live together. Jill lived in Hollyberry House in Hampstead, Michael in his ‘chaste’ top-floor flat in 62 Park Street, Mayfair.55 They had to threaten with reprisals in the press about the private life of his employer a journalist who saw them together in 1948 in a hotel in Nice where they had spent a ‘honeymoon’ in July 1946. They got married on Trafalgar Day, 21 October 1949, in Hampstead registry office. Isaac Foot and Paul Reilly (now with the Council for Industrial Design) were the witnesses. Isaac was someone for whom Jill had real affection, and she handled him with much sensitivity. After their marriage she reassured him about Michael’s appearance: ‘He has had his hair cut you will be pleased to hear and he looks very neat and tidy so that everyone at the House is now teasing him about it.’ This metamorphosis was not to last long. The West Country press reported that Foot’s bride was ‘a talented film producer’. Foot added that she was ‘a keen Socialist’.56 Jill had continued to be professionally very active, making a documentary film for UNESCO and working for radio. Her documentary on the rebuilding of Plymouth, The Way we Live, was shown at the Cannes film festival in 1946. Perhaps her main achievement was Blue Scar, a film about the nationalization of the mines set in Abergwynfi in south Wales, and shown in 1949. It was not successful commercially, and was too sentimental and perhaps too uncritical about a community for which she had intense admiration. A historian of Welsh film saw it as blighted by class stereotypes and some ambivalence about the mining community after nationalization.57 But, he added, ‘there is no doubt that Craigie was happiest when working on location in South Wales’. It began her love affair with the valleys, which helped with the transition to Ebbw Vale later on.
Jill fitted in happily enough with Michael’s parliamentary activities; she hugely admired Nye Bevan, but had a predictably awkward relationship with Barbara Castle. She was marvellous with Beaverbrook. She was also devotedly supportive of her husband, and kept up his spirits in the course of the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case when there was a real prospect of their facing financial catastrophe. She was a sparkling hostess at her dinner parties, to which artists, actors and film-makers would be invited. She also enjoyed going to politicians’ social gatherings. Whether others always enjoyed her presence is questionable. One who must have had reservations was Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, whom Jill always made a point of nagging mercilessly at parties about the government’s failure to do more for the British film industry.58 The Foots now had a home together for the first time, 33 Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, a terrace house leased from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, a mile or so from the Heath. It was a small household, just Michael, Jill and her teenage daughter Julie, who viewed Michael for some time with a certain coolness. One decisive personal decision was taken when Jill became pregnant. They decided on a private abortion, since neither of them felt able to make the commitment of time and energy necessary to a small child. Like many of their friends on the left – the Bevans, the Castles, Driberg and others – the Foot blood family thus remained childless.
The other vital aspect of Foot’s private life was his ties with his family. A major blow came in May 1946 when his mother Eva, at sixty-eight years of age, suddenly died of a heart attack in East Grinstead hospital. Isaac learnt of the news while on a train which stopped specially for him at Reading station. At a simple funeral service on 17 May the assembled Foot family sang her favourite hymn, ‘For all the saints who from their labours rest’. Michael, more than most of the family, felt the loss of his mother keenly. He had always found her warm, tolerant and understanding, not least for the famous Cornish pasty she sent to Devonport during the 1945 election. But Isaac himself continued a robust and active life, to Michael’s joy. In February 1949 Michael sent him a cheerful telegram after his vigorous defence of Cromwell in the press to rebut sharp criticisms of the Protector by the Bishop of London: ‘Hazlitt applauds, Swift rejoices, even the martyred Marat finds comfort for his wounds. Michael and Jill’ More practically, in 1948 Michael had to have Isaac to provide financial security when, not for the first time, he had to dip into his own reserves to cover debts incurred by Tribune.59
At the end of 1949 Michael found himself travelling down to Devon for the unexpected second marriage of his father to his housekeeper, Kitty Dawe, a widow from Liskeard. She did not share either Isaac’s literary or political interests, and found his bibliomania hard to reconcile with her view of house and home. But they lived together harmoniously enough. Inevitably, the various Foot brothers and sisters were going their separate ways, yet the family was still an instinctively close one, with its familiar watchwords like ‘pit and rock’. Michael’s strongest relationships appear to have been with his brother John, still a Liberal and a parliamentary candidate, and his sister Sally with her love of poetry, horses and the countryside. But all the Foots kept in touch with one another. Newspaper photographs showed Isaac, Dingle, Hugh, John and Michael (and sometimes Christopher) watching the ancestral team, Plymouth Argyle, at Home Park. Their expressions suggest that home defeats were not unknown.
In 1950 Michael faced a major political challenge in defending his Devonport seat, won against the odds from the Tories in 1945. The prospects were still unpredictable. One factor was that the 1949 redistribution had cut down the Plymouth seats from three to two, Devonport and Sutton. On balance, perhaps Labour’s position in Devonport had been marginally improved. The Drake constituency had been abolished, and its former Labour Member, H. M. Medland, was to serve as Foot’s election strategist.60 Michael Foot had been a good, conscientious constituency member; he had worked hard on conditions in the dockyards, especially the working of the 1947 Dock Labour Scheme, which ended the casualization of labour, and felt optimistic.
He had been preparing for the general election in a more general context. In Tribune he had pressed for an election long before Attlee finally called one for February 1950. Also, with Donald Bruce, a left-wing accountant who served as Bevan’s PPS at the Department of Health, he had written what was in effect a pre-election tract, published again by Gollancz in the usual ‘yellow peril’ jacket. It was entitled Who are the Patriots?: in reply it provoked a counter tract, Patriots? My Foot! by a far-right Scottish Catholic journalist, Colm Brogan, the brother of a famous Liberal professor and radio personality. One of Brogan’s specialities was anti-Semitism: he almost suggested that Labour, with all its Jewish MPs, was not a British party at all.61
The Foot – Bruce booklet’s 115 pages were unremittingly partisan, but also highly effective. While Donald Bruce supplied much of the hard data on economic and social policy, the entire work bears the imprint of Michael Foot on every page. The Foreword emphasized that ‘the Guilty Men are Still at Large’. Who are the Patriots? then followed what Foot later called the Bevan maxim for debate – ‘Seize the enemy’s stronghold; capture that and all other outposts will fall in the same assault.’62 The facts were marshalled economically, stylishly and with a sense of history, and the pamphlet ended with a visionary conclusion (‘The Revolution must go on’). There are touches even closer to Foot’s enthusiasms. The dedication is to Benjamin Disraeli, a confirmed hero of his, ‘who wouldn’t have stood for this Tory gang at any price’; quotations from Coningsby and others of his novels are sprinkled throughout. Special attention is also paid to the Tory press, not excluding Beaverbrook, who is pilloried for seeing R. A. Butler’s Industrial Charter as ‘another variation of the old planned economy of the Socialists’.63 This was written just before Foot’s reconciliation with his old master at the Savoy in early 1949. Churchill, an earlier hero in wartime days, is repeatedly condemned for reactionary attitudes. Often at this period Foot was busy cutting Winston down to size. In Tribune on 8 October 1948 he dealt fiercely with Gathering Storm, the first volume of Churchill’s history of the Second World War, in a book review. Sharp and accurate comments were made on Churchill’s distortions of fact, including his own role as an appeaser towards Mussolini and Franco. Remarkably, Foot compared Churchill’s ‘personal conceit and arrogance’ to Hitler’s in Mein Kampf.64 Who are the Patriots? is a powerful document to appeal to the converted, but was inevitably of short-term impact. Since there was in fact no election in 1949 it sold poorly. Gollancz had had a print run of only five thousand at first, and paid a meagre royalty. Foot did not mention it later in his Who’s Who entry.
Attlee called a general election unexpectedly for 23 February 1950; the reason, apparently, was the moral repugnance of the Chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, towards having a pre-election budget to bribe the voters. The campaign was tranquil, even dull; no particular scares or ‘stunts’ materialized. The Conservatives made what they could of unsuccessful development plans like those for groundnuts in Tanganyika and Gambia eggs as instances of Labour’s socialist extravagance with public money; Labour linked the Tories with responsibility for pre-war mass unemployment and reminded the electorate that they had voted against the National Health Service. But it was also a tense, grand confrontation between Attlee and Churchill. Almost the last pre-television election, it marked the climax of two-party politics, with high political consciousness and the public well aware of their class polarization. Men and women readily identified themselves as working-or middle-class; almost three-quarters of the electors placed themselves in the former category. The election was evolutionary Britain’s version of a class war. Despite years of rationing and austerity, enthusiasm was still high amongst natural Labour supporters, and no by-election had been lost by the government in the entire 1945–50 Parliament, an astonishing record. Full employment, a welfare state, ‘fair shares’ were all hugely appreciated. On the other hand, the collectivist mood (with attendant high personal taxation) had waned since 1945. A growing consumerist ethic gave impetus to Churchill’s appeal to ‘set the people free’, contrasting the Tory ladder with the Labour queue. Opinion polls had shown voters swinging against the government in the wake of rationing, austerity and scarcity of basic commodities, including food. In addition, the redistribution of constituencies seemed likely, in effect, to give the Conservatives many extra seats, while huge Labour majorities piled up mountains of ‘wasted votes’ in mining and other industrial areas. Devonport was, after redistribution, the largest seat in the west of England, with almost seventy thousand voters.
Media attention was riveted by Devonport, largely because of the candidates. Foot was a Labour star throughout the media, and shortly on television too. His opponent was even more of a celebrity, none other than Randolph Churchill, erratic and often alcoholic son of the Conservative leader. As it happened, he and Foot knew each other well from weekends with Beaverbrook at Cherkley, and enjoyed a good relationship. In the election campaign Foot and Churchill hurled invective and personal abuse at each other. Notes for one of Foot’s speeches show him describing Randolph Churchill as ‘a throwback to the nineteenth century. He thinks that politics is a matter of stunts, scares, handshakes and synthetic smiles for the ladies.’ But they remained remarkably friendly – far more so than were Churchill and the local Conservative Party, who found their candidate difficult and tetchy. A remarkable sight at the end of some days was Churchill being dumped on his own by his party workers, perhaps in some rural backwater, and then being taken up by the Labour candidate and Jill for a fraternal evening drink. Sometimes the Labour candidate and his wife would see the Conservative candidate safely on his train.65 There was also a Liberal candidate, A. C. Cann, who was distinctly embarrassed when evidence was produced of a former association with the British Union of Fascists. Like his party, he was no threat.
The campaign attracted many celebrities. Winston Churchill spoke on behalf of his son early on at the Forum cinema in Devonport. Bevan spoke for Foot to an immense audience the same evening. It was an extraordinary performance, an eighty-minute display of rhetoric and logic without notes: Foot’s life of Bevan later recaptured its inspirational quality.66 A more unexpected supporting speaker for Foot was Herbert Morrison, one of his bêtes noires. He amiably observed that ‘Michael Foot has been a good and lively member of the House, particularly happy when he was knocking the Tories about,’ and hailed him as a ‘great journalist and pamphleteer’.67 Foot’s speeches focused almost entirely on domestic issues – health, education, employment and housing – where Labour felt it was on firm ground. He strongly endorsed Lewis Silkin’s Town and Country Planning Bill of 1947, which gave local authorities enhanced powers over the environment and future development. He had hailed it in the Daily Herald at the time as ‘the Plymouth Resurrection Bill’ which had brought new hope to the blitzed cities of England. A tricky point was that on education he had to declare his friendliness towards Catholic schools in working-class communities. One of his supporting speakers, unusually for those days, was his wife Jill: this produced a sharp exchange with the Daily Express about ‘an eve of the poll stunt’.68 As before, John Foot, again fighting Bodmin as a Liberal candidate, weighed in with support for his socialist brother. The result showed that Randolph Churchill had been a less effective opponent than Hore-Belisha in 1945. Foot polled 30,812 to Churchill’s 27,329, a majority of 3,483, compared with 2,013 in 1945. There was a 2.5 per cent swing from Labour to the Conservatives nationally. Foot in Plymouth, on a poll of around 80 per cent, thus did better than his party, though he may have benefited from Cann, the ex-Tory Liberal candidate who polled 2,766 votes, probably mainly from the Conservatives. But, with some losses in middle-class constituencies in the south-east among voters fed up with austerity and controls, Labour nationally only scraped home with a majority of six, with 315 MPs against 298 Conservatives and allies, nine Liberals and two Irish nationalists. Labour had polled significantly more votes than the Tories – 13,266,176 (46.1 per cent) against 12,492,404 (43.5). But the voting system was balanced against them, while redistribution may have cost Labour sixty seats. What it meant for someone like Foot was that, with so tiny a majority and the prospect of another election very soon, there was a premium on loyalty, and the need at all costs to avoid splits in the party.
This was broadly reflected in Foot’s writings in the months after the election. In the face of ferocious Tory ‘harrying’ in the Commons and a sustained campaign by the Tory press, including Express Newspapers, Labour put on a strong show of unity, even fraternity. This was shown at a conference of Cabinet, NEC and trade union leaders at Beatrice Webb House, Dorking, on 20–21 May.69 Here virtually every speaker, even Aneurin Bevan, endorsed a version of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ on domestic policy. The existing nationalizations should be made to work better before the principle was extended. Foot, present as a member of the NEC, introduced a little ginger of his own in criticizing the inadequacy of Morrison’s definition of socialism, but he did not seriously diverge from the consensus. His later view was that ‘Dorking ended in deadlock and Morrison turned, as was his custom, to renew the contest elsewhere.’70 But most of the others felt more positive. Foot himself kept up a campaign to capture new ideological ground. His advice in Tribune on ‘How to win the next election’ consisted of the reassertion of socialist principle over nationalization and a free health service.71 Morrison was chided for wanting to stand pat on past achievements rather than pressing on with nationalizing steel, ship-building or chemicals, and for soft-pedalling the egalitarian ideals that underlay the case for socialism. But these were contributions to party debate, not threats of revolt.
Tribune, in constant financial trouble, changed its strategy as the voice of socialism in September 1950, when it was forced to go fortnightly instead of weekly, alongside publishing a series of five pamphlets. Foot wrote two of these. Still at Large was a series of satirical portraits on ‘Guilty Men’ lines, prefaced by a two-page summary of the history of England from the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt onwards. Full Speed Ahead appeared under the name of Saint-Just, a French revolutionary. Yet these tracts were perfectly compatible with mainstream policy, and need not have alarmed the apparatchiks. One particularly might have been acceptable in Transport House, Fair Shares for the Rich, written by none other than Roy Jenkins. When Morgan Phillips, the party’s General Secretary, judged that Methodism should be placed far above Marx in the making of British socialism, Tribune mildly demurred. Yet Michael Foot, reared in Wesleyanism in the chapels of south Devon, could hardly complain at due honour being granted to Methodism. There was more criticism of the TUC for rejecting a wages policy. It was illogical to plan everything else and leave wages untouched.72 Barbara Castle would echo this view in 1969, but without Foot’s support.
In foreign policy too, Foot remained publicly well within the fold. The greatest challenge of all came with the North Korean invasion of South Korea in late June 1950. Here was a dangerous international crisis. Yet Tribune came down strongly in favour of defending South Korea against attack and supporting the United Nations in sending troops to do so, largely American forces under General Douglas MacArthur.73 The sending of British troops to Korea was also endorsed since they had UN backing. Constantly Foot is urging comrades about the folly of appeasing aggressors, or the sentimental errors into which they fell in the 1930s.74 Most of the other members of the Keep Left group took the same view, though Ian Mikardo strongly dissented and resigned as a director of Tribune. A small minority of far-left MPs such as Sydney Silverman and S. O. Davies, who criticized UN action, were fiercely attacked. ‘The aggression of the North Koreans was and remains an international crime of the first order,’ wrote Foot; for them to equate the American government with the Kremlin was absurd.75 At home, Labour’s policy of planning, public ownership and redistribution would ensure that Britain could cope with the economic strain of further rearmament. Collective security and democratic socialism could proceed side by side. Labour’s party conference in October used the union block vote to defeat a left-wing motion criticizing Bevin’s foreign policy by 4,861,000 to 881,000. The star of the show was Nye Bevan, with a passionate plea for party unity.
Labour Party apparatchiks felt they could still live with, and cope with, Michael Foot. He embarked on a new venture from August 1950, when he first appeared on television in the BBC weekly political debates series In the News, with the Conservative Bob Boothby, the former independent MP W. J. Brown and soon the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor as the most regular fellow members of the team, and Edgar Lustgarten in the chair. They were convivial occasions, with lavish hospitality from the BBC, an initial gathering at the Albany off Piccadilly and a lavish meal at the Écu de France restaurant, followed by a drink at the Prince of Wales pub near the Lime Grove studios, before transmission actually began at 10 o’clock on Friday evenings. Not surprisingly after all this, the programmes were vigorous and lively, a blend of wit and passion which entertained the viewers. All four team members were chosen because they were unorthodox, even heretics, in party terms. But at first Morgan Phillips and the Labour whips took Foot’s forthright, aggressive appearances with equanimity. It was the later birth of ‘Bevanism’ that caused all the protests.76
Then it all fell apart. A massive crisis pole-axed the Labour Party, from which it took a decade to recover. The post-war solidarity (‘Pulling through together’) disintegrated. The legacy of the new crisis scarred Michael Foot, along with allies like Barbara Castle and Ian Mikardo, for the next thirty years; there were reverberations during Foot’s leadership of the party in 1980–83 (Tony Benn was never any kind of Bevanite). The crisis began in Cabinet on 1 August 1950, when Bevan openly voiced concern about the new £3,400-million rearmament programme for 1951–54 and the principles underlying Labour’s international policy. The unemotional tones of the formal Cabinet record do not entirely obliterate the flavour of his complaints: ‘Our foreign policy had hitherto been based on the view that the best method of defence against Russian Imperialism was to improve the social and economic conditions of the countries now threatened by Communist encroachment. The United States government seemed now to be abandoning this social and political defence in favour of a military defence. He believed that this change of policy was misjudged …’77 This intervention, ignored by Gaitskell’s and Morrison’s biographers and memoirs from the Labour right, suggested a major rift, without precedent in the course of Attlee’s government.
It was common knowledge that Bevan had been unhappy with aspects of government policy since the Cabinet arguments over whether to press on with nationalizing iron and steel in the summer of 1947. He did not like Morrisonian ‘consolidation’. He had had furious debates with his old Tribune comrade Stafford Cripps when the Treasury proposed levying charges on medical prescriptions. In the end a fudge was produced for the 1950 election under which prescription charges were accepted, but in principle only. A Cabinet committee was set up to monitor soaring expenditure on the NHS, but no charges were imposed. The argument rumbled on throughout the summer of 1950.78 But the Korean War gave it a new cogency. A soaring rearmament programme imposed new strains on the economy and threatened a regime of spending cuts, along with retrenchment and charges at the point of use which might undermine the welfare state. The NHS, Bevan’s prized creation, could not escape.
Bevan’s anxiety about the drift of policy was reinforced by personal grievance. Attlee, often insensitive in these matters, had not seen fit to promote Bevan after five years of extraordinary achievement at Health. In January 1951 he did move, but only sideways to the Ministry of Labour. When in October 1950 Cripps, a dying man, had to be replaced as Chancellor, the man appointed was the relative political newcomer Hugh Gaitskell, a socialist like Bevan but firmly on the party right. Bevan’s anger knew no bounds. He and Gaitskell had met at Cripps’s private dinner parties. They had not liked each other, quite apart from the social gulf between a product of Winchester and New College, Oxford, and a native of the mining community of Tredegar. Bevan once tried, amiably enough, to spell it out as a temperamental difference between an eighteenth-century rationalist like Gaitskell and a nineteenth-century romantic like himself But he also felt there was an ideological emptiness about Gaitskell: ‘He’s nothing, nothing, nothing.’79 A clash was inescapable.
The outcome is one of the best-known and most decisive episodes of British post-war history.80 The clash between Gaitskell, defending the American alliance, justifying the revised rearmament programme of £4,700 million and insisting on imposing charges on the NHS whatever the political fallout, and Bevan, pointing to the damage to the economy from so excessive an arms burden, and defending to the death ‘my health service’ as a beacon of socialist promise throughout the world, has a titanic quality. The battle between the politicians, Hugh and Nye, became a battle between the biographers, with Philip Williams and Michael Foot locked in dispute over matters great and small in their works on Gaitskell and Bevan. Both have suffered for it. Only Attlee, whose own leadership in the final crisis was supine, even allowing for a temporary stay in hospital in April, has largely escaped scot free, although the opening up of the Cabinet records of the time from 1982 onwards (which Philip Williams did not use) raised new questions about his lack of leadership. Michael Foot’s supporting role is still a matter of controversy. But beyond dispute, as player and as historian he had an influence on what resulted.
Bevan had used him as a sounding board for his discontent before and after the general election. By the autumn of 1950 Foot was in daily contact. He urged his friend to take a decisive stand; if Foot’s eloquence was ineffective, in the Bevan household the other Tribune editor, Jennie Lee, would be even more forceful. Foot reacted to Gaitskell’s promotion to Chancellor with as much fury as Bevan. It was followed by a series of increasingly alarming developments at home and abroad. The Americans appeared to be moving into a newly aggressive phase of policy. General MacArthur, threatening an advance towards the Chinese frontier across the Yalu river, seemed almost out of control. There were rumours that the US might use the atomic bomb in Korea. In alarm, Attlee went to Washington for talks with Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He claimed to have been given adequate reassurances from the American government about nuclear weapons, but there were serious conditions he had to accept in return. One was the prospect of German rearmament, disturbing to many on the left. Another was Britain’s agreement to take on a huge new rearmament programme of £3,400 million, soon to rise to £4,700 million. American defence chiefs were even talking of it growing to £6,000 million. Despite all its economic problems, Britain’s per capita burden of defence spending would be higher than that of the United States. In addition, Britain was concerned at the aggressive approach shown towards China, which Britain had formally recognized in 1949, while the Americans were committed to the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Formosa (now Taiwan), which they insisted was the legitimate Chinese government.
These issues came out in a critical meeting of the Cabinet on 25 January 1951.81 Gaitskell spelled out the case for financing the new defence budget. He itemized with appalling frankness the various economic difficulties that the defence budget would cause – the damage to exports and investment, the bottlenecks in supplies, a shortage of machine tools, labour difficulties, a net reduction in consumer living standards – almost as if he were arguing the other way. But he justified the programme on political grounds, as a sign of solidarity with Britain’s American allies. Bevan spoke strongly against the new armaments programme. He reinforced the economic arguments against it, and emphasized the damage to the social and economic fabric. It was noticeable that Gaitskell, the supposed hard-headed economist, spoke as a politician, defending the arms budget almost out of instinct. By contrast Bevan, the supposed emotional Welsh firebrand, based his arguments on solid, almost incontrovertible, economic fact. However, many of the big guns in the Cabinet – Morrison, Dalton, Attlee himself – spoke in support of Gaitskell, and the programme went through. Since Bevan had spoken convincingly on behalf of an increase in the arms budget in a major debate as recently as 15 January, it was hoped that perhaps the crisis was over.
In fact it was only just beginning, and Foot was to be a crucial part of it. For it was clear that Gaitskell, a long-standing advocate of the need for prescription charges as part of a general programme of cost-cutting at home, had health service charges in his sights. On 15 March he proposed charges on spectacles and dentures, and prescription charges as well. On 22 March he put these proposals to full Cabinet. Bevan, furiously angry at an attack on his cherished National Health Service, launched a violent assault, backed up unexpectedly by Harold Wilson. ‘He thought it deplorable that, for the sake of £23 million in a very large budget, the principle of a free health service should be abandoned … The government were now proposing to depart from Labour principle for the sake of a paltry increase in revenue.’82 Privately, Bevan suspected that Morrison, Gaitskell and others were engaged in a conspiracy to evict him from the Cabinet. In conversation with Dalton he attacked ‘rootless men like Gaitskell and Gordon Walker’, the latter being the right-wing Commonwealth Relations Secretary. Personalities and policies were intertwined.
Gaitskell stood firm on his proposals, and offered to resign if his budget plans were turned down; Attlee, temporarily in St Mary’s hospital for an examination of his duodenum, gave little guidance, other than offering Bevan a somewhat fatuous historical comparison with the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill after a dispute over the defence estimates during the second Salisbury governmemnt in December 1886. Attempts at mediation, first by Ernest Bevin just before his death, then by the aged Lord Addison, then by some junior ministers led by Callaghan and Arthur Blenkinsop, all failed. Gaitskell duly introduced his budget, with charges on spectacles and dentures, on 10 April, and the entire political world waited to see what Aneurin Bevan would do. There was one significant clue to be heard already. Gaitskell’s announcement of the NHS charges was met with a solitary cry of ‘Shame’ from the Labour benches. It came from Jennie Lee.
It was at this point that Michael Foot became a major player in the drama. Throughout March he and Jennie Lee were urging Bevan to stick to his guns and, if necessary, to resign if NHS charges were imposed. In an under-reported aside during a speech at Bermondsey on 3 April, Bevan said he would do so. Foot himself was as furious about Gaitskell’s budget as was Bevan. Philip Williams, Gaitskell’s biographer, depicts Foot elsewhere as inserting into his narratives a more hostile view of Attlee and his colleagues than Bevan held, but that hardly applies in this case. On 6 April Foot had warned in Tribune of the perils of sacrificing socialist principles, as had happened when MacDonald cut unemployment benefit in 1931. On 19 April Bevan announced that he could not vote for the NHS charges proposed in Gaitskell’s budget. The following day Tribune led off with a truly ferocious unsigned personal attack on Gaitskell written by Michael Foot, under the title ‘A Dangerous Budget’. He focused attention on Gaitskell’s health service charges: ‘It was the first major attempt to dismantle the social service structure which Labour has built up in the last five years.’ He added, ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr Gaitskell shares the detestation of Treasury officials for the principle of a free health service.’83
This was bad enough, but Foot’s final passage aroused near apoplexy: ‘The only way to defeat the Tories is by a united Labour movement which does not, like Philip Snowden, desert Socialism at the moment of crisis.’ Present policies should be reversed ‘before we are led back to another 1931’. The very comparison with Philip Snowden, remembered in Labour folk tradition as one of the arch-traitors of the past, second only to Ramsay MacDonald himself, roused enormous anger. On 22 April it was announced that Bevan had indeed resigned, along with Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, and John Freeman, a junior minister. Bevan’s somewhat incoherent resignation speech on 25 April, with Foot sitting next to him, raised the temperature still further, as did an angry meeting of the parliamentary party. Dalton commented, during a furious statement about ‘my health service’ by Bevan, ‘This is Mosley speaking.’84 Oswald Mosley might be seen as located in an even lower circle of Labour’s legendary Inferno than his Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald.
This editorial in Tribune ensured that Foot would be identified as a leader of the anti-Gaitskell movement. He had already been preparing for the crisis, rejoining the somewhat shadowy Keep Left group, chaired by Crossman, on 17 October 1950 after leaving the National Executive: ‘Michael Foot’s return to the group was warmly welcomed.’85 On 12 December he had signed a resolution urging, among other things, that China should be admitted to the Security Council of the UN; that Formosa, presently controlled by Chiang Kai-shek, should be returned to it; and that the rearmament programme (at that time only £3,600 million) should not be proceeded with. Bevan’s resignation from the government was announced on 22 April. This gave the rump of Keep Left a huge injection of new vitality. In February they had numbered no more than ten: members like George Wigg had resigned. But on 26 April Foot and Ian Mikardo convened a meeting attended by fifteen Labour MPs; they included Bevan, Wilson and John Freeman. The others were Richard Acland, Barbara Castle, Harold Davies, Leslie Hale and Richard Crossman of the Keep Left group, along with Hugh Delargy, Will Griffiths, Kim Mackay, Tom Driberg and Jennie Lee. The minutes were kept by Jo Richardson, the personal assistant of Ian Mikardo, in many ways the organizing genius of the group.86 A series of brains trusts were to be held in different towns. People now began to speak of ‘the Bevanites’. The Statist, a right-wing journal, added that ‘the true mind behind the fat façade of Mr Bevan is the Robespierre mind of that sea-green incorruptible, febrile class-conscious agitator, Mr Michael Foot’.87 No doubt Michael was happy to be compared with a Jacobin, if not that particular one.
He was also feared for his links with Fleet Street: for instance, he was thought to be constantly leaking private party matters to Hugh Massingham, the political correspondent of the Observer. Foot’s angry, finger-jabbing debating style was already known to television viewers of In the News. Polls showed that many of them saw him as a latter-day Robespierre, ‘intolerant, humourless and fanatical’, quite different from the diffident personal charm he could show in day-to-day personal relationships. His black-rimmed spectacles, over-long and untidy black hair brushed back from his temples, and vaguely Bohemian mode of dress caused citizens of middle England much alarm, while giving to many a sixth-former the secret delights of forbidden fruit. By July, from Morgan Phillips downwards, party officials were writing to the BBC governors complaining that Foot was not a suitable Labour representative on the programme, since he was a doctrinaire schismatic, with an agenda of his own.88
The outcome, inevitably, was a pamphlet, One Way Only, published in July. It bore a foreword signed by Bevan, Wilson and Freeman, but most of it appears to have been written by Foot. He has since described it as ‘an essay in qualified judgements’. It was not as tentative as that. But much of it was quite moderate, even unexceptionable, with sections on the world crisis in raw materials, keeping down prices at home, and especially on world poverty being addressed by development programmes under the UN’s Point Four programme, such as the 1950 Colombo Plan, to aid economic and social development in South-East Asia and the Pacific. There was, however, a separate passage, probably written by Bevan but perhaps by Foot, which attacked the cost of the rearmament programme and urged that restraint be imposed on American foreign policy. Hugh Dalton, no mean conspirator himself, felt that pages written by Foot were ‘both very anti-American and very anti-Russian’.89 It was not, however, an inflammatory document. Tribune pointed out, for instance, that it did not advocate unilateral disarmament.90 But what observers noted was that it looked like a separate manifesto from a party within a party. Michael Foot appeared to be its presiding (some thought its evil) genius.
It was a tetchy summer and early autumn for both government and party. Trade union leaders, while unhappy themselves with aspects of Gaitskell’s budget and voting down wage restraint, condemned the Bevanite group in fierce terms. They especially objected to attacks on union leaders like Arthur Deakin that appeared in a second Bevanite pamphlet, Going our Way. The Bevanites countered by preparing an all-out assault on the elected constituency section places on the NEC at the October party conference. After all, Driberg, Barbara Castle and Mikardo were already there. The government generally was weary, after six very hard years (and almost eleven years consecutively in office for men like Attlee, Morrison and Dalton). There were new problems in abundance. In Persia there had been a summer crisis over the nationalization of Anglo-Persian Oil by the Persian government. Morrison and Shinwell talked in jingoistic terms about sending British troops to Abadan, but a majority of ministers, including Gaitskell, voted them down.91 Difficulties also mounted in Egypt, until in October the Egyptian Prime Minister Nahas Pasha announced that the 1936 treaty with Britain would be abrogated. He demanded that the British military presence in the Suez Canal base be removed. Another confrontation threatened.
Most serious of all, the economy now lurched into new difficulties, imperilling the financing of the ambitious rearmament programme. A massive balance of payments crisis, largely caused by a rise in the cost of raw materials, resulted in a gold and dollar deficit of $638 million for the period July – September. Gaitskell responded, among other things, by imposing a three-year dividend limitation, which won him some rare praise from Foot and his friends.92 He also went to Washington and Ottawa in September for talks with Louis Snyder, the US Secretary of the Treasury, and his Canadian counterpart. These did not go well: Gaitskell thought Snyder ‘a pretty small-minded, small town semi-isolationist’, though a ‘burden-sharing’ scheme was cobbled together.93 However, Gaitskell was compelled to say at Ottawa that the pace of rearmament must slow down, and warned of the dangers of a worldwide inflation in the prices of raw materials. Tribune was exultant: ‘A gleam of sanity is at last breaking through.’ Foot’s article was cheerfully headed ‘Has Gaitskell Joined the Bevanites?’
At this remarkably unpromising moment, Attlee decided to call a general election for October. It was the second time that he had called one apparently on his own whim, and again for unusual reasons. In February 1950 the reason had been Cripps’s unwillingness to introduce a pre-election budget, with the hint of electoral bribery. This time it was a proposed visit of the King to Commonwealth countries in the near future – in the event George VI fell fatally ill and never went. However, at a thinly-attended Cabinet of seven on 19 September, Attlee announced, without warning, his decision to call an election. Morrison and Gaitskell, both abroad, were thunderstruck. The Labour Party seemed ill-prepared, with quarrels among its leading figures. The preparation of the manifesto produced much argument on the NEC between trade union and Bevanite figures, both on defence issues and on the case for more socialism. At party conference, without apparent irony, Bevan made a powerful speech about not underestimating Labour’s natural instinct for unity. In the newspapers, opinion polls showed a 7 per cent Tory lead precisely because the reverse appeared true.
Yet the campaign went remarkably well. Despite all the rows between supporters and opponents of Bevan, the morale of party workers in the constituencies was high. There was still huge enthusiasm for ‘our’ government amongst the British working class, Devonport dockyard workers included. In the end there was a high turnout of 82.6 per cent (compared with 83.9 in 1950). Labour was to poll 13,948,883 votes, the highest ever until it was surpassed by the Conservatives in 1992 (when, obviously, the electorate was much larger). Labour polled 230,000 more than the Conservatives, who obtained 48 per cent of the vote as against Labour’s 48.8 per cent. Labour lost just twenty-three seats, most of them in suburban areas of London and the south-east. And they lost the election, winning 295 seats to the Conservatives’ 321. By comparison, Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997 polled just 44.4 per cent of the votes, and obtained an overall majority of 179. In October 1951 it was a tense and highly partisan election. Conservative onslaughts on ‘socialism’ were countered with Labour claims that Tories were warmongers who would send British troops to the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf ‘Whose finger on the trigger?’ asked the pro-Labour Daily Mirror. In Wales, Churchill was taunted for sending in troops to deal with striking miners at Tonypandy back in 1910, a cherished (and historically accurate) component of Labour’s usable past.
This angry mood showed itself in Devonport, where the Conservative candidate was once again Randolph Churchill. There was little of the previous geniality this time. Churchill attacked Foot as ‘Bevan’s principal hatchet-man’, and offended Jill by referring to Michael’s not having done military service.94 In return, Foot denounced ‘British MacArthurs’ in the Tory Party who would send troops to Persia. His main supporting speaker again was Aneurin Bevan, whose hour-long speech at the Guildhall was ‘untroubled by hecklers’, according to the local journalist. Bevan did not forget to give due praise to a former Plymouth Mayor, Isaac Foot, ‘a human dynamo of ideas’.95 Jill, who had recently been unwell, also spoke in the campaign, helping out Michael as he lost his voice. Randolph Churchill’s main supporting speaker was again his father, who addressed ten thousand excited people on Plymouth Hoe. He also brought in the old MP, Leslie Hore-Belisha, perhaps not the most appetizing of electoral assets. In a straight fight, Michael Foot triumphed again, with a 2,390 majority, a good result in the circumstances. Randolph Churchill heard the results in the Embassy ballroom, with tears in his eyes. He and Foot were to remain good friends. Later in the fifties Foot read the manuscript of his biography of Lord Derby. Foot also took the witness stand on Churchill’s behalf in a difficult libel case in October 1956, despite fears that he might lose his job on the Herald for political reasons: ‘Rather than see his friend go down he volunteered to go into the box. He undoubtedly made a considerable impression on the jury.’ Charles Wintour, later to edit the Evening Standard, told Beaverbrook, ‘The hero of the day is Michael Foot.’96 But despite, or because of, these pleasant associations with Foot, Randolph Churchill never fought an election again. It would, however, be his father back in 10 Downing Street. Foot returned to Westminster to fight new battles, this time perhaps mainly against his own comrades.
The Attlee years ended tumultuously for Michael Foot. In retirement, he wrote warmly of that government as ‘this most gifted, intelligent and idealistic Cabinet’.97 Its programme of nationalization, a planned economy, a welfare state, full employment and ‘fair shares’ based on redistributive taxation was the most complete achievement of democratic socialism that Britain had ever seen, with the NHS and Indian independence as its glorious highlights. Much of the time until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 Foot’s criticisms of Attlee’s government were muted. Even on foreign affairs, the ‘Keep Left’ critique of 1947 turned into a more orthodox view of accepting the need for collective defence against a perceived Soviet threat. Foot had supported the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and sending troops to South Korea. He did not protest against the manufacture of a British nuclear deterrent because it was never announced, and the relevant Cabinet committee authorizing it, GEN 163, was kept totally secret. Foot later said that he never knew of its existence until Britain’s first atomic bomb testing took place in the Pacific in October 1952.98 Aneurin Bevan surely did. But for most of the time it was a government he was happy, even proud, to support – not really in the Commons, where his influence was limited, but in nationwide speech-making and of course with his ever-fluent pen. Tribune, for all its financial weakness and the legal threat from Lord Kemsley, kept a strong socialist critique alive, while Foot’s own reputation as author and pamphleteer was enhanced.
But the ending of the government was so utterly miserable that memory of the Attlee years was inevitably soured. Foot’s recollection of them in his biography of Nye Bevan twenty years on was one-sided and often bitter, especially towards Attlee himself Hugh Gaitskell he was to demonize mercilessly for the rest of his days. In fact, despite the criticisms rightly made by Philip Williams of Foot’s account – its sprinkling of factual inaccuracies and distorting use of selective quotation – most of what he says in his life of Bevan is perfectly sound.99 On balance it is a better account than that of Williams, who ignored the public records altogether. Bevan’s economic critique of Gaitskell’s 1951 budget was confirmed by the response of the Churchill government in 1951–54, when the arms programme was greatly scaled down on broadly Bevanite lines. We were all Bevanites now, even if a little late. Gaitskell’s one and only budget was a fairly calamitous one, which harmed domestic investment and raised taxes excessively, quite apart from the defence issue. The need to restrain American policy in the Far East, that of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles especially, with its commitment to propping up puppet regimes in Formosa (and later in South Vietnam), also became clearer. But fundamentally it was the image of party civil war that impressed observers, and depressed Foot himself Thereafter, until Tony Blair’s huge victory in 1997, Labour was felt to be inherently disunited, and for that reason usually unelectable.
The schism in his party in the spring and summer of 1951 was to shape Foot’s career for years to come. He had acquired celebrity status as an icon of the left, a star of pamphlet, platform and now television. Only Bevan had a stronger reputation on the left. But memories of the Attlee years ensured that Foot, unlike Nye, would invariably be seen in the mould of Hardie or Lansbury, as an agitator of protest, not a politician of power.