For the next ten years, Michael Foot’s world was to be shaped by the life and death of one man, the lost leader, Aneurin Bevan. To its relief, Labour had lost the October 1951 general election by only a narrow margin, while it was reinvigorated by gifted young MPs like Roy Jenkins (elected 1948), Tony Crosland (elected 1950) and Denis Healey (elected in a by-election in 1952). The book New Fabian Essays (1952), to which all three contributed along with Ian Mikardo, John Strachey and others, showed that there was plenty of intellectual energy in the ranks. The South African émigrée Rita Hinden restarted Socialist Commentary as a highly intelligent organ of the centre-right. Labour could also draw comfort from its Conservative opponents. Soon Churchill’s government was plunged into as serious financial difficulties as Attlee’s had been, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler in major disagreement with colleagues over the ‘Robot’ plan to float the pound, allowing it to find its own level and letting ‘the reserves take the strain’. Nevertheless, almost from the start of the new Parliament, Labour was obsessed with its own internecine conflicts, the battle between right and left personified in the titanic struggle between Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan. Since both of them were socialists, it was a less clear-cut divide than that between soi-disant Old and New Labour in the 1990s. But it dominated the party’s history for years. It also determined the work and priorities of Michael Foot from then on.
Trouble began early in the new Parliament. As always, it concerned foreign and defence policy, more particularly relations with the Americans. On 26 November 1951, thirty-five Labour MPs defied the whips to protest against the Japanese peace treaty, since it was opposed by the Russians and included China and India, while a further hundred abstained. There was a graver crisis on 5 March 1952, when Bevan and his supporters again ignored the whips and put forward an amendment which condemned the rearmament programme. This produced no fewer than fifty-seven rebels, about double the familiar core group of ‘Bevanites’. In each case Foot was amongst them. He had already in Tribune highlighted Churchill’s decision to roll on the rearmament programme for a further year.1 This further underlined the foolishness of Gaitskell for insisting on his paltry £23 million of NHS charges. Foot and Bevan both felt they might now be expelled from the parliamentary party, and had anxious discussions as to how to respond. In fact, the parliamentary party a few days later broadly accepted a moderate motion from Strachey and George Strauss (both to be identified later with the ‘Keep Calm’ group, along with James Callaghan) which merely confirmed party standing orders and left the personal aspects untouched. Attlee’s authority seemed to be buckling under the challenge. Relations in the party at Westminster remained tense during the summer. At a calamitous party conference at the end of September, animosity and bad temper were everywhere. The conference was held in Morecambe, a distinctly downmarket Lancashire resort. Crossman described it as ‘a minor Blackpool, dumped down on mud flats with a four-mile promenade’.2 The weather was dreadful, rain with biting winds, and everybody caught colds trudging along that bleak, exposed promenade. No political party ever went there again for its conference. Foot described the conference as ‘rowdy, convulsive, vulgar, splenetic’; the episode for which Morecambe is best remembered came when Will Lawther of the National Union of Miners shouted at a left-wing heckler, ‘Shut yer gob.’ One important landmark was that Bevanites captured six of the seven constituency section places on the NEC: Foot chose not to stand because it would undermine his role as a detached journalist. Immediately after the conference a bitter speech by Gaitskell at Stalybridge made things worse still: Foot saw it as a British version of McCarthyism. Gaitskell denounced the conference for ‘mob rule’ and attacked the Bevanites elected to the NEC as ‘frustrated journalists’. As it happened, Foot was not amongst them, but his name cannot have been far from Gaitskell’s thoughts. Relations between the two comrades verged on hatred.3
Attlee now asserted his leadership. In an unusually blunt speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London he told the Bevanites: ‘Stop this sectionalism. Work with the team. Turn your guns on the enemy not your friends.’ A meeting of the parliamentary party on 24 October called for the disbandment of all ‘group organizations’ in the party other than those officially affiliated. After that, the Bevan group formally disbanded, but it continued to hold meetings all over the country, variously condemning American policy in the Far East, the threat of German rearmament and the costs of the rearmament programme. The audiences were invariably large and appreciative.
For Foot, the decisive question was what Nye would do. In fact his hero was distinctly uncertain and ill-tempered. On occasions he and Foot had discussed the theoretical possibility of leaving the party altogether. But neither seriously contemplated that. Bevan was very alarmed by the Morecambe conference, which looked as if it could produce a permanent split in the party. He told Crossman that what the Bevanites should do was not operate as a private group but act as a socialist ginger group which all members of the party could potentially join. Crossman dissented from this. Foot, who was also present, remained silent: it may be assumed that his instinct was to agree with Bevan.4 After that, Bevan stood for the Shadow Cabinet in November, and was elected twelfth and last (Harold Wilson, who was also showing signs of backing away from any split, came thirteenth, a point of significance later on). For the next seventeen months Bevan acted in orthodox fashion as a front-bench spokesman on health and housing issues, even though the atmosphere in the party remained cool. Overseas issues were still divisive. Like Foot, Bevan strongly opposed any proposals for German rearmament, but that issue did not have quite the same capacity to damage party unity as the problems of the Far East or nuclear weapons. After all, centre-right figures like Dalton and Callaghan opposed rearming the Germans too. The Bevanites decided not to challenge the whips on that. Bevan stood for the deputy leadership against Morrison in November 1952 and was predictably heavily defeated, by 194 to eighty-two. But then the atmosphere suddenly improved. Crossman noted that ‘the Bevanite and anti-Bevanite feuding has melted away … everybody is rather shamefacedly aware that both sides are on the same side after all’.5 Whether Foot shared this complacency is very doubtful, but relations did seem to improve throughout 1953.
Then, quite unexpectedly, there was a major eruption on 13 April 1954. Bevan objected to proposals made by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, that the winding-up of the war in Indo-China should be followed by the creation of a new security alliance in south-east Asia, the future South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). It was a bombshell to everyone that he challenged the party leadership on so marginal an issue. This time Attlee had to respond, and it was announced the following day that Bevan had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet. To the dismay – but hardly the surprise – of Foot, Crossman and other colleagues, Harold Wilson, the runner-up in the Shadow Cabinet elections, then decided to take Bevan’s place rather than appear as Nye’s poodle. Although Mikardo reconvened the old Bevanite group, it was now visibly weakening. Bevan’s bad-tempered performance at the 1954 party conference, coloured by his first defeat for the party treasurership, did not increase his stature. He complained angrily (at a Tribune rally) of the influence of ‘desiccated calculating machines’, a reference either to Attlee or Gaitskell (or conceivably both) which caused much offence.
In March 1955 came yet another crisis when it was announced that Britain was going to manufacture the hydrogen bomb. Bevan was not opposed to this decision in principle, any more than he had ever resisted manufacture (as opposed to testing) of the A-bomb earlier on. Michael Foot, by contrast, like Barbara Castle and Jennie Lee, was always an instinctive unilateralist who wanted Britain to renounce such weapons completely on moral grounds. Before the Commons debate Bevan accepted the view of Foot and Jennie Lee and came out strongly against party policy on the grounds of opposing ‘first use’. He also called for four-power talks between the USA, the USSR, Britain and France to discuss the future of nuclear weapons, a view which the party leadership accepted. The debate was made memorable for Foot because, in his final Commons speech, Churchill delivered a powerful warning about the spread of nuclear weapons, which Bevan’s speech echoed.6 But at the end of the debate Bevan almost contemptuously challenged his party’s views, and interrupted Attlee’s winding-up speech in peremptory fashion. He asked whether Labour would support the British use of thermonuclear weapons in the face of a conventional armed attack. It was a crucial issue which Attlee had failed to address; nor did he now. But Bevan’s ferocity towards his own party leadership alienated many sympathizers. Foot joined Bevan and several former Bevanites among the sixty-two Labour Members who disobeyed the whips and abstained. The whip was withdrawn from Bevan as a result. Gaitskell tried hard to use this as a reason for drumming Bevan out of the party entirely. Bevan in reply called on the six ‘Bevanite’ members of the NEC (now including Wilson) to resign if he were. Foot, like Jennie Lee, as always urged Bevan to fight on and not to ‘grovel’ before the party leadership. But Crossman and Wilson, neither of whom Bevan fully trusted, took a different view. It was noted that several Bevanites – Wilson, Crossman, John Freeman, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler and Hugh Delargy – had voted for the official opposition line. Wilson indeed had effectively ceased to be any kind of Bevanite at all.
In the event, Bevan was persuaded (not by Foot) to reverse gear, and apologized to Attlee before the NEC subcommittee. There was a general election coming up soon; to Gaitskell’s huge disappointment, Bevan’s expulsion was rejected on the full NEC by just one vote, fourteen to thirteen; the whip was restored. In Barbara Castle’s reflective verdict, ‘Nye was saved by Attlee’s distaste for Hugh Gaitskell’s bigoted destructiveness.’7 But the Bevanite group now quietly disbanded for good, and never re-emerged. Later, in December 1955, after Labour’s general election defeat, Attlee resigned the leadership and Gaitskell comfortably defeated Bevan and Morrison to take his place. Harold Wilson and other former Bevanites voted for Gaitskell. Even Crossman, who had severely criticized Bevan’s tactics on the H-bomb, came close to doing so too.
The Bevanite period thus ended ingloriously. Yet it is an important phase in the career of Michael Foot. He was Bevan’s main champion through the power of the printed word. At every stage he urged Bevan to fight back. Through his columns in Tribune he became the voice of dissent at every stage, while he roused intense dislike in the party centre-right, who felt Bevan to be out of control. Nye’s Commons speeches seemed to take flight oratorically so as to leave any thoughts of compromise behind. There was immense bad blood as the Gaitskellites denounced the Bevanites as a crypto-Communist conspiracy. The extent of this animosity was invariably minimized thirty years later, when the Bevanites were deemed to have been ‘the legitimate left’, committed to the parliamentary approach, in contrast to the Bennites of the 1980s, who were anti-parliamentary and by definition illegitimate. The normality of the Bevanites was not a view the Gaitskellites endorsed in 1951–54. They also offered derisive comment at the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle of these supposed socialist firebrands, especially when Lord Faringdon of Buscot Park had them driven to Bevanite-run campaign meetings in his Rolls-Royce. Patronage (perhaps on mischievous grounds) from the capitalist enemy, notably Beaverbrook newspapers, was also noted. The comrades were growing apart, and solidarity evaporating. Dalton found it an ‘awkward coincidence’ when he had to travel on the same train as Foot to a meeting. Foot insisted that no MP could obey the dictates of ‘a majority vote at a private meeting’. It unnerved the party hierarchy that he remained one of Labour’s supposed spokesmen on the television programme In the News, where he could make Bevanite propaganda. He was actually much the least popular of the four regular team members with the viewers. A. J. P. Taylor refused to appear on the programme in April 1953, when Foot was excluded and more orthodox Labour people like Callaghan and J.B. Hynd took his place. In the end, in late 1954 In the News, with Foot now back and in full flow, moved to the new ITV under the title Free Speech.8 The ill-will rumbled on.
The Bevanites were a short-lived group. After a period of thriving growth from April 1951 to December 1952, they formally disbanded. Then, after resurrection in April 1954 they simply petered out as Bevan himself got into one row after another. Yet their political importance is considerable. As an articulate body, comprising mainly lawyers and journalists, they had a powerful impact on opinion in the constituencies. Mainly for this reason, Labour Party membership reached unprecedented heights after the electoral defeat in 1951. The circulation of Tribune, a major factor in the surge of Bevanism in the constituencies, increased considerably, to perhaps eighteen thousand.9 The Bevanite MPs – at most thirty-one according to current calculations – kept a strong socialist message alive in the grassroots, even if their main themes always concerned foreign and defence policy. Over 150 invariably successful public forums or ‘brains trusts’ had been held by late 1954, often in improbable nerve-centres of socialism, such as amongst the disgusted citizenry of Tunbridge Wells. Foot, marooned in his Tribune offices, was one of the more occasional performers. A note by Rose Cohen and Jo Richardson showed that of the thirty-one sympathetic MPs, Ian Mikardo attended forty-six brains trusts, Harold Davies forty-three and Leslie Hale twenty-two, but Foot only three.10 But in any case, the Bevanites operated largely as individuals. Foot and Barbara Castle always maintained that other people greatly exaggerated the element of planned organization.11 There was a core of MPs who met regularly in the smoking room of the Commons or the pubs of Fleet Street – Crossman, Mikardo, Castle and certainly Foot. More signs of there being an organized group perhaps came from rather jolly buffet lunches every Tuesday in Crossman’s elegant residence in Vincent Square for the six NEC Bevanites together with Foot, Jennie Lee, Mallalieu and the Oxford economist Thomas Balogh. These were all paying guests. Others flitted in and out of Bevanite gatherings according to chance or whim. Individualists like Fenner Brockway, Sydney Silverman or Emrys Hughes were almost impossible to tie down in any group, even a splinter group. In Foot parlance they represented ‘the dissidence of dissent’, like the Fifth Monarchy men of the English Civil War. Possible recruits to the Bevanite ranks like Woodrow Wyatt, Desmond Donnelly, George Thomas and Cledwyn Hughes soon retreated to the centre ground.
What united the members of the group was personal loyalty to Nye Bevan. But it was a much looser tie than that of Blairites to Tony Blair after 1997. Whether Bevan himself actually was, or ever wanted to be, a Bevanite is debatable. He gave his supporters only intermittent encouragement, and he distrusted both Crossman and Wilson. Barbara Castle recalls that ‘he hated teamwork and would sit brooding in his Cliveden Place flat with a few close allies from Tribune, notably his wife Jennie and Michael Foot’.12 Basically, he disliked the whole idea of conspiratorial private groups so beloved of Ian Mikardo. Anyway, Bevan was increasingly abroad, with long visits to India, China and even the USA, and unable to keep closely in touch with his followers. And yet his galvanizing presence in the House lent a constant touch of inspiration which kept the Bevanite movement alive.
The main weakness of Bevanism, however, lay not in the waywardness of its individuals or the uncertainties of its titular leader, but in the meagreness of its doctrine. On practical issues the Bevanites had many central questions to ask and much to contribute. Internationally, Foot and others perceptively anticipated the world of co-existence and disengagement, the world of the Rapacki plan for a nuclear-free zone in central Europe, including a united Germany, and possible nonalignment after 1956. Foot himself brilliantly deployed his knowledge of historical evidence to show that the case for an atomic deterrent power for the West was quite misconceived. The Russians had not often launched an aggressive war, with Poland in 1919, Finland in 1940, Poland again in 1940 and Japan in 1945 the only instances. Many key tenets of the West’s defence strategy were thus fundamentally flawed.
But it is difficult to uncover many documents to illustrate Bevanite political theory as a body of ideas. The nearest equivalent is Crossman’s independent-minded chapter ‘Towards a Philosophy of Socialism’ in the New Fabian Essays. His main argument there was the need for socialism to break away from linkage with corporatist ideas: ‘the planned economy and the centralization of power are no longer socialist objectives’.13 Crossman could hardly be said to be offering a Bevanite analysis. Indeed, he was explicitly calling for Labour to reject the residual Marxism with which many Bevanites, including Foot, felt comfortable. Another very important document was Aneurin Bevan’s own In Place of Fear, a brilliantly written series of fragments, some recycled from the past, published in 1952. On some it had a profound influence: Barbara Castle wrote of it that ‘Nye’s analysis made a permanent impact on my political thinking.’14 But the book was really a series of personal statements on behalf of a libertarian form of democratic socialism and tackling global poverty. Full of beguiling phrases, they hardly offered any ideological structure firm enough for his disciples to embrace. Otherwise, Bevanite writings in newspaper columns tended to repeat the achievements of 1945–51, so far as they went, and to call for more public ownership and public spending. They said little that was new.
Surprisingly, the Bevanites, so committed were they to public ownership and ‘socialist planning’ of the economy, did not respond to contemporary suggestions that the essence of socialism lay elsewhere – that ‘socialism was about equality’. They always preferred economic to sociological emphasis. They did not take the opportunity to reshape the ideological debate in the party. It was left to Anthony Crosland of the party right to do so with his Future of Socialism in 1956, which provided a fundamental new analysis for a generation to come. With Douglas Jay’s Socialism in the New Society appearing in 1962, the Gaitskellites manifestly had all the best tunes. As was argued by the ‘Keep Calm’ group which included Callaghan and Strachey, the Bevanites were too consumed by animosity towards Gaitskell (and he towards them) to examine whether his vision of socialism (which certainly included room for more public ownership and control of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’) was really so different from their own. Harold Wilson was a manager, not a theorist. He never wrote anything on political ideas. Effectively he ceased to be a real Bevanite when he took his leader’s place on the Shadow Cabinet in 1954. Ironically, it was Wilson’s election as party leader in February 1963 which the Bevanites later regarded as their supreme achievement. Before a portrait of Bevan, they drank a toast to the lost leader.15 He had won at last. But their opportunity to recast the ideas of the Labour movement or to redefine the meaning of post-Marxist socialism in Britain had long since passed.
Foot’s contributions to Bevanism naturally came most effectively in his writing. He still wrote a column in the Daily Herald, alternating with Douglas Jay, whose austere contributions, indicating a professional knowledge of economics, were very different in style and content. But Foot was relatively restrained here. The Herald was not a platform for radicalism. Its editor, Percy Cudlipp, became a critic of Bevan himself, which caused some strain with his columnist. Foot, however, did come out with a ringing endorsement when Bevan lost the whip for a second time after the H-bomb debate in March 1955. ‘I Stand by Bevan’ on 18 March argued that Bevan’s points were entirely reasonable, and criticized Attlee for being afraid of healthy debate.16
But Foot’s main journalistic activities, of course, came through his manifold activities in the Strand office of Tribune. The years of the Bevanite revolt were that newspaper’s most glorious period. When it resumed weekly publication in late 1952 it became news as never before. It had moved away from the arguments of the early Cold War years after 1945, when Jon Kimche and Evelyn Anderson were focusing on eastern Europe. It now ranged over a myriad of issues at home and around the world. Foot’s influence on the newspaper was still central, but he operated now mainly as a manager. He had given up the editor’s chair to a remarkably young successor, the twenty-six-year-old Robert Edwards. At Ian Mikardo’s suggestion Edwards had joined the staff from a provincial newspaper in 1948, and supplemented his meagre payment of £12 a week with investigative journalism. He got on well with Foot himself: when Edwards’s leaders on the bomb were criticized by Jennie Lee as too right-wing, Foot defended him on the grounds of editorial freedom.17 As has been seen, circulation in Edwards’s time at Tribune, the climax of Bevanism, rose impressively. Foot, always generous to colleagues, believed that the paper became livelier under Edwards, with a more clearly defined point of view.
Otherwise, the paper had problems. Tribune editorial meetings were sometimes discordant, with clashes between Edwards and Peggy Duff, the business manager. Foot, as chairman of the editorial board, took the side of Edwards. The other directors had given Foot a hundred shares so that he could outvote the others, in effect a block vote. Duff later recalled ruefully that, as with the removal of Jon Kimche earlier, Foot had a ruthless side to him which was not always detected. She was sacked on the spot for dissent.18 However, relations were sufficiently repaired for Foot and Duff later to collaborate on CND. Eventually, after three successful years, Edwards became another link between Tribune and Beaverbrook Newspapers, moving to the Evening Standard in December 1954 and becoming in time editor of the Daily Express. Foot took up the editorial baton again after the 1955 general election, and remained there until his election to Parliament for Ebbw Vale five years later.
In the Bevanite period in the early fifties, Foot’s work for Tribune was endlessly demanding. He remained its chief fund-raiser. Prospects of any help from the Labour Party, of course, were now zero, so he turned to the capitalists. The most successful link was with Howard Samuel, a millionaire property developer and publisher who pumped much money in to support the causes endorsed by Bevan, of whom he was a great admirer. Beaverbrook continued to send the occasional cheque, for his own whimsical reasons. His largesse, as will be seen, extended to the editor’s personal needs as well as to those of his paper. But, as noted earlier, by far the most important event to affect the finances of Tribune was the eventual removal of the black cloud of the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case. Lord Kemsley, owner of the Daily Mail, was a political enemy, a former champion of Chamberlain and appeasement, and bitterly anti-socialist. Kemsley Newspapers had sued, with the apparent intention of driving both Tribune and perhaps its editors into bankruptcy. Kemsley won the case, but the verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeal. A key judgement was that delivered by Lord Birkett, a champion of free speech and, as it happened, an old Liberal friend of Isaac Foot. Eventually in the House of Lords in May 1952 Tribune had its appeal verdict confirmed, on the basis of its attack on Kemsley being fair comment. One helpful intermediary was the Tory Minister of Labour Sir Walter Monckton, who appeared for Kemsley in the Court of Appeal but then advised his client not to take the case any further, but to drop it. A colossal worry for Foot, not only as editor but also as the husband of a deeply anxious Jill, was finally eliminated, and Tribune entered a flourishing period.19 Ironically, later on Foot was to become friendly (Jill thought perhaps too friendly) with the wife of Kemsley’s nephew, the right-wing saloniste Lady Pamela Berry.
Foot was also still active as a journalist as well as fund-raiser. He wrote extensively during Robert Edwards’s editorship under the pen name of ‘John Marullus’, a tribune under Julius Caesar and a more recondite classical reference than ‘Cato’ and ‘Cassius’. In similar vein, Tribune’s future editor Dick Clements was to write as ‘Flavius’. ‘John Marullus’ was a caustic commentator on the world, and certainly widely read, not least by Herbert Morrison. It was Foot who landed the newspaper in another huge row in October 1954 when he launched a fierce attack on trade union leaders in general, and Arthur Deakin of the transport workers’ union the TGWU in particular. Foot had long resented the one-sided way in which Transport House and its allies on the NEC interpreted personal attacks on party colleagues. Morrison had delivered a sharp condemnation of Aneurin Bevan in Rita Hinden’s Socialist Commentary early in 1954, but escaped any censure. Foot, however, reacted aggressively after Arthur Deakin, their General Secretary, disciplined members of his union when they took sympathetic action on behalf of dockers who were members of another, smaller union, the National Amalgamated Stevedores Union. Foot directed a fierce, highly personalized attack on Deakin entitled ‘A Slander on the Dockers’ in Tribune on 22 October. He had in any case long resented Deakin’s role as chief bear-baiter in promoting the leadership’s vendetta (as Foot saw it) against Bevan. In a speech in Birmingham on 17 October, Deakin had accused Communists of being behind recent London dock and bus strikes. There was ‘a conspiracy to create chaos and confusion’. Foot now accused the union leader of intolerance and worse: the dockers’ strike was not caused by Communist elements, said Foot, but by a major issue of principle – that of compulsory overtime. Deakin himself had seriously traduced the stevedores as being led by ‘a moronic crowd of irresponsible adventurers’.20
The Labour Party’s National Executive met on the twenty-seventh and then wrote to Tribune in stern terms, asking the three editorial board members, Foot, Jennie Lee and Mallalieu, how they could reconcile such a personal attack with loyalty to the party. Foot reacted in memorable terms. In a six-thousand-word article in Tribune, entirely his own work, he strongly upheld Labour’s traditions of free speech, and pointed out how left-wing figures like Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, Ben Tillett and more recently Aneurin Bevan had been attacked far more viciously by right-wing elements in the past: ‘We shall continue to print the truth as we see it. We trust that others will do the same.’ If Arthur Deakin attacked the Stevedores Union, he must expect to be attacked in return. Union leaders, Foot added, were not ‘a special breed of humanity, always to be shielded from the rough breezes of democracy, rare birds to be protected by special game laws’. It was a brilliant, really unanswerable philippic. It was published as a pamphlet entitled The Case for Freedom – an Answer to Morgan Phillips and the NEC, which sold well in dockland.21
In fact, nothing happened: Morgan Phillips told Crossman that he had been surprised at the ferocity of the NEC’s reaction, and that no expulsions were contemplated.22 What this episode did, other than confirm Foot’s reputation as a polemicist, was to show the huge gulf between him and the trade unions, or at least their leaders. He was aware of this himself, and in 1953–54 brought a talented young journalist, Ian Aitken, a labour correspondent on Beaverbrook’s newspapers, onto the staff of Tribune to give a trade union perspective.23 But at this stage Foot had no close associates among any of the unions. This was, incidentally, also true of Barbara Castle, which had a bearing on her attitude in In Place of Strife in 1968. Foot’s general attitude was to see the unions as undemocratic reactionary monoliths, using their block vote to shore up the leadership against left-wing critics, and to keep at bay the advance of socialism. Like all the Bevanites, Foot was at home essentially with the middle-class world of suburban socialism. So it continued until Frank Cousins, and more especially Jack Jones, entered his life and opened his eyes.
Tribune in the Bevanite years was the nerve-centre of a lively intellectual world. The presence of a highly intelligent woman, Elizabeth Thomas, on its staff, moving steadily up the ranks to become literary editor, was a signal.24 Foot himself had a growing and attractive range of friends. He was on warm terms with three young journalist colleagues, Ian Aitken and Geoffrey Goodman, on the Express and News Chronicle respectively by 1954, and Tom Baistow, also on the News Chronicle; he would enjoy meeting them for a drink or perhaps a meal at the George, a pub near the Tribune offices on The Strand. Foot was always unembarrassed at his bourgeois and comfortable lifestyle, and happy to make a political point of it. When he dined at Leoni’s, an Italian restaurant in Soho, he would point out that it was ‘where Karl Marx had once found sanctuary’. A new venue for meeting friends was the Gay Hussar, just off Soho Square in Greek Street, founded in 1953 by a recent Hungarian immigrant, Victor Sassie. It became famous for its goulash and the powerful red wine ‘Bull’s Blood’. For the remainder of his days it would be an important landmark, almost a shrine, for Michael Foot, the social venue where he felt most at home. It was reassuringly close to the bookshops of Charing Cross Road and to the burial place of his greatest literary hero, William Hazlitt, in St Ann’s Soho. Foot donated copies of all his own books to the restaurant’s growing shelves of left-wing volumes, and his portrait was prominent on its walls. It was natural that the main celebration of his ninetieth birthday in 2003 should take place in an upstairs dining room in what had for decades been his second home.25
At the Gay Hussar he lunched with other important new friends too. One was James Cameron, a crusading left-wing journalist on the Lib – Lab News Chronicle who had made his name with thrilling dispatches during the Korean War. He shared with Foot a deep love of India, and indeed added to his appeal for Foot when he married an Indian woman, Moneesha Sarka (‘Moni’), another close friend. Cameron stood shoulder to shoulder with Foot in many a subsequent campaign, especially on marches to Aldermaston. Perhaps closer still was ‘Vicky’, Victor Weisz, a compassionate, tormented man who was to commit suicide during the atrocities of the Vietnam War. He became the greatest British cartoonist since the heyday of David Low, chiefly in the News Chronicle but later, less successfully, in the Express. Viennese Jewish and passionately socialist, Vicky became a master draughtsman: his famous depiction of Harold Macmillan as ‘Supermac’ perhaps did Labour little good at general elections. Often attracted to cartoonists, like Abu and Austin later on, Foot admired Vicky’s radicalism, his quixotic outlook, his mitteleuropa romanticism. They shared a common passion for the German romantic poet Heinrich Heine. To Foot, Vicky’s presence showed the best of the British liberal tradition, welcoming an immigrant to our shores to enrich our culture. With him, as with few others of his friends, Foot found friendship turning into communion and love.26
Michael Foot, for all his public image of prickly, aggressive dogmatism which upset the right-wing papers and television viewers, was indeed a warm and generous man. He did not forget his friends. He lived for their intimacy and steeped himself in their ideas. But with one friend the ties were abruptly snapped. This was Arthur Koestler, a frequent visitor and drinking companion. In May 1952 Koestler was with Jill in the Foots’ Hampstead home, after visiting local pubs, and insisted that she make him some lunch. As she was doing so, he attacked her physically and raped her. Screaming and shaken, she felt herself being hit again and again. In the end she staggered outside, bruised and with her clothes torn, trying to regain some kind of composure but deeply distressed. She told Michael afterwards that Koestler had attacked her, but apparently did not tell him that she had been raped. They took no legal action, in the presumed anti-feminist climate of the time which would have assumed that Jill had invited Koestler’s sexual attentions. No mention was made of the incident for forty-three years, until, in the unlikely setting of a review of David Cesarani’s biography of Koestler in the Financial Times, Foot observed almost casually that ‘Koestler had tried to rape my wife’. There was an unedifying attempt by one of Koestler’s biographers to dispute the facts, but the news surprised no one who had known the writer personally. His unfeeling attitude towards women was well-known. Tony Crosland had called him a ‘serial rapist’; Richard Crossman, whose wife Zita had suffered a similar attempt, said that Koestler was ‘a hell of a raper’. Extraordinarily enough, the Foots resumed some kind of contact with Koestler after this episode, and Foot made no reference to it in an essay on Koestler in Debts of Honour (1980). But the magic for Foot of close intimacy with his fellow Zionist, brilliant author of Darkness at Noon, evaporated for ever.27
The rape episode was only one of many that made these years less than comfortable for Jill Craigie. Her relationship with Michael was content if childless by mutual agreement. She found professional opportunities, if more sporadically, including as screenwriter for the successful film The Million Pound Note (1954), an adaptation of a story by Mark Twain, which led to a close friendship with its main actor, Gregory Peck. But there were rows with Michael about the Bevanite campaign, and money worries. The financial disaster threatened by the Kemsley libel case caused her anxiety. Money seemed short, not least with the costs of her daughter Julie’s education. Charles Wintour told Beaverbrook, ‘I get the impression that the Foots could use a little more too. They like to live reasonably well, and furnishing their house, small though it is, must have been quite an item, paid for by Jill.’28
Just before this, on 10–11 December 1954, Michael and Jill had moved into a new home. They had had to leave their house in Rosslyn Hill in 1953, when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners refused to renew their lease, which confirmed Foot’s hostile view of all Churches. They spent a few months in another Hampstead house, 4 Hampstead Hill Gardens. There it was very much a hand-to-mouth existence, including reportedly for a time sleeping in their car. They were then given shelter by Foot’s friend J. P. W. Mallalieu and his wife, and lived with them in Hampton Court for six months before some domestic disagreement between Jill and Mrs Mallalieu put an end to the arrangement.29 Again they were homeless. But again the old patron, Beaverbrook, helped out with rare generosity. He gave them the use, rent-free, of Paddock Cottage on the Cherkley estate. The Foots, or rather Jill, decorated and maintained it at their own expense. The Beaverbrook home was attractively located. Jill said that it meant living in the countryside; this was questioned by Michael’s country-loving sister Sally, who retorted that they were really living in a private park.30 It was nevertheless remarkably generous of Beaverbrook to give them use of the cottage, effectively as a second home, for years to come. It was, in turn, remarkably insouciant of Foot to accept the gift of a right-wing millionaire capitalist, even if he did not advertise the fact to the Tribune staff. Here was perhaps a more intimate donation than the free summer holidays provided for Tony and Cherie Blair by various rich Continental friends after 1997, which led to sceptical press comment. There were suggestions that Foot used his contacts with Beaverbrook to encourage Express Newspapers to push his own views, including stirring up criticism of Bevan during the rift between him and Foot during 1958.31 This may not have been so, but there certainly was a highly personal, almost naïve, quasi-paternal relationship between the press magnate and the editor of Tribune. In the meantime, in December 1954, as noted, the Foots moved into a new house in St John’s Wood, 32A Abbey Road, where they were to live for the next ten years. It was a modern house in an expensive area of London, and apparently entailed Jill selling a minor painting by Renoir once given her by an admirer, Malcolm MacDonald. The £2,000 this sale realized provided one-third of the cost of their new house.
In May 1955 the new Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, called a general election shortly after he had succeeded the octogenarian Churchill in Downing Street. This was bound to be a difficult campaign for Labour. Prosperity and consumer affluence had been growing since the end of the Korean War in 1953, and the falling cost of raw materials worldwide gave a gratuitous boost to the balance of payments. In addition, the Conservatives had not met the left’s bleak expectations about a Tory government: Walter Monckton as Minister of Labour had been notably amiable towards the unions, as indeed had Winston Churchill himself. Labour’s own seemingly endless wranglings, mostly involving Foot’s intimate friend Bevan, gave the Conservatives a moral advantage and, save for occasional intervals such as from August to November 1954, they usually led in the opinion polls.
It was clear that it would also be a difficult contest for Foot. His Devonport seat might be considered marginal, even though local journalists felt that he would scrape home. Randolph Churchill had left the political scene, but Foot’s Conservative opponent was the most formidable he had yet experienced. This was Miss Joan Vickers, who had served nine years on the London County Council, and who had worked in the Colonial Service and with war prisoners, along with the Red Cross. Her strong experience of social work, and her appeal to women voters, whom she talked to in shops or cinema queues, gave her many advantages. The constituency had perhaps changed in her favour since 1951, with new private housing on its fringes, plus some help from redistribution.32 On the other hand, there was a Liberal candidate, A. Russell Mayne, a Plymouth-born estate agent, who might siphon off a few crucial Conservative votes.
It was a quiet campaign, with television eating into the enthusiasm for public meetings: ‘Devonport has never heard such a muted Michael Foot,’ wrote the Western Morning News’s lobby correspondent.33 Foot’s was not only a quiet campaign, but possibly not a very sensible one. He made no attempt to moderate his views on defence spending and especially on the bomb, which was not perhaps the best line to take before service voters and their families. He spoke strongly on such traditional socialist issues as the steel and road haulage industries, which the Tories had denationalized, along with nationalizing ICI and the rest of the chemical industry, also not vote-winners. His supporting speakers were what a local journalist called ‘the Bevanite circus’, Bevan himself, Jennie Lee and the pacifist Methodist Dr Donald Soper.34 Votes seemed to be slipping away, though Foot’s agent Ron Lemin still felt his man would get home. But on polling day there was heavy rain in the evening, when most Labour voters went out to vote. The turnout fell from 82 per cent in 1951 to 77 per cent. So, in the closest of finishes, Joan Vickers polled 24,821 votes against Foot’s 24,721, and the Liberal’s 3,100. Foot was out by just one hundred after a recount. Nationally, Labour’s poll fell by a million and a half, and there was a 2.5 per cent swing to the Conservatives. With a majority of sixty-eight over Labour, four or five more years of Tory rule were guaranteed. Isaac Foot wrote sensitively to his son, telling him that his own six electoral defeats were more honourable than his five victories, and sending him a valuable first edition of Swift.35 But it was still an immense blow for Michael. His life would have to start all over again.
After the election he had time on his hands and a living to earn. He still had Tribune, of course, and became its editor again in December. He was still writing weekly columns for the Daily Herald, though they give the impression of being in the way of throwaway ephemera. His bank account benefited from the Herald, but his heart was always in Tribune. With his new freedom he changed the direction of his life, as will be seen in the next chapter, and spent the next twelve months fulfilling an old ambition by writing a serious book about Dean Swift. In Tribune he wrote about matters great and small. There were several opportunities for light relief, including Princess Margaret’s affair with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend and other aspects of the life of the royal family. When it was reported that Grace Kelly and her husband Prince Rainier were looking for someone to run the finances of Monaco, Foot suggested that Macmillan should move there from the British Treasury.36 More seriously, he kept up solid support for Bevan, and encouraged his bid to become leader when Attlee retired in November 1955. But Gaitskell was easily elected, with 157 MPs’ votes to Bevan’s seventy and Herbert Morrison’s forty. It was known that Gaitskell’s supporters included Harold Wilson, who soon became Shadow Chancellor. More striking was Bevan’s return to the fold. He became shadow spokesman for colonial policy, then defeated George Brown to become Party Treasurer at the 1956 party conference at Blackpool. Shortly afterwards Gaitskell made him shadow foreign affairs spokesman, and they collaborated together henceforth, with perhaps less difficulty than is implied by Foot’s account in his biography of Bevan.
By far the greatest political event of this period was the Suez crisis, when British troops were sent into Egypt in October – November 1956. Soon after it was over, and Eden had resigned as Prime Minister, it emerged that it had resulted from secret collusion between Britain, France and Israel to invade Egypt, following President Nasser’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal. Here was a natural opportunity for Foot’s exposé journalism, and with a Tribune colleague, Mervyn Jones, he produced in rapid time a 264-page book which was published on 1 April 1957 by Gollancz with the familiar yellow jacket, under the title Guilty Men, 1957: Macmillan etc.37 The subtitle perhaps caused most comment, since Harold Macmillan was now Prime Minister, and the extent of his bizarre manoeuvrings, first to promote the Suez adventure, then to stop it following severe US pressure on the reserves and on sterling, was not yet known. Foot was again identified as ‘part-author of Guilty Men’, and there were excellent cartoons from his friend Vicky. Much the liveliest part of the book is the first few pages, ‘At the Palace’, with the usual satirical sketches of Conservative leaders at the time of Macmillan’s out-manoeuvring of Butler to become Prime Minister in January. After that there is a fairly dense narrative account of the events from their origins, from Gladstone’s sending troops to the region in 1882, to Eden’s ignominious withdrawal. While Gaitskell does receive incidental praise for opposing the Suez venture in the end, the book’s finale inevitably comes from a broadside by Bevan in the Commons on 19 December. In fact Bevan himself, with his deep sympathies for Israel, had been somewhat more equivocal than Gaitskell in pronouncing on the crisis: Tory newspapers considered him almost a patriot compared with his traitorous leader.38 Foot, however, seems to have had no difficulty in condemning the Suez invasion; it gave him even more grist for his mill when he attacked Tony Blair’s involvement in the Iraq invasion in 2003. His criticisms, however, focused almost entirely on the illegalities committed by Eden and the French premier, Guy Mollet. Israel’s response he saw as the result of Arab provocation. On balance the new Guilty Men lacked the sparkle, originality and element of surprise of its 1940 predecessor. Reviewers felt it was too partisan to be wholly effective. Other books on Suez followed, with fuller and fresher revelations that left it behind.
The aftermath of Suez was relatively short-lived, so immediate and complete was the Anglo – French climbdown. By the time Foot’s Suez book appeared, public debate was being increasingly dominated by an even more momentous issue, namely Britain’s development and testing of nuclear weapons. This had always been an uneasy problem between Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot, and often caused tensions on Tribune’s editorial board, which Bevan sometimes attended. There was much anxiety among Labour MPs when repeated British tests took place on Christmas Island in the Pacific. On 24 May Tribune published an article by Bevan, ‘Destroy the Bombs Before They Destroy Us’.39 Everyone could agree with this; the question was how to do so. In August there came a very different clarion call from the octogenarian philosopher Bertrand Russell which called passionately for a unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons, whose development, let alone use, he called ‘a vast atrocity’. Michael Foot strongly committed Tribune to this standpoint, arguing that using nuclear weapons would simply mean worldwide mass suicide.
He was not closely in touch with Bevan in the run-up to the party conference in Brighton at the start of October 1957. In the Tribune of 4 October, Foot’s focus was on the debate on the policy document ‘Industry and Society’, a modest statement of Labour attitudes to further nationalization, including regulation of private industry and the purchase of shares by the government. Gaitskell’s defence of it, wrote Foot, was ‘evasive and unconvincing’, though Bevan found it quite adequate as a transitional view.40 But the crucial debate, which took place on 2 October, was on a unilateralist amendment to the official party motion on nuclear weapons. Aneurin Bevan’s view was a matter of intense speculation on the left, and it was known that he was wrestling with his conscience in painful fashion. In fact, Foot had already guessed beforehand that Bevan would not endorse unilateralism.41 He knew that Bevan was impressed by talks he had had with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the summer. The Russian leader had insisted that it was essential for meaningful great-power diplomacy for Britain to retain its own nuclear weaponry and thus make its own contribution to any settlement. Barbara Castle and others had also given indications to Foot of Bevan’s likely attitude, while a Tribune meeting the day before saw Bevan confirming this view. It was clinched at a long meeting that evening, involving several bottles of whisky, with the Durham miners’ leader Sam Watson.
Even so, Bevan’s speech at conference the next day was a huge shock to Michael Foot and to almost all the old Bevanite and Tribunite supporters. It was a confused speech, revealing the torment and intellectual self-torture that Bevan had undergone over months past. Cross-man thought it ‘a ghastly performance’, though ‘immensely impressive’ when heckling began and the old bull was enraged by his tormentors.42 Bevan conceded the need to stop nuclear tests, and the urgency of getting rid of all nuclear weapons in rapid time. But his essential point was that if it renounced its own weapons unilaterally, Britain would lose any influence on future negotiations, it would be ignored by the Americans, whom we had to influence, and it would become a laughing-stock throughout the world. In effect, it would cease to be a great power. But, as John Campbell has rightly observed, it was not what Bevan said, but the way he said it.43 Goaded by waves of heckling from his former supporters on the left, he talked of their wishing to send a British Foreign Secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. In the most wounding phrase of all, he almost screamed, ‘You call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.’ That evening, with James Cameron, Geoffrey Goodman and other friends, Foot sat miserably in a Brighton bar. His god had failed. Nye, his idol, his hero, his supreme fount of inspiration and hope, had betrayed the principles in which they all believed. It was easily the most wounding experience of Foot’s life.
But, passionate as he was about Britain’s renouncing the use of nuclear weapons, he recovered from his immediate gloom to deliver a measured response in Tribune. In ‘Bevan and the H-Bomb’ on 11 October, Foot deployed a range of strong arguments. Countries like India, West Germany and China exercised great influence on world events without having an H-bomb. Britain’s stance meant a total dependence on the United States, and a permanent confrontation between massed alliances and pacts all over the world. Worst of all, Britain was committing itself to a horrific and utterly immoral weapon whose use would mean collective suicide.44
Foot’s position gained massive endorsement from individuals in the party and beyond. One of them was Frank Cousins, the new General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who had delivered an emotional speech condemning nuclear weapons, and using his daughter as a symbol of the new generation he wished to protect. Although never close to Bevan, Cousins was to become an important figure in Foot’s life, his first significant friend amongst the union leaders. He and his wife Nance were to be frequent dinner guests of the Foots.45 In the pages, especially the correspondence columns, of Tribune, the debate about Bevan continued to rage. Mervyn Jones has told us that Foot, anxious to preserve some kind of balance, actually wrote letters himself to support Bevan’s position. On 18 October Tribune published a counter-article from Jennie Lee which in effect repeated her husband’s line at conference. The Russians, she wrote, would be contemptuous of a country that dismantled its own weaponry without any regard to others. Foot speculated that these were not perhaps Jennie Lee’s own feelings, but the evidence from Patricia Hollis’s biography is that she too had been converted to Nye’s point of view.46 Bevan himself wrote in Tribune too, on the continuing importance of the nation state and the need to retain the ability to act independently in world affairs. The entire Tribune staff were much divided, and board meetings were angry. Bob Millar, the business manager, was strongly pro-Bevan, and reportedly leaked news of divisions among the board to the Daily Mail.47 There was no meeting of minds on so fundamental an issue, especially after the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was formed early in 1958. As will be seen, its first Easter march to Aldermaston heralded a new stage in the mass protest and debate over Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons. So far as Michael Foot was concerned, he and his hero were hopelessly at odds. They met less and less frequently; they were driven far apart by a fundamental difference of principle. Thrown out of Parliament, his party self-destructing, his idol disappointing his old friends, Michael Foot had never felt more depressed.
The rift with Bevan continued for a considerable time, perhaps well over a year, certainly longer than Foot indicates in his biography of Bevan, where the whole affair is dealt with, understandably, briefly and in a general way. Throughout 1958, as Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman, Bevan showed no sign of relenting in his views on Britain retaining its nuclear weapons. He even moved towards the proposition that Britain should endorse the possible first use of tactical atomic weapons, a view put forward by the Labour right, notably by the defence spokesman George Brown. Gaitskell and Bevan, if never personally close, were now proving a strong team in foreign policy debates. They agreed about the cessation of nuclear tests, and the need to convene four-power talks to stop them. Together they also took the initiative in pressing for a scheme for disengagement in central Europe, with the eventual reunification of Germany: they both endorsed the Rapacki plan for central Europe put forward by the Polish government. Foot seemed more and more a fringe figure, sad and forlorn. His meetings with Bevan were infrequent.
At one of these meetings some time in 1958, a legendary clash occurred. After a somewhat alcoholic reception at the Polish embassy, Bevan and Jennie Lee went back to the Foots’ home in St John’s Wood, where a passionate argument broke out between Bevan and Foot over the H-bomb. Voices were raised, and it even seemed possible that the two men might come to blows, a unique event for Michael Foot. Instead Bevan vented his fury on one of Jill’s antique Sheraton chairs, which he smashed to the floor before leaving, violently angry. The next morning Jill rang up Jennie Lee to try to mend fences (though not, unfortunately, the Sheraton chair), and a kind of personal reconciliation was managed.48 But the episode showed the potential for a permanent rift or worse. Jennie Lee herself was furious at what she took to be Tribune’s personal attacks on Bevan. She also had her own strong grievances about Tribune policy, especially what she took to be Foot’s surprisingly sympathetic remarks towards Tito and his ruthless treatment of dissidents like Milovan Djilas and the Yugoslav Vladimir Dedijer.49 Certainly the newspaper laid major emphasis on the nuclear weapons issue, and became in effect the organ of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Its new deputy editor, Dick Clements, whom Foot had met on the Daily Herald and who had previously edited Socialist Advance for Transport House, ran a weekly banner headline on the front page: ‘The Paper which Wants to Abolish the Bomb’.50
The impasse went on. In June 1958 Gaitskell reported to Hugh Dalton that Bevan’s relations with Foot ‘were now very bad and that Foot was trying to stir up Beaverbrook to attack Bevan’. Dalton responded that he had noticed references to Bevan in the Sunday and Daily Express ‘which suggested that Bevan was no longer on the White List’.51 Geoffrey Goodman, who saw Foot a great deal at this time, believed that he was in a state of ‘emotional disrepair’ after his quarrel with Bevan, and has questioned whether their relationship was ever properly repaired. Bevan is quoted as saying, ‘Deep down, Michael is still a Liberal,’ and a compliment was not intended.52 Even as late as June 1959 Richard Crossman’s diary records Foot as being deeply depressed: ‘When I suggested we might recreate an informal group with Nye to discuss nuclear weapons, Michael told me he had no kind of relations with Nye. Only once this year had he seen him. He had been over to the farm just after Aldermaston. He had a pleasant afternoon but only because each side had carefully avoided discussing anything serious at all. In fact, Michael and Nye have had no political contact for over a year.’ Foot is reported as saying gloomily that Crossman, Tony Greenwood and Barbara Castle would be better off talking to Bevan: ‘I’m no good these days.’53 Foot’s whole career seemed to be on hold. He was no longer the most famous Foot. Dingle had finally joined the Labour Party at the time of the 1955 election, and was elected Labour Member for Ipswich in 1957 (the decisive agent seems to have been not Michael, but Dingle’s close friend and fellow ex-left-wing Liberal Megan Lloyd George, daughter of the former Prime Minister). Hugh was now winning golden opinions for his statesmanlike role as Governor of Cyprus in handling the alarming threat from Greek Cypriot EOKA terrorists waging a relentless guerrilla campaign against British rule. Michael appeared more a querulous gadfly, buzzing about in the wings.
He worked off some of his frustration with attacks on the Labour Party leadership, and especially the whips, for trying to suppress free debate within the parliamentary party. Tribune at this time is full of complaints about the repressive use of standing orders to this end. In 1959 Foot published, in a series of small pamphlets for Pall Mall Press, Parliament in Danger!. It had previously appeared in article form in the Observer, with whose political correspondent, Hugh Massingham, he was friendly. Foot here made several strong points about the stifling effect on political life of an over-disciplinary party system, drawing on impressive historical examples, notably Edmund Burke, that famous champion of the independence of MPs. He proposed a number of procedural reforms, including more free votes in the Commons and the opening up of closed meetings of parliamentary parties. He was himself to exemplify some of the merits (and also some of the drawbacks) of this approach when he returned to the Commons. But it was noticeable that the pamphlet had the air of settling old scores. The champions of rigid party discipline seemed to be mainly on the Labour side, notably Attlee, Morrison and Gaitskell. The last-named was sharply taken to task for drawing a distinction between an MP’s vote and his ‘judgement, thought and speech’.54 At least Foot could sometimes extract humour from a bleak situation. On 28 November 1958 the sage ‘John Marullus’ can be found ironically complimenting Transport House for publishing The Future Labour Offers You in the green and black colours of Plymouth Argyle. Perhaps this offered ‘an unconscious act of appeasement towards Tribune’.55
One unexpected diversion came in France. In May 1958 the Daily Herald dispatched Foot to Paris to report on the political turmoil surrounding the fall of the Fourth Republic and the emergence of de Gaulle as leader. He took this very seriously, writing to his agent Peter Jackson, ‘events which have been happening in France may be extremely important for all of us, just as what happened in Germany twenty years ago eventually resulted in the bombing of Plymouth. The Daily Herald has in my view been by far the best paper in Britain reporting events in France, just as it has improved greatly in other respects in recent months.’56 Predictably, Foot was fiercely critical of de Gaulle’s role in the crisis. This ‘self-appointed national saviour’ was the beneficiary of a conspiracy between the military and the politicians, together with the craven Vichy-like appeasement offered by the Pflimlin government, the last administration of the Fourth Republic, which effectively sacrificed the old republic by yielding to pressure from military leaders in Algeria.
Finally Foot launched an attack on President René Coty, formerly a leading figure under Vichy and famous for the manufacture of perfume, who, he declared, had surrendered supinely to illegality like Pétain before him. This was too much for the French authorities, and for the first and only time in his life Foot faced physical danger, and was imprisoned without explanation in the Paris prefecture with another British journalist. An alarmed Jill did not know where he was. The Herald’s Paris correspondent, David Ross, a regular contributor to Tribune, later blamed himself for not making clearer to Foot the risks he was running. Eventually Foot was flown back home, where he denounced Coty in Cobbett-like terms, with some help from the Bard: ‘Coty … is the Great Nothing of the Fourth Republic … All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten the name of Coty.’57 It should be added that as de Gaulle’s presidency unfolded in the sixties, Foot’s views became a good deal more cordial, particularly after the withdrawal of French troops from Algeria and the diplomatic stance of resistance towards the United States shown by de Gaulle on numerous issues.
Foot desperately needed a more prominent platform and a stronger voice. CND and Tribune were essentially locations on the fringe, even in the Labour Party. Above all, he wanted to return to the Commons. In the summer of 1959 he and Bevan at last had a proper reconciliation, and much of the old warmth returned. For Foot it was a kiss of life. There had been prospects of a safe seat before. The MP for Aberavon, W. G. Cove, sympathetic to the Bevanites, had approached Foot suggesting that he inherit his twenty-thousand-odd majority. Trade unions in the constituency had written in numbers asking Foot to put his name forward. He had also been approached about by-elections in Wednesbury, Ipswich (where Dingle was elected Labour Member in 1957), Gloucester, Gateshead and St Helens, and also about nomination for Bishop Auckland, all of them seats with strong Labour majorities. But he felt committed to Devonport, ‘quixotic’ though Nye Bevan thought this to be.58
His home town, however, was now anything but a hopeful prospect. The Conservative Member for his old constituency, Joan Vickers, had been a good MP since 1955, and had built up a strong personal vote, especially amongst women. She had pushed issues like the treatment of wives deserted by their husbands, and had been prominent in debates on the many African questions that loomed large at this time. There was also a likelihood that population movements would help the Conservatives, with many old Labour areas affected by the drift of people into neighbouring Sutton and to dormitory areas outside the city.59 On the other hand, there were still eighteen thousand rock-solid Labour voters amongst the dockyard workers of Devonport. But a poll in the Daily Express on 14 March 1959 showed a huge lead of 18.5 per cent for Joan Vickers over Michael Foot. Its reporter, Francis Cassavetti, concluded that Foot had no hope of winning the seat back.60
The Labour Party in Devonport had been energetic, and conducted 100 per cent canvasses in many areas. Foot, however, had a problem with his agent Peter Jackson, an anxious man of somewhat unstable personality. He wrote to Foot in June 1958 expressing concern about his absences from the constituency, notably his eventful visit to Paris for the Herald. He also voiced alarm at Foot’s heavy involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Foot, needless to say, rejected the latter point: ‘I believe that the policy of the British government on the subject is utterly disastrous.’ He added, ‘If we are going … to have a strong Labour Government (and any other kind of Government is worse than useless) we must be prepared to make a much more aggressive attack on the Tories, [and] explain Labour policy more persistently.’ In November Jackson was expressing further anxiety about the state of organization in Devonport, and wrote a somewhat panicky letter direct to Labour’s General Secretary Morgan Phillips. He talked of a ‘showdown’ in the local party.61 Foot’s response was measured and firm. There should be no showdown: ‘There were feuds and quarrels inside the Party when you took over and there has certainly been much too much inertia among many people in the Party about getting on with the job of propaganda,’ but things had improved. He particularly resisted Jackson’s suggestion of the member of the National Executive coming down to Plymouth to sort things out. He also defended his own proposal for a special Tribune publicity project to be launched in the constituency – ‘This I am sure could be one of the finest pieces of propaganda attempted by any constituency party in the country.’62 Reluctantly, the agent climbed down.
Harold Macmillan called a general election for 8 October 1959, and Labour began the campaign in good heart, with the polls mostly putting them in the lead nationwide. In Devonport, with the constant support of Jill and his terrier Vanessa (a present from his stepdaughter Julie), Foot campaigned with more punch than in 1955. He emphasized the rise in unemployment in Plymouth to three thousand (double the national average), along with new initiatives on pensions and education.63 There were various ‘soak the rich’ recommendations to deal with speculators much in the news, like the property developer Charles Clore, through a capital gains tax. But he also made no effort to soft-pedal on the nuclear issue: ‘Most people know I go further than many of my colleagues in the Labour Party. Nuclear weapons are no use to us. To use them would mean national suicide. They are futile as well as evil.’64 He had few supporting speakers. As in 1955 the constituency was visited by the Methodist pacifist Donald Soper, a passionate member of CND. More seriously, Aneurin Bevan, due to attend a large Labour rally in Plymouth after an appearance in Swansea, was unable to come, since he was suffering from what the press called ‘influenza and a severe sinus infection’.65 Foot always knew that Joan Vickers would win. There was an increased turnout of 78.62 per cent, compared with 77.15 per cent in 1955, which was thought to favour Labour. But the Conservatives ended up with a large 6,454 majority. Labour’s vote fell by 2,700 to 22,027. Nationally, the Conservatives took 49.3 per cent of the vote to Labour’s 43.9 per cent, a nationwide swing of 1 per cent; Devonport’s swing was far greater than this. Foot was gallant in defeat: he told his agent Peter Jackson that he lost because of the ‘general swing’, not because of his own views. In many wards the Labour vote had held up strongly.66 But he was out again. Jill was near tears. Poor Jackson was to take the defeat very badly, and subsequently his life collapsed, with breakdowns, divorce and suspected suicide. For Michael Foot the result meant that he remained a figure on the fringe.67
Things got even worse. Aneurin Bevan produced a riveting final performance at the post-election party conference, with a breathtaking speech that rescued Gaitskell over the party’s policy on the economy and private ownership. He made brilliant use of Lenin’s views on the commanding heights of the economy to reconcile Gaitskell’s speech with that of Barbara Castle, who struck a far more socialist note. But he also used his considerable influence to suppress Gaitskell’s maladroit suggestion that the party jettison Clause Four of its constitution, the commitment to nationalization, and even more Douglas Jay’s weird proposal in Forward after the election that Labour change its name, because it seemed old-fashioned. Foot believed that a right-wing conspiracy had been foiled by his old hero. In Tribune he noted the very different terms in which Gaitskell and Bevan had spoken of socialism. All Bevan’s old charisma and power were on display. The magic was back.
But Foot knew that in reality Nye was a very sick man. That was why he had failed to speak at Devonport. At a meeting of the Tribune board, according to Foot, Bevan ‘saw Gaitskell and Gaitskellism as more of a threat than ever to the kind of socialism he had dreamed of and fought for all his life’.68 The leader’s ‘mixed economy’ programme did not appear to Bevan to be socialism at all. Shortly after Christmas Foot saw him, and Bevan was at his sparkling best in a rumbustious conversation. Two days later he had an operation for malignant cancer in Hampstead’s Royal Free hospital. He was declining fast, with Jennie Lee, and old comrades like Michael Foot, his closest friend from Tredegar Archie Lush and his doctor Dai Davies, in constant attendance. In late March 1960 he gave a non-political interview to journalists, with some cautionary words for future authors (and their reviewers): ‘I understand that Mr Macmillan reads political biographies. I have never been able to achieve that degree of credulity.’ He quoted (in English translation) from Eifion Wyn’s famous Welsh awdl (poem) ‘Cwm Pennant’ – ‘O Lord why did you make the world so beautiful and the life of the old shepherd so short?’69 On 6 July he died in his sleep. Foot was distraught. On 8 July there appeared in Tribune his beautifully crafted appreciation of Bevan, ‘the most principled great political leader of the century’. Foot’s biography conveyed the pathos of the moment even more poignantly: ‘he was like a great tree hacked down wantonly in full leaf’.70
In their final conversations Bevan and Foot had discussed an important political matter. Bevan had urgently pressed his friend to succeed him as Member of Parliament for Ebbw Vale. With much support from Bill Harry and other Bevan intimates in the constituency, Foot now actively sought the nomination.71 But this proved to be very difficult. Foot, as a unilateralist, and perhaps even more as an Englishman, was not necessarily the most appropriate candidate for a south Wales constituency. Even Bevan himself had not met with universal popularity in his home territory: he was regarded as a London-based politician. Foot’s passionate support for CND was suspect in many quarters, not least the steel union with its right-wing, Gaitskellite leadership. The Ebbw Vale steelworks was central to the industrial future of the constituency. When the shortlist for the Labour candidacy was announced after a very disorderly process, to general astonishment Michael Foot’s name was not even on it. Nor was the miners’ nominee, Frank Whatley. The five people on the list, all male as was customary in south Wales, were a modest group – Ron Evans (Bevan’s old agent), Fred Evans (a teacher and later MP for Caerphilly), Gordon Parry from Pembrokeshire, Dr K. G. Pendse and Tom Williams, a barrister and former MP.72 None approached Foot’s reputation or charisma. Much pressure was now applied to the constituency party to change its mind. In particular Frank Cousins, staying in London with Geoffrey Goodman at the time, picked up the phone and demanded of his TGWU members in Ebbw Vale that they ensure that Foot was a candidate.73 Archie Lush, Bevan’s old colleague, also put pressure on local party officials. On 19 September the general management committee added both Foot and Whatley’s names to the shortlist. At the selection meeting on 24 September, Foot made a powerful speech which laid the fullest emphasis on his unilateralism and opposition to Britain’s possession of nuclear weapons. In the first ballot he received sixty-seven votes, the runner-up being Ron Evans. Foot was selected on the third ballot.74 Evans, a generous man, took his defeat in the best of spirits. Indeed, he would serve as Foot’s agent, and remained a close personal friend until his death in 1991.75
The by-election came in mid-November, following on from an exceptionally bitter and divisive party conference at Scarborough in which Foot took a leading part. There was no question of Foot’s not winning easily – Bevan’s majority had been over twenty thousand in 1959. In his campaign Foot laid particular emphasis on the steel industry: nationalization was a major issue, since the Richard Thomas & Baldwin works in Ebbw Vale was shortly to be denationalized.76 His election address declared that the sell-off of RTB was ‘nothing short of an outrage’. He also supported a substantial pay increase for the miners. At meetings in Ebbw Vale, Tredegar and Glyncoed, nearly all his supporting speakers came from the left. They included Judith Hart, Harold Wilson, Ian Mikardo, Will Griffiths, Richard Crossman, Sydney Silverman and even Konni Zilliacus, now back once again on the Labour benches, though scarcely diluted in his ideas.77 The only representatives of the centre-right were John Morris, the new MP for Aberavon, and Jim Callaghan. The latter took sharp issue with Foot’s views on defence policy, for which he was both heckled and applauded. After the poll, Callaghan wrote to Ron Evans that it had been agreed he would say something on defence ‘as unprovocatively as possible’.78 Easily the most embarrassing document was a formal letter of support from the party leader. Gaitskell noted that he and Foot ‘disagreed strongly’ on foreign and defence policy: ‘But I understand that much of your campaign has been fought on home affairs.’ He wished Foot luck in the campaign for Democratic Socialism (Gaitskell’s capitals), but it was hardly a cordial endorsement.79
Foot’s speeches were, as always, aggressive. He had fierce exchanges with the right-wing Conservative candidate, Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, over the way the Tories had savaged Nye Bevan. Williams was informed that he possessed ‘pin-headed intellectual capacity’.80 Seven by-election results were announced on 18 November. Labour lost six of them in Tory-held seats in different parts of the country. But in Ebbw Vale it was totally different. Foot swept home with a majority of 16,729: he polled 20,528 votes against Williams’s 3,799. Williams, like the Liberal and Plaid Cymru candidates, lost his deposit. Foot’s share of the vote was 68.7 per cent, compared with 81 per cent for Bevan in 1959. But there had been only two candidates in the general election; in November 1960 there were four. It was a victory, Foot told the Ebbw Vale electors, using the same formulation as he had before the Monmouth voters in 1935, for socialism and peace. The electors had demanded ‘a new foreign policy which repudiates nuclear strategy altogether’.81 Foot’s great friend Vicky produced an appropriate cartoon of Gaitskell reading the Ebbw Vale result in a newspaper. He is shown lamenting, ‘Oh, dear, we’ve won.’ Foot was particularly excited by a congratulatory letter from the author Compton Mackenzie, a supporter of CND: ‘I can’t tell you how delighted I was to receive it – from one of my heroes!’82
Foot’s return to Parliament, symbolically as Member for Aneurin Bevan’s constituency and ancestral home, rounded off a troubled and frustrating decade. Politically, he had little to show for his endeavours. He had spent more than five years out of Parliament. Both in and out of the House, he had been in constant quarrels with parliamentary and party colleagues. Some he relished, notably his long vendetta against Gaitskell. Easily the most wounding and stressful was his breach with Bevan. Like Hazlitt’s famous disputes, it was ‘the quarrel of the age’. Even at Nye’s death, scars in their relationship remained. In November 1960 Foot’s Labour Party also seemed at a low ebb, Gaitskell and the left wing, which now had many large unions in support, being passionately at odds with each other over policy towards the bomb. Gaitskell had said at Scarborough that he intended to ‘fight, fight and fight again’. His opponents were equally combative. Ever since Bevan’s resignation in April 1951 the party had seemed to be engaged in a long civil war, with years of Conservative rule as a result. As he resumed his role on the backbenches, Foot was still haunted by the legacy of Bevan. Indeed, it would dominate his thoughts as totally as Bevan himself had when was alive, since he had agreed to Jennie Lee’s proposal that he should be her husband’s official biographer. Crossman prophesied that it would be his ‘one and only’ masterpiece.83
Foot, many felt, would now take over ‘the mantle of Nye’. But the nature, or even the existence, of that elusive garment was much contested. Would Foot be still the incorrigible Bevanite freelance, crusading for a purer form of socialism, whatever the destructive outcome for Labour ever returning to power? Or, as he moved towards his fifties, would he turn into the more accommodating Nye of post-1956, still doctrinally on the left but working constructively for the Labour coalition to recapture power? Or would he avoid both choices and focus largely on being a polemical man of letters, a kind of political dilettante, seeking inspiration mainly from a selective view of the past and the wisdom of ancient texts, as he appeared to do after electoral defeat in 1955? On Foot’s choice and his still half-developed idea of leadership much would depend as he contemplated a political rebirth.