‘You will be glad to see Michael back in the House again. You are a rich man to have so many wonderful children.’ So wrote Jennie Lee to Isaac Foot in late October 1960.1 But two weeks after his son’s election for Ebbw Vale, Isaac died, at the age of eighty. For Michael, probably the son Isaac felt closest to, it was deeply upsetting. He received the news on the day of his first speech in the Commons as Member for Ebbw Vale; not surprisingly, his speech, inevitably on the bomb, was not one of his best. Isaac had always declared that while being a politician was a defensible proposition, being a writer was a supreme vocation. Although he wrote little himself, he always encouraged Michael to become a writer of books, serious and scholarly works of literature that would stand the test of time, not ephemeral journalistic squibs. It was Isaac who directly inspired the most original and exciting new departure in Michael’s career in the fifties, his volume on Dean Swift, The Pen and the Sword. In encouraging his son to turn his attention away from the political duel between Gaitskell and Bevan to that between the Duke of Marlborough and Robert Harley in the reign of Queen Anne, Isaac helped to show the world a new, and deeply rewarding, dimension of Michael’s many talents.
Jonathan Swift, an ambiguous political figure at various times held to be Old Whig or neo-Jacobite Tory, had long been a hero of the Liberal Foot family. Isaac had handed this gospel on to Michael early in his life. The suggestion, after his defeat in Devonport in the 1955 election, that Michael should turn his energies to a book on Swift came directly from Isaac, as he fully acknowledged. It was a book he had been meditating for many years.2 He wrote it not by way of orthodox research into manuscript materials in university or other libraries but through work done in Paddock Cottage on Beaverbrook’s Cherkley estate, interspersed with visits to Pencrebar.3 His essential sources were from his father’s remarkable two-hundred-book collection of Swift’s published correspondence and writings. It was in that sense a work of filio-piety and inherited scholarship.
Another person close to Foot who held Swift in the highest esteem was George Orwell. He had been brought up on Gulliver’s Travels since he was a small child, and had remained obsessed by its author ever since. Animal Farm was commonly taken as a Swiftian satire on the modern hegemonic state. While being repelled by some aspects of Swift, Orwell hugely admired his incisive prose and his uninhibited style in challenging authority. In the essay ‘Politics vs. Literature’ (1948) he celebrated Swift for his rejection of the totalitarian police state that Orwell himself so memorably condemned in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Foot himself wrote of Swift’s ‘horror of state tyranny’ as one of his most appealing features.4 His interpretations of Swift, however, differed from those of Orwell in major respects. Orwell saw Gulliver’s Travels as radical conservative propaganda (as commentators such as Ian Higgins have seen it as coded Jacobitism). Foot rather regarded Swift as a visionary social critic, a view which many scholars have found a refreshing corrective.5
Foot’s literary heroes from the past also felt particularly inspired by Swift’s work. Hazlitt, who perhaps held equal place to Swift in Foot’s affections, was a great admirer of Swift’s originality and boldness. So were Byron and, later on, H. G. Wells. When Foot discovered another of his father’s heroes, Montaigne, whose Essais (1580) he read while recovering in hospital after his car accident in 1963, he found yet another precious link, since Montaigne’s writings had been a great inspiration to Swift himself in the development of the essay form. The high regard in which Swift held Montaigne, as Foot showed, was confirmed by his giving a copy of his works to Stella, one of his two close women friends.6 There was thus a kind of celestial literary descent, ranging from Montaigne, the sceptical politique of sixteenth-century Bordeaux, down to H. G. Wells, the suburban London socialist, three hundred years later. To Foot, Swift was the essential link in this inspired genealogy. Swift was no sort of socialist, but without understanding or appreciating him and his values, Michael Foot could not have been one either.
Other aspects of Swift also appealed to a man like Foot. One was his personality. It was marked by alternating extremes of humanity and misanthropy. Orwell saw Swift as ‘a diseased writer’. He was ‘permanently in a depressed mood rather as though someone suffering from jaundice or the after-effects of influenza should have the energy to write books … In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together.’7 Foot’s brother John, who enormously admired The Pen and the Sword, also wrote, ‘Mind you, Swift is a disgusting fellow.’8 Swift’s was certainly an unstable personality, as the various shifts of mood in the four books of Gulliver’s Travels suggest. It was a strange man who devoted poems to ageing whores, or whose satirical solution for Irish poverty in his Modest Proposal was to introduce cannibalism: the Irish should breed their children only for eating them. There were many suggestions that he may even have gone mad, and he certainly had a dismal death. But Foot cited medical and literary evidence, originally amassed by the doctor father of Oscar Wilde in the mid-nineteenth century, which showed that Swift’s decline was physical rather than psychological. To him, Swift was the more fascinating precisely because of his angular, tormented personality. It made his comic writing the more spontaneous, his satire the more uninhibited, his visionary consciousness, as in his treatment of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels as embodiments of Stoic reason and Epicurean passion respectively, the more searching and intriguing. Swift’s frequent lapses into lugubrious misanthropy gave his writing a keener edge.
Foot also warmed to Swift as an outsider, both literary and political. The obscure backwoods Irish clergyman who stormed into English political debate in 1709–11 had yet to make much of a mark in the world. Even A Tale of a Tub (1704) had not impressed the public, partly because it was anonymous. Swift was a frustrated genius with huge ambitions unfulfilled. It was a type that always appealed to Foot. So did a very different personality, the outsider Jewish adventurer Benjamin Disraeli, another of his unlikely heroes. Perhaps Beaverbrook, the Canadian outsider who also invaded the English establishment, could be bracketed with them too. There was a kind of instinctive minority-mindedness in Foot which made the individual rebel like Swift, locked into a kind of permanent self-made exile, attractive to him. He liked a man who could shock and destabilize the establishment single-handed, as Swift did to the Whig Junto in England or the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Similarly, Foot warmed to H. G. Wells’s undeniably destructive attacks on the old guard of the Fabian Society, especially the Webbs. The fact that Swift, like Hazlitt, was also an Irishman, who championed a kind of Irish nationalism and attacked the class pretensions of the Ascendancy, reinforced his claim to Foot’s sympathies. After returning to Ireland in 1714 Swift pleaded for his native land to be freed from its economic and political servitude under English rule. Even if it was accompanied by a marked lack of confidence in the Irish themselves, this still gave the latter stages of Swift’s controversial career a kind of nobility.9 This aspect was also a factor in Foot’s intense admiration for yet another Irishman, Edmund Burke, even in his most reactionary phase of opposition to the French Revolution. The fact that Swift was a clergyman might have caused problems for an agnostic like Michael Foot. But he argued that, far from Swift being a sound churchman, it was debatable whether he was even a Christian at all. Certainly, a writer who saw ‘religious cant as flatulence and charity as suppressed lust’ was not overwhelmed by piety.10
Swift’s attitude towards women also made him congenial to Foot, who insisted that he was a great defender of women’s rights. He took a particular delight years later, in October 1993, when in the presence of Mary Robinson, the President of the Irish Republic, at the fourth annual Swift seminar at Celbridge, County Kildare (Swift’s friend ‘Vanessa’s’ home), he hailed this aspect of Swift’s public outlook. But the implications for Swift’s private life also fascinated Foot. Swift’s experiences with women both harmonized and humanized his life and work. At times he could pour contempt on the entire female species; some of his later poems, notably in 1730–31, were distinctly scatological. But there was a frequent idealization of women as well. His relations with his two famous close friends, ‘Stella’ (Esther Johnson) and ‘Vanessa’ (Esther Van Homrigh), helped to make his personality more complex and humane. Foot felt quite certain that Swift genuinely loved both women. Almost all Foot’s chosen literary heroes had distinctly powerful libidos. Talent was always reinforced by testosterone. There was Hazlitt’s inordinate passion for his landlady’s daughter Sarah Walker, and the scandal caused by his sexually-charged Liber Amoris, which haunted his reputation after his death. Byron’s serial infidelities, from Augusta Leigh to Lady Caroline Lamb, are too well-known to need rehearsal here: Foot objected to Fiona MacCarthy’s life of Byron (2002), which suggested homosexual tendencies. H. G. Wells’s irregular liaisons left a trail of human turmoil, from poor Amber Reeves during his Fabian days, on to Rebecca West and then Moura Budberg. Bertrand Russell was another much-married contemporary whose sex life entailed casual cruelty, but his gospel of liberated relationships was an important part of Foot’s philosophical outlook from the time he joined the Labour Party. One of his early formative literary influences was Rousseau, in the posthumously published Confessions as well as in the earlier Émile. It may be instructive that Charles James Fox, the prospective subject of his projected historical work back in the 1930s, combined ‘Jacobin’ radicalism with a libertine lifestyle. He was not only radical but raffish. Daniel Defoe Foot admired not so much for Robinson Crusoe as for the racy chronicles of Moll Flanders and Roxana. Even William Blake’s gentle mysticism was demythologized. ‘Jerusalem’, Foot liked to argue, was really a poem in defence of free love, ‘arrows of desire’ indeed, enlivening England’s green and distinctly pleasant land.11
Swift was another in this category. Foot relished the fact that Vanessa’s home was now a monastery and that the monks kept her portrait in the neighbouring abbey, with positive benefits for the tourist trade. He was never an author to cherish the orthodox or the morally conventional. The puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers he left behind on Plymouth Hoe. And in each case he insisted that, whatever the sexual pain, the women in his heroes’ lives always enjoyed the experience too – though it was a view from which his wife Jill, among others, often dissented, especially in relation to H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.
But ultimately the compelling feature of Jonathan Swift for Foot was his satirical brilliance as commentator and critic. To use a favourite Foot word, he admired Swift’s audacity. He was versatile enough both to run the marathon and to sprint the hundred metres. He could not only conduct a prolonged examination of the human condition in Gulliver’s Travels, but could also operate with brutal intensity as a journalist of exposure in his pamphlet The Conduct of the Allies. It was this quality of passion, expressed in bewitching language of apparent simplicity, which made Michael Foot his most devoted of disciples, and a sort of heir in an honoured line of literary descent. It was particularly for that reason that Foot turned so fiercely against Dr Johnson, who had written with such scorn of Swift’s greatest achievement, even claiming that it was his recondite facts, not his literary style, that made The Conduct of the Allies at all interesting. Johnson had also spread the legend of Swift’s madness. Foot’s savagery towards Johnson was equalled only by his venom towards Hugh Gaitskell. Dr Johnson was wrong in his judgements on Swift. There was a more fundamental reason for smiting him hip and thigh – he was ‘a bloody old Tory’. But then, many thought then and later, so was Jonathan Swift. It mattered little to Michael Foot. Decades later, his brother John observed, ‘I note in passing that your absurd prejudice against the great Dr Johnson is as virulent as ever.’12
It is instructive that the phase of Swift’s life which Foot chose as the subject for a book was his venture into politics, soon after he moved to London from Ireland. He focuses on a totally political tract by Swift in which his usual self-satire or irony are absent. The years 1710–11, which The Pen and the Sword covers, were a dramatic period of violent party controversy. The state seemed in great danger, with the royal succession precarious and the return of the Jacobites a constant threat: indeed, in 1715 the Old Pretender launched his bid for power. Queen Anne’s later years saw crisis after crisis, from the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell to the downfall of the Duke of Marlborough. Rumours of treason were in the air. The period saw Godolphin and the Whig Junto, who since 1702 had kept the country at war with France in the so-called War of Spanish Succession, manoeuvred out of office by the resurgent Tories headed by Harley and St John, and the indirect help of Queen Anne herself. Secret negotiations began with the French. But peace was still some way off.
Then came the intervention of the virtually unknown pamphleteer Jonathan Swift. He had secured the patronage of Harley, and used the venom of his pen to dish the Whigs and sell a Tory peace to a sceptical public. He did so initially in his newspaper the Examiner, and then most brilliantly in The Conduct of the Allies, published in November 1711. It flayed the Whigs for perpetuating the war for their own personal ambitions and corrupt financial ends, and argued for the acceptance of the peace terms concluded secretly with the French by the Tory ministers. Most audaciously, it claimed that the war, instead of being a struggle for national survival against the overwhelming power of Louis XIV’s France, had been wholly unjustified in the first place, and totally against Britain’s interests. It had been a prolonged conspiracy by the ‘monied men’, who made huge profits through trading in stocks and ‘lending upon great interest and premiums’, but also placed enormous tax burdens on the country gentleman at home.
Most dramatically of all, the book turned opinion against the Duke of Marlborough, the greatest man of the age. Swift dismissed him as a land-based commander with no understanding of sea power or of maritime trade (an argument that appealed to the Plymouth-bred Foot). He also alleged (on the basis of virtually no evidence) that Marlborough had waged war for his own financial benefit, and that he was consumed by avarice and ambition. For years he had received secret payments from Britain’s allies which were ‘unwarrantable and illegal’.13 This was why the country had been at war for so long and with no apparent benefit. Swift pressed the insular arguments, popular with Tory Jacobites, that the Houses of Orange and Hanover had ensured that Dutch and German interests were pursued at the expense of those of Britain. He proclaimed the venality of the mercenary Dutch and the ingratitude of the duplicitous Austrians. ‘We are thus become the Dupes and Bubbles of Europe,’ wrote Swift. On the personal side, Marlborough was also said to have put pressure on the Queen to make him General for life. Some even believed that the Duke, whose Blenheim palace, built by Vanbrugh at Woodstock near Oxford, was almost to rival Versailles in its baroque magnificence, himself sought to become King. But then along came the little vicar of Laracor to barge him off his pedestal and cut him down to size.
Swift’s pamphlet was a sensational publishing triumph. The thousand copies of the first edition sold out in two days; the second within five hours. By the sixth edition, eleven thousand copies had been sold in two months. Daniel Defoe also wrote tracts against the war at this period, but with nothing like Swift’s panache or success.14 Opinion turned against Marlborough. The war was wound up with the aid of the Queen, who created twelve Tory peers in late December to get the peace terms through the House of Lords. Marlborough, who had terrified Europe on its battlefields for ten years, was cast into the dust. Ormonde took his place as Captain-General. It was a victory, if not a particularly honourable one, for the peacemongers, and amongst the great journalistic coups of all time.
Foot portrays these complex episodes with bold colours; he gives them an immediacy that makes his book intensely exciting throughout. He begins with an incisive gallery of the dramatis personae: Swift himself, the Whig aristocrat Thomas Wharton (‘the epitome of a loose-living, arrogant, Church-hating Whig’), Harley, St John, the Queen and Marlborough. His overall treatment of them, while vigorous, is more balanced and subtle than his pamphleteering or his weekly journalism were inclined to be. The contrasts between the two great Tories, St John and Harley, are brought out – St John brilliant and self-indulgent, Harley sinuous and secretive. Swift, the former Whig, went privately to see Harley the Tory and left ‘with mischief in my heart’. Marlborough is something of an off-stage presence, but his greatness as a general is fully acknowledged. There is pathos as well as a sense of justice in his downfall. This was indeed a highly controversial part of the entire story, and Swift has been widely condemned for inaccuracy and unfairness. Foot later professed himself uncertain whether his father Isaac’s sympathies lay with Swift or with Marlborough on the matter. At least Michael Foot does not attempt to exact any kind of revenge from Marlborough’s great living descendant, who was also his biographer. On the contrary, Foot’s bibliography generously acclaims the great qualities of Winston Churchill’s life of the Duke.
The core of his book is the relationship between the press and Parliament. Both are described with great skill. Foot provides a vigorous account of the rise of Grub Street, and its growing influence in the world of the coffee-house intelligentsia. His treatment of the birth of the popular press is a central theme of the book, and a contribution to our knowledge of the subject. The great virtue of the press, in his view, was its sense of independence and its championing of free comment. Writers like Swift and Defoe are thus praised for promoting the cause of journalistic freedom and bringing about the decline of journalistic sycophancy. Thereby, Foot argues, the entire quality of our literature was elevated: ‘Never again did the craft of writing suffer quite the same debasement as Dryden had endured.’ Events in Parliament are also deftly handled: the qualities of the Tory Robert Harley as parliamentarian and political manoeuvrer are amply praised. One of Foot’s specialities comes out in his discussion of parliamentary procedure. He is also excellent on relations between the two houses, the Tory government of Harley and St John matched against the Whig majority in the Lords. Foot explains the initial defeat of the Whig ‘No Peace without Spain’ lobby in February 1711, and the final crisis which led to Queen Anne’s creation of twelve new Tory peers to ensure a government majority and the eventual safe arrival of peace with France. As with Roy Jenkins’s biographies of Asquith, Gladstone and Winston Churchill, there is an added fascination because the author is a practitioner of politics in the real world, not merely a detached scholar immured in his ivory tower.
Foot’s book is concerned with men in action. But it also has an implied heroine – not the dull but dutiful Queen, but the imperious but magnificent Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, ‘a tremendous figure’.15 Although she plays a marginal part in the final crisis of 1711–12, Foot wrote in Debts of Honour in praise of the sharpness of Sarah’s political intelligence and the magic of her personality. This he bracketed in the title of his chapter on her with ‘Praise for women in general’; Jill Craigie evidently agreed with this assessment. The patronizing misogyny of Professor J. H. Plumb of Cambridge University, who had criticized Sarah’s ‘viragoish temperament’, is splendidly dismissed as ‘a caricature’.16 (Plumb had also given a somewhat mixed review of The Pen and the Sword in 1957 – Foot’s literary arsenal never neglected the small arms of the tu quoque.) Elsewhere in the same book, A. L. Rowse of All Souls in Oxford is duly chastised for his treatment of Stella and Vanessa: ‘Nothing … could be more pitiful than Dr Rowse’s attempt to foist upon Swift his own contempt for women.’17 One major quality in Sarah was her generosity of spirit. Nothing better illustrated this for Foot than her warm praise of Gulliver’s Travels later on.
Swift himself is criticized by Foot for being unfair to the Duchess. Yet clearly he is the hero, or perhaps the anti-hero, of Foot’s book. Foot later described how, initially somewhat sceptical about the tone of The Conduct of the Allies, he ‘became more and more converted by what Swift was writing’. Foot sees him as ‘the prince of journalists’, a ferocious, fearless critic of independent judgement.18 A later scholar, Irving Ehrenpreis, condemned the fact that in writing about the Whigs, Swift ‘abandons plain fact and rational inference, relying instead upon innuendo’.19 But Foot treats Swift’s clinical attacks as being all of a piece. His sharpness, his immediate recognition of the killer fact (usually derived from secret government documents to which his Whig opponents had no access and no opportunity to refute), contributed to what Ehrenpreis calls his ‘dramatic immediacy’.20 He overthrew an overmighty subject, he ended a war, and he reversed the course of history. Not even Guilty Men had quite managed that.
For all its colourful style, Foot’s is a work of history, not of historical journalism. All his other books, on Bevan, Byron and Wells (and, one might guess, his unwritten life of Fox as well), were highly partisan accounts of heroic figures. Swift here is not depicted as a giant: he operates on the human scale. The Pen and the Sword is detached, at times almost pedantic in its scholarship. Scholars in 2005 regarded it as still the most exhaustive work on the subject, and important for an understanding of the politics of Queen Anne’s reign. Foot’s book is a remarkable work for a non-professional writer. It was read through prior to publication, not by a historian but by Tribune’s drama critic Richard Findlater, and also by Foot’s father Isaac.21 The book is set in its own time, and deserves to be considered separately from its author’s career in contemporary politics and journalism, socialism, Bevanism, the campaign against the bomb. Attempts have been made, for example, to relate Foot’s treatment of Swift’s relationship with Harley to his own patronage by Beaverbrook, but that does not really add to our understanding. The contemporary connections lie at a deeper level.
One reviewer of the book, the strongly Conservative Kenneth Young, later author of a biography of Stanley Baldwin, writing in the Daily Telegraph under the heading ‘Swift’s “Guilty” Men’, was baffled why Michael Foot, the left-wing Labour partisan, should turn his talents to the study of the politics of Queen Anne’s reign. After some dithering, Young offered the lame view that Foot might be taking tips from ‘the most vicious and successful political pamphleteer in our history’. But the connections are not so great a mystery. After all, Foot, a famous journalist, was celebrating a remarkable predecessor who effectively created the press as the Fourth Estate of the realm. Moreover, the great theme celebrated in The Pen and the Sword is the cause of peace. Swift’s achievement in 1711–12 was to convert the country to winding up a war. He disaggregated real patriotism from the pursuit of military glory as conducted (so he claimed) by Marlborough and the Whigs. He did this not only in The Conduct of the Allies but in all his most influential writings. Gulliver’s Travels, Foot controversially claimed, was ‘still the most powerful of pacifist pamphlets’.22 Linked with this was a principled rejection of foreign entanglements, a subtle kind of xenophobia. This came out even more clearly in Swift’s Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712), with its scathing attacks on the Dutch for their deceit and avarice. Michael Foot was a very English patriot who was for long a reluctant European. He warmed to the spectacle of a freelance Irishman who identified himself with the patriotic prejudices of parochial English country gentlemen whose world he knew only at second or third hand. Foot also responded to Swift’s hostility to a moneyed Establishment, the power that used to follow Land now having gone over to Money. He celebrated especially Swift’s insistence on a nation’s constitution being based on traditional principles, underpinned by the rule of law as a function of citizenship: ‘Freedom consists of a People being governed by Laws made with their own Consent, and Slavery on the contrary.’23 George Orwell wrote of Swift as having the outlook of a ‘Tory anarchist’. This may be a self-description, or even a self-parody. Michael Foot was neither a Tory nor an anarchist, but as a self-liberated critic he could respond to both. Perhaps it was what Aneurin Bevan had in mind when he said to Geoffrey Goodman in 1959 that ‘Deep down, Michael is still a Liberal.’24
The Pen and the Sword appeared in the early autumn of 1957, a little later than Foot and Mervyn Jones’s book on Suez. Published by MacGibbon & Kee, it was widely reviewed and well received. The famous man of letters and one-time diplomat Harold Nicolson, no admirer of Swift himself, and the recipient of a sharpish review by Foot of his own Congress of Vienna in the New Statesman years earlier, gave it lavish praise in the Observer. So did other reviewers as diverse as Lord Samuel, Hannen Swaffer and Foot’s good friend James Cameron (‘tremendously full and stimulating account’). Isaac Foot was delighted with the book. He wrote to his son Hugh, appointed Governor of Cyprus in succession to the fiercely military Sir John Harding at the very time of The Pen and the Sword being published: ‘Anyone can be an MP or Governor of Cyprus. But this is the summit of the Foot family’s achievement – an historic work that will be read in many a year’s time.’25 How Hugh Foot responded to this paternal blessing is not recorded, but he was always a good-natured, uncompetitive son.
Although it was not widely noticed in historical journals, the book was reviewed in the Sunday Times by J. H. Plumb, the leading historian of early-eighteenth-century England. He dismissed it as a work of journalism – ‘not a satisfactory book’ – that failed to explain the violence of the political press. Yet he too felt that ‘a great deal of sense’ was scattered throughout its pages. Patronizingly, he concluded that ‘it will do less harm than many a scholarly monograph’. By contrast, Harold Nicolson praised it both as a guide to the political complexities of the time and especially as a study of earlier political journalism, even if Foot gave Swift ‘a political stature he did not in fact possess’.26 The book also attracted the kind of learned discourse with other scholars in the field which can extend the impact of individual monographs by academic osmosis. In particular, Foot conducted from 1959 a fruitful correspondence with a distinguished Swift scholar, Kathleen Williams, which he acknowledged with typical generosity. It was she who surprised and delighted him by showing him the full importance of Swift’s indebtedness to Montaigne. It was also she who directed his reading towards the Drapier’s Letters and the other rich evidence of his radicalism from Swift’s brilliant last Irish phase. Not the least aspect of Dr Williams’s appeal was that her home town was one first encountered by Foot at the 1935 general election – ‘bloody old Tory Usk’.
At this distance of time Michael Foot’s book has passed into the penumbra of largely forgotten works on the Whig Supremacy. Since it was written scholars have transformed our understanding of the complexities of politics between the Glorious Revolution and the ascendancy of Walpole.27 Yet Michael Foot, an amateur historian but one of many insights, played his part in that transformation. One of the most important passages in The Pen and the Sword comes in an appendix. Here he demolishes the argument of an American scholar, Robert Walcott, who had tried, in a book published the previous year, to transfer Lewis Namier’s analysis of the politics of interests, located usually in the mid-and later eighteenth century, to the reign of Queen Anne.28 Foot showed convincingly that this was totally mistaken. In Queen Anne’s reign it was transcendently clear that the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ had profound ideological meaning, and that it was a time of intense party contention. This is now the conventional wisdom amongst scholars. The whole Namierite methodology was condemned by A. J. P. Taylor, Foot’s close friend and Namier’s former university colleague at Manchester, as ‘taking the mind out of history’. Foot, in his modest way, was amongst those putting it back in. He and others rebuffed the teachings of value-free Namierite historians and linguistic Oxford philosophers. For him they were but scholastic ghost writers for an unfeeling, unbending Toryism.
An amateur historian, Foot had the imagination to see the past – all of it – not as a static nexus of structures and economic interests, but as a dynamic universe with its own inherent dialectic. His book shows how he had moved on from Macaulay, Trevelyan and the Whig interpretation of linear progress safeguarded by Parliament in which he was brought up in his West Country youth. Historical change was the product of secular clashes of ideas and social forces, with the popular press acting as both its engine and its arena, leaving great personalities, even a Marlborough, helpless in its wake. The total inability of Marlborough to come to terms with the rising power of Grub Street is a dominant theme of both Dean Swift and Michael Foot. Thereafter, Swift was a constant visitor to Foot’s columns, book reviews and parliamentary speeches. He did not return to write about Swift again until his retirement in the 1980s; he was busy doing other things. But the conceptual approach of his book in 1957 crystallized much of his outlook in the intervening years, when he became one of the major political figures in Britain.
Both in what it says and in what it implied about Foot’s world view, The Pen and the Sword is an important document in understanding him, more so than hundreds of his journalistic throw-offs and show-offs. It is his most scholarly book and probably his best, one still well worth reading. His judgements were certainly daring, and the radical peace-mongering Swift whom Foot depicts was not one recognized by all other scholars. J. A. Downie saw Swift as fundamentally a ‘true, loyal Whig’, even though The Conduct of the Allies was aimed at sympathetic Tory readers. Ian Higgins, in sharp contrast, saw in almost all of Swift’s writings ‘a disaffected High Church extremist with Jacobite inclinations’. Even Gulliver’s Travels, on this interpretation, exemplified ‘the Church Tory doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience’.29 Foot takes a bolder stance in seeing Swift as an iconoclastic radical from The Tale of a Tub in 1708 to the Irish writings of the 1720s, and his case deserves to be taken seriously. His later biography of Aneurin Bevan rightly became famous for its political passion and personal commitment; it is also most brilliantly written, with breathtaking panache. But it is, in the best sense, a polemic. In this earlier study of a remote crisis in the age of Queen Anne, far removed from contemporary controversies, Michael Foot showed the talent to write historical literature of high quality, and to handle the English language sensitively in doing so. These abilities were to give him a unique place in the culture of his people in the later twentieth century.
By the time critics and commentators were calmly reviewing Michael Foot’s contribution to the understanding of Queen Anne’s reign, in the contemporary political world he was being plunged into passionate controversy. As in Swift’s day, it centred on the sacred cause of peace. But now it was the overwhelming menace of the bomb, and of nuclear weapons in general, that tormented the British left and gave central impulsion to Foot’s career. It had already led to his devastating breach with Aneurin Bevan after Bevan’s 1957 conference speech. But, far beyond personalities, it led Foot into a mass movement of popular protest that took him well outside the orthodox confines of the Labour Party, almost beyond party politics altogether. This was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a central preoccupation for the rest of his life.
The Campaign came into being in the early months of 1958, in the wake of nationwide alarm at Britain’s development of her own H-bomb programme. Its message, characteristically, was first proclaimed to the world not by a politician but by a man of letters, in J. B. Priestley’s article ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bomb’ in the New Statesman on 2 November 1957. Priestley’s passionate outcry against weapons whose use was suicidal and whose purpose was morally obscene struck a powerful chord. A private meeting of professional and intellectual eminences was held on 21 January 1958 in the house of Canon John Collins of St Paul’s at 2 Amen Court, next to the cathedral. Among those present were the scientist author Ritchie Calder, Kingsley Martin, Peggy Duff and Professor Joseph Rothblat. The last-named was a particularly notable recruit since he was a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos which had developed the first nuclear weapons, but had resigned from his work and rebelled against the entire nuclear strategy. Michael Foot, whose Tribune had long advocated the abolition of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, was also amongst the pioneers. Bertrand Russell was nominated as President of the new body, with among others Richard Acland, James Cameron, the Bishop of Chichester and Sir Julian Huxley invited to join.30 In many ways it was a reprise of the associates with whom Foot had worked on the 1941 Committee and the ‘Save Europe Now’ movement after the war, an identifiable group of progressive intellectuals and campaigners. Foot was a leading figure from the start. On 28 January it was he who proposed that Canon Collins be made Chairman, Ritchie Calder Vice-Chairman and Peggy Duff (of mixed recollection from Tribune days) Organizing Secretary.31 A twelve-person committee headed by Russell and Collins was appointed; Foot was one of them, and with Collins and Rothblat was empowered to sign the cheques. Along with Priestley, Calder and Cameron he would serve on a separate public relations committee.
In the next few weeks and months, CND became the new sensation of British public life. Meetings were held on 13 and 27 February, 18 March and 14 April, all of which Foot attended. A large public meeting was held to launch it at Central Hall, Westminster, on 17 February. Five thousand people attended, while overflow meetings were arranged in Church House, Caxton Hall and elsewhere to cater for thousands of others unable to get in. Foot spoke powerfully there, but the most memorable speech came from his old friend and In the News colleague A. J. P. Taylor, who now became a nationwide CND crusader. He raised huge applause when he proposed to his audience that pro-nuclear MPs should be called ‘murderers’.32 Young people, properly dressed in the regulation protest uniform of the day of duffle-coats and blue jeans, flocked to its meetings. There were innumerable extramural activities by students, notably the Oxford University contingents who demonstrated outside the US air base at Brize Norton. The very youth of much of the membership aroused doubts among some senior CND figures about the likely longevity of their movement. However, dissenters and idealists of all ages were thrilled by its direct, single-issue moral imperative.
Foot, a nationally known face from ‘Free Speech’ appearances and In the News, was much the most prominent of the politicians enlisted. But what was most striking about CND – and in the end one of its major weaknesses – was its ability to enlist people like Canon Collins, Priestley, Russell and Stephen King-Hall, who were independent-minded progressive intellectuals of no formal party affiliation at all. It was unpolitical, perhaps even anti-political, in its appeal. Religious leaders from all Churches joined in. They took their stand like latter-day Luthers: Aldermaston weapons establishment was their equivalent of the church door at Wittenberg. One outstanding feature of CND was its ability to attract major figures from the arts. Benjamin Britten, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael and Vanessa Redgrave and Iris Murdoch were among its distinguished supporters.
A symbolic gesture was needed to give the movement a lift-off. What was decided upon had the stamp of genius. A vast inaugural meeting, attended by perhaps fifty thousand people, was held in Trafalgar Square, symbolically at Easter, the season of universal redemption. A mass protest march then took place to Aldermaston, the nuclear weapons research establishment in Berkshire, forty miles away. The annual Eastertime Aldermaston march, a deeply serious event but also an entertaining folk festival, complete with the ‘skiffle groups’ of the day, became the badge of honour of CND. It made it lodge in the public awareness for years to come.
From the first, Michael Foot was one of CND’s iconic figures, the most famous of the politicians swept along by the unpolitical. His identification with the movement contributed to his electoral defeat at Devonport in 1959, and was perhaps a reason for his victory in Ebbw Vale the following year. He was an omnipresent figure, denouncing the infamy of the bomb-makers and their political voices like Gaitskell from the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, and in mass rallies all over Britain. His ‘shaggy white bitch’, Vanessa, was a familiar participant in the Aldermaston marches, despite the distance involved, accompanied by her equally shaggy master. Jill Craigie was as passionate a CND demonstrator as was Foot himself, while his brother John, a Liberal, was also strong in support.
CND had some overlap with the old Bevanite group. Ian Mikardo, for instance, threw himself into the movement and became a key organization man as he had been with the Bevanites, while his secretary Jo Richardson assisted Peggy Duff on the administrative side.33 On the other hand, Barbara Castle, while a member of CND, never joined the Aldermaston marches, since she distrusted the simplifications of single-issue campaigns.34 Richard Crossman had nothing at all to do with it, while Harold Wilson, as a champion of NATO, was actually opposed. Cleverly, he placed the emphasis not on the existence of the bomb as such, but rather on Britain’s so-called independent nuclear deterrent, which the cancellation of the Blue Streak project was, in any case, soon likely to make a logistical and economic contradiction.
Close friends of Foot’s outside Parliament like Geoffrey Goodman were doubtful about unilateralism. Aneurin Bevan, of course, had given CND no support: it was the physical embodiment of the ‘emotional spasm’ of the 1957 party conference. The party leadership, from Gaitskell down, was totally hostile to a movement which they regarded as permeated by the far left, and more hostile to themselves than to the Tory government. Yet some prominent MPs not active in Bevanism did play an active part in the CND movement, notably Anthony Greenwood, who was even persuaded in 1961 to run against Gaitskell for the Labour Party leadership. There was also an influx of young members later to be prominent in the party, such as Stan Orme of the Manchester District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and Joyce Gould, in time to become National Party Organizer.35 Two decades later CND membership was claimed by a young trainee barrister, apolitical at university, Tony Blair.
Michael Foot’s own passionate endorsement of the anti-nuclear campaign, of course, rang out loud and clear week by week from the pages of Tribune. The front page advertised prominently the fact that it was the newspaper that wanted to abolish the bomb. When Foot gave up the editorship in 1960 after being elected for Ebbw Vale, his successor Richard Clements, although a CND supporter himself, felt that the nuclear issue was being overdone to an extent that harmed sales.36 Tribune was a difficult paper to manage anyway. There were rows about relations with Bevan after 1957, and about the unlawful campaigns of Russell’s Committee of 100 after 1960. Clements felt that Tribune should have ‘a policy for everything’, and that this was compromised by an obsession with the bomb to the exclusion of much else.37
Foot, however, refused to retreat in any way on what he regarded as the supreme issue of the time and the key to the survival of humanity itself. Like Swift, but with more consistent idealism, he was giving himself to the cause of peace. Ever since news of the first atomic bomb tests by Britain had come through in 1953, he had been adamant that such weapons were abhorrent and immoral in every way. As he wrote to his agent in Devonport, Peter Jackson, in June 1958: ‘There can be no subject more important than this one of what we are going to do about these weapons which can blow us all to pieces. I believe that the policy of the British government on the subject is utterly disastrous.’38
Foot regarded the medical and biological evidence of the catastrophic effect of using nuclear weapons as beyond dispute. First use of them in a war was unthinkable: apart from other considerations, it would be an act of collective suicide, since everyone would be obliterated. Even testing them would be harmful to future generations: CND campaigners quoted facts about the health of babies and pregnant women in New Mexico around the Los Alamos testing area. It followed also that dependence on someone else to drop bombs on our behalf or to save our skins was immoral. Hence an alliance system which imposed on Britain a humiliating reliance on the United States, with its notoriously erratic foreign policy in the Far East and elsewhere, was equally objectionable.
Britain should therefore, in the view of CND activists (though Foot himself was significantly unclear on this), leave NATO with its strategy of nuclear deterrence. All global alliances should be broken up, and the policy of non-alignment promoted. Britain should instead use her unique moral example to promote the cause of unilateral disarmament throughout the world, starting perhaps with Commonwealth countries like India (a cherished nation for CND). They hoped, even assumed, that other countries would rush to follow Britain’s lead, but this was not a condition of Britain renouncing its own nuclear weapons, which would follow whatever the rest of the world did or thought. Foot tended to argue that countries which had no nuclear weapons had all the greater influence in international affairs – he would cite India, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Egypt and, curiously, Ghana, seen as an early African instance of a post-colonial state. The resources wasted on potential world suicide should be devoted to world poverty and the regeneration of the planet. Foot never deviated from this policy.
Meanwhile CND seemed to be carrying all before it. The Aldermaston march of 1959 attracted even larger crowds than 1958. CND has been accused of being almost entirely a middle-class movement, a sop to the guilt-complex of the comfortably-off and the high-minded. But its membership was starting to include working-class people, especially trade unionists, too. Frank Cousins, Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, was merely the best-known of many key union officials, while union members like the young Stan Orme were recruited in large numbers. It was all very dramatic. As in the marches against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was noted that at a time of alleged political apathy or cynicism during a dull period of single-party rule, hundreds of thousands, even millions, could be mobilized to crusade for a mighty cause. In John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, first performed at London’s Royal Court theatre in May 1956, Jimmy Porter had claimed that there were ‘no great causes left’: ‘I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah.’ Arnold Wesker’s trilogy of plays Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1958) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960) contrasted the high community ideals of old Jewish socialists in the East End with the mindless lack of commitment of the present generation. CND appeared to change all that, especially among young people. Through its power over the public mind gospel, man and society would be born again. In the spring of 1960, despite Macmillan’s large Tory election victory the previous year, a new level of support was recorded when 100,000 people attended the final stages of the march to Aldermaston. Opinion polls showed that a record proportion of 33 per cent of the British population wanted to ban the bomb, and everything connected with Britain’s and the world’s nuclear arsenal.
While CND was passionate and unambiguous about the end, the means were less certain. So many of the movement’s members were young or apolitical that it was hard to formulate a strategy. Kingsley Martin asked Mervyn Jones at one large rally, ‘What on earth are we going to do with all these people?’ Nor was it clear who or what would decide policy, since CND had almost a mania for democracy. It claimed to be an undifferentiated mass movement of the people at large, with no effective internal organizational structure to discuss policy or strategic options at all. Mostly, the Campaign just wanted to change society, by mass protest or moral persuasion. The walls of Jericho would come tumbling down soon enough. But harder-headed politicians felt that it would come to nothing without a political platform. That could only mean the Labour Party. This was emphatically the view of Michael Foot, who could not imagine a political existence outside his party, and who felt that, with a change of leadership and policy, it could become the great cleansing agent of reform and a nuclear-free country. There had been intense argument within CND on this point. The Bulletin of the movement in January 1959 contained an article by Foot calling for the election of a Labour government at the next election, and one by Michael Croft arguing the exact opposite. After the 1959 general election, Labour CND activists within the constituencies and the trade unions launched a mighty campaign to capture their party. They obtained the natural adherence of many who had no close interest in the nuclear threat, which they saw as abstract and remote from everyday experience, but who simply wanted to be rid of the party leader Hugh Gaitskell after all the revisionism, the attempt to scrap Clause Four and the feud with the Bevanites.
The TUC voted for unilateralism at its 1960 conference, with large unions like the TGWU casting their block votes in favour (and the Engineers voting both ways). At the Labour Party conference in Scar-borough there was a mighty debate, led off by an extraordinarily muddled but emotionally powerful speech by Frank Cousins. He was backed up by Foot and others. In the pro-Gaitskell pages of the Daily Herald Foot had argued that a Britain ‘absolutely tied to NATO whatever follies NATO commits (like rearming Germany)’ would have little influence, whereas if it denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy it would have a major impact in the UN and the world.39 Beforehand it was clear, after switches in their votes by key unions like the AEU, that the Labour Party, the architect of NATO in Ernie Bevin’s days, was going to endorse a policy of unilateralism. Gaitskell’s final speech at Scarborough was an astonishing oratorical achievement, fired with an emotion once thought improbable from him. His cry that those who opposed the resolution would ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’ was thought to be unforgivably divisive by his opponents, an inspiring clarion call for renewal by his multilateralist supporters. The official policy was defeated by just under 297,000 votes in a total of six million, with individuals like Wilson and Crossman striving in vain for some kind of compromise proposition. The unilateralist victory is often attributed to left-wingers in the constituency parties, as were the triumphs of the Bennites in the early 1980s. But in fact it was the unions, especially the TGWU block vote of over a million, that settled the outcome.
Michael Foot was exultant, yet deeply apprehensive, after the Scarborough vote. He told Margaret Cole of his personal efforts to try to negotiate a compromise with Crossman, Walter Padley of the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (USDAW) and others.40 Foot did not want to break up the Labour Party, especially in alliance with inexperienced supporters strong in idealism but weak in political common sense. The opinion polls after Scarborough showed that it was Gaitskell’s arguments, not the miscellaneous ranks of CND, which commanded the support of the great majority of the British people. It was known, too, that the Gaitskellites were being all too true to their word in fighting back. They had most of the party’s major figures behind them, men like George Brown, Jim Callaghan and Patrick Gordon Walker, while it was known that a strong centre-right group, the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS), was being mobilized in the constituency parties to capture control from the left. Its organizers included younger people like William Rodgers, Brian Walden and Gaitskell’s future biographer Philip Williams. Crossman noted in his diary on 14 December 1960, two months after the party conference, that Foot’s ‘commitment to CND is a bit of an embarrassment, since he really knows in his heart of hearts that the Party can’t be completely unilateralist’.41 Nor did Foot really support Britain’s leaving NATO, which he had himself so strongly backed at the time of its foundation in 1949.
As 1961 wore on, the strength of CDS rapidly grew, as that of CND waned. Much of its finance came not from the grassroots but from wealthy businessmen such as Charles Forte, and there was also evidence of some linkage with the American CIA. However, Crossman’s judgement fairly noted that the left ‘is taking a terrible beating … up and down the country in the conferences I address … [because of] the passion to stop wrangling, combined with a really savage disillusionment against unilateralism. People are seeing more and more that what we need is not merely a protest but a will to power.’42 The tide was turning. Three of the six major unions changed sides compared with their positions in 1960, even if the extent to which they forsook unilateralism as a policy is debatable. To a degree some of them just wanted to support the party’s leader. The TUC supported Labour’s official defence policy, critical of an independent British deterrent but clearly multilateralist, by almost three to one. At the party conference at Blackpool a unilateralist defence motion sponsored by the TGWU was defeated by 4,309,000 to 1,891,000. The unilateralist crusade was fast losing momentum. Michael Foot was witnessing a repeat of the erosion and demoralization he had experienced with Bevanism six years earlier. He continued to campaign for CND. When a mass demonstration was held at Holy Loch in 1962 to protest against the manufacture of Polaris submarines with their nuclear warheads, Foot was the main speaker.
The decline of unilateralism was reinforced by a great schism within CND itself. This had always seemed probable with so unpolitical and unworldly a leadership. With prima donnas like Canon Collins, J.B. Priestley and Bertrand Russell, rows about strategy or priorities were always likely. Despite great marches, passionate speeches and massive media attention, nothing seemed to have changed. Both government and opposition were committed to retaining Britain’s nuclear strike force, however dependent it was on US patronage. The great majority of the British people seemed to feel that a threat of nuclear obliteration was theoretical at most. They had no inclination for Britain, still a great power, to throw away its influence and go it alone.
Much more was needed if CND was to make any effective point at all. Pressure now grew within the organization for a campaign of direct action. There had already been demonstrations against the siting in Britain of US Thor missile bases by a Direct Action Committee, contrary to orders from the CND executive. Now a new surge developed, led by the near-nonagenarian philosopher Bertrand Russell, a veteran of high-minded moral protest since long before the First World War. On 18 February 1961 he led hundreds in a sit-down protest outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. Unfortunately the prospect of martyrdom was extinguished, since the police took no action, and officials even handed the protesters materials with which to attach their protest documents to the ministry door. CND now went into swift decline. Russell formed a militant body, the Committee of 100, to engage in direct action on the lines of the suffragettes in the past. Many identified as the evil genius of the Committee Russell’s young American friend Ralph Schoenman. The Committee seemed to be expounding not pacifism, certainly not socialism, but something akin to nihilism. A fundamental split in the movement followed. Leading figures like Collins, Priestley and A. J. P. Taylor resigned from CND. The Committee of 100’s sit-downs in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere aroused not public support but public exasperation. The success of Bertrand Russell in being arrested and put in prison for seven days did not inspire many erstwhile followers.
Michael Foot was not enthused either. He was still passionate about abandoning nuclear weapons, and made an effective protest in the Commons on civil liberties grounds when Ralph Schoenman was imprisoned. He cited Gandhi, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and other past dissidents to justify acts of civil disobedience. But he was fundamentally a rationalist and positivist who was not in favour of breaking the law. A poorly attended demonstration at the US Air Force base in Wethersfield, Essex, at the end of 1961 showed that the momentum had gone. Major events in 1962–63 confirmed the decline and fall of the first great anti-nuclear movement. By March 1963 the momentum even seemed to have left the Aldermaston march.43 Thus the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 seemed to show the irrelevance of whether Britain had the bomb or not in the face of a great confrontation between the superpowers. In the summer of 1963 multilateralists could argue that there was actually some achievement to show, when the international test-ban treaty was signed in Moscow, Lord Hailsham being the almost nominal signatory for Britain. Now under Harold Wilson’s leadership following the sudden death of Gaitskell in January, the Labour Party concentrated on unity. It abandoned ‘theology’ and focused on industrial, not nuclear, science. Tribune got back to writing on other topics. Students found other issues, closer to their campuses, about which to demonstrate. As in Bob Dylan’s sad songs of antimilitary protest, it was all over now.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a major episode in Michael Foot’s career as a politician of protest. It touched him deeply, and he never gave up his faith in the rightness of unilateralism. Councillor Olive Gibbs in Oxford, a prominent CND campaigner, wrote in 1964 of the need for Labour Party members who were also in CND ‘to show, quite uncompromisingly, that Nuclear Disarmament and peace take precedence over all other policies’. She told Foot, ‘You, thank God, have never done anything else …’44 When CND revived in the later 1970s, this time largely from within the left rather than across the spectrum, in response to a new escalation of nuclear weaponry, Foot was again an eager supporter. He rallied the female faithful at Greenham Common. The Labour Party adopted unilateralism in its manifesto, and under Foot’s leadership fought the 1983 general election on that basis. Under his successor as party leader Neil Kinnock the policy was reversed, but Foot’s commitment did not change. He continued to participate in international peace conferences to promote the cause, notably a famous one in India in 1997, at which he discovered that he now had an unlikely ally in Robert McNamara, the former US Secretary of Defense. Foot’s late book Dr Strangelove, I Presume (1997) struck many of his familiar notes, especially over the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Middle and Far East.
In retrospect, the failure of CND seems almost preordained. It was a large, miscellaneous rallying call for enthusiastic political amateurs. Although dedicated to one single issue, it brought in supporters for a variety of reasons. There were environmental activists concerned about the dangers of nuclear testing and the hazards of nuclear waste. There were nationalists in Scotland and Wales who had their distinct agendas. And there were thousands and thousands of highly intelligent young people, many of them on university campuses, who responded to CND as a form of generational revolt. Some joined the movement because it was a protest against current American foreign and defence policy, others simply because they opposed Gaitskell. Olive Gibbs wrote to Foot about ‘this element in C. N. D. which seems to hate the Labour Party more than it does the Bomb, and certainly more than it hates the Tories’. The Campaign’s leaders were miscellaneous and highly individualist, with scant reputation as team players. The tactics were always sketchy. Well before the emergence of the Committee of 100, there was always a fundamental division between those dedicated to moral protest for its own sake, and those like Foot and Ian Mikardo who saw little point in CND unless it intended to convert and capture the Labour Party. Foot vehemently opposed a proposal from Stuart Hall of the quasi-Marxist New Left that CND should run its own parliamentary candidates, certainly that they should oppose Labour candidates. At the 1962 CND conference he condemned attempts to run independent unilateralists at by-elections. There was also a clear gulf between those who were simply pacifists and those who championed alternatively the case for conventional weapons.
Perhaps, though, CND’s major weakness lay in its purposes. As A. J. P. Taylor was to observe, the movement was the heir of British imperialism.45 It assumed that if a great nation like Britain took a decisive moral stand, then the rest of the world would be sufficiently stirred to do likewise. There was a kind of nationalist pride in the vision of Britain as the moral leader of mankind. In fact, most British people felt that unilateralism would reduce their country to near impotence in world affairs. Critics cited the pacifism of the 1930s to argue the dangers of futile moral gestures. Like George Lansbury then, CND seemed to be hawking its conscience around from demo to demo, rather than confronting the realities of power politics. Michael Foot, for all his sympathies with the anti-nuclear movement, had been there before. Much of his political career since 1945 had been devoted to ensuring that the British left did not lapse into the illusions of the appeasement years. CND collapsed in 1962–63, but emotionally Foot had left them long since. Certainly he was too much of a Labour loyalist to tear his party apart. When he served in the Wilson and Callaghan governments of 1974–79 he never once raised the issue of nuclear weapons, not even when proposals for Trident and Cruise missiles emerged from talks between Callaghan and US President Jimmy Carter in 1978–79. In the end he was reconciled to the view that disarmament was a matter not for instant protest, but rather for the diplomatic long haul.
And yet the unilateralist movement was a great and noble cause. It focused the public’s mind on a potential holocaust being planned in their name. It was defeated not because the British public had a different view of defence policy, but because of its indifference. CND was the first significant body to confront and spell out the colossal dangers arising from the nuclear arms race of the superpowers. If some of its arguments seemed tenuous and its tactics naïve, it was its opponents who seemed content to avoid the major questions and to repeat traditional Cold War shibboleths. There was always an absurdity in arguing that the supreme usefulness of nuclear weapons lay in the fact that they would never be used. And even after the test-ban treaty in 1963, the nuclear arms race continued. In the 1980s both the Americans and the Russians pressed on with alarming new technical developments, such as the US ‘Star Wars’ programme. The Russian SS20 missiles, targeting central Europe, raised the spectre of new terrors, not least for the Germans. The dangers of nuclear proliferation became all the starker in the 1990s when India and Pakistan, locked in constant disputes over Kashmir, both developed nuclear weapons. Nuclear-powered warheads provided a backdrop, too, to the ever dangerous conflict between Israel and the Arab states. In the new century, new nuclear programmes by both North Korea and Iran, purportedly for domestic energy purposes but with a clear possible military implication, aroused much alarm and led to pressure from the UN. The Cold War had gone but the menace was unchanged.
Foot and CND argued in the late 1950s that somewhere, somehow, a stand had to be taken. If they greatly exaggerated Britain’s potential influence in the world, so too, even more, did the supporters of the bomb. Like Nye Bevan, CND’s opponents argued that Britain would be naked in any conference chamber if it renounced nuclear weapons. But the extent of Britain’s influence was never measured. Like the supposed ‘special relationship’ with the United States, it was an untested shibboleth. The case for a separate British deterrent was all the harder to make when the cancellation of the US Skybolt missile programme in 1962 showed how Britain’s independent weaponry was totally reliant on American charity. Conservatives and Gaitskellites took it for granted that the possession of nuclear weapons, even in that indirect form, gave Britain influence with the Americans, but little in world history for the remainder of the century gave any support for that view. Britain remained subordinate, and increasingly ignored, whatever the state of its nuclear programme. The key decisions in British defence policy would be dictated by American assessments and priorities. This totally unbalanced ‘Anglo-Saxon’ relationship was a factor causing difficulties between Britain and other European countries long after Britain joined the European Union. In 2003, claims that President George W. Bush’s policy in invading Iraq was seriously influenced by Britain’s independent viewpoint, resulting from its military status, seemed questionable. Perhaps the decision to take the Iraq question to the UN was a formal response to Tony Blair’s pleas, based on pressure from domestic British opinion. But the decision to avoid a decisive UN resolution and invade Iraq anyway, as previously decided in Texas a year earlier, a policy in flagrant breach of international law, made Britain’s role appear marginal at best.46
By that time, several old Gaitskellites who had voiced the conventional arguments in the 1960s accepted that events had confirmed their futility. Denis Healey was one notable figure who changed his stance, as did many former Gaitskellites who migrated to the Social Democratic Party in the 1980s. Even Roy Jenkins was heard to murmur doubts. On the Tory side, Enoch Powell’s total opposition to the British deterrent, which he thought implied an inflated and totally wrong view of Britain’s role, was one strong bond in his unlikely but close friendship with Michael Foot.47 Foot could claim, therefore, that the passage of time had brought its own vindication, and that his labours on behalf of CND had not been wholly in vain.
The thrust of Michael Foot’s varied activities in the 1950s, both as writer and politician, suggests important themes for estimating his career. In his book on Swift he was writing serious history on the Augustan age. In CND he was throwing himself heart and soul into an emotional popular crusade. At first sight it might seem that the author and the activist had little contact with one another. Perhaps they were even at odds. Anthony Powell has written of the tension within George Orwell between politics and literature: ‘The former both attracted and repelled him, the latter, closer to his heart, was at the same time tainted with the odour of escape.’48 With Michael Foot there was no such tension. Writing on Swift or Hazlitt was not a form of escapism. It was neither a casual part-time hobby before he resumed his day job, nor simply lodged in a cultural hinterland, as Denis Healey’s profound knowledge of art and philosophy was for him. Literature was always centre stage in Foot’s life, inseparably intertwined with all his humane values and central to his politics. In more modest form, it compared with the importance of Gladstone’s ideas on Homer for his work as a politician.
Foot’s devotion to Swift’s social critique and his participation in CND were joint components of a lifelong devotion to a humanist ideal. As he put it to the present author, ‘it all fitted in’.49 The writer and the movement shared the same recklessness. They both embodied his favoured audacity. Swift, for all his cynicism, was an agent of liberation and renewal, challenging the stale stereotypes of Anne’s England in the causes of freedom and peace. He also savaged ‘the crimes committed in the name of a strutting, shouting patriotism’. Gulliver’s Travels was in part a mordant, subversive reflection on the cult of war. In the 1980s Foot published a lecture on ‘Byron and the Bomb’. One feels that ‘Swift and the Bomb’ would have been an equally natural theme. Swift attracted Foot precisely because he was an outsider, the enemy of the Establishment, untypical of the classical orthodoxies of the Augustan age. None of the luminaries of that age obsessed Foot in the same way as Swift. He would not have wanted to write about the equally political Addison or Steele, not even Alexander Pope, who in any case interested him much less than Swift, his lifelong inspiration. Long before Foot’s death, it was proposed that his memorial meeting at Conway Hall would feature centrally a reading from Swift’s dramatic poem ‘The Day of Judgement’, the event being rounded off by the singing of ‘The Marseillaise’, ‘Yr Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’ and ‘The Red Flag’. CND was a rough-and-ready offshoot of a democratic age, almost a shambles at times. But it embodied the values of Hazlitt, the young Wordsworth and the still younger Keats, Byron and Wells – and, in Foot’s controversial opinion, those of his great mentor Jonathan Swift.
Almost a quarter of a century later, in November 1980, Jim Callaghan announced his retirement as leader of the Labour Party. To much surprise, Michael Foot announced his intention of standing in the election to appoint his successor. He had just been away on a lecturing visit. The venue was the pulpit of St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin; his topic was the life and death of Dean Swift. During this visit the Dublin telephone lines hummed with lengthy calls from union leaders, Neil Kinnock and others. No one knew for certain what Foot would do. But he came back to Hampstead to tell the world that he would stand. Back in 1967, when he was in Dublin for a conference marking the tercentenary of Swift’s birth, he had had to abandon a visit to Vanessa’s home in Celbridge to return to Westminster for a three-line whip.50 But now in 1980 it was Swift first, the Labour Party afterwards. For once in his life Michael Foot felt absolutely certain that he had got things in the right order.