For a quarter of a century after 1945, Britain lived under one-nation unionism. The trade unions stayed within the implicit social contract with the Ministry of Labour worked out with Ernest Bevin when he served under Churchill in 1940. The government listened with respect to the suggestions of the TUC and union leaders. They, in turn, endeavoured to keep their members away from the path of militancy, strikes and industrial disruption. They did not have undue difficulty in doing so. The unions’ loyalty to the Labour government in 1945–51, along with the blessings of full employment and a welfare state, saw them prepared to put up with rationing and austerity, a total wage freeze in 1948–50, and the continuance of the wartime Order 1305, which forbade strikes. In effect, real wages fell. The Conservative years after 1951 were also quiet, with no sign of the confrontational attitudes of the 1920s. In 1951 Labour had raised the spectre of Tory class warriors trying to hammer the unions as Winston Churchill had done in 1926. But this was very far from being the case. There was full employment, the welfare state was extended under the Tories, a mood of consumer choice and growing affluence prevailed. Spain to trade unionists in the early sixties meant not passionate, class-conscious memories of Franco and the Civil War, but cheap and cheerful holidays on the Costa Brava. Conservative Ministers of Labour, one after the other, made every effort not to provoke the unions. The tone was set by Walter Monckton, Churchill’s Minister of Labour, whose reputation was entirely based on his being an amiable high-class fixer in relation to the TUC as he had formerly been to King Edward VIII, not to mention his role in Foot’s own ‘Lower than Kemsley’ affair. Monckton’s relationship with his Labour opposite number, Alfred Robens, was gentility itself Macmillan once suavely remarked that the three institutions the Tories would never take on were the Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers, and all three were left undisturbed.
The unofficial strikes of the early sixties amongst a wide range of industrial workers led to anxious debate amongst free-market Tories about the legal status of the unions. Iain Macleod, one of Monckton’s successors, wrote in 1963 that he was ‘frankly schizophrenic’ about wildcat strikes – but then, without the votes of one and a half million trade unionists and their wives, the Conservatives would never get elected. After mature consideration of all the possible legislative actions that he might take, Macleod elaborately gave his voice in favour of doing nothing.1 This particular boat need not be rocked. His successors in the Labour department, Edward Heath and John Hare, took the same view. For industrial relations, it meant thirteen peaceful years. It was assumed that under a Labour government from 1964 things would be much the same.
The trade unions were for a long time scarcely any more belligerent. Old militant bodies like the mineworkers were docile, at least at the national level; the last major miners’ dispute had been in 1926, at the time of the General Strike. The emergence of Frank Cousins as General Secretary of the TGWU in 1956, after the sudden death of his predecessor Jock Tiffin, suggested a new militancy in the leadership of large unions. A celebrated London bus strike took place in 1958 which saw Macleod and Cousins in fierce confrontation, and the bus drivers duly lost. But there were no alarming consequences, and Macmillan kept up a non-confrontational policy towards the unions. A forceful, comparatively anti-union document like A Giant’s Strength, written by some Conservative lawyers (including the future Lord Donaldson) in the late fifties, remained essentially academic. From 1960 to 1968 the TUC’s General Secretary was George Woodcock, an even more tranquil figure than the supreme apparatchik, Walter Citrine, had been during the war. Woodcock, an intelligent, taciturn man, previously the head of TUC research, wished to preserve the status quo, without any threat to trade unions’ privileges and legal immunities, as guaranteed under their Magna Carta, the 1906 Trades Disputes Act. When that appeared to be confirmed by the report of Lord Donovan’s Royal Commission in 1968, voluntary collective bargaining seemed to be ensured. After Woodcock moved on to become head of the Commission on Industrial Relations, his replacement in 1969 by the more combative Vic Feather might have suggested a coming crisis. But not yet. In any case, Feather’s Bradfordian belligerence was perhaps largely a matter of style: in TUC terms he was very much the establishment figure. There remained legal dangers arising from the 1964 Rookes v. Barnard case, which raised the spectre of individual workers challenging union officials in the courts over industrial action taken in their name. Rookes, a draughtsman at London Airport, had resigned from his union, which operated a closed shop. He sued union officials for conspiracy and won ‘exemplary damages’ for his dismissal. This appeared to undermine the 1906 Trades Disputes Act.2 But things had been largely left in abeyance thereafter. The one legislative change in the early Wilson period was the 1965 Trade Disputes Act, which reversed the Rookes v. Barnard decision. It was passed by his Minister of Labour Ray Gunter, otherwise reclining with some equanimity on what he called his ‘bed of nails’.
But the new links Michael Foot was building up with Jack Jones and other major union figures from 1969 implied a fundamental change. For the next fifteen or more years, the question of trade union power was to be central to British public life, and it was decisive in making Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister in 1979. As membership soared ever upwards, reaching a peak of thirteen million in 1979, 55.6 per cent of the labour force, union muscle was said by some to be undermining the economy, destroying social peace and (in the famous words of one American Congressman) making Britain as ungovernable as Chile. It set the tone of Michael Foot’s political priorities from the late sixties on, giving him, for the first time in his parliamentary career, a clear departmental interest. More remarkably, it meant that this incorrigible rebel, veteran of a hundred rebellions, the scourge of the whips and the critic of party standing orders, was to become a man of government, and thereby to discover, in the phrase of the former French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, that to govern meant to choose.
The new mood of conflict was heralded by, of all people, Barbara Castle, the new Secretary for Employment. Always on the left, she had never been close to the unions, which she viewed with Bevanite detachment, if not actual hostility. The rational appeal of socialist planning was juxtaposed by her against union sectionalism. She was in no way seduced by the power of Jack Jones, and regarded the Donovan Report as a huge missed opportunity. It was a document which contained no philosophic view of industrial relations. She made it her business to supply one. Hence her famous – or notorious – white paper In Place of Strife, published in November 1968 (the title was a conscious echo of Bevan’s In Place of Fear), posited a quite different approach, and generated a new turmoil on the industrial relations front. It proposed many things highly acceptable to union leaders like Jack Jones. It did indeed offer the unions legal guarantees and protection, notably the compulsory registration of unions and a Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR) to spread good practice in the conduct of collective bargaining. This would be given powers to deal with any employer who refused to recognize a trade union, much as suggested to Donovan by the Nuffield College authority on industrial relations, Allan Flanders. However, In Place of Strife also made the deeply controversial proposal that the government should be able to intervene, with powers backed up by legal sanctions, in three areas: enforcing the recommendations of the CIR, implementing a ‘conciliation pause’ in unconstitutional strikes not preceded by adequate joint discussions, and the holding of ballots on strike action when the support of the workers might be in doubt. There was a bad-tempered series of Cabinet meetings in January 1969 when Barbara Castle’s policy was sharply criticized by Crossman and Callaghan, the Home Secretary, who had begun life as a union official and could plausibly present himself as the keeper of the cloth cap.
In April, after much debate in Cabinet, Barbara Castle introduced a short Industrial Relations Bill of five clauses. The two key ones threatened possible penal sanctions against the unions, since they gave the government power to impose settlements in inter-union disputes where voluntary agreement could not be reached, and to impose a twenty-eight-day conciliation pause in cases of unconstitutional industrial action. There was uproar. The TUC totally rejected the government’s approach, and offered its own brand of mediation and intervention by itself instead. Castle and Wilson now found themselves increasingly isolated in Cabinet, as minister after minister drifted away. The Welsh Secretary, George Thomas, had been sufficiently stirred by Castle’s first version of her Bill to write her a note in Cabinet which began ‘Oh, you beautiful doll!!’,3 but other responses were far less printable. The Parliamentary Labour Party, now chaired by Douglas Houghton, a veteran public-service union leader close to Callaghan, seethed with rebellion. A special TUC Congress at Croydon in June rejected the government’s proposals overwhelmingly, by nearly eight to one. After angry exchanges with Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon and other union leaders at 10 Downing Street – ‘take your tanks off my lawn, Hughie’ – Wilson had to recognize his political weakness and climb down humiliatingly in the face of the new Jones – Scanlon axis of power in the TUC. A virtually meaningless ‘solemn and binding’ covenant procedure was cobbled together by government and TUC: journalists ridiculed the phantom figure of ‘Solomon Binding’. A Labour government had caved in abjectly to union power. At the same time, it was clear that Barbara Castle was a Pandora who had opened an ominous box. The shelf life of Solomon Binding could not be lengthy. Some form of industrial legislation to control the unions, perhaps from a future Tory government carrying out the terms of the right-wing Selsdon Park programme of January 1970, appeared inevitable.
Michael Foot was, of course, totally opposed to the entire philosophy of In Place of Strife. He had angry meetings with Barbara Castle, who recognized that his opposition to her proposals was even more implacable than that of others on the parliamentary left. She savaged him for his lack of realism. When he urged that her Bill be delayed until the special TUC Congress, he was compelled to admit that even if the Congress came up with nothing, he would oppose her proposals anyway: ‘I told Mike flatly that he had grown soft on a diet of soft options because he never had to choose.’4 It is a tribute to both of them that the Foot – Castle relationship survived exchanges like these. But Foot was only a bit player in the unfolding drama. The government’s key opponent was none other than its own Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan. He led the fight on the NEC and in Cabinet, and in the end faced the Prime Minister down. Roy Jenkins wrote with some awe of Callaghan striding through the crowds in Victoria Station during the crisis, ‘with a defiant dignity which made me realize how important a politician he had become’.5 The future TUC General Secretary Len Murray believed it all showed that Callaghan’s informed grasp of industrial relations was ‘intuitive’, whereas that of Wilson and Castle was ‘ideological’ and misconceived.6 With the new links Callaghan had cultivated with the unions before being elected Party Treasurer in 1967, he was too big to be disciplined. Indeed, very shortly his adroit handling of the crisis in Northern Ireland made him the government’s single most valuable and effective minister. He never regretted the stand he took over industrial relations in 1969, not even after the ‘winter of discontent’ ten years on. Contrary to one or two public statements later in his life, he always felt that penal sanctions on trade unionists were counter-productive and illiberal. Until the end of his life Jim Callaghan was always a voluntarist, always a Donovan man.
Michael Foot’s role, though, unlike that of Callaghan, lay in the future, through his new alliance with Jack Jones, Clive Jenkins and other union power-brokers. He had a long and cherished legacy to defend. The existing system of voluntary industrial relations had become the prevailing conventional wisdom, and was seminal to old Labour ideas. Almost the first measure to be introduced by the Attlee government in 1946, moved by no less than the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, was a Trade Disputes Act. It restored legislation on the unions’ political levy to the situation prior to the Tory measure of 1927 which had imposed ‘contracting in’ on trade unionists paying the levy. This tradition was broadly endorsed by almost all of the academic authorities in the field, by Otto-Kahn Freund, Allan Flanders and the TUC’s industrial adviser Bill Wedderburn. In 1983 the eminent labour historian Henry Phelps-Brown was to publish a subtle volume, The Origins of Trade Union Power, which drew a sharp distinction between the voluntarist British tradition of industrial relations and the preference of union leaders in Australia and New Zealand for state action on arbitration, legal liability and the restriction of strikes.7 The shift in policy implied in Barbara Castle’s proposals meant a new role for the law, and a transformation of the balance of social power. The argument gained in passion throughout the strike-torn seventies. The unions seemed to dominate the domestic agenda, and were credited with effectively overthrowing two Prime Ministers, Heath and Callaghan. The union question as variously understood by Castle or Heath meant a fundamental redirection of public policy. It also meant a major redirection for the career of Michael Foot as he was forced to contemplate changing the habits of half a lifetime spent in permanent opposition.
On another issue over which he challenged the government, Foot’s role was far more central. This was a curious episode, a proposed reform of the House of Lords devised by Wilson and Crossman in which hardly anyone really believed. It was scarcely even relevant to current politics, since it was impossible to argue that the difficulties into which the government had plunged were in any way due to the House of Lords, even with its eight-hundred-plus hereditary, mainly Tory members. The Parliament Bill proposed creating two categories of peers, non-voting (largely hereditary) and voting. The latter would largely be chosen by the party whips, and would create a huge reservoir of patronage for the Prime Minister and other party leaders. Even Callaghan, the Home Secretary who had to introduce the Bill in the Commons in 1969, had little belief in it, and viewed its defeat without distress.8 Crossman also viewed the end of his own Bill with equanimity: he later invited Foot to lunch at the Athenaeum so that he could congratulate him on ‘scuppering’ it. Callaghan’s relations with Wilson were in any case glacial at this time, as a result of policy on the unions.9 The difficulties of constructing a House of Lords that had a measure of independence but was also basically controlled by a democratically-elected Commons plagued the Blair government for almost a decade after 1997. An elected House would indeed be democratic, but also potentially an assembly of party hacks unwilling to play an amending or scrutinizing role. The Blair government dithered over possible answers in the 2001–05 session and did nothing; in 1969 Wilson’s could find none.
Michael Foot, the traditional opponent of party discipline, whether through standing orders or the ukase of the whips, was a predictable and brilliant critic of such a measure. He was also, of course, a committed abolitionist as far as the Lords was concerned. He led the charge against the Bill on Labour’s backbenches during the second reading debate in February 1969. Many of all shades of his party eagerly supported him: another trenchant critic of the Bill was Robert Sheldon, by no means a man of the Labour left, who began the resistance by conducting a lengthy filibuster. But Foot also naturally acquired support from Tories resistant to change to the Constitution and tender towards the hereditary principle. His most effective ally was Enoch Powell, his private dinner-party guest and another natural rebel with high skills of oratory and literacy. Wedgwood-Benn, a strong supporter of the Bill, designated them as Conservatives of the left and the right. Foot’s onslaught upon it bore the imprint of Cobbett’s past assault on ‘The Thing’ – his term for the Establishment: ‘Think of it! A second Chamber selected by the whips! A seraglio of eunuchs.’ Expanding on this interesting metaphor, he declared that, in some national crisis, ‘we would hear a falsetto chorus from the political castrati. They would be the final arbiters of our destiny.’ There would arise ‘a Heath Robinson House of Lords, a contraption which will fall to pieces in any crisis, which will be laughed out of court on such an occasion and which it would be better for us to laugh out of court now’. In the subsequent vote, Foot acted as teller for the Noes: one of those voting with him was his brother Dingle, former Solicitor-General.10
The subsequent committee stage of the Parliament (No.2) Bill was a masterclass in the filibuster, with Foot and Powell the outstanding participants. In all, Foot spoke twenty-six times on the Bill between February and mid-April. On 25–26 February he orated through the night. He condemned the Bill as an instrument of patronage, he drew on a range of historical evidence probably lost on many honourable members, he cited an array of past heroes from Aneurin Bevan back to Edmund Burke: ‘The British Constitution is an interesting contraption. I hope that is not too Burkeian a statement for a Thomas Paineite like myself to utter.’11 Since there was an obvious parallel with the Tory creation of peers in 1711, Dean Swift made a predictable entry, with lengthy extracts from his letters to Stella. There was indeed a great deal to ridicule in a Bill that was a parody of democracy. By the start of April it was clear that the measure, assailed on all sides and scarcely defended by a Home Secretary going through the motions of presenting it, was doomed. Throughout, Foot engaged in a torrent of vigorous, if good-humoured, invective. He had a final evening of knockabout fun on 14 April, ridiculing the presence in the legislature of the Anglican bishops: ‘The bishops like the shepherds should be watching their flocks. If they did, they might have a visitation from the angels and glory shine all around … Many bishops have been watching their flocks. It is better that they should be left undisturbed to do so.’ He added, on a more philosophical note: ‘I approach these matters in an Erastian spirit. I wish to see a subordination of the bishops to the popular electorate. That is one definition of Erastianism.’12 Three days later, Harold Wilson ended the farce by telling the Commons that the Parliament Bill was being withdrawn so as to give priority to the Industrial Relations Bill. Foot warned him that it would very likely suffer the same fate. Crossman observed of this remark that he agreed with every word of it.
Apart from helping to inflict a sharp defeat on the government, Foot’s performances in the debates on Lords reform confirmed his growing command as a parliamentary performer. For observers like Leo Abse they showed how he had developed a wider range of political skills since his enforced stay in Hereford hospital five years earlier. Alan Watkins had observed in the Spectator that sketch writers rated Foot (along with Wilson at that time) as the outstanding speaker in the Commons.13 As with his hero Disraeli long ago, the time had come when they would listen.
Michael Foot’s role throughout this period was one of fairly consistent opposition to the Labour government, on the unions, on the reform of the Lords, on Vietnam. On 5 May 1970 he initiated an adjournment debate to warn against an American invasion of Cambodia following the mass atrocities inflicted in Vietnam, and urged the remarkably passive Foreign Secretary, Michael Stewart, to reactivate the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indo-China: sixty-eight MPs, mainly Tribune group and some Liberals, backed him in the division lobby. However, Foot did warmly endorse the government’s liberal social policies, especially Roy Jenkins’s measures to free books, plays and films from puritanical censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. Jenkins had kept in touch with Foot on these measures, and also tried unsuccessfully to get him, rather than the erratic and unpredictable Leo Abse, to introduce a Bill to reform the laws on homosexuality. But this humane policy showed signs of coming to grief under Jenkins’s distinctly non-permissive successor, Jim Callaghan; ever the libertarian, Foot attacked Callaghan’s refusal to follow the proposals of the Wootton Report to liberalize the law on the smoking and supply of cannabis.14 On the other hand, Foot did give warm backing to Callaghan’s stand in 1969 to remove capital punishment once and for all from the criminal justice system, an aspiration for which he had worked with Victor Gollancz, Arthur Koestler and others over many decades. But on balance, despite the joyous knockabout of the debates on the Parliament Bill, Foot was privately gloomy about the general standing of the government and its broadly non-socialist attitudes. He was scathing about its performance, uncontaminated and undefiled by its failures.
Some wondered about the precise ties that bound him to the Labour Party at all. They might have wondered even more had more attention been paid to a strange speech that Foot made on being invited to address a ‘Morning Star birthday rally’ held by the British Communist Party’s newspaper in his Ebbw Vale constituency on 4 March 1969.15 Here he spoke with warmth of the Communist Party and called for the ‘sectarian walls’ in the socialist movement to be broken down, to secure the triumph of the working class all over the world. He quoted examples, such as France in 1958, of the disasters that could occur if the left allowed itself to be divided, and hailed Marxism as ‘a great creed of human liberation’ which ‘enlarged the empire of the human mind’. Interestingly, among the evils to be fought he listed ‘Powellism and all the bestialities of racial discrimination’. It was difficult to reconcile outpourings such as this, reminiscent of Cripps in the 1930s, with the anti-Communist, distinctly democratic socialism for which Foot’s Tribune had stood. It was a throwback to a much younger Foot in Socialist League days, or perhaps to his collaboration with Harry Pollitt in the Russia Today movement during the war. Perhaps at that period a left-wing democratic socialist could reasonably claim common cause with the Communists in the fight against fascism. To take such a view in 1969, when so many distinguished Communists had left the party after its Stalinist intolerance had been openly exposed, seemed barely credible.
A more characteristic performance, perhaps, had come two months earlier when Foot and his parliamentary colleague Eric Heffer took on Tariq Ali and Bob Rowthorne of the underground newspaper Black Dwarf in London in what was hailed as the ‘debate of the century’.16 The background was the surge of a youthful grassroots New Left in the constituencies, fanned by the protests against the Vietnam War. British university campuses followed Berkeley and the Sorbonne with ‘demos’ and sit-ins directed against the ‘repressive tolerance’ of their institutions during the long hot summer of 1968. But Foot lent no support. In fact, his speech in the debate adopted his most characteristic stance of championing the parliamentary route to socialism. He quoted examples from the past, notably Germany in 1932, to show the dire results of turning away from democracy to direct action: the lesson of CND was that extra-parliamentary activity had its place, but that it should be channelled to achieving socialist change in Parliament. It was a foretaste of the long debate between Foot and Tony Benn during Foot’s time as party leader after 1980, and consistent with his views for most of his career. He made little impact on the revolutionaries in his audience, and the meeting became increasingly angry, ending in near uproar. But it did draw a clear distinction between democratic change achieved through consent and persuasion, and the revolutionary Marxism of those on the further left, and helped to place Foot more centrally within Labour’s broad church. He received rare praise from Socialist Commentary, Rita Hinden’s old pro-Gaitskell monthly, which saw his defence of representative government as quite distinct from the ‘protest left’.17 Foot had more contempt for anything remotely Gaitskellite than for almost anything else in politics, but his debating speech was a more convincing performance by far than the clichéd soi-disant Marxism offered to the Morning Star rally.
In the spring and summer of 1970, things at last seemed to be going better for Wilson’s government. Roy Jenkins had presided over a significant improvement in the balance of payments: his ‘two years of hard slog’ were officially over. In Northern Ireland, Callaghan had shown the smack of firm government not often evident elsewhere, with a series of strong executive decisions. Foot approved of all of them, including the decision to send in troops to protect the Roman Catholic minority. The polls began to move strongly back in Labour’s favour, and Wilson called a general election for the sunny month of June 1970. Despite all his manifold grievances in the past six years, Foot had no difficulty in throwing himself into the fray as stump speaker. In Ebbw Vale there was the usual non-contest, with Foot romping home over the Liberal Angus Donaldson with a majority of 17,446 and 72.4 per cent of the vote, and the Conservative and Plaid Cymru candidates losing their deposits.
But elsewhere in Britain, Labour met with a rude awakening. The campaign never got off the ground, and there was much demoralization and indifference at the grassroots. Labour’s poll fell by almost a million compared with 1966, while that of the Conservatives rose by 1,700,000; Labour took only 288 seats, against the Conservatives’ 330. Edward Heath became Prime Minister, and Wilson and his team departed, later derided on television as ‘yesterday’s men’. Much was made of events during the campaign, including somewhat unfortuitous bad news on the balance of trade three days before polling day, but the outcome lay in more deep-seated factors. Labour had seldom seemed to be in control of the economy, its strategy for 25 per cent economic growth had not been fulfilled, the planners had shown an inability to plan, thereby creating, in Ben Pimlott’s judgement, a permanent void at the heart of the party’s ideology.18 The long, painful decline of Old Labour, with its client support in economic backwaters, council estates and public sector workers, was already under way before the left-wing tide of the seventies. Michael Foot raged furiously at the Labour right for frustrating the socialism which he believed would have guaranteed electoral victory: Roy Jenkins at the Treasury, seen as a latter-day Gaitskell, was a particular bête noire. But the electoral results, beyond Ebbw Vale and other traditional but declining working-class citadels, gave little support for Foot’s view. Sociology apparently stood in the way of socialism.
It might well have appeared that the bulk of Michael Foot’s Commons career was now past. There was not a great deal to show for his two and a half decades of permanent dissent. He was the darling of the parliamentary sketch writers, civilized and amiable, hailed as a writer and orator, ‘a wonderful man to have in politics’, in the view of The Times.19 But that cut little ice in the real world. If he was to play a role in building socialism in our time, it would have to be a constructive and active one. This was strongly urged upon him by close associates like Jack Jones, anxious that the unions should be strongly defended at the highest level. When the new Parliament assembled in late June, Foot was predictably defeated (133 to sixty-seven) by Roy Jenkins in the contest for the deputy leadership in a simple battle between old left and newish right. But he also stood for the Shadow Cabinet, elected by all Labour MPs, immediately the new Parliament assembled. His campaign was enthusiastically managed by allies like Stan Orme and a young Welsh constituent of Foot’s, Neil Kinnock, newly elected for neighbouring Bedwellty. Foot duly came sixth in the poll, with 124 votes. He did so manifestly as the leader of the left: his only possible rival was Tony Benn (formerly Wedgwood-Benn, and an ex-Gaitskellite) but Benn’s transition from right wing to left was only now taking place, while in any case he was twelve years Foot’s junior, and Labour usually made a virtue of age and experience. Harold Wilson made Foot opposition spokesman on fuel and power. It was by far the most encouraging news that a despondent Parliamentary Labour Party was to hear. Foot’s elevation suggested a new surge of political energy at last, and so it proved. So successful was he in this new role that in the following session, in October 1971, he became Shadow Leader of the House, with a wide-ranging brief, from the miners’ strikes to Europe. The press for the first time, and almost inconceivably in the light of his career prior to 1970, talked of him as a possible Labour leader. For the man himself, the period 1970–74 marked a decisive transition in his career. At the age of fifty-seven he found himself a coming man, custodian of his party’s dreams for the future, the symbol of the old alliance of party and trade unions, the best hope of Labour’s rapid return to power.
But, Foot being Foot, his literary interests were never far away even at this pivotal moment in his life. He spent the first period of the opposition years after the 1970 general election writing the second volume of his life of Aneurin Bevan, which he had for long been impatiently urged to complete by Jennie Lee. It finally appeared to much acclaim in mid-1973, published by Reginald Davis-Poynter, a distinctly minor publisher but a good personal friend. It was published in the United States by his old friend Michael Bessie.20 This time the sales were less impressive than for the first volume, at ten thousand copies, no doubt a reflection of the thirteen years that had passed since Bevan’s death. Even so, the volume’s 684 pages give ample opportunity for consideration of Foot’s remarkable talents as writer, commentator and political historian.
The first 330 pages are the most valuable part of the book, covering Bevan’s almost six years as a Cabinet minister under Attlee, at Health until the start of 1951 and then the three unhappy months at Labour. Some of Foot’s account has aroused keen controversy, especially his discussion of the conflict between Bevan and Gaitskell over NHS charges, and Bevan’s subsequent resignation. Foot himself said later, on many occasions, that he wrote his book before he himself had had experience of serving in Cabinet, and that it would have been a different book had he written it after 1974.21 Even so, it offers a vivid, if one-sided, view of the history of the Attlee government which hardly any other biography can match: perhaps only Ben Pimlott’s outstanding biography of Hugh Dalton merits comparison with it. As noted above, Philip Williams rightly pointed out factual inaccuracies in Foot’s treatment of the high politics of 1950–51 and the formation of the Bevanites,22 but the overall sweep of Foot’s account has not been equalled by any later author. His account of the years of opposition after 1951 is less satisfactory. He too often elides Bevan’s views with those of the Bevanite group, when in fact Bevan himself was often embarrassed by their rebelliousness, and at odds with them on many issues, especially the bomb. After 1951 the book becomes seriously distorted by Foot’s animus towards Gaitskell. The difficulties between Gaitskell and Bevan are often exaggerated, and Bevan’s urge for power underplayed. The tortuous internal quarrels of various groups of Labour MPs are given priority over the large swathes of issues, especially in domestic policy, over which the party in general could coalesce. Bevan’s socialism is regarded as being the only version seriously on offer, while the fruitful revisionism associated particularly with Tony Crosland, and Bevan’s reaction to it, are nowhere examined. Foot’s own savage breach with Bevan over the bomb is treated with inevitable delicacy, and the length of the breach between them is not made clear. Without doubt, Bevan would have been content to continue working under Gaitskell as Shadow Foreign Secretary. Had both lived on into the 1960s, Bevan would probably have been a pragmatic and by no means pro-Soviet Foreign Secretary, a kind of more ideological Ernie Bevin. But this would not be gleaned by reading Foot’s account.
Even so, the second volume of Foot’s biography is as remarkable an achievement as his first. It is a powerful book which brings out the charismatic greatness of its subject. Bevan’s philosophic originality, his magnetic presence, his towering international stature in the changing diplomatic fluidity of the fifties, are fully evoked. No other writer could have achieved this, especially as Foot’s account is stamped on almost every page by his own intimate association with his subject. The final pages, on Bevan’s death and the posthumous assessment, are deeply dignified and extremely moving:
For Socialists, for those of us who heard him speak and talk and argue and who shared his political aspirations, he was the man who did more than any other of his age to keep alive the idea of democratic Socialism. With him, it never lost its power as a revolutionary creed. Others might define it as well or serve it as faithfully. But no one else, for most of us, could give it a vibrant and audacious quality and make it the most ambitious and intelligent and civilized of modern doctrines. He was, as the Speaker of the Indian Parliament said in introducing him to its members during his visit of 1957, a man of passion and compassion; but only his closest friends could know that to the full. The feeling that surged towards him in those months of 1960 cannot be thus explained. For it was not confined to his political friends of his own party; it burst all banks and frontiers. It was, maybe, a sense of national guilt; a belief that he had been cheated of his destiny, that some part of his greatness had been shamefully thrown away; an awareness that he had much to say to our perplexed, polluted world, and that we had listened only fitfully. What the nation mourned was the tragedy which mixed with the brilliance and the genius, and what it did in expiation was to acknowledge his unique place in our history.
Other Labour politicians have written powerful autobiographies: Roy Jenkins’s and Denis Healey’s have rightly been hailed for their intellectual brilliance. But none has written a work with the passion and panache of Foot’s two volumes. Perhaps the only written work that can be compared with it is the two chapters by Michael and by Jill Craigie in an excellent centenary volume on Bevan edited by Geoffrey Goodman in 1997.23 Foot’s biographical masterwork affirms, with unique power, the vibrancy of the values of British democratic socialism. His life of Bevan is not his best book – it lacks the scholarly qualities of The Pen and the Sword. But it is his most important book, and his imperishable contribution to the socialist tradition of which his career in public life was a celebration.
It should be added as a postscript that, not unusually in Foot’s writing career, the second volume of his life of Bevan led to busy activity in the courts. In a footnote, Foot accused Desmond Donnelly, then a Bevanite of sorts, of leaking secrets from their meetings to right-wing journalists; rather surprisingly, in November 1973 Donnelly sued author and publisher for libel. Foot took the precaution of hiring a prominent Conservative QC (and future Home Secretary), Leon Brittan, as defence counsel, and it was soon found that his account was amply confirmed in the published diaries of Hugh Dalton for 1951. In the end the judges were not troubled, since Donnelly had to withdraw his prosecution. His sad life was by this time in much turmoil, with alcoholism and womanizing playing their part; he had in any case left the Labour Party and lost his Pembrokeshire seat. A few months later, in April 1974, the turbulent career of a gifted man came to an end following an overdose of drugs.24
But the main thrust of Foot’s career now was manifestly in frontline politics. He was a key member of the Shadow Cabinet, as spokesman on fuel and power. He and Jack Jones were in regular contact, strengthening the ties between the parliamentary party and the unions after the near disaster of In Place of Strife. In 1971 they together created the TUC/Labour Party Liaison Committee. It was essentially a forum for the TUC leaders to present their priorities to the NEC and the government. Its dominant personality, Jack Jones, felt that its achievements were modest – it was ‘useful’ and no more – but it was a means for him to spell out his own views on such matters as an advisory and conciliation service, and the need for the immediate repeal of the Conservatives’ new legislation on industrial relations, especially their Trade Union Act of 1979.25 The Parliamentary Party found such a committee difficult to handle, since matters of high policy tended to bypass the elected Members altogether. Nevertheless, Foot thought it an invaluable means of discovering the wishes of union leaders, and thereafter of trying to satisfy them. This was by no means a straightforward process, since on some matters (such as protection of employment) the unions wanted the state to do more, but on others (such as industrial relations) to do as little as possible. But whatever they wanted, Foot would endeavour to discover it and do his best to oblige. The Liaison Committee was important. Without it, such a vital initiative as Jack Jones’s policy in 1975 for a £6 flat-rate pay increase, which rescued the government at a time of overwhelming inflationary pressure, might never have emerged. The committee was also a clear indication of the new stature that Foot had so rapidly built up after the 1970 general election, which was further confirmed when he was elected to the party National Executive in 1972, a body on which he had last served back in 1950. This was another signal of Foot’s willingness to assume responsibility: he was elected at the expense of an old, fading ex-Bevanite and journalistic colleague, Tom Driberg, who disappeared to the Lords disguised as Lord Bradwell.26
Foot’s first reaction to being in the Shadow Cabinet was ironic, with joy strictly confined. Noted for his informality, he expressed private surprise at how disorderly the meetings were, ‘at moments slightly raucous or comic’, with Wilson exerting little authority. His fellow Shadow Cabinet members were less than impressive, Callaghan ‘obdurate’, Jenkins ‘dour and not very versatile’, Crosland ‘superciliously amused’. Barbara Castle struck a more cheerful note, being ‘chirpy and provocative’. Foot concluded that membership ‘will take years off my life and theirs’.27 He did, however, come to welcome moments of appalling frankness in the Shadow Cabinet, which admitted the general failure of the Wilson years. When Tony Crosland declared in October 1970 that Labour’s intention of achieving 3.5 per cent annual economic growth was a total illusion and that ‘no one had the foggiest idea of how it was going to be achieved’, Foot thought this the most sensible contribution to economic debate anyone in the party had made for many years.28
However, whether his own alternative nostrums of more socialist planning, public ownership and redistributive taxation would be any more effective in kick-starting a sluggish economy was debatable in the extreme. They found little support, other than from Barbara Castle and the new convert to radical views, Tony Benn. The latter, spokesman for industry, which dangerously overlapped with Foot’s departmental concern with fuel and power, was already developing a different leftish perspective and a divergent vision of socialism which was to make his relationship with Foot a complicated one for the rest of the decade and beyond.
Foot’s main role in building up his prestige as leader of the left lay in his performance in the Commons as front-bench spokesman for the opposition. From the start he was remarkably, perhaps unexpectedly, effective. His old oratorical and rhetorical skills, an amalgam of the Oxford Union and the West Country chapels, were allied to an ability to absorb complicated briefs, and to speak easily and spontaneously at a moment’s notice with apparently little preparation. As regards his themes, his opportunities were inevitably demarcated by collective responsibility. But his main concerns by far were trade union legislation and Britain’s relationship to Europe. Here he spoke with force and freedom in voicing what were thought to be the essential positions of the left. On other hand, it might be noted that another politician asserting pro-union and anti-European views at this time, and with more powerful ultimate effect, was Jim Callaghan, only a year older than Foot. Callaghan had long been somewhat disdainful of the Mantle of Nye, but the prospect of the Mantle of Harold drove him on with new momentum, not checked even by a serious and potentially fatal operation for prostate cancer. Meanwhile, clearly on the party right was Roy Jenkins, still a rising star after success at the Home Office and the Treasury, strongly pro-European and with his own group of distinguished young disciples. Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland were other powerful politicians in that section of the party. Foot seemed to have little in common with any of this trio, and clearly had a variety of challenges with which to contend amongst his unfraternal colleagues.
As spokesman on fuel and power until October 1971, Foot had ample opportunity to pronounce on industrial relations. He had concerns closer to his home base to deal with also, since the coal and steel industries, both central to the economic life of Ebbw Vale, were crucial to the nation’s energy supplies. Looming in the near future was a great crisis for Ebbw Vale steelworks, which faced significant closure and layoffs. Foot proved to be both an effective critic of government policy and a cooperative front-bench colleague. Eric Varley, when a trade and industry spokesman, was one who found working with him on the steel industry an easy and harmonious experience.29 Foot attacked ministers for delaying major investment programmes in the steel plants at Llanwern and Ravenscraig, and the Steel Corporation for apparently considering hiving off key functions to private industry. The hapless target of his attacks was the Secretary of State for Industry, John Davies, translated to party politics from the world of the CBI, who was soon to subside as a minister through a combination of political maladroitness and deteriorating health. His reference to firms which needed state assistance as ‘lame ducks’ was a massive political error. As a parliamentarian he was simply not remotely in Foot’s class.
But fuel and power were soon subsumed in a wider crisis in industrial relations. In 1971 the Heath government passed an Industrial Relations Act of astonishing comprehensiveness. It achieved what Barbara Castle had failed to do in 1969, and put industrial relations within a firm legal framework. It also soon proved to be quite unworkable. The Bill proposed serious inroads into the legal immunities that the unions had enjoyed since 1906. A new set of institutions would be created to administer the system: a registrar of trade unions, a Commission on Industrial Relations, and, most provocative of all, a National Industrial Relations Court, presided over by Sir John Donaldson. It had wide powers to impose fines on unions, to order a return to work, and to discipline shop stewards. The unions reacted with a fury that took the government by surprise. The Secretary for Employment, Robert Carr, had seemed a moderate and non-abrasive figure. The Prime Minister, Edward Heath, was by no means disliked by the TUC, and had shown humanity in handling redundant Rolls-Royce workers. Jack Jones was quite an admirer, and felt that Heath would have made a good Labour Prime Minister in other circumstances, with a stronger grasp of the working-class world than Wilson ever had. But the government’s proposals seemed coercive and destructive to the unions, and it was a view that Michael Foot faithfully echoed. He linked them with Heath’s corporate measures for a statutory prices and incomes policy as what he saw as anti-union measures. Heath, he alleged, had broken his word, and ‘his political honour is besmirched beyond recovery’.30 Soon the entire world of industry, in key areas such as the transport workers, railwaymen, engineers and electricians, was embroiled in challenging the authority of the government’s court. A series of tense nationwide strikes, official and unofficial, followed, driven on by shop stewards and the local industrial muscle of the shop floor. Five dockers from the TGWU defied the courts and went to Pentonville prison. In a humiliating episode for the government a hitherto unknown person called the Official Solicitor released the ‘Pentonville Five’ on a legal technicality. Well might the question be asked, ‘Who governs Britain?’ Lloyd George had told the TUC leaders in 1919, ‘Gentlemen, we are helpless before you.’ It seemed much truer now.
The most critical episode of all was a national strike in January 1972 by the National Union of Mineworkers, the first to be called since 1926, in support of a 10 per cent wage claim. There were power blackouts and a state of emergency. A young miners’ official called Arthur Scargill mobilized squads of flying pickets to prevent deliveries of fuel to power stations, most famously at the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham. The eventual wage award, by a tribunal chaired by Lord Wilberforce, conceded the miners’ demands virtually in full. The Tory government had suffered a massive defeat, their pay and prices policy in ruins. For Foot, who spoke with power and passion on behalf of the miners, some of whom were his constituents, these events illustrated the dangers into which the Act of 1971 had plunged the union movement. A fundamental revision of labour law was now essential to restore the social balance and provide the unions with the legislative protection they had long felt was secure. Ironically, Labour’s front-bench spokesman on labour matters was Reg Prentice, regarded by Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon as distinctly more right-wing than Heath himself, and a strong opponent of miners’ and other strikes. In time Prentice was to leave the Labour Party altogether and to serve as a Conservative minister under Mrs Thatcher. For the unions, he would never do. It was clear that they needed a far more positive and sympathetic voice in their defence, and that could only mean Michael Foot.31
Europe was an issue that aroused even more passion in Foot’s breast. Heath was strongly pro-European, on good terms with the French President Georges Pompidou, and in 1972 negotiations were successfully concluded with the Common Market countries about the terms of British membership. The resultant European Communities Bill led to a titanic struggle, in which Foot was perhaps the most formidable of the Labour opponents. Indeed, for years to come, well after his party leadership ended in 1983, opposition to membership of the European Union was a central, driving theme in Foot’s career. Even more than his opposition to the bomb, anti-Europeanism was his most strongly held political position. Only much later, after Neil Kinnock had wrenched Labour’s outlook into pro-European directions (later still Kinnock was to become an EU Commissioner), did Foot discover the virtues of Britain’s being in Europe.
Precisely why Foot should have been so vehement on the subject of Europe needs examination. He was not a natural isolationist, fearful of the influence of the Continent, as might be said of Douglas Jay or Peter Shore. He never went in for the Churchillian note of the latter, prepared to fight Brussels on the beaches. Foot’s influential tutor at Wadham, Russell Bretherton, had been, at the Board of Trade in 1961, a major figure in the British negotiations over entering the EEC. And Foot’s culture was distinctly European. His revered authors included Montaigne, Heine and Stendhal in the past, and Ignazio Silone in more recent times. Also, as noted above, in his early years in Parliament after 1945 he was a strong advocate of a united Europe, and frequently wrote and spoke of the merits of the notion of European federalism. Admittedly, that idea was commonly linked with the idea of a European ‘third force’ which might wean Britain away from a subservient dependence on the United States, but a man who took part in the inaugural meeting of western European nations at The Hague in 1948, in defiance of the party whips, was clearly a potential convert to Europeanism. He was also well aware of the pro-Europeanism of all the Continental socialist parties and their wish to have British Labour join them. His particular heroes included men like Willy Brandt and François Mitterrand, both strong federalists.32 Nor was anti-Europeanism an article of faith on the Labour left at this time. Admittedly Nye Bevan had been suspicious of joining Europe, and might have welcomed Gaitskell’s bizarre speech arguing against British membership in 1962. But amongst Foot’s closer associates in Parliament, Eric Heffer was one who embraced the idea of Europe and might wrote forcefully to Foot to remind him of the fact.33
For all that, Foot’s opposition to Europe was unshakeable. When Roy Jenkins, who was as adamant in his pro-Europeanism, tried to persuade Foot over lunch in Brooks’ Club that the European Communities Bill should not be defeated, he found him totally inflexible. Foot was content to make common cause with his old comrade Enoch Powell, about whom, Jenkins commented, ‘he was nearly as starry-eyed as he had been about Beaverbrook’.34 No doubt Jenkins’s own patrician style, so removed from the Welsh valleys whence he sprang, did not help either. For Foot, as for Benn and many others on the left, keeping Britain out of the embrace of the bureaucracy of Brussels was a passion, a matter of faith. Here the remnants of the old Bevanites, Barbara Castle, Ian Mikardo and others, marched with him, resolute for a better yesterday.
Why was this? Certainly in part Foot opposed Europe because he was a socialist. Europe was a capitalist cartel, a ‘rich man’s club’, as he told the voters of Ebbw Vale, that would take powers of economic management away from the British government and from domestic agencies like British Steel Corporation, and make socialist planning in Britain impossible. The problems of the British steel industry he attributed to competition and pressure from steel from the Continent – though that would surely remain whether Britain joined Europe or not. He objected more generally to the rules governing European policy on steel and other industries, to the threat to proper regional policies in areas such as south Wales, and, of course, to the ending of cheap food, the great triumph of one of his political heroes, Richard Cobden, in 1846. Free trade had always been a central tenet of Foot in his Liberal days, and he never forgot it.35
But Foot’s basic objection to Europe lay not in his being a socialist but in his being a parliamentarian. Throughout, his fundamental antagonism to Britain joining the Common Market lay in the fact that it undermined the sovereignty of Parliament, the very foundation of Britain’s constitution, and diverted control away to institutions overseas over which the British electors would have no control. It was ‘the most deliberate proposal for curtailing the powers of the House that had ever been put before Members of Parliament’, and much reference was made to parliamentary heroes past, John Pym, John Hampden and Algernon Sidney. British electors could overthrow the Heath government at the polls – and Foot hoped that the issue of Europe would provide an early opportunity for them to do so. But they could never touch the Commissioners of Brussels. With his familiar ally Enoch Powell, he used all his powers of debate and dialectic, all his knowledge of the intricacies of parliamentary procedure, to prevent the catastrophe of Britain entering Europe ever happening, and to try to ensure that Parliament could not bind its successors on Europe.36 There was an early indication of the crisis to come when a preliminary vote, a declaration of intent, on 28 October 1971, saw the Heath government triumph, after a six-day debate, by a large majority of 112. The Labour policy was to vote against, not on broad principle but because the terms of the agreement were unacceptable (which left open the prospect of their being renegotiated later). Heath’s victory was due to sixty-nine Labour MPs, headed by Roy Jenkins, defying the whip and voting with the Conservatives (who were unwhipped). A further twenty abstained. The thirty-nine Conservatives, including Enoch Powell, who voted with Labour were thus easily cancelled out. There was enormous tension in the Labour ranks from that time onwards. One or two senior figures amongst the sixty-nine, such as George Thomson and Cledwyn Hughes, found that they were ruled out ever again as possible members of a Labour Cabinet.
The European Communities Bill limped through the Committee and Report stages throughout 1972. Foot, as over the Parliament Bill in 1969, was a dominant figure in debate, filibustering to the end. He intervened in debate forty-three times in nine days in March 1972. His interventions in Committee between March and July 1972 totalled 112 in all, many of them on technical issues of parliamentary procedure, criticizing restrictions imposed on the debates by the Chairman of Ways and Means.37 As before, his opposing minister was the hapless John Davies, transferred from Industry to become Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for Europe, and no more successful there. Outside the House, Foot acted in concert with a variety of opponents of the Bill, ranging from an old Labour maverick like Raymond Blackburn to a dissident Conservative like John Biffen, to give Parliament powers to determine the operation of European rules, to redefine the relationship with the EU Commissioners and their directives, and to ensure that Parliament’s sovereignty could not be fettered in the future. The Secretary of State for the Environment Geoffrey Rippon, who had negotiated the entry terms, insisted disingenuously that membership of the Common Market would leave Parliament’s authority and the rule of British law quite unaffected, and this claim was vehemently attacked. ‘What a wonderful fight you are making,’ Raymond Blackburn wrote admiringly to Foot.38 Foot’s fundamental hope was that the government should be defeated, and that the subsequent general election should be used as a means of overturning membership of the Common Market. Tony Benn’s original proposal for a referendum was unacceptable to a stickler for old constitutional ways like Michael Foot.
But in the end, after the Bill got home on third reading by 301 votes to 284 in July 1972, making British membership of the Common Market inevitable on 1 January 1973, Foot had to go along with the eventual narrow majority on Labour’s NEC to commit the party to a referendum after it regained office. This, it was hoped, would repair the deep rift in Labour ranks dating from the initial vote in October 1971. It was clear that for Foot, whatever the Shadow Cabinet consensus on other issues such as trade union legislation, the battle against membership of Europe would go on. To him it, even more than the Tory Party, represented the ultimate obstacle to a socialist Britain. Europe would bring in insidious capitalism by the back door, just as Mrs Thatcher was to see the then President of the European Commission Jacques Delors doing for socialism a decade later. Entry into the EEC would lead inevitably, as the French President Georges Pompidou openly acknowledged, to further attacks on British sovereignty, such as an Economic and Currency Union. In the event of such a union the British government, which had so recently floated exchange rates, would henceforth be cabined and confined by fixed rates, and unable to defend British interests as it saw fit. Foot compared joining the EEC to the shame of Munich. Like his old enemy Gaitskell he would fight and fight again to save the Parliament he loved. There would be no concessions, no acceptance of holding European elections now or ever, no agreement to send Labour delegates to attend what Stan Orme called ‘the nonsense in Strasbourg’.39 But for Foot, this essentially negative campaign, in embryo the start of the party schism which saw the SDP come into being in 1981, had its positive side. He was still only a departmental spokesman. His bid to become deputy leader in 1972 failed again, well beaten this time at the hands of the singularly grey figure of Ted Short, whom Wilson supported. But Europe was changing all that. It confirmed that, for the Labour left and indeed an increasing number in the party centre as well, Foot was in fact a leader, the protector of their liberties, the champion of socialism in one country.
These years of tension over the unions and Europe added excitement to Michael and Jill’s domestic life in their leafy, ill-paved Hampstead road, not yet rechristened as Pilgrims Lane. They enjoyed a rich and entertaining social life with a circle of mainly Hampstead intellectuals, the historian A. J. P. Taylor, journalists like Alan Brien, Milton Shulman of the Standard, Ian Aitken of the Guardian, the former Labour MP for Hampstead Ben Whitaker and his wife Janet. The Foots’ social life was colourful and fulfilling, with a remarkable array of political and arts personalities coming to their dinner parties. One whom Jill got to know well was the American film director Stanley Kubrick. The Foots greatly admired his 1964 fantasy of a nuclear world, Dr Strangelove, which not only enraged the Pentagon but later received the accolade of providing a title for one of Michael’s books. But Jill also looked beyond Pilgrims Lane. She became increasingly fascinated by Michael’s prominence in front-line politics, and was even led to speculate that he might rise higher still in political life: if journalists mentioned Michael’s age as he moved into his sixties, she might respond that Gladstone became Prime Minister at the age of eighty-two. Their home was increasingly comfortable as Jill redesigned and modernized it, the basement area especially. A few yards away was Hampstead Heath, where Foot’s morning walks with his terrier Vanessa became a familiar feature of the social scene.
Jill herself still found opportunities for her professional talents. In 1967 she made a controversial film for television, Who are the Vandals?, a ‘guilty men’-style title suggested by Michael. It was a fierce attack on Camden Borough Council’s policy of rehousing and building tower blocks of flats; the inspiration for it came from Lewis Mumford’s prophetic Culture of Cities (1938), expanded in 1961 into The City in History, invariably major texts for Jill. In the course of making the film she developed a close and affectionate friendship with a much younger architect, Tom Hancock, who found her humane vision of city planning inspirational. Elsewhere, she also found deep satisfaction in her research on the suffragette movement: she focused especially on the particular role of Christabel Pankhurst, whom she treated with a near-religious and certainly uncritical zeal. Michael hoped that Jill’s work would materialize in a book, but she was not known as a writer, her skills being visual rather than literary, and early discussions with Hutchinson about a contract led nowhere. More widely, Jill was a major figure in the promotion of women’s writing and biographies of women: one beneficiary of her encouragement was the distinguished author and former mistress of H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, to whom both the Foots became devoted, and whose autobiography Jill in time managed to have published by Virago Press.40
An important feature of the Foots’ calendar was their regular fortnight’s holiday in Venice every Easter, or sometimes in September. This was striking in itself, because Foot was never a great traveller. He had long given up visiting America, and he also kept away from all the Communist bloc countries after the war, apart from one trip to Poland. He refused to go to Yugoslavia after Tito imprisoned Djilas. But, until they discovered the rival charms of the walled city of Dubrovnik in Croatia in the early 1980s, Venice held for both Michael and Jill a unique romantic fascination. It was one of Foot’s many counts against Hugh Gaitskell that, according to their mutual friend the scholar and writer Maurice Bowra, he disliked the city. Michael and Jill loved its cultural ambience, not only its incomparable art and architecture but also its role as a cradle of baroque music and opera, and in the world of letters. Michael also admired the political traditions of the city. It was historically anti-papist and secular, he believed: the dominant building there was the Doge’s Palace rather than a church. Michael and Jill also treasured what Venice had meant to them both since the early 1950s: Michael would read passages about the Serenissima from his beloved authors to underline for Jill its significance for him. He was always entranced by the sensuousness and warmth of the city, a matchless historic jewel which had excited the passion of Byron, Hazlitt, Stendhal, de Musset, Heine, Ruskin, Browning and Proust amongst others of Foot’s favourite authors, of Rossini, Verdi and Wagner amongst composers, and Turner amongst foreign painters. Byron’s vision of Venice particularly captivated Foot. He felt that Byron ‘had put Venice on the map’ and introduced Turner to it as a theme for his painting.41 Byron, Foot believed, had fundamentally changed the way people looked at Venice, and thereby reclaimed it for all humanity:
My only Venice – this is breath!
Thy breeze, thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face
The very winds feel native to my veins
And cool them into calmness.
Foot’s lyrical account of Venice is highly charged, physical, almost sexual in its intensity. He wrote repeatedly of the city’s unique power of seduction and how admirers should swoon before it: ‘Venice demands from her lovers absolute, hyperbolic submission.’
The place of Venice in Foot’s imagination confirms what the world already knew: that he was a romantic, passionate, sensual man. It was this quality that gave wings to his speeches and attracted Jill to him in the first place. But it also led their marriage, if only briefly, into its one moment of crisis. Both Jill and Michael were susceptible to members of the opposite sex, and attractive to them. Jill, as we have seen, had many affairs in her earlier life, and encouraged a variety of talented admirers both in the arts and film worlds. She always appealed to men (not least Welsh men like Bevan or Kinnock) through her rapt and sensitive attention to what they said and felt. Physically, she could charm them at any age of her life. Like other men married to beautiful women, Michael took this as a compliment to his own good taste, and perhaps good fortune. He himself was always susceptible to attractive women, without regard to their politics. His friendship with the upper-class right-wing saloniste Lady Pamela Berry, married to Lord Hartwell of the Daily Telegraph, the nephew of Foot’s old adversary in the courts, Lord Kemsley, aroused Jill’s fleeting jealousy. His affections could straddle the class divide. His manner towards women was always outgoing and charming, even flirtatious, right through his life. A friend in Dubrovnik observed that ‘Michael made you feel happy to be a woman.’42
But the Foots remained a strong partnership, whose unshakeable devotion was remarkable in the demanding world of high politics. During their marriage Jill remained utterly faithful to Michael, and instinctively loyal. Michael was no less attached to Jill. Then, in 1971 there came a major exception. Michael became attracted to a twenty-four-year-old, sexually highly charged black woman, and they had an affair. Of course, it caused a serious crisis in his relationship with Jill, not least because it involved significant loans of money to the other woman to pay off some of her bills. There was talk of ending sexual relations, even a divorce, and Jill went to Venice on her own. It took months for matters to be disentangled. Paul Foot (himself married three times) was at one period called in to mediate between his favourite uncle and aunt. But the Foots’ marriage was too strong to be uprooted even by a personal crisis of this kind, which, after all, is common enough even in the longest-lasting marriages. By the spring of 1972 the affair was over, leaving the third party unhappy and bereft. Thereafter the renewed strength of the links that bound Michael and Jill reflected credit on both, especially on Jill’s capacity to forgive. Michael’s passionate romanticism henceforth found its outlet in his books, where it most comfortably and naturally belonged.
In September 1973 Michael and Jill went on an important journey to Michael’s favourite country, India, which he had passionately admired since his Oxford days but had not previously visited. They went with a somewhat curiously assorted parliamentary delegation including Jennie Lee and a Labour MP, Michael English, whom Foot found rather tedious company.43 They travelled widely over three weeks, ranging as far north as Kashmir (where Foot strongly pressed the claims of India against Pakistan). Everywhere they were entranced by the colour and excitement of the subcontinent, and Jill was thrilled by first-hand contact with the thriving Indian film industry, although they also observed the widespread poverty, which indeed stares any visitor to India in the face from the moment of their arrival. The most important aspect of the trip, though, was that for the first time Foot met the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, daughter of his old hero Pandit Nehru. She had written with much warmth to him of Aneurin Bevan when explaining her inability to attend the unveiling of his memorial at Waun-y-Pound in 1972.44 Foot was fascinated by her style of leadership, and entranced by her vision of a secular and socialist India. His relationship with her became perhaps his closest political association since the death of Bevan, and his attachment to her and to the Congress was to be no less emotional and uncritical. Already India was engaged in much external dispute, especially after the intervention of the Indian army in Pakistan’s civil war in 1971, which saw East Pakistan become the independent state of Bangladesh. When serious internal religious and political troubles rose up in India shortly afterwards, leading to a state of emergency and arbitrary action against dissidents by Mrs Gandhi, Foot was her foremost defender.
Soon after they returned from India, Michael and Jill sensed a significant change of scene in the political world. The Heath government was lurching from crisis to crisis. Another national miners’ strike approached, against a background of a world energy crisis following OPEC’s refusal to ship oil to countries that supported Israel. In February 1974 the strike duly began, solid in all coalfields, moderate and militant alike. A nationwide three-day week had been imposed after the miners’ overtime ban, and the country seemed to be approaching near-chaos: the pressure drove Sir William Armstrong, Heath’s head of the Civil Service, into a nervous breakdown. Heath believed that the country favoured a strong response to the unions, and that an early election could be called on the slogan ‘Who governs Britain?’ On 28 February 1974, a precious week or two late in the view of some close advisers of the Prime Minister,45 it duly took place. Labour had not anticipated the election with enthusiasm after its internal divisions since 1970, and Harold Wilson seemed to expect, and even to welcome the prospect of, a defeat. But Heath’s gamble failed. Labour polled only 37.9 per cent of the vote, and their national tally of votes was 220,000 below that of the Conservatives, but they gained enough seats to end up very narrowly as the largest party, with 301 seats against the Conservatives’ 297. David Owen defeated Joan Vickers in Devonport. The Liberals held the balance of power with a mere fourteen seats, but this masked a huge surge in their vote, to 19.3 per cent: this was really the reason for Heath’s defeat, not Labour’s challenge.
In Ebbw Vale there was actually a 1 per cent swing from Labour to the Liberal candidate, Angus Donaldson. Foot’s share of the vote fell below 70 per cent in a general election for the first time, even though his majority of 15,664 was still beyond challenge. A major reason for this slight decline was the deep concern about the industrial future of the valley. It had been announced by the Steel Board in 1972 that iron and steel making would end at the Ebbw Vale works in 1975–77, with the loss of 3,300 jobs, and that the hot strip mill would close in 1978–79, with the loss of a further 1,300 jobs. That would leave only around 4,500 jobs. Labour had announced that an inquiry would take place before any closures or redundancies took place, but there were no grounds for optimism. The Guardian’s Welsh correspondent Ann Clwyd (a future chairperson of the PLP) wrote of this sombre local background to the election campaigns in the Gwent valleys.46
The next government would be a minority one in a hung Parliament. After a tense few days the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, was forced by his party rank and file to decline Heath’s offer of a coalition with the Conservatives. On the Labour side, Callaghan had assumed control with the new stature he had gained since 1969. He told Wilson to refrain from any comment or intervention, and to leave the Tories, in Kennedy’s language, ‘hanging slowly, slowly in the wind’.47 This strategy paid off. So, almost against his will, Harold Wilson became Prime Minister for the third time. He headed a powerful team on paper, with Callaghan as Foreign Secretary, Healey as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Jenkins as Home Secretary as the main appointments. There were other very able ministers too – Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Harold Lever, Shirley Williams. In more stable times it might have been regarded as a ministry of all the talents, with a high proportion of Oxford graduates. It was on balance a right-of-centre Labour government, but with Barbara Castle at Social Services and Benn at Trade and Industry there were also important anti-European left-wingers as part of Wilson’s traditional policy of equilibrium.
But there was another left-winger more central to the government’s future than either of them. Good relations with the trade unions were absolutely essential to the government’s having any future at all. There had been much trumpeting about the ‘social contract’ negotiated in 1973 between the party leadership, mainly through Wilson and Callaghan, and the TUC, under which a broad agreement was set out between sympathetic government policies and trade union self-restraint. This corporate approach would determine the way ahead on every front. The immediate government agenda included the rapid repeal of the Tories’ industrial relations legislation, creating new legal protection for individual workers in unions, establishing new advisory and conciliation machinery and, most urgent in March 1974, ending the huge crisis of the miners’ strike, which threatened to cripple the economy. All these could not conceivably be handled by the shadow spokesman on employment, Reg Prentice, who had long been regarded by the unions as an unregenerate right-winger or worse. He was eventually to cross the floor and join the Tories. Immediately after the election, therefore, Jack Jones saw Wilson and told him that Michael Foot would be the ideal, perhaps the only, choice as Secretary of State for Employment.48 Foot, with his ties to the unions now central to his reputation, was eager to confront the challenge. At the Privy Council with the Queen at which the new Cabinet was sworn in, Barbara Castle noted that ‘it was comical to see Mike balancing on one knee’.49
Almost thirty years after he first entered Parliament, Michael Foot was to serve in government, and in perhaps the most demanding portfolio of all. He liked to quote from a favourite novel, Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr. That’s the way to get through’ (see page 319). In learning about the exercise of power, Foot was a mature student. But now, for the first time in his life, he was to pay heed to the instruction given to MacWhirr – though not to his subsequent irresolute behaviour – and to face the elements unflinchingly in the very eye of the storm.