‘We wait with an unusual degree of expectation,’ said Robert Carr, the Conservative Shadow Chancellor, on 18 March 1974, immediately before Foot’s first appearance at the dispatch box as a Cabinet minister.1 Carr was very far from being alone. Michael Foot as a member of government was the most unknown of unknown quantities. He had never run anything more grandiose than the editorial board of Tribune. He had no experience of holding office anywhere; local government was a world unknown to him. He was widely regarded as an ornament to the House, its finest man of letters, certainly one of its most distinguished intellectuals. Francis Boyd in the Guardian hailed him on his first day in post as a brilliant journalist, a superb communicator, and a faithful parliamentarian with a principled background of Cromwellian Liberal nonconformity. He recognized, however, that Foot would have to reach out beyond addressing ‘our people’ if the government was to succeed. But his administrative and executive skills were unknown. Harold Wilson’s senior policy adviser Bernard Donoughue noted that, facing his first ministerial job at the age of sixty, Foot seemed ‘the most nervous’ of Wilson’s team.2 He neither looked nor sounded like a conventional member of government. His very style suggested protest, not power, and a zeal for permanent opposition. This most natural and unaffected of men resembled a dilettante of bohemian inclination unexpectedly summoned to arms from the cafés and pubs of Fitzrovia. His clothes were often shapeless, even shabby, he favoured pullovers, sometimes with holes in the elbows, his hair was long and untidy. Photographs abounded of his shambling walks around Hampstead Heath in pursuit of his dog: the press would later cruelly christen him ‘Worzel Gummidge’ after the scarecrow in a children’s story made famous on television. If Foot’s emergence in government aroused curiosity in many quarters, in some it aroused alarm. Colin Wallace was one of the more extreme of the so-called ‘barmy army’ working for MI5 in the early 1970s, and in effect reporting privately to their masters about Labour ministers. He listed Foot, along with Tony Benn, Ian Mikardo, Eric Heffer, Judith Hart, Tom Driberg, Barbara Castle and even, astonishingly enough, David Owen, as ‘Labour MPs who are believed to be Communists and who hold positions of influence’.3 Even Peter Wright, in full Spycatcher mode, did not go quite that far.
Foot’s speeches were also a potential hazard. They were full of intellectual self-confidence and rich with literary reference, to a degree that inspired awe amongst new MPs. His performances were often of rhetorical brilliance but, delivered without notes and with a rhythm and pace all his own, seemed to be made up almost as he went along. Barbara Castle had noted, somewhat enviously, that the preliminary to Foot’s leading off for the opposition in a major debate was a casual stroll in the park.4 This had been an effective strategy on the opposition front bench, when his reputation as a politician rose sharply. But the demands of government, including the need for the most precise statements of intent and policy, were far more searching. Foot’s penchant for shooting from the hip with unpremeditated abuse could be a problem for the front bench. This emerged very early on when, on 7 May 1974, he made a sharp personal attack on Sir John Donaldson, the one and only President of the National Industrial Court, for his ‘trigger-happy judicial finger’. Donaldson had been bitterly attacked by Labour for repeated decisions against the trade unions since 1971, and 181 Labour MPs had signed a Commons motion for his dismissal. It was also noted that he had been an active partisan Conservative in his earlier years, and was the part-author of an anti-union tract. However, protests about Foot’s comments came from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery. Harold Wilson, while reminding Widgery of the injudicious nature of some of Donaldson’s past remarks, also pledged to ask his minister ‘not to repeat his observations about the judges any further’. Foot was persuaded to publish a retraction, and did not err in this direction again. Wilson and Callaghan, however, were to inflict a more serious revenge on Donaldson by denying him promotion to the Court of Appeal.5
Foot’s very mode of arrival on 5 March, his first day at the Department of Employment, located unusually in St James’s Square, was unconventional. He came not in a ministerial limousine but in a small car driven by his private secretary, Roger Dawe. His usual preference was for something even more populist, namely the number 24 bus, which he caught at the end of his Hampstead road and which eventually got him to Parliament Square. One of the advantages of this form of transport was that it afforded ample opportunity for reading. Another was that it might give him the chance of historical discussion with a near neighbour and fellow-traveller on the number 24, the historian Eric Hobsbawm.6 In those days, less obsessed with issues of personal security, no one seemed to mind very much. In due time Foot did have his official minister’s car, with a woman driver, Winnie Dabin, with whom he had an excellent relationship.
Foot did at least start with a strong ministerial team. He had three ministers to help him, and would have regular meetings with them at 9.30 every morning. Albert Booth, his Minister of State, had been in the Tribune group since his election in 1966. He had the political problem of being a near-pacifist member of CND who represented Barrow-in-Furness, where nuclear submarines were made. But his service as Chairman of the Select Committee on Statutory Instruments in 1970–74, dealing with delegated legislation, had shown his command of detail. Not all the civil servants in the department were impressed by Booth’s intellectual qualities, and he did not cut a great figure when he succeeded Foot as Secretary of State in 1976, although it should be said in fairness that the department was shrinking by then. But Booth was well-liked and doggedly loyal: he also had an immense knowledge of trade union practices. It was he who largely handled the enormously complex Employment Protection Bill during the long committee stages in 1975, and with great success.7 Foot himself was by no means a natural master of detail. His later PPS John Evans saw him as a ‘broad brush man’, a view confirmed by two very different witnesses, Jim Callaghan’s adviser Tom McNally and the civil servant Sir Michael Quinlan, in relation to devolution.8 Booth’s skilful work enabled Foot to focus more generally on ‘the vision thing’.
Harold Walker was perhaps the best of Foot’s aides, even though he never rose above the rank of under-secretary. A cheery Yorkshireman and trade unionist, he had served at Employment in 1968–70, in the days of Barbara Castle, and his performances in the House were considered to be impressive both by civil servants and by government colleagues like Stan Orme. He particularly took up the burden in the discussion of the Health and Safety Bill.9 Foot’s third aide was a former PPS to Barbara Castle, John Fraser, a London MP and a solicitor by profession. He covered legal matters, including EEC issues like redundancies, equal pay and the Work Permit Scheme. Foot also encouraged him to pursue issues like race and sex equality. Fraser was seen as ‘a nice guy’. For him, Foot was ‘the friendliest and most unpretentious but inspiring person I have worked with’, whose accessibility and good humour enabled his team to work well and confidently.10
Foot also had need of a Parliamentary Private Secretary to enable him to keep in touch with the parliamentary party. At first he gave this (unpaid) position to Neil Kinnock, the youthful Member for Bedwellty who had impressed him in opposition during debates on industrial relations. But Kinnock had little inclination for so shadowy a position; he never seemed to materialize in this role, not even in the Commons parking space assigned to him, and he eventually resigned.11 A year later, Foot asked Caerwyn Roderick, a pleasant Welsh neighbour who sat for Brecon and Radnor, a former member of CND and a warm admirer, to assume the role. He was to serve Foot as PPS until March 1979, with diligence and frankness. He gave Foot full warning of the disillusion of trade union MPs prior to the ‘winter of discontent’, and considered his warnings, which Foot largely disregarded, to have been thoroughly justified by events.12
Foot had no special advisers of the kind spawned by the Blair years after 1997, although other ministers did have such people to help them on policy and political contacts: Tony Benn at Industry had Frances Morrell and Francis Cripps, and Barbara Castle had Jack Straw. Foot did try to enlist one expert adviser, Bill Wedderburn, Professor of Industrial and Commercial Law at the London School of Economics. Wedderburn was an outstanding authority on labour law; he was a man of the Marxisant left, a former member of CND and an admirer of Michael Foot. But he was a part-time adviser to the TUC, and was helping them to draft legislation to nullify what the Tories had done, and he also wished to retain his chair at the LSE. Reluctantly, he declined Foot’s offer, although his influence, mainly through his discussions with lawyers and civil servants, was very important on Foot’s policies over the next two years. Wedderburn’s prolific publications, notably The Workers and the Law (1975), gave academic weight to the new legislation.13 In 1976 Foot was to make a different kind of appointment, bringing in his old friend and Tribune workmate Elizabeth Thomas to help him as Lord President of the Council. But she was to play a more personally supportive, office-bound role.14 In 1974 the nearest thing Foot had to a personal confidante was his deeply loyal, though outspoken, secretary Una Cooze, who had served him since 1966.
It was a good team on balance, bound together by genuine loyalty. Foot respected them all, and they certainly responded to his mode of leadership. Indeed Albert Booth and John Fraser tried, though with little success, to get him to work less hard.15 He seemed to take on parliamentary burdens far in excess of what might be required of a government minister. There was another quality that Foot brought to his team: he made their lives fun. He was always full of teasing humour, sociable and highly accessible. Work at the Department of Employment was extremely tough, but it was also enlivened by parties, receptions and private drinks sessions that made working for Foot a pleasure as well as a privilege. It was a style that he carried on when he became Lord President in 1976, a routine much appreciated by his staff, especially as the weekend drew near.16 Ray Gunter had called his Employment department a ‘bed of nails’. Under Michael Foot the work was more grinding, but the experience less painful.
The civil servants at the department awaited Foot’s arrival with unusual expectation, even apprehension. They wanted businesslike, orderly command, and they were unlikely to get it. There was an underlying awkwardness, in that their role would be to repeal all the industrial relations legislation they had themselves so laboriously put together under the Conservatives. Even the strictly non-partisan Civil Service might find that standing on their heads would create some difficulty. But in fact their experience of their unorthodox minister was to be almost uniformly excellent. The one possible exception was Conrad Heron, the Permanent Secretary. He offered Foot his resignation at the outset, since he was being asked to demolish his own committed work at Employment under William Whitelaw. Foot rejected his resignation, but in fact Heron did soon leave Employment and moved to work at Social Security for Barbara Castle, with whom he had an excellent, sociable relationship. Heron, however, was to tell her, somewhat disloyally, about his reservations about working under Foot, whom he found charming but under-prepared and simplistic: ‘His only policy is to find out what the unions want.’ He also doubted whether Foot would stay the course, or would find some reason for resigning. Heron was quite wrong, and it was perhaps as well that he and Foot parted company so swiftly.17
He was succeeded by the previous Deputy Secretary, Kenneth Barnes, with whom Foot had a good relationship. Barnes recalled Foot telling him not to read Churchill’s life of Marlborough on his summer holidays, and giving him a new edition of Gulliver’s Travels instead. Roy Hattersley noted admiringly that when in 1977 Callaghan wanted to move Barnes from the Department of Employment because he was too pro-union in his sympathies, Foot resisted the move, and Barnes stayed.18 This showed that Foot could be as fiercely loyal to his former civil servants as to his present ones. Personal generosity of this kind was a strong feature of Michael Foot’s conduct throughout his career. With the Deputy Secretary Donald Derx, a cheerful man of broadly Labour sympathies brought up on a council housing estate, Foot had the best of relationships. Derx uncomplainingly unscrambled all the legislation he had himself put together under the Conservatives, and became a huge admirer of Foot in all aspects: ‘I count myself lucky to have served someone who had positive aims, definite ideas on how to secure them, and a generous spirit.’19 When the Conservatives came back to office in 1979 Derx soon quarrelled with Mrs Thatcher’s ideological quirks. His career did not progress, and he left the Civil Service early for life on the Continent.
Another civil servant who became very close to Foot was his Principal Private Secretary, Roger Dawe. They met under the best of auspices, since Dawe, like Foot, hailed from Plymouth, and had a similar background of Cornish Methodist ancestry. The Foots had been family heroes in his youth. Dawe even shared an enthusiasm for Plymouth Argyle Football Club, and went with his minister several times to see matches at Home Park. He found Foot affable and courteous, highly intelligent, and caring for his officials. Foot, he felt, ‘built up mutual confidence’. Like all civil servants, Dawe valued the fact that Foot spoke well and strongly in defence of departmental policy in Cabinet, despite all the formidable political talents who confronted him there. With Whitelaw and Foot as successive ministers, he felt that the Department of Employment ‘climbed up the Whitehall ladder’ in importance. Dawe also saw Foot as preserving his independence from the unions on key aspects of industrial relations policy, including on picketing. In 2000 he retired from the Civil Service, and in his farewell speech he observed that if Sue Lawley asked him on Desert Island Discs what he would like to take to his mythical island, his answer would be no less than Michael Foot. Dawe’s unusual selection did both men credit.20
There were other able civil servants at the Department of Employment, very bright and very young. Douglas Smith, later the head of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS), had previously been Barbara Castle’s Private Secretary, and she made unsuccessful efforts to poach him for the Department of Health and Social Security to help with industrial disputes there. Jennifer Bacon, Foot’s Principal Secretary, was still in her twenties: she was to be head of the private office under Albert Booth, and twenty years later was to head the Health and Safety Executive, set up by Foot’s legislation of 1974.
One other civil servant of importance was the Press Officer Keith McDowall, an able man who was the former industrial correspondent of the Daily Mail. He had formerly worked with Willie Whitelaw at Employment, and got on well with him. McDowall had an interesting and influential role, acting at the interface of the Civil Service and the press. He was to be the first official called into Foot’s office when he began as a minister. Interestingly, had McDowall not been appointed to Employment, Foot’s Press Officer would have been Bernard Ingham, later to be closely associated with Margaret Thatcher. According to Ingham’s biographer Robert Harris, Foot toyed with the idea of taking on Ingham. But when he asked Peter Jenkins of the Guardian about him at a dinner party the response was not enthusiastic, and the idea was dropped. With Foot’s journalistic background, he and McDowall had a particularly close and friendly relationship. For his part, McDowall liked Foot very much personally, but he found him less impressive than others did. He thought his casualness as a minister was a weakness: ‘He was impossible to write a speech for’21 – not that Foot often requested that service.
By 1976 the Department of Employment was perhaps less stimulating for its employees. Its programme of action was being exhausted, and it was losing authority in many directions. With the Manpower Services Commission taking over many of its powers, the creation of ACAS to arbitrate in industrial disputes, training going to the Training Services Agency, and the Health and Safety Commission to administer working conditions, Foot was presiding over a shrinking empire, and his staff had less to do. The powerful Ministry of Labour over which Ernest Bevin had massively presided during the war was being hived off and becoming a shadow of its former self. Under Foot’s successor Albert Booth, a far less imposing minister, the process of downsizing went further still. On the other hand, everyone recognized the magnitude of the task confronting the Department of Employment in 1974. There was a state of crisis when Foot began there, in the aftermath of Heath’s labour legislation, the confrontation with the unions, and the trauma of the three-day week. In eventually taking some of the heat out of industrial relations, Foot performed a vital service.
Some civil servants might have had their reservations about Foot’s performance as a minister. One or two felt that, unlike Callaghan or Healey, he never learned how to run a department, and that as a result things could get out of control. But in general officials found Foot’s informal, almost post-modern style as Secretary for Employment attractive and refreshing. They liked the volumes of Rousseau, Montesquieu and Montaigne on the minister’s office shelves. They liked his sneaking off from all his hard grind to write the odd book review for the Observer or the Standard, and the bottles which emerged from his drinks cabinet at unexpected times. They were amused by his habit of leaving a television on in his office with the sound turned down during Test matches. Serious discussions on complex legislative issues would be interrupted by cries of ‘He’s got him!’
The extent to which Foot’s domestic life impinged on his official duties was somewhat less straightforward. One regular visitor to the Secretary of State’s office was his dog Vanessa, who needed the occasional walk around St James’s Park by ministerial aides. Vanessa was universally popular in Whitehall, the other Foot female, Jill, rather less so. Some civil servants found it difficult that she sometimes entered the office unannounced, insisting on seeing Michael. Keith McDowall found her ‘prickly’ and sometimes naggy towards Michael: she was ‘at him all the time’ on equal pay and women’s issues generally. Women officials felt that she did not take enough trouble to make her husband presentable in public – a dinner jacket he once wore was ‘awful’. Jill’s manner seems to have aroused the particular wrath of some of Michael’s associates. One Cabinet colleague saw her as snobbish, with little understanding of how ordinary people lived. A junior minister thought she had ‘no nerve ends’, and ‘behaved like the wife of a Roman emperor’. Another felt she tended to speak with too loud a voice on political issues when dining with Michael, Caerwyn Roderick and Stan Orme at the Grand Paradiso restaurant near Victoria station.22 But the role of a political spouse, frequently in the spotlight yet having to keep one’s distance, is notoriously difficult to carry off, as Cherie Blair and many others before and since Jill Craigie have found. Jill’s assertiveness in pushing her views was central to her attractive personality. Her broad supportiveness and pride in her husband’s growing stature as a major politician were beyond dispute, and her overall influence was a positive one.
Whether Foot was on balance an effective minister was a question which produced a wide range of answers. People who worked closely with him, like Donald Derx and Roger Dawe, were very positive. Andrew Graham, who worked with the Prime Minister on economic policy, thought Foot ‘had absolutely no idea how to run a department or how to take decisions’, though he recognized his importance in getting the unions to observe wage restraint.23 Foot tended to be needlessly provocative with employers: Edmund Dell records him on 17 June 1974 interrupting Campbell Adamson and other CBI leaders with debating points.24 But he did make an excellent impression on trade unionists who came to see him. Muriel Turner, Assistant General Secretary of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Management Staffs (ASTMS), found him both capable and very friendly. She noted that he would always see trade union visitors on his own without any civil servants present, the only minister other than Shirley Williams to do so, and that he delivered results.25
He struck the right note at the start, and the reputation stayed with him. His very first ministerial speech in the debate on the address on 18 March, greeted with such anticipation by Robert Carr as noted, aroused trepidation amongst Derx, Barnes, Dawe, McDowall and others in the office. Civil servants were used to their ministers working from a carefully prepared text when they spoke in the House. They would sit on side benches in the Commons chamber ‘checking against delivery’. This time there was nothing whatsoever to check.26 Foot had prepared his observations quite privately during a leisurely walk around the lake in St James’s Park. He spoke without any visible notes. And he was brilliant. He tore apart the Conservatives’ legacy of industrial legislation, their battery of boards, their commissions and courts, and especially their statutory controls on incomes, which he saw as ‘a cancerous growth’. He dealt genially but devastatingly with Carr, author of the previous government’s Industrial Relations Act: ‘Never was a father so impassive in the face of the prospective slaughter of his pride and joy.’ Regarding Edward Heath’s charge that he was throwing the pay relativities report out of the window, he said: ‘As far as I can recall I have not been guilty of a single act of defenestration since I have been in office.’ On incomes policy, he deplored how ‘the well-to-do or – even more offensively perhaps – the truly wealthy have been inclined to threaten sanctions or preach sermons to people who have to fight every day of their lives to keep their heads above the inflationary flood … Nothing can be more absurd than the spectacle of a few fat men exhorting all the thin ones to tighten their belts.’
He crisply spelled out the heads of the new government proposals, which included repealing the Act of 1971, and examining the distribution of incomes through a royal commission (chaired in the event by the Labour MP Jack Diamond): ‘I am sure that my right hon. friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will not mind even if I anticipate his budget statement, at least if I do it in verse:
Oh that in England there might be
A duty on hypocrisy
A tax on humbug, an excise
On solemn plausibilities.’
He ended joyously, hilariously, with apposite quotes from his ancestral hero Oliver Cromwell on ‘self-denying ordinances which he suspected might have been tampered with by Cavalier hands in the Treasury’.27
The press reaction on all sides was ecstatic. Norman Shrapnel in the Guardian hailed it as ‘the most dazzling parliamentary performance in living memory’: ‘By turn Mr Foot was sparkling, knockabout comedian, grave statesman, brilliant conjurer with a dispatch box full of tricks.’28 The Sunday Times commented that ‘the one-time Devonport reject has emerged as the superstar of the new Labour Cabinet … The extent of Foot’s triumph is hard to overestimate.’ The Tory opposition was sufficiently stunned that its motion of no confidence was summarily withdrawn.
At the very outset, therefore, he imposed himself on his new department and on the House. But clearly a far more formal text would be required from a minister presenting government policy. Foot thus resorted to a technique of composing his own speeches as before, but of including a solid Civil Service statement en bloc during its course. The opposition spokesman, James Prior, noted that the different parts of Foot’s speeches would be indicated by a change of spectacles. Another pair would be required to read out the Civil Service material – which would also tend to make the speech much duller.29
But the criterion for measuring Foot’s achievement as a minister lay not in debating triumphs but in policy. This meant, first and last, policy towards the unions. Labour’s election manifesto had clearly set out a range of measures to strengthen the legal and industrial status of the unions, as laid down in the ‘social contract’ negotiated by Labour with the TUC during the opposition years. Foot’s task was to implement this in full, and as a leading advocate of the Contract he did so with enthusiasm.30
One curious feature was that the Department of Employment under Michael Foot did not seem to be primarily concerned with employment, any more than it had been under Barbara Castle. Never greatly interested in the minutiae of economics, Foot did not spend undue time in discussing strategies of pump-priming or job creation. Economists were heard to complain that he never saw them to consider proposals for combating unemployment, or the consequences for the economy of the oil-price explosion in 1973. Things, they felt, were significantly different when James Prior went to the Employment Department under Mrs Thatcher after 1979. On 18 September 1975, however, Foot did bring to the Cabinet a set of proposals, costing £70 million in all, to alleviate the growing unemployment (forecast to reach 1.2 million by Christmas, but, Foot believed, more likely to rise to 1.5 million). These comprised a recruitment subsidy of £5 per head per week to encourage public sector employers to take on school leavers, a £30 million job-creation scheme proposed by the Manpower Services Commission, an increased adult training allowance, the extension of the Employment Subsidy Scheme at a cost of £7.5 million, and an enhanced Employment Transfer Scheme. To these could be added further public expenditure through more building activity on government and trading estates, and the acceleration of major capital projects. It was Foot’s responsibility to take these proposals forward, insufficient though he recognized them to be. The Cabinet, however, brushed aside his suggestion that there should be encouragement for businesses and individuals to ‘buy British’. At the end of 1974 Foot was also centrally involved in providing government backing for a redundancy scheme to car workers at the beleaguered Chrysler UK, and in warding off the threatened closure of the Linwood car and steel plant in Scotland.31
Foot’s holy grail was always to succeed in recasting the framework of industrial law. Here, against a background of global economic crisis and massively rising wage and price inflation, he was under intense pressure. In the 1970s trade unions and industrial disputes were at the very forefront of the public stage in a way inconceivable to people thirty years later. Every newspaper had a labour editor, commonly someone like Geoffrey Goodman or Keith Harper who was sympathetic to the unions and whose copy would usually make or dominate the front pages. Nor were they necessarily typical products of Grub Street. Some labour specialists were to achieve high scholarly acclaim, as Eric Wigham of The Times and Robert Taylor of the Financial Times were to do. Throughout that wearisome decade, lugubrious labour correspondents would front up television news bulletins on BBC or ITV with lengthy accounts of the latest strike, walkout or wage dispute. Cliché-ridden accounts would tell the miserable viewers, wondering whether electricity, trains or water supplies would next come to a grinding halt, that the ‘dispute’ (American pronunciation preferred) was now ‘escalating into a confrontation’, but that ‘at the end of the day the government would have to govern’. Foot, therefore, was undertaking a peculiarly sensitive job, with a high degree of visibility.
From the start he faced pressure from trade unionists, from Jack Jones down, with their huge expectations that the Labour manifesto would be carried out and a battery of Tory laws demolished. The nature of Foot’s response to all this was much contested. Some regarded him as a pushover in the hands of the Emperor Jones. This was the view held in many quarters, and not only in the right-wing sectors of the press. Keith McDowall felt that Foot’s understandable pro-union sympathies went too far: he was ‘a soft touch’. Somewhat surprisingly this was also the view, late in his life, of Len Murray, who in 1973 succeeded Vic Feather as General Secretary of the TUC. He saw Foot as an intellectual and an orator, with no strong grasp of the technicalities of trade union matters; he was a ‘catspaw’ for Jack Jones.32 Whether this represented Murray’s view in the period 1974–76 is debatable, since he appeared to show confidence in the Secretary then. In fact, it was not at all true that Foot gave way in Pavlovian fashion to whatever the unions demanded. In any case, it was not always clear that the unions themselves knew what they wanted, since they were traditionally wary of legislation and the courts – with some reason, as the case of Rookes v. Barnard had shown. As will be seen, on many key issues, including picketing and redundancies, Foot stood firm and did not give the unions what they wanted. He was also prepared, if unwillingly, to operate what came very close to being a statutory incomes policy, anathema to the unions and previously to himself.
Jack Jones, the unions’ main voice, was not an easy man to deal with. Many in government saw him as imperious and less approachable than his ally, the engineers’ leader Hugh Scanlon: Eric Varley saw him as a ‘prima donna’, while Stan Orme found him ‘prickly’ and ‘with no small talk’.33 But Jones was deeply loyal to the principle of a social contract. He was even prepared to give Scanlon a public dressing-down when he intransigently (as Jones thought) resisted TUC proposals to curb wage claims in return for increases in pensions, a freeze on council rents, curbs on prices and the winding up of the Pay Board. He opposed Scanlon when his AEU came before the Industrial Relations Court for unlawful strike action, from which they were rescued by a £65,000 donation from an evidently wealthy but unknown source.34 The evidence suggests that Jones and Foot formed a strong, and not unequal, partnership. Jones respected both Foot’s intellect and his socialist commitment. In revising employment law, Foot was ‘a worried and often flustered man’,35 but he made good use of experts like Professor Wedderburn, and managed to transform the balance of practice and rights in the conduct of industrial relations in an astonishingly short period. Some of his legacy survived even the ravages wrought by the Thatcher government. The bypassing of his measures and the political marginalization of the trade unions by the Blair government after 1997 was much to Foot’s distaste. Indeed, a trade unionist of a different political stamp, the future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, objected quite as strongly as Foot did.
Cabinet ministers think they have done uncommonly well if they get one major Bill through in a parliamentary session. In just two sessions in 1974–76, Michael Foot passed no fewer than six – Health and Safety at Work and the Trade Unions and Labour Relations Act (TULRA) in 1974, ACAS, the Employment Protection Act and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, and the TULRA Amendment Act in 1976. The Race Relations Act, which had obvious employment implications, followed from the Home Office soon after Foot changed jobs. All this was at a time when Labour was governing with a tiny majority or none at all. In addition, Foot was heavily involved in wages strategy with Denis Healey and the unions, in prices and incomes policy with Shirley Williams, and an array of other things ranging from entry into Europe to the publication of the diaries of Richard Cross-man, who died in April 1974. For a man in his sixties, indeed of any age, not least a man laid low for a time in 1975 by a serious operation, it was an extraordinary record. Many felt it was the most distinguished and altruistic phase of a principled political career.
But before he began legislative work at all, Foot had to deal with an immediate crisis. It was his role, in partnership with Eric Varley, Secretary of State for Energy, to settle the miners’ strike. This he did in his first three days in office, on 5–7 March. The three main NUM officers, Joe Gormley (President), Lawrence Daly (Secretary) and Mick McGahey (Vice-President), called in at St James’s Square for summit diplomacy at 2 p.m. on 5 March, almost as soon as Foot arrived there. He told them that free collective bargaining was being restored.36 The strike was then brought to a speedy end, entirely on the miners’ terms. In effect, Foot kept his distance from the pay negotiations: the National Coal Board was instructed to negotiate an immediate settlement, and the Pay Board agreed that the issue of pay relativities through comparison with other occupations be bypassed. On 7 March the NUM agreed to terms that would raise basic wage rates to £45 a week for face workers, £36 for other underground workers, and £32 for surface workers. It was a settlement costing £108,500,000, an increase of 32 per cent on the existing wage bill. Threshold agreements implemented automatically on the lines of the Pay Code set up under Heath’s legislation would add a little more. On behalf of the Cabinet, Wilson formally congratulated Foot and Varley for their part in settling matters so rapidly. The Cabinet looked forward to a speedy end to Heath’s Pay Board: in fact it was wound up in July, after a somewhat edgy correspondence between Foot and the Board’s Chairman, Sir Frank Figgures.37
The resolution of the miners’ strike was pragmatic and hopeful, with long-term implications. Foot himself admitted in Cabinet that the deal ‘would inevitably have an effect on the general prospect for pay settlements, which was already disturbing’. Inflation was rising sharply: by the end of 1974, earnings would be 19–20 per cent higher than a year earlier, and prices 15 per cent higher. Referring to the staged pay rises of the Tory legislation, he added: ‘The fact that the Stage 3 limit had been lifted for mineworkers did not mean that it had been lifted for all other claims.’ Varley added that the settlement would make the NCB’s deficit in 1974–75 rise to some £400 million.38 Ministers questioned the value of the TUC’s promise that the miners would be regarded as a special case, with no knock-on effect. Still, Foot’s solution was surely the right one, and was endorsed by the Chancellor, Denis Healey. The miners had been shown in the Wilberforce Inquiry to have slipped down the wages table. Their union’s current President, Joe Gormley, was a Labour loyalist from the moderate Lancashire coalfield, and no enthusiast for industrial action. The government could not grapple with the immense challenges of inflation, following huge oil-price rises, with a standstill in production in what was still a major industry and a prime source of energy. The country breathed a sigh of relief as the miners returned to work, with Foot a short-term hero.
The Department embarked upon its legislative programme at a furious pace. First up was the Health and Safety at Work Bill, a relatively uncontentious measure. It was based on a committee headed by the former Labour MP and Chairman of the National Coal Board Lord Robens, set up under the Conservative government. In May 1973 Robert Carr had announced that the Conservatives would implement the Robens proposals virtually in full, which meant setting up a tripartite health and safety authority. Harold Walker handled most of the detail as the Bill sped through committee. The main change Labour added was to ensure that employers would consult with union representatives on working conditions; indeed the entire consultation process was tilted somewhat in the unions’ direction, as befitted a measure governed by the ‘social contract’. Walker declared that the Robens proposals had been too permissive in tone. There were one or two difficulties in individual cases. Applying the Act to agricultural workers was one, and this was added to the Bill after the October 1974 general election. There was also ironing-out to be done over the miners, who preferred their own Mines and Quarry Inspectorate. After brief Cabinet debate on 9 May the Alkali Inspectorate, previously a separate system for chemical workers, was absorbed to ensure a fully integrated system of inspection.39 But the Bill was all happily through in the summer. To Foot, mindful of past workplace disasters, it was a deeply satisfying achievement. In the House he quoted the Gresford mining tragedy in north Wales in 1934, when 266 men had died, as an example of the horrors that had existed under the previous order. His department had shown that it could work well and decisively. Indeed, the Health and Safety Bill actually added to its powers, by transferring certain functions from the Department of the Environment. In the House he spoke cheerfully of Lord Robens’s inquiry – ‘perhaps he does not still hold the same high place on the pedestal in the Socialist Pantheon which was once his’.40 Somehow, Hazlitt, Burke and Paine were all squeezed into Foot’s observations. But the Health and Safety Bill itself he hailed as a powerful affirmation of three socialist principles. It mobilized the power of the state for a great cause, it meant the active participation of working people, and it empowered ministers to give leadership. In 1995–2000, the Director-General of the Health and Safety executive was to be Jennifer Bacon, who had been Foot’s Principal Secretary at the time it was set up.
The Trade Union and Labour Relations Act (TULRA), introduced at the start of May, was more contentious. Drafted in rough outline by Booth and Fraser, it completely overturned Heath’s Act of 1971. All the apparatus of that measure – the National Industrial Relations Court, the Commission on Industrial Relations, the registry of union and employers’ associations – would disappear. The concept of ‘unfair dismissal’ would vanish, and unions would no longer be open to civil action for damages in connection with trade disputes. The idea of ‘unfair industrial action’ would also disappear, and the unions would regain their previous immunity from civil claims for damages. Foot himself wanted to call his measure ‘the Workers’ Rights Bill’, but the Civil Service forced him, reluctantly, to change his mind.41 It was not simply a union-pleasing Bill, devised as a sop to Jack Jones. Indeed, Foot explained in Tribune that the government had refrained from adopting the TUC General Council’s draft Bill because this massive document, of perhaps seventy clauses, would take too much time to get through Parliament. One tricky issue was that the TUC wanted to preserve the unfair dismissals protection part of the 1971 Act while demolishing the rest of it.42 Much of Foot’s Bill was almost uncontroversial, and he hoped that it would reach the statute book very soon. At an early Cabinet on 28 March, Harold Wilson had emphasized the certainty of an early general election, and the need to clear up matters regarded as being of particular electoral importance such as trade union legislation and housing finance: ‘It was highly desirable that the legislation repealing the Industrial Relations Act should have reached the Statute Book before a general election took place.’43 In fact, TULRA became law in September.
Several of the provisions wanted by the TUC were omitted, including stronger legal protection for pickets, an end to conscientious objection to union membership for religious and other minorities (a clause on which the libertarian Foot was particularly keen), and a reinstatement of compensation for unfair dismissal. The Cabinet did not accede to two major demands by the TUC. One was to deny the right of strike pickets to stop vehicles on public highways (something much opposed by the police), an issue which was deferred for further consideration.44 The other, agreed to on 25 April against Foot’s wishes, was the setting-up of machinery for appeals to a special tribunal by union members against unreasonable expulsion or exclusion from a union: ‘The government had made numerous concessions to the unions and the time had come to see what the unions had to offer in return. By including this provision in the present Bill the government would demonstrate that they were not instruments of the TUC but were taking their decisions on grounds of public interest.’45 Foot’s Bill was generally well received, even in some Conservative circles. The Times pointed out that it was fundamentally a conservative measure, restoring the legal situation regarding the unions to what it had been prior to 1971.46 The Lord of Appeal, Lord Scarman, was to give a strong endorsement of Foot’s Bill in 1979. He declared that it restored what had really been Parliament’s intention when Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government enacted the Bill of 1906 – but it was ‘stronger and clearer than it was then’.47 To do that, Foot’s measure had to go back in time, not just to repeal the Conservative Act of 1971 but also to reaffirm the principles of the Act of 1906, and even of Gladstone and Disraeli’s legislation of 1871–75. Without this the unions would have had no protection under the common law against charges relating to breach of contract, conspiracy or intimidation. Foot’s Bill thus achieved a much fairer legal balance between unions and employers. But it did so not through revolutionary change in the jurisprudence, but by judicious turning back of the clock.
There were some elements of controversy during the passage of the Bill, relating to legal protection for those arbitrarily or unreasonably excluded or expelled from a trade union. During July, the House of Lords passed five amendments which the Commons upheld, by majorities varying from six to eleven, despite the fury of Foot’s invective against the unelected upper house. The key one was Amendment Seven, which prevented the Bill from giving legal immunity to unions when they persuaded members to break a contract.48 Other amendments sought to protect workers from arbitrary expulsion or exclusion from a union, for example over closed shop arrangements, to tighten up union rule book provisions, and to limit the power of British unions to ‘black’ goods or otherwise assist with strikes in other countries. Foot was advised that he had no choice but to accept these setbacks. This meant that a substantial amending Bill to TULRA would have to be introduced at some time in the future. But his Bill went through nevertheless, and a much fairer climate in industrial relations seemed to have emerged. Professor Wedderburn noted that, although not understood at the time, the Bill helpfully removed the need for trade unions, uniquely, to have to conform to certain ‘guiding principles’ in their behaviour.49 It was certainly different from what Labour had tried to do during Wilson’s previous government. Michael Foot christened TULRA in his own affectionate way. He called it ‘In Place of Barbara’.50
The next proposal from the department’s legislative machine was the setting-up of an Advisory and Conciliation Service (ACAS) for the handling of industrial disputes. This was the particular project of Jack Jones. But first there was an essential political interlude. Wilson could hardly continue in office as a minority Prime Minister dependent on the unpredictable votes of Scottish and Welsh Nationalists. Foot and Crosland were amongst ministers who had urged an even earlier election, perhaps in June 1974, while Callaghan counselled delay. The Conservatives exerted no pressure, since Heath’s leadership appeared so beleaguered. The polls suggested that opinion was moving Labour’s way, not least because of Foot’s work at Employment. So a general election was called for October 1974. Foot naturally took a key part in Labour’s election campaign, which saw the party and the unions working in close partnership, as never before since 1945. The Times correspondent praised him as ‘one of the last of a dying tradition of great political orators’, and ‘the Bringer of the Only True Socialism’.51 He declared total opposition to pay controls, but asserted that recent wage settlements, for instance for construction and engineering workers, were not excessive. Heath’s claims of 40 per cent wage increases were swept aside as ‘statistical bosh’. Foot was also anxious to make clear that the government was not engaged in any craven surrender to trade union power.52 He was used indirectly as a covert mediator by Wilson in an industrial dispute by ITN journalists which Labour felt was harming coverage of their election campaign, but which nevertheless continued during its course.53
Foot had a thoroughly good election, with positive press reaction. He swept home in Ebbw Vale as usual, this time with an increased majority of over eighteen thousand and an improved share of the poll at 74.1 per cent, despite the looming cloud of the closure of the local steelworks. But nationally Labour’s results were much less satisfactory. It was a dull campaign, most of the partisan ammunition having been expended in February. Although the Tory vote fell by 1,400,000, partly as a result of Heath’s lacklustre campaign, Labour gained only a 2 per cent swing compared with February, and won only eighteen additional seats. The outcome thus left Wilson with 319 seats against the Conservatives’ 277, and an overall majority of only three. It was almost a hung Parliament, with Labour likely to be dependent on a miscellany of eleven Scottish Nationalists, three Plaid Cymru and a few assorted Northern Irishmen (including amongst the Unionists Enoch Powell, who had recommended voters to support Labour in February 1974 because of its policy on Europe). Foot’s projected legislation would not face an easy ride in a finely balanced House.
However, the immediate legislative aftermath, the setting-up of the Advisory and Conciliation Service, was again relatively pain-free for Foot’s busy department. Jack Jones rightly observed that ‘it was my baby’.54 A nine-person tripartite body would be set up, three members appointed by the TUC, three by the CBI and three others with experience of industrial relations. The Employment Secretary would retain the power to appoint committees of inquiry for serious disputes that ACAS could not solve. Jim Mortimer, a left-wing former trade unionist, currently Personnel Director of London Transport, would be appointed the first Chairman at the start of September 1975. The Service won its spurs a month later by sorting out a difficult strike of road haulage drivers in Scotland. Foot reassured the Cabinet about Jack Jones’s satisfaction with the way things were proceeding, a sign of the times.55
ACAS, which received statutory powers in 1975, was to prove one of Foot’s measures that stood the test of time. During the Thatcher years it survived attacks on its powers both from the government and from judges. It arose because it was widely felt, by many employers as well as trade unions, that existing procedures were unsatisfactory in that the impartiality, and hence the credibility, of the arbitration and conciliation services offered by the Department of Employment was in doubt. With its tripartite controlling body, ACAS was apparently bringing the state directly into the conduct of industrial relations. In fact, Paul Davies and Mark Freedland argue convincingly that it was designed to achieve the exact opposite, namely to create an impartial body in which both sides of industry could feel confidence, as under the old Ministry of Labour in Ernie Bevin’s days.56 Time was to show that the powers of ACAS were far less robust than contemporaries hoped or feared. The Grunwick case in 1976 showed how an unscrupulous employer, in that case the owner of a photo-processing works, could simply evade the recommendations of ACAS (by withholding the names and addresses of his, mainly Asian, employees). The Law Lords gave him every help by upholding his case.
ACAS remained busily useful, including throughout the Thatcher and Major periods, but Jim Mortimer had to confess in 1980 that his Service could do little more than attempt to persuade, since it lacked any legal or statutory powers of compulsion or regulation to enforce a settlement. The TUC had asked, for example, that ACAS be given powers to make employers pay the ‘going rate’ to their workers, but that did not happen. This weakness of enforcement powers was indeed to apply to a number of Foot’s measures. Unions received some greater powers, but so did the courts, notably over issues involving ‘contempt of court’. Apparently sound and fair-minded in conception, some of the legislation lacked teeth. Anti-union employers like George Ward at Grunwick and Eddie Shah in the print industry, the founder in 1986 of the Today newspaper, backed by sympathetic judges, could ride roughshod over them.57
The Employment Protection Bill introduced in March 1975 was much bigger and more controversial: it was the most wide-ranging and complicated of all the items on Foot’s agenda of legislation. It owed much to the proposals put forward by Len Murray and Jack Jones on behalf of the TUC, and was considered by many Conservatives to be an extreme instance of the government surrendering to union pressure. Some quoted Harold Wilson’s remark about Edward Heath’s negotiations over Britain’s entry into Europe – ‘rolling on his back like a spaniel’. This was an exaggerated view, and the degree of Foot’s submissiveness was overstated. The Bill was taken through committee almost single-handedly by Albert Booth, who did so with much shrewdness and patience in a House where he had the barest of majorities behind him. He himself boldly tried to rewrite passages of the Bill which did not appear to him to make sense. At a party afterwards to celebrate the passage of the Bill, Booth was given a present by his minister which always bore a particular symbolism – a copy of Gulliver’s Travels.58
Like TULRA in the previous session, the Employment Protection Bill aimed to improve free collective bargaining. But while TULRA had done this by removing state intervention, the Employment Protection Bill did so by bringing it back in, by guaranteeing the rights of workers. It therefore mirrored the historic doubts and debates among union leaders, going back to the 1906 Act, as to whether labour law should embody a positive role for the state in industrial relations or not. It created a legal protection of the right of workers to join unions, and a ‘recognition procedure’ to make employers negotiate with union representatives. Employers would have to be more forthcoming in disclosing information to shop stewards and union officials; workers would be given a statutory right to reinstatement if ACAS found they had been unfairly dismissed; employers would no longer be able to punish workers for shop-floor misdemeanours by deductions from their pay packets. It also protected workers over a variety of other issues, including the insolvency of the employer, guaranteed payments when on short time, rights of maternity payment and the right of mothers to return to a job after childbirth, and the right to a written statement giving reasons for dismissal. The main arbitrating body to decide whether legislation was being complied with would be the Central Arbitration Committee, which Davies and Freedland judged to be ‘probably the most successful and innovative of the institutions established by the Employment Protection Act’.59
The Employment Protection Bill was a measure which contained many positive features. It could be said to locate the unions within the legal system on a modern basis for the first time. It extended to the wage-earner much of the legal protection enjoyed by the salary-earner. But it also proved to have its limitations, and was capable of being bypassed through the instrumentation of the law. The unions in many cases were reluctant to use the force of positive law in defiance of their historic traditions, and preferred to rely on their own power at a time when union membership was reaching a new peak of close to thirteen million. Of these, only about fifty thousand additional workers gained access to collective bargaining through the Act of 1975. It was union muscle, not the law, that was the dominant factor in this new surge in membership and in power.
It is important too to note what was left out of the Bill. In particular, after renewed debate in Cabinet, the TUC again failed to win the right for pickets in industrial disputes to stop vehicles entering places of work. They wanted properly identified official pickets to be allowed to ‘obstruct’ the highway for a reasonable period in a non-violent manner, communicating with the drivers of vehicles and trying to persuade them not to cross picket lines outside factories. Foot himself had accepted this, but was overborne by a combination of the Home Office and the police, who felt it would be impossible to administer and would quite possibly lead to violence. In Cabinet on 9 October 1975, Roy Jenkins defended the police objection that Foot had proposed to give pickets equal authority on the public highway to themselves. Jenkins’s view was backed, less vigorously, by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Elwyn-Jones, who argued that it would not be to the benefit of the pickets themselves. It was decided that Foot should resume discussions between the police and the TUC on satisfactory guidelines on picketing.60
Another point was that the Bill contained no provision about forms of industrial democracy. This was a controversial issue which divided ministers. Foot argued in Cabinet on 19 June 1975 against having an independent inquiry into the subject, since it might alienate the trade unions, whose cooperation was essential.61 But the prevailing view was that the unions, who had shown so little interest in serving on the boards of companies or nationalized industries prior to the era of Jack Jones, could hardly have the final say. A committee of inquiry was eventually set up, chaired by the Oxford historian Alan Bullock. Its proposals in late 1976, the so-called ‘2x + y formula’ for equal representation from unions and shareholders plus some independents, strongly favoured by Jack Jones, who backed the idea of worker directors, were to founder in the face of opposition from Shirley Williams, Edmund Dell and other ministers who saw it as too great a surrender to unreconstructed trade unions. On another issue, ‘a rare rebuff’ to the TUC was noted by Paul Routledge, the industrial correspondent of The Times. Foot had rejected a TUC proposal to give the Department of Employment power to veto redundancies and even to subsidize temporarily ailing companies to save jobs. Employers wishing to reduce their labour force would have to gain the approval of the department. This bold proposal, of uncertain financial impact, Foot rightly said would be unprecedented.62
Most important of all was the contentious issue of the closed shop, where employment rested on membership of a named union, and cases where workers might be deprived of their employment by union practices. Much controversy had been raised by the case of the so-called ‘Ferrybridge Six’, a group of power-station workers in Leeds dismissed by the Central Electricity Generating Boad for failing to join a specified union under a closed shop agreement. Foot’s opponents attacked him for ‘callous treatment’, since the dismissed men could even be refused unemployment benefit as a result. In the end, this difficult issue was postponed for further deliberation until an amended TULRA was introduced in 1976. Foot had originally supported a TUC proposal to cooperate with the government in setting up voluntary procedures to monitor the closed shop.63 The National Union of Journalists, of which Foot was a long-time member, was particularly zealous on this issue. But the TUC had been opposed in Cabinet discussions by the Lord Chancellor, who pointed out that the Donovan Commission had gone further than the TUC proposed to do. The TUC scheme, Elwyn-Jones observed, would include no power to award compensation or to enforce compliance: ‘If the government retreated from this principle in the face of trades union pressure, its action would be difficult to explain in Parliament and its credibility would come into question.’ Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, backed this view with more vehemence: ‘A threat to deprive a man of his livelihood involved a fundamental question of human rights. The government could not justify reliance on voluntary procedures to deal with these cases any more than with cases of discrimination on grounds of sex or race.’ He concluded that ‘if the government gave up these safeguards merely because the TUC disliked them it would not only seem wrong; it would be wrong’. Unusually, Jenkins’s name is identified with his intervention in the Cabinet minutes, to illustrate the force attached to it. In the end his view, supported by the majority of ministers, prevailed.64 Foot’s Employment Protection Act got through safely at the end of the 1974–75 session, and was hailed by the unions as another Magna Carta, almost comparable to that of 1906. But for all its many merits it soon proved to have serious limitations, while the issue of the closed shop remained for all the interested parties, in politics and in industry, to be fought another day.
The Department’s other new measure in 1975 was consensual and straightforward, the Sex Discrimination Act, warmly supported of course by that doughty feminist Jill Craigie. Here again the law was being introduced directly into matters of employment, since the Act forbade dismissal of workers on grounds of sexual discrimination. It came into full force at the end of 1975, on the same date as the full implementation of the Equal Pay Act of 1970. There could be little problem here, least of all from the Conservatives, who had just elected a woman, Margaret Thatcher, as their party leader for the first time. But simultaneously there arose the controversy by which Foot’s time at the Department of Employment would be best remembered, the celebrated struggle over the closed shop. This raised major questions not only about Foot’s qualities as a parliamentarian and his priorities as a Cabinet minister, but also about his lifelong commitment to journalism and the principle of a free press. This had been sacrosanct for Swift, Cobbett and Hazlitt in the past, and an article of faith for Foot in his various previous incarnations as columnist and editor. The nature and substance of this commitment were now to be put sharply to the test.
The question of the closed shop, and the problems it presented to employees as well as employers where it existed, had been brought up in previous measures, as has been seen. It had been left on one side in TULRA and the Employment Protection Act because of the controversies it aroused, including among ministers. But in 1975 it could no longer be avoided. The closed shop only affected a minority of workers, but it was growing as an institution: by the end of the decade, 23 per cent of the workforce were included, compared with 16 per cent a decade earlier.65 It should be added that many employers were also inclined to favour the closed shop, since it made discussing labour relations with the unions that much more straightforward. A particular flashpoint was the newspaper industry. In fact the main problems concerned the print unions like the National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants (NATSOPA). Most attention, however, focused on the high-visibility National Union of Journalists, of which Foot had been for thirty-five years a fully-paid-up member. It was a small, somewhat maverick, union of twenty-eight thousand members, at odds with its rival, the smaller Institute of Journalists; its General Secretary, Kenneth Morgan (not the present author), was a moderate. Indeed, one of Foot’s arguments was that if Morgan were not backed, it would discredit moderate union leaders everywhere, and hand the initiative over to extremists. But the NUJ did operate a post-entry closed shop, which meant that contributions to journalism from outside the unionized profession might disappear. There was a particular issue in an ongoing trade dispute when the union, in pursuit of a pay claim, refused to handle copy in provincial newspapers that was not submitted by a union member. Conservatives denounced this as a threat to a free press. The NUJ’s role thus led to a prolonged crisis, unique in its history, that lasted for almost the whole of Foot’s remaining time at the Department of Employment.
Immediately after the general election in October 1974, Foot brought forward a Bill to amend TULRA and permit the closed shop. It was an issue with which he was very personally identified. His bitterest enemy, the Observer columnist Nora Beloff, observed of him (in a book described by Lord Goodman’s biographer Brian Brivati as ‘deranged’): ‘only a man of Foot’s stubbornness, dedication and political acumen could have driven [the Bill] through against so much opposition inside and outside the Cabinet’.66 A wide range of critics rose up against him, among them his brother Dingle, on libertarian grounds. Almost a hundred distinguished writers and academics wrote a letter of protest to The Times Literary Supplement against the closed shop proposals: among them were prestigious scholars like Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper and C. V. Wedgwood. Within the Cabinet, Foot’s proposals were strongly attacked by Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams. Jenkins described them as ‘an over-hanging menace’ inimical to a free press: ‘In his pantheon the dead Lord Beaverbrook had been replaced by the living Jack Jones.’ Shirley Williams was vocal in Cabinet, and talked of resignation. A group of Labour MPs from the right-wing Manifesto Group, including David Marquand, John Mackintosh, John Grant, Brian Walden, John Dickson Mabon and Bryan Magee, saw Foot privately to demand the affirmation of the rights of individual journalists to protection under the Common Law. The exchanges were often bad-tempered, and some of those present doubted whether Foot was familiar with the details of his own Bill.67 In Foot’s own circle of friends, the Guardian journalist Ian Aitken (once his possible step-son-in-law), a member of the NUJ, nevertheless felt uneasy about the freedoms of his own profession. Foot was also told of the position of workers other than journalists. Paul Nicholson of the Committee of Employees’ Organizations told Foot: ‘Most workers who object to the closed shop have less opportunity to make their case public than journalists … You do not seem to have any respect whatever for the integrity of those who oppose your legislation about closed shops.’68
The most prominent adversaries that Foot had to face, however, were the newspaper owners and editors, headed by Sir Denis Hamilton, chairman of Times Publications, and three editors, David Astor of the Observer, Harold Evans of the Sunday Times, and Frederick Fisher of the Financial Times. Operating somewhat on a track of his own was Alastair Hetherington, editor of the pro-Labour Guardian, who attacked the proposed dismissal without compensation of anyone who refused to join a union, and the removal of ‘reasonable grounds’ exemptions. He argued that the Bill would give leverage to NUJ militants.69 But he was a frail reed for the employers’ side, pro-Labour and liable to drop away. The main controversy centred on whether newspaper editors should be compelled to join unions, or whether this would compromise their powers of free expression. Perhaps unwisely, the Editors’ Guild (forerunner of the Society of Editors) brought in Lord Goodman as their spokesman and representative. He was an old friend of Cabinet ministers, and had given Foot legal advice on Tribune matters back in the 1950s, as well as acting as Harold Wilson’s lawyer in difficult personal cases involving his secretary Marcia Williams. He had also been close to Richard Crossman and George Wigg, and closer still to Jennie Lee, whom he had wanted to marry. But Goodman’s relationship to the proprietors was always unclear, while in any case his own skills as a master backstairs fixer who dealt with the establishment were far less applicable to a high-visibility political question like the press and the closed shop.70
In the autumn of 1975 the Bill was beached in the House of Lords. In Cabinet Foot urged the use of the Parliament Act to restore the original Bill, but this was hardly practical politics, so tiny was the government majority. Instead it was decided to consider possible movement on amendments put down by Goodman.71 Discussions between Foot and the editors then began on 19 November 1974, in his offices in St James’s Square. From the start it was clear that the initiative lay with Foot. It was an issue on which he was very determined to win: he had a warm regard for the NUJ, and well recalled how his union had backed him and secured his severance pay when he was sacked without warning by the Sun in 1964. He also knew the facts of the case intimately. He was ‘far better prepared than we were’, David Astor was to declare ruefully.72 The truth was that Foot’s mind was far clearer and his objectives more easily defined. Some of his departmental officials, notably Jennifer Bacon, were also powerfully effective in championing the cause of the rights of workers, journalists included.73 By contrast the editors were a miscellaneous crew, and Goodman an uncertain captain of them. Having Wilson’s former Press Secretary Trevor Lloyd Hughes to run a public campaign did not help the editors’ cause. By the end of January 1975 Hetherington of the Guardian had in effect signed a peace pact with Foot, and his Bill went through the Commons.74
The editors now gave up hope of altering the main lines of Foot’s legislation, and concentrated instead on a voluntary press charter drafted by Kenneth Morgan and Alastair Hetherington, with help from Lord Houghton, to be embodied in the amended TULRA that Foot now proposed. This charter was voted down by NUJ members, and once again Foot found himself attacked in a letter in The Times Literary Supplement. The signatories this time included writers like Arthur Koestler, J. B. Priestley, Jacquetta Hawkes and Rebecca West, all old comrades-in-arms on the left. Their main lifeline lay in the uncertain forum of the House of Lords, where Lord Goodman put forward a series of amendments drafted by the judge Leonard Hoffman. But Goodman had undercut his own position by reaching agreement with Foot privately on some issues.75 For the Conservatives Lord Hailsham, their leader in the Lords, was often exasperated by Goodman’s tactics, and the new party leader, Margaret Thatcher, refused to offer official party assistance by use of the Conservative whip in the Lords. In Cabinet, Shirley Williams continued to protest, with support from Harold Lever and Reg Prentice. Roy Jenkins suggested a possible compromise on the basis of proposals drawn up by his special adviser Anthony Lestor. But most ministers were content to let Foot’s Bill progress. Callaghan, Healey and Crosland refused to obstruct it, while Roy Hattersley, a centre-right figure and a frequent journalist, gave Foot his support.76
The Bill shuttled to and fro between the two Houses in November 1975; amendments moved by Lord Hailsham in the Lords to enforce the proposed code of conduct by law and to add that breaches in the press charter were ‘contrary to public policy’ were rejected by the Cabinet. By now the press code had been endorsed by the NUJ membership. The Lords were effectively conceding that the Bill would become law in the next session. On 21 January 1976 the government’s additional proposals on press freedom to be added to TULRA mark two were passed by the Commons by the comfortable margin of forty-five.77 Goodman’s final proposal was that the press charter, which he saw as brought forward by the government but drawn up by the NUJ, be dropped from the Bill altogether. But this was defeated, and the Bill finally got the royal assent on 25 March 1976. The Trade Union and Labour Relations (Amendment) Act thus became law. It featured a lengthy clause headed ‘Charter on freedom of the press’.78 By this time Foot was actively campaigning for the leadership of the Labour Party after Wilson’s announced resignation, his prestige higher than ever.
Foot could view the outcome of the closed shop debate with much satisfaction. He had comprehensively out-argued his opponents, and a subsequent book on the affair, Nora Beloff’s Freedom Under Foot: The Battle Over the Closed Shop in British Journalism, was too intemperate and inaccurate to make much impression. Foot had been able to show that the issue was really about the rights of trade unionists and their immunity from actions in restraint of trade as understood since 1871, not the freedom of journalists to think, write or publish what they chose. Parliament was debating the imposition on journalists of the restrictions of the 1971 Act, which applied to no other group of workers. Now journalists would have the same freedoms as other workers to protect their professional status and skills, in negotiation with their employers, free from the intervention of the judges. Their rights of free speech would remain undiminished. Foot was also able to tell the Conservative MP Ian Gow that closed shop arrangements would be applied with much flexibility, and in any case covered only a small minority of workers.79 The editors had cut unimpressive figures, detached from their journalists, finding it difficult to maintain a common front. They had failed to demonstrate exactly how their own professional freedom would be undermined by either their joining a union or their employees doing so through a closed shop. The half-hearted response of Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives to the editors’ plight suggested an unreality in their position. Throughout a tricky passage of play, Michael Foot had managed to confirm both his effectiveness as an adroit minister and, through the adoption of a press charter which affirmed the right to free comment, his lifelong commitment to free speech. In his confrontation with the newspapers, Foot was much the best communicator of them all.
The passage of the short TULRA Amendment Act, which also included a stronger provision on freedom from actions for tort in pursuance of a trade dispute, completed a remarkable battery of legislation. At the time the Act aroused much press comment about the menace of trade union power and the empire of ‘the Emperor Jones’. In fact it was essentially a restoration of the balance between the two sides of industry after the problems caused by the Act of 1971. The law was certainly amended in ways favourable to the unions, but many of their key points were not conceded, and the enforcement of many of the measures proved difficult afterwards. In the later 1970s the atmosphere of legislative conflict passed away, and the Department of Employment moved into a quieter and more functional role. As Lord Scarman observed, its work had made the legal framework for industrial relations significantly clearer. Even at the time, on 12 January 1976, the Conservative shadow spokesman, the studiously moderate James Prior, was able to tell his party that TULRA had been accepted as the ‘basis for labour law’. In formulating any Tory response he ‘counselled a cautious, considered approach’, not least because millions of trade unionists voted for his party.80 After the election of the Thatcher government in May 1979, much of Foot’s legislation was swept away. But that was less because of its intrinsic weaknesses than because of the failings of the leaders of the unions themselves, especially following the retirement of Jack Jones in 1977. The ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978–79, while often exaggerated in the right-wing media, did highlight major problems in the calling and conduct of strikes, and in the powers of central government. A Labour government, headed by the only trade unionist ever to become Prime Minister, was helpless, and the machinery of government ground to a halt. Foot’s legislation should have laid the foundations of long-term industrial consensus, not of class war. Thirty years on, moderate union leaders like David Lea, John Monks and Brendan Barber recalled the Foot years as a golden age which redressed the social balance, but to which a market-orientated, managerial New Labour showed no inclination to return.
His union legislation showed how indispensable Michael Foot had become to the government. He was at the heart of every crisis. It was Foot who led off for the government on the nationalization of the aircraft-and ship-building industries. It was this that led the then Shadow Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine to engage later in the extraordinary charade of seizing the mace in the House of Commons chamber and brandishing it at Labour MPs who were celebrating winning the crucial vote by singing ‘The Red Flag’. Foot, who disliked Heseltine, said that it was much the best thing he ever did. It was also Foot who brought forward the Dock Work Regulation Bill at the behest of Jack Jones, who needed it for his own credibility within the TGWU. This would seek to combat the effects of containerization and the growth of non-scheme ports, thus continuing the fight against casual employment and the threat of port closures. It aimed to extend the 1947 Dock Labour Scheme which Foot had strongly supported when MP for Devonport, but was emasculated by hostile amendments in the Lords, a process assisted (strangely enough) by private advice from Vic Feather, former Secretary of the TUC.
But much the most serious problem confronting the government was inflation. It continued to soar throughout 1974, with wage settlements reaching a level of increase of over 28 per cent. By January 1975 Peter Jenkins in the Guardian was writing of how the Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey’s ‘chilling’ assessment of the economy had influenced Foot, ‘who no longer disguises from himself or others the extreme seriousness of the wages problem’.81 The key relationship in the government, therefore, was that between Healey and Foot, who were in constant negotiation with the union leaders about ways of controlling wages without the coercive powers of legal sanctions. Healey and Foot were hardly a natural pairing. They had been in disagreement over virtually every aspect of policy over the last twenty years. Healey, a Gaitskellite and pragmatically pro-Europe, had been Defence Secretary between 1964 and 1970, operating a policy in which the British nuclear deterrent, as renegotiated by Macmillan with Kennedy at Bermuda, had survived unscathed. It would be difficult to find a set of policy positions with which Foot disagreed more comprehensively. Television programmes on the bomb had featured Healey shouting at him, ‘Stop mucking about with debating points, Michael.’
However, confronted with the realities of trying to produce an anti-inflation policy, they got on remarkably well. They were both bookish intellectuals, though of different kinds, fellow members of the Byron Society. Foot admired Healey’s great intellectual power; Healey was impressed by Foot’s loyalty.82 In detailed discussions with the unions on wage claims Foot played little part, but he was important in overall strategy and in selling the alleged success of government policy to the public, or more particularly to Labour Party members. One of his major triumphs was in persuading a very doubtful Jack Jones that Healey was someone with whom he could do business. Foot had to strike a difficult balance. In June 1975 he was condemning a pay claim of up to 33 per cent from the railwaymen (British Rail’s offer of 27.5 per cent had been rejected). A rail strike ‘would be a catastrophe for us all’, declared Foot.83 On the other hand, at this very time there was a threat that the Cabinet might have to bring in statutory powers to enforce wage restraint, something to which Foot was fundamentally hostile, and over which his friend Eric Heffer resigned as Minister of State at the mere threat of their being introduced. Foot still pinned his hopes on the power of reason.
The other partnership in which Foot was deeply involved was with Shirley Williams over a prices and incomes policy. As Minister for Consumer Affairs, Williams had to work closely with the Department of Employment – she was ‘prices’ and Foot was ‘incomes’. Here again, the two ministers had had little enough to do with each other before, but worked together excellently. This was especially true of the negotiations they had with the Economic Committee of the TUC and with CBI representatives in the tense days of early July 1975, leading up to the acceptance of Jack Jones’s £6 flat-rate pay limit. Williams admired the way in which Foot’s work for the government’s broad economic objectives was combined with social concern, notably for the low-paid. She found his literary approach to life appealing; she also felt him to be fundamentally a ‘radical’, an anti-statist liberal in 1975 as in his student days. Foot himself, with his penchant for intelligent women, formed a strong bond with her. Williams’s defection to the Social Democrats in 1981 was the one which Foot most regretted, and which he worked hardest to try to avert.84
For over a year the government allowed the voluntary method of wage restraint to take its course. The TUC had offered guidance to unions in a document that Foot called ‘highly intelligent’, which emphasized the need for maintaining rather than increasing real incomes, and to stick to a twelve-month rule for pay increases.85 By the summer of 1975, however, this policy was manifestly collapsing, and new initiatives were urgently needed. Wage settlements were rising to over 30 per cent, the balance of payments was lurching into huge deficit, the value of the pound was falling relentlessly, unemployment was the highest since 1940. Economists spoke of ‘stagflation’, economic recession and price inflation at one and the same time. Government ministers were at odds on the way forward. Reg Prentice delivered some sharp criticisms of the unions’ lack of responsibility. Foot tore into him for his ‘economic illiteracy’ – and for his use of the verb ‘to welsh’, which, rather quaintly, he took to be an insult to constituents in Ebbw Vale and elsewhere.86
But clearly some immediate way had to be found to curb wage settlements. On 20 June 1975 Healey gave the Cabinet a deeply sombre account of the nation’s economic position. He spoke of imminent threats to sterling, and possible cuts of £1,000 million in public expenditure, with unemployment rising to two million as a result. He still hoped that a voluntary system of wage negotiation could be preserved, a view echoed by Harold Lever, but there were now serious proposals within the Treasury for a statutory policy to avoid both massive expenditure cuts and an unacceptable fall in living standards. Foot had from the start of the government declared his total opposition to a statutory policy, and it was known that he regarded it as a resigning matter. When proposals advanced further, Foot saw Wilson privately at 9 a.m. before the Cabinet meeting on 20 June, telling the Prime Minister that he would resign. He acknowledged the vital need for an incomes policy, but believed it should be voluntary, and never enforced by law, which ‘would almost certainly lead to serious industrial disputes’. Almost any other resignation would have been more bearable to Wilson. He persuaded Foot to defer a decision, and then, influenced by a paper from Bernard Donoughue and his Private Secretary Kenneth Stowe, dropped the idea of a statutory policy. The Cabinet decided to continue talks with the TUC on voluntary guidelines for pay increases of 10 per cent, a level which economists considered to be more than the economy could bear. (Foot himself had suggested in Cabinet that 15 per cent would be ‘a more reasonable target’.) 87
Meeting followed meeting: Healey with Len Murray and his assistant David Lea, Foot with Jack Jones, key sessions of leading ministers in the MISC committee of the Cabinet. Healey was told by Gordon Richardson, Governor of the Bank of England, that sterling was collapsing. There were threats to withdraw from sterling by holders in oil-rich Nigeria and Kuwait. Eventually, with government policy at a near impasse, Jack Jones agreed to endorse a proposal for a flat-rate £6 weekly pay increase, a single cash sum, not a percentage. It was a major concession by Jones, who had favoured £8. But it was to haul the government back from the brink of economic collapse.
Wilson’s proposals on 22 July to put this policy into practice included the prospect of reserve powers which, if applied by regulation in particular cases, would make it illegal for an employer to exceed the £6 pay limit. This virtually amounted to a reversion to a statutory policy. Foot had to concede as much before the Commons, in what Ian Aitken called ‘a painful and sometimes embarrassing performance’ (a description for which he was afterwards fiercely rebuked by Jill Craigie). In response to a Tory interruption, Foot admitted that if a statutory policy were introduced, ‘I would hardly be the person to do it’. In fact he had argued strongly against reserve powers being included during a long, lunchless Cabinet meeting on 10 July. It would lead, he had said, ‘to the destruction of the government’ by creating difficulties in Parliament and in relations with the unions. When Roy Jenkins called for a strong statutory policy, Foot asked him, ‘Are you suggesting putting people into prison?’ But a few days later Ian Aitken (who was kept unusually well-informed on these matters) wrote that the proposals for reserve powers had dropped into a ‘legislative limbo’, and that this was ‘a clear victory for Mr Foot’.88
Henceforth, the centrepiece of the government’s anti-inflation policy was Jack Jones’s £6 a week pay limit. It would involve an enormous amount of monitoring by the Department of Employment, working with the TUC. The measure was not as powerful in reducing inflation as the Treasury had hoped, since in 1976 the retail price index fell only from 25 per cent to 15 per cent, not to the hoped-for 10 per cent. But it was the only show in town. It was also powerfully egalitarian, since it would inevitably erode wage differentials. It had been a close-run thing, but Foot’s resignation was never again to be on the agenda. On the other hand, the fact that Wilson had been forced abruptly to reverse policy on incomes showed how absolutely indispensable Foot had become.
Foot not only accepted a difficult compromise, he sold it to the Labour faithful with incomparable panache. At the Labour Party conference on 29 September he produced an extraordinary oratorical performance to win over the delegates on economic policy. Keith Harper in the Guardian called it ‘an actor-manager’s tour de force’, ‘full of meaty phrases and literary allusions’ which ‘kept his audience enthralled’. Hugh Noyes in The Times described it as ‘a glorious performance which mesmerized his audience’. The same newspaper’s political correspondent, George Clark, thought it ‘surpassed all the others in its oratory and sincerity’.89 In his speech, Foot dwelled with pride on the government’s achievements in its last year and a half in office: stopping the miners’ strike, repealing the Industrial Relations Act of 1971, TULRA and the Employment Protection Bill, the introduction of ACAS. He pointed out, as he had done before, the absurdity of claiming to plan for investment, health or housing, while having no plan whatsoever for wages policy. He concluded with great power, in a peroration that Barbara Castle wrote almost reduced her to tears by its ‘emotional voltage’ and passionate sincerity:
We face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said, ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem. We do not want a Labour movement that tries to dodge it, we do not want people in a Labour Cabinet to try to dodge it. We want people who are prepared to show how they are going to face it, and we need the united support of the Labour movement to achieve it. I am asking this movement to exert itself as it has never done before, to show the qualities which we have, the socialist imagination that exists in our movement, the readiness to reforge the alliance, stronger than ever, between the government and the trade unions, and above all to show the supreme quality in politics, the red flame of socialist courage …
In the emotional aftermath, conference rejected two motions from the engineers’ union to reject any kind of statutory wage policy and any government interference in wage bargaining machinery. Foot’s speech was strong on rhetoric, but negligible on economic analysis. It was essentially an emotional appeal for unity. But it worked, and was a massive confidence-booster for the government. No one but Michael Foot could have managed it. It was a sign of changing perspectives. Foot’s declaration, so very different in tone from most of what he had been saying in the previous thirty years, annoyed many on the left. Several delegates from the NEC refused to join in the standing ovation afterwards, including Tony Benn, Ian Mikardo, Frank Allaun, Judith Hart, Renee Short and Lena Jeger. There was a massive row over wages policy at a subsequent Tribune meeting between an incensed Jack Jones and Mikardo.90 But from that time there was no more consistent advocate of the government’s attempt to promote economic recovery through controls on wages than that veteran champion of free collective bargaining, Michael Foot.
By now, his resignation threat over statutory wage control proposals apart, Foot was the very model of collective responsibility. He was felt by colleagues to be far more loyal in that respect than Tony Benn, whom one of them later called ‘treachery incarnate’. Yet Foot insisted that he remained the unmuzzled left-winger he had always been. One sign of this was a group of left-wing ministers who met regularly to dine together – Foot, Barbara Castle, Benn, Peter Shore, John Silkin and Judith Hart, their spouses and also the economist Thomas Balogh – and discuss matters of common interest. They met sometimes in a private room at Locket’s fish restaurant near Westminster, sometimes at each other’s homes.91 Jill was a regular hostess at the Foots’ home. On one of these occasions Caroline Benn actually fell asleep, and was gently borne home by her husband. These evenings were given the extraordinarily staid title ‘the husbands and wives dinners’, but the closed circle of their participants was obvious to all. These were important forums for discussing policy from a left perspective, and continued to be held until the fall of the Callaghan government in 1979. They were also ways of letting off ideological steam. John Silkin observed to Barbara Castle when they found Roy Jenkins and Reg Prentice also dining at Locket’s, ‘I can’t bear these right-wingers. They are arrogant, selfish and …’ Castle helpfully added the adjective ‘insensitive’.92
At times the group could rouse itself to collective action, notably when Harold Wilson chose to remove a left-wing minister, Judith Hart, from the Department of Overseas Development and replace her with Reg Prentice, who was distinctly on the right and with whom Foot had clashed in Cabinet, but who had the backing of Roy Jenkins. Foot, Castle and Benn saw Wilson close to midnight on 10 June to protest, and demanded Hart’s reinstatement. Foot shouted about ‘poor Judith’s blood being on the carpet’.93 But Hart departed just the same, declining the offer of Transport, and went to the back benches. In fact these dinner meetings were not at all private conclaves of like-minded dissidents. They were frequently marked by sharp disputes between Foot and Benn, notably over wages policy. Benn believed that Wilson, and later Callaghan, were kept fully informed of these occasions, and that they were a part of Foot’s shoring up of the leadership.94 Foot had written extensively about Bevan’s challenging of the Attlee government from the left and his eventual resignation in 1951, but he had no intention of repeating the exercise himself. He did, however, argue strongly against any idea of Wilson removing Benn from the Cabinet, not out of personal affection for Benn, but because it would upset many of the unions at a time when relations with the government were particularly fragile. The eventual outcome, with Benn moving from Industry to Energy that same day and suffering a perceived loss of prestige, was one Foot felt was satisfactory.
One quite different test of Foot’s view of collective Cabinet responsibility arose in the autumn of 1975. He had known that Richard Crossman, who had died of cancer the previous year, had dictated, almost every night, full diaries of the Cabinets he attended. Foot strongly disapproved of the practice, which he regarded as a disservice both to responsible government on grounds of trust, and to history on grounds of accuracy. He equally disapproved of Barbara Castle and Tony Benn for doing the same later on, as he indicated in a famous review of the first volume of Castle’s diaries in 1980.95 However, he had agreed in 1973, as Crossman’s health deteriorated, to act as one of his literary executors, and the issue of publication would clearly come up. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, actually suggested in March 1974 that Foot should stand down as Crossman’s executor because it would clash with the principle of confidentiality to be observed by a Cabinet minister, but Foot stoutly declined. By the autumn of 1974 the Nuffield College, Oxford, academic Dr Janet Morgan had prepared the diaries for publication, and a contract was agreed with the publisher Jonathan Cape. The manuscript was then sent to Sir John Hunt, who simply rejected the idea of publication at all on the grounds that it would erode the idea of collective Cabinet responsibility by revealing differences between ministers, and other sources of contention. However, the executors decided to go ahead with publication, and to authorize the preliminary serialization of extracts in the Sunday Times.
Apart from considerations of the ‘right to know’, this was certainly in line with Crossman’s own wishes on scholarly grounds to reveal the working of modern Cabinet government. He had already touched on this theme in his famous introduction to the 1963 edition of Bagehot’s English Constitution of 1866.96 Crossman believed that a record of Wilson’s administration would confirm the view that Cabinet government, as interpreted by Bagehot, had been transformed into prime ministerial government; indeed, the Cabinet was joining the monarchy and the Lords as a ‘dignified’ part of the current constitution. John Mackintosh, a Labour MP who amplified this interpretation in a classic account of The British Cabinet (1962), saw the process of prime ministerial rule as beginning with Lloyd George in 1916. Historians and political scientists had joined in a lively and fruitful debate on the subject from the mid-1960s.
There was now a vigorous tussle in the courts. The Secretary of the Cabinet and the government itself through the Attorney-General, Sam Silkin, strove to prevent the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Silkin did not invoke the Official Secrets Act, that powerful barrier to free enquiry, but turned instead to an arcane Victorian law protecting official confidentiality. It was alleged (wrongly) that Silkin’s behaviour was a case of a supposedly independent Attorney-General, embodying the public interest as the law officer of the Crown, acting under political pressure from the Cabinet. He was to be accused of the same offence in 1977 when refusing to take action, namely in not pressing on with the relator case of Gouriet v. the United Postal Workers, when a trade union declined to handle South African mail. Silkin was to be sharply criticized by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, although his view that he was ultimately accountable to Parliament, not to the courts, was upheld in the Lords. Both cases indicated the problems of the Attorney-General’s fulfilling at the same time both a legal and a political role, and the difficulties this created in entrenching the rule of law. The Crossman diaries case came before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, in July 1974.
Foot’s role was an awkward and paradoxical one. As a Cabinet minister, he was committed to previous practice as a basis of collective responsibility. He disapproved of the habit of ministers keeping diaries anyway, let alone of publishing them in the newspapers. Yet he found himself in conflict with his own government’s law officer, Sam Silkin. There was a real prospect of Foot, busy at the time with major trade union legislation, appearing before Widgery in the high court. On the other hand, his every instinct was for the freedom to publish and to roll back official censorship; after all, at the time Crossman was dictating his diaries, the fifty-year rule operated, which meant that historians could not examine the public archive subsequent to Asquith’s government, which ended in 1916. In the 1970s it became a thirty-year rule, and that was still the case in 2006, although it had been healthily modified by the Freedom of Information Act (2000). Foot had earlier refused, quite rightly, to sign a pledge, as recommended by Lord Radcliffe as Chairman of the Committtee of the Privy Council on ministerial memoirs, that no minister should publish any memoirs for fifteen years after being in office. Benn, Jenkins and Barbara Castle joined him in this. At the meeting of Crossman’s executors and the diaries’ publisher, Foot ‘was prepared to accept the risk and bare his breast for the dagger’. In fact he did not have to, since Lord Widgery, in a distinctly curious judgement published on 1 October 1974, decided to allow publication on the grounds that ‘much of the action is up to ten years old’. The outcome appears to have been satisfactory for Harold Wilson, who was contemplating publishing his own lucrative memoirs in due time.
The extracts appeared in the Sunday Times in the new year, and Crossman’s four classic volumes, brilliantly edited by Dr Janet Morgan and covering the major span of Crossman’s career, as backbencher as well as minister, from 1951 to 1970, were published between 1975 and 1981.97 Foot has sometimes been criticized over the false position in which he placed himself But his instinct was surely right. Plenty of previous ministers had published their diaries, notably Hugh Dalton only a few years after leaving office. Ministers and Prime Ministers had been cavalier in deciding whether documents in their possession were in the public domain or were private material belonging to them as individuals – Lloyd George’s and Churchill’s war memoirs being the most obvious examples. Foot’s impulse to challenge official censorship so as to allow material into the public domain, just as Hansard itself had fought to be published a century and a half before, was a tribute both to his instincts and to his sense of history. The Crossman diaries, like all such sources, are flawed and governed by the diarist’s personal perspective. But they are also an enormous aid to historical enquiry and public understanding. Scholars may feel gratified that a politician as libertarian as Michael Foot was a key figure in these events. He helped to ensure that a firm blow was struck against the British curse of official secrecy, the psychological backdrop to its unwritten constitution, based on convention, custom, informality and social conservatism.
These were complicated and troubled times for Michael Foot, at home and abroad. There was the huge controversy over Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community to be resolved, with Foot known as the Cabinet’s most forthright anti-European. But before that there was a crisis much nearer home, in his own constituency. In February 1975 the long-anticipated but still traumatic closure of most of the Ebbw Vale steelworks, the hub of the valley’s economy, took place. The minister and his government had done what they could in a lost cause. In November 1972 Foot had been putting pressure on Lord Melchett, who had made proposals to downsize the plant, to retain most of the work at the south end of the plant. The Wilson government set up an inquiry under the former Labour minister Lord Beswick, but he reported in February 1975 that the closures should go ahead as planned. That meant that over 3,500 jobs would go in the near future – three hundred from the A blast furnace in April 1975, seven hundred from the C blast furnace in July, 1,300 from the open hearth shop and slabbing mill in March – September 1977, and a final 1,300 from the hot strip mill in March 1978. Eventually, 4,600 jobs would be lost in all. The government announced that £12.6 million would be additionally allocated as follows: £5.5 million to develop water and sewerage facilities, £2.5 million to clear derelict land, £2.3 million for new, government-assisted, advance factories, and £2.3 million to the local council for additional industrial sites. The Welsh Office said that 1,950 new jobs were currently in the pipeline. But that would inevitably take time, and the closures were a body blow for an already declining area. Shutting down a steelworks inevitably caused more layoffs and closures than a coalmine would.98
Foot, bravely but perhaps unwisely, decided to bear the burden directly himself. When he went down to his constituency with John Morris, Secretary of State for Wales, and Caerwyn Roderick on 7 February, he faced a reception unique in his thirty-two years as Ebbw Vale’s MP. A demonstration of two thousand angry steelworkers in Ebbw Vale Civic Centre shouted abuse at him. It was eight minutes before the crowd would even let him speak. At the same time, six thousand local steelworkers took part in a one-day protest strike. People shouted out, quite unfairly and wrongly, that it would not have happened if Nye Bevan had been alive. Foot left, pale and shaken.99 The following day he had another difficult, though less hostile, meeting at the Ebbw Vale leisure centre. The occasion could have been even more disastrous, since John Morris narrowly escaped death in a car crash on the M4 on his way back to London. Both in Ebbw Vale and in an angry debate at Westminster, it was Foot who took the full force of his passionately angry constituents.100
He made immense efforts to bring new jobs to his stricken valley. A few days later, the first fruits were announced. With government assistance, a total of 550 jobs would come from a BSC factory making coated steel products, and a further 350 eventually from a Grundy plant manufacturing stainless steel car silencers. A Colorcoat plant to make wide-coated steel strip would employ a further two hundred in 1977. But much more was needed, and local men, used to doing ‘proper’ work in a steel plant, were critical of the ‘marshmallow’ jobs in light industries due to come in, including the making of fur coats. It was a slow and partial recovery, but there was one hugely symbolic development, originating as it happened from Foot’s strong contacts with India.101 He persuaded a British-based Indian industrialist, Swraj Paul, Chairman of National Gas Tubes, to invest in the constituency by setting up the most advanced spiral weld steelmill in Europe, with the aid of funding from the British government and the EEC – Foot, an arch anti-European, was fully prepared to receive money from Europe for a good cause. Swraj Paul (later Lord Paul) had earlier helped to arrange Foot’s first visit to India in 1973, and his giving the Krishna Menon Lecture, in honour of the old socialist guru of the thirties, in November 1976. Foot, ‘a man who inspires trust through his integrity’, was always a hero to him.102 Swraj Paul’s plant was opened on 22 November 1978 by no less a person than Mrs Gandhi. The Ebbw Vale economy continued to limp along.103 The Garden Festival of Wales, on the site of the former steelworks in 1992, did not create many new jobs, while in 2001 the Corus company, which now owned what was left of the steelworks, virtually closed it down. Nevertheless, it was a characteristically courageous effort by Foot. A steelworkers’ leader later considered that closing the works had been inevitable ever since the Llanwern works was opened on the coast in 1962.104 In difficult circumstances, ones that Bevan had never had to face, Foot took the flak, worked hard to repair some of the damage, and soon recovered his local esteem.
Europe was the big problem overshadowing Harold Wilson’s government from the start. Jim Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, spent many months before and after the October 1974 general election purportedly ‘renegotiating’ Britain’s terms of entry into the EEC. There was a good deal of scepticism about the practicality of this, including from Callaghan’s great ally Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor, but he did achieve some improvements, notably over the admission of Commonwealth produce such as New Zealand dairy products to markets within the EEC, and also over Community budget payments. On the other hand, Callaghan had said early on that he was ‘negotiating for success’, and the relationship of Britain to the EEC remained much the same despite his efforts.105 After much debate, Foot had reluctantly gone along with Benn’s proposal that a referendum on the question of Britain’s membership of the EEC should be held, and he, Benn and Peter Shore wrote to Wilson on 27 November 1974 asking for one, with ministers being given the right to differ in public. Wilson replied firmly that this must be a collective Cabinet decision after the renegotiations of the terms of entry were concluded, and that until it was agreed ministers should not air their own personal views. Benn responded by claiming his own fidelity to the manifesto. In a milder letter to Wilson on 3 January 1975, Foot wrote that it was wrong to assume British approval on three key issues – the weakening of the British veto, direct elections for the European Assembly, and the terms for a monetary and economic union. The communiqué of the recent European summit meeting, he argued, had ‘altered the position which prevailed before’.106
Eventually, at a marathon session on 17–18 March, the Cabinet endorsed the terms renegotiated by Callaghan for remaining within the EEC by sixteen votes to seven. There would be a referendum on 5 June 1975 to confirm or reject British EEC membership, and during the campaign ministers would have the freedom to ‘agree to differ’, as Liberal ministers in the National Government (including Isaac Foot) had done over imperial preference back in 1932. The Cabinet minority of seven were Foot, Benn, Castle and Shore (who was especially vehement), along with three less powerful figures, John Silkin, Eric Varley and Willie Ross, the Scottish Secretary (the last two being far more even-handed in their views). The contributions of all seven are recorded by name in the minutes. For his part, Foot was implacable in resisting what he saw as a sacrifice of British parliamentary sovereignty. Benn records him as saying ‘We shall dismember Parliament and the UK.’ A pro-European colleague, Edmund Dell, wrote later that ‘it sometimes seemed that extracting Britain from entanglement with the EEC had become his predominant ambition to which every other policy objective should, if necessary, be sacrificed’.107 The bare bones of the Cabinet minute give Foot’s key arguments:
The consequences of withdrawal from the EEC had been exaggerated: he did not accept that Britain’s problems could be solved only by our accepting an alien system whose legislative basis – the European Communities Act 1972 – it was not proposed to change. Policies which had stood Britain in good stead, for example on agriculture and the Commonwealth, had already been destroyed by attempts over the last decade to join the EEC. Continued membership would lead to the dismembering of the United Kingdom, and of the authority of Parliament which had already lost much of its power in EEC affairs. If we remained in the Community the seat of power would lie in future in permanent coalition in Brussels.108
At Labour’s special conference in Islington’s Sobell Hall on 26 April, Foot struck a note of evangelical patriotism, citing the Putney Debates and Nye Bevan along the way: ‘I say to our great country, “Don’t be afraid of those who tell us that we cannot run our own affairs, that we have not the ingenuity to mobilize our resources and overcome our economic problems.”’ The anti-Marketeers won the vote on EEC membership taken in the hall, and in Benn’s view also the argument, after Foot’s ‘brilliant’ speech.109
In fact Foot played a limited part in the ‘No’ campaign because, quite unexpectedly, he was rushed to the Royal Free hospital immediately after this conference for an emergency operation. At first cancer had been feared, but he soon recovered – sufficiently to mount a successful libel action against Linda Lee-Potter of the Daily Mail, who had spitefully and inaccurately suggested that he was receiving private treatment under the NHS. Foot was able to speak at a few meetings, including one spectacular oratorical performance with the Conservative John Biffen. But it was Benn, Castle and Shore who led the attack for the ‘Noes’.
The outcome of the referendum was a massive victory for the ‘Yes’ campaign, with seventeen and a half million votes in favour to eight and a half million against. Edward Heath proved to be a strong performer for the ‘Yes’ campaign, as was Roy Jenkins: only the fringe areas of the Scottish Western Isles and the Shetlands showed a ‘No’ majority. The campaign was hardly a proper debate on the political or economic issues at stake, and the ‘Yes’ vote was no doubt swayed by industrial funding, along with the fact that it was supported by every national newspaper. But at that time, with membership of Europe being presented as being primarily of economic benefit to an ailing British economy, and no mention being made of federal superstates or anything of the kind, public opinion was manifestly in favour. Foot remained implacably opposed, however. He kept up the fight to question all EEC directives, to limit the controls exercised by Brussels, and to keep at bay any proposal for direct election to the European Assembly.110 The referendum was not his finest hour. He was not at all a natural isolationist or xenophobe, as some of his fellow ‘No’ campaigners seemed to be. At least, however, he accepted the verdict with better grace than other, more extreme Labour anti-Europeans such as Shore or Douglas Jay, and felt able to move on. He made no attempt to interfere with John Fraser’s work on directives for redundancies and equal pay at EEC ministers’ meetings on social affairs. These and the economic rescue of Ebbw Vale showed that even the Brussels bureaucrats had their uses.
In the spring of 1976, Foot seemed to be entering a more tranquil phase. His trade union legislation had got through, more or less, and the Department of Employment was operating at a less hectic pace as some of its activities were hived off to ACAS, the Manpower Service Commission and other bodies. Not too many scars had been left by Europe. On issues like the financial crisis in the car firm Chrysler (UK) and the Public Expenditure White Paper he played an emollient role. Then, to general astonishment, on 16 March Harold Wilson announced that, after precisely eight years in office, he was going to retire from the premiership, almost certainly on health grounds. Jim Callaghan alone of the leading contenders to succeed him had been told beforehand, and could prepare the ground.111 For Foot, as for almost everyone else, Wilson’s announcement came as a great shock.
Clearly, though, Foot was obliged to campaign for the party leadership as the main challenger from the left. The odds were against him – the press thought that out of 319 Labour MPs, only around 127 were on the left. But Foot had performed strongly in office, and could well pick up votes from the centre-right as well. There were six candidates nominated: Callaghan, Crosland, Healey and Jenkins on the right, Foot and Benn on the left. Callaghan was the clear favourite, with Jenkins certain to have strong but small support from the pro-European Manifesto Group. On the left, Benn would have the support of the most socialist elements, including some from the Tribune group. Foot’s chances were believed to be strong by Peter Jenkins in the Guardian. On the other hand, Jenkins’s assessment of Foot’s qualities was scathing: he was ‘almost totally ignorant of economics’ and essentially a romantic. His knowledge of foreign affairs was also said to be slight: he was interested in Spain, although he had never been there, ‘he knows Venice extremely well and James Cameron has told him some plain tales of India’.112 Here, as elsewhere, though, Jenkins’s balance deserted him.
Foot campaigned in his usual relaxed fashion, leaving the ward-heeling to be done by Eric Heffer, Albert Booth and his young protégé Neil Kinnock.113 On 25 March it emerged that Foot had headed the poll on the first ballot, with ninety votes to Callaghan’s eighty-four and Jenkins’s fifty-six. Benn polled thirty-seven, and promptly announced his withdrawal and his support for Foot. Crosland also withdrew, with a somewhat humiliating seventeen votes; Healey polled thirty, but decided to stay in. In the second ballot, Callaghan drew ahead with 141 votes to Foot’s 133 and Healey’s thirty-eight. Clearly the eliminated Healey’s votes would almost all go to Callaghan, but even so Foot’s poll was remarkably strong. On 5 April the third ballot showed Callaghan polling 176 votes to Foot’s 137. Foot had probably done better than was expected by even his most hopeful supporters. He even received one or two right-wing votes – from Douglas Jay because of a shared antipathy to Europe, and Brian Walden, soon to leave Parliament, who voted for Foot because he was ‘a man of principle’.114 Foot’s political reputation was continuing to rise, as it had done ever since the 1970 election. He enhanced it further with a wonderfully entertaining, noteless speech to the parliamentary party after the result was announced. Barbara Castle, who had strongly backed him, observed, ‘I thought as I listened what a joy it was to have a touch of quality brought back into our political dialogue. Mike is the only one to give it to us since Nye died.’115 Even the top of the famous greasy pole seemed not hopelessly unattainable now. The question of age could not be raised because Foot, at sixty-three, was actually sixteen months younger than Callaghan. George Hutchinson wrote, in somewhat exaggerated terms, in The Times that Foot, ‘the supreme political pamphleteer of his day and generation, orator, biographer and romantic’, had taken a big stride forward: ‘The Foot philosophy is in the ascendant.’116
Callaghan’s Cabinet-making demonstrated Foot’s new authority. He became in effect Deputy Prime Minister, and moved to become Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House. Jack Jones regretted this, as Foot had been the best friend in government the unions had ever had. But Foot, who would have been prepared to stay on at Employment, sensed that leading the House would be crucial at a time when the government’s majority had disappeared after the death of a health minister, Brian O’Malley, and the defection of John Stonehouse to Australia in mysterious (indeed criminal) circumstances, after faking his suicide following an investigation into his financial affairs. There would be much interest for him in constitutional reform, notably Scottish and Welsh devolution, which the government was pledged to introduce after the report of the Kilbrandon Commission on the subject. The greatest interest lay in the composition of Callaghan’s Cabinet more generally, since Denis Healey was staying on at the Treasury and Roy Jenkins leaving Westminster to become a European Commissioner.
Foot had three main demands or requests which he put to Callaghan in a private meeting on 5 April.117 He succeeded with two of them. He ensured that Jenkins, immensely pro-Europe as he was, would never go to the Foreign Office, though in this case Foot and Callaghan were of one mind anyhow; Tony Crosland, much cooler over Europe, went there instead. Foot also secured a promise that his loyal colleague Albert Booth would succeed him at Employment. The third, however, was the most symbolic of all, and here he failed. Callaghan, predictably in view of many past conflicts, decided to sack Barbara Castle. She was mortified, but also disappointed that Foot had not insisted that she should stay in office, as she made clear to journalists afterwards. During the election campaign Jill Craigie, sitting next to Castle on a sofa, had whispered, ‘Mike won’t let Jim be nasty to you.’ Most certainly Foot pleaded her case strongly – ‘Barbara should not go’ is recorded in Callaghan’s private diary account of their conversation – but the new Prime Minister was clearly adamant. Foot equally obviously did not regard Castle’s fate as a resigning matter, unlike political issues such as a statutory incomes policy. He recognized the long antagonism between Callaghan and Castle, going back to the time when Callaghan was shadow colonial spokesman in the late fifties, and Castle had harried him unmercifully on behalf of the union of Cyprus with Greece, rather than Labour’s favoured position of territorial independence for the island. After her sacking Castle found Foot ‘sorry but not desolate’. For all his regard and affection for his old comrade, he could joke years later that when she left office, ‘Barbara thought the whole world would come to an end’.118
Foot and Callaghan, drawn from quite different wings of the party, were now pledged to be in indissoluble partnership. Without Foot in high office, the government’s precarious alliance with the unions, facing huge new pressures as massive economic clouds rolled up, would fail almost at once. His reluctant desertion of Barbara was thus a signal of his authority as a political leader, gained almost by stealth. But it was also a recognition that the priorities of the old Labour past, based on protest and suspicion of the facts of life when in office, would have to be subordinated. For Michael Foot, veteran of Bevanism, Tribune and CND, who had once entertained the young Barbara Betts in her Bloomsbury flat with readings from Das Kapital, but now responsible minister and practitioner in the uses of power, it was goodbye to all that.