Michael Foot surveyed his changed world from an office of faded Victorian splendour with a bay window looking out on Horse Guards Parade. He moved from St James’s Square to 68 Whitehall, at the heart of government: he had access to number 10 directly through a connecting door later made famous in the television series Yes, Prime Minister.1 His new role as Lord President and Leader of the House was remarkably flexible and unstructured. To a degree, the job would be what he made of it. It was perhaps a role more appropriate for a free spirit like Foot than undertaking a heavy and formal departmental responsibility. He had only a handful of, mainly junior, officials to help him, unlike the large Civil Service machine he had had to assist and advise him at the Department of Employment. Much of his briefing came from the Cabinet Office next door at number 70, which also, of course, gave advice to 10 Downing Street, and thereby enabled the Prime Minister and his party deputy to say identical things. For Foot’s position was to be strengthened later in the year, on 21 October, when he defeated Shirley Williams in a little-noticed contest for the deputy leadership by 166 votes to 128. Callaghan had supported him.
It emerged at once that leading the House of Commons had its decidedly social side, especially as the political parties were so finely balanced and the government’s fate rested on a miscellany of small groupings. The nationalist minorities in Scotland and Wales, and Unionists in Northern Ireland, had to be conciliated with a variety of concessions – a pipeline here, compensation for retired quarrymen there. John Biffen, a Conservative Leader of the House in the 1980s, called it ‘a very drinks kind of job’. So it was, with Foot an active and genial host.2 Compared with an earlier Lord President, his old bugbear Herbert Morrison, Foot was a far more flexible and accessible, if also more disorganized, operator.
He had a large number of major responsibilities in his new role. His Private Secretary’s initial memorandum of 8 April 1976 ran to eight pages and listed twenty-four separate items.3 The Lord President bore overall responsibility for the government’s legislative programme, and had formal relationships with the opposition leaders and with all Members of Parliament. It was a priority of Foot’s to ensure, along with the Chief Whip Michael Cocks, that the government had sufficient votes to survive. He also had to arrange, with Cocks’s Private Secretary Freddie Warren, the business of the House, to make parliamentary statements and answer questions on a wide-ranging and unpredictable number of issues. His very first formal debate on the adjournment ranged, in his Private Secretary Clive Saville’s words, from ‘the iniquity of VAT on yachts to the fate of the New York dressed turkey’. His role also covered domestic Commons matters (such as the huge £500,000 deficit in the catering budget), Members’ pay and pensions, and arrangements for party political broadcasting. All these were unpredictable issues, especially in a hung Parliament.
In addition to these shifting and varied tasks there were his formal duties on the Privy Council as Lord President, advised in this area, though never on political matters, by the Clerk to the Privy Council, Neville Leigh. The Privy Council was a dignified but still functional part of the constitution which met about once a month to approve Orders in Council, grant Royal Charters, prick Sheriffs and the like. This meant that Foot was in regular contact with the Queen, and he would travel down to Windsor each month by car with Neville Leigh, a somewhat formal character who may or may not have appreciated having Foot’s dog Vanessa on the back seat for company. Foot’s very first Privy Council featured the swearing-in of the New Zealand Prime Minister, who had to fly all the way from Wellington for the ceremony.4
Foot was a known republican, and declared himself as such in the House on more than one occasion, to the anger of traditionally-minded Tories. It was commented that he never attended the Trooping of the Colour since he was temperamentally unsympathetic to both the army and the monarchy. But in fact he and Queen Elizabeth got on remarkably well.5 He made an effort to be neatly dressed for their meetings, and treated the Queen with his habitual courtesy towards all women. He liked her, and pronounced her to be, like Jack Jones, ‘highly intelligent’. They had at least two points in common. They shared an interest in political and constitutional history; it may be surmised that the Queen was treated to frequent discourses on the reign of Queen Anne. Also, they both liked dogs: Foot’s terrier Vanessa (shortly to be joined by Roxana, another Swiftian name) and the Queen’s corgis provided a strong bond. Foot was required, under formal ‘Procedure for Ministers’, to give attendance at the Privy Council priority over all other business. On the one occasion he failed to do so, because of a crucial meeting of Labour’s National Executive to discuss ‘entryism’ by the far left or Trotskyists into the party, he went to much trouble in writing out a three-or four-page letter, beginning ‘Madam, with my humble duty’, explaining why the NEC had to take priority (unfortunately this letter cannot now be traced in the royal archives). By contrast, Foot had little time for the Duke of Edinburgh, whom he regarded as a hopeless reactionary. He was, however, quite a favourite of the Queen Mother, who called him ‘Michael’ and later even complimented him on his notorious ‘donkey jacket’.6
The personal chemistry between Foot and the Queen was always good. On one occasion, when the topic under discussion was the appointment of a chaplain to his old Oxford college, Wadham, he went on at such length that the Queen had gently to suggest that they move on to other business. A spectacular issue arose in the summer of 1981, when Foot was leader of the opposition. The Queen indicated her irritation with King Juan Carlos of Spain, who had objected to the Prince and Princess of Wales calling in at Gibraltar aboard the royal yacht during their honeymoon. ‘After all,’ declared the Queen, ‘it’s my son, my yacht and my dockyard.’ After a period of silence, Foot burst out enthusiastically, ‘Your Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I could not have put it better.’ When his Labour colleague Roy Hattersley expressed some surprise to Foot as they left, Foot replied, as if no further explanation was necessary, ‘She was standing up for England.’7
Foot had one important ministerial colleague, his Minister of State John Smith, appointed to handle constitutional matters and particularly the forthcoming Bills on Scottish and Welsh devolution. Smith and Foot had not previously been close: Smith was a Callaghan supporter, and was viewed by the Prime Minister as one of three bright young men (along with Roy Hattersley and David Owen) who could make a future leader. He had previously been cool on devolution, but his legal expertise and high intelligence made him an invaluable support for Foot in handling business in the House: indeed, since his minister was never a detail man, Smith took the various Devolution Bills through the long committee stages himself, almost single-handed. He was a convivial man, and he and Foot struck up the best of relationships, often with the assistance of a glass of whisky. Smith remained Minister of State until almost the end of the government, when he was succeeded by a peeress, Alma, Lady Birk.8 Caerwyn Roderick remained Foot’s knowledgeable and amiable PPS. His only other political support in his new role was the appointment as special adviser of Elizabeth Thomas, an old flame and long-time aide on Tribune who fulfilled a number of party duties in the office, including at times the thankless task of writing Foot’s effectively non-scripted speeches. She was punctilious in keeping the government and party lines quite distinct.9 Elizabeth was a constantly reassuring presence, but for the support a minister would normally expect to receive from his department, Foot was thrust onto his own resources. The Cabinet Office would brief him on formal matters, but on other questions, such as the IMF crisis of 1976 or incomes policy, the Lord President had to look elsewhere for guidance. His job was a somewhat lonely one, but on the whole Foot, a self-contained operator who invariably met visitors to the department on his own without civil servants present, preferred it that way.
Foot’s Civil Service staff in his private office was small and junior. He had two relatively young high-flyers, recruited from Education and the Inland Revenue, a Parliamentary Clerk, a Diary Secretary and a couple of clerk/typists. His Private Secretary was Clive Saville, an able young graduate of University College, Swansea. There was also a separate Civil Service directorate for the Constitutional Unit, headed by John Garlick, Second Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office, and, most importantly, Michael Quinlan.10 An interesting appointment was Jacqui Lait, a young Scottish woman, one of two Press Officers who ran the government information service for the Privy Council, working mainly with John Smith. She was to become a Conservative MP in 1992 and a junior minister, but she recalled working with Foot with great affection. One instance was his courtesy in giving her a lift in his car to Paddington station and carrying her case down the platform when she was late for a train due to take her (as Foot knew) to a Conservative conference in Oxford. She felt comfortable working with him. Foot’s methods of work, ‘a process of osmosis’, were chaotic, and he seldom used notes for his speeches. But he was always honest and open: ‘You knew he was reliable.’11
Much the most important adviser, by common consent, was Freddie Warren, Private Secretary to the government Chief Whip. Located in 12 Downing Street, he was a vital player in keeping government business up and running: he was, in his own bluff person, ‘the usual channels’, the permanent link between government and opposition whips, in this case Michael Cocks and Humphrey Atkins. He might get a guillotine motion drafted or negotiate the duration of a debate. He was also an ebullient, highly eccentric personality, unpredictable in mood and with a formidable capacity for whisky. Simon Hoggart well described him as ‘a strange combination of technocrat and court jester’. Warren and his secretary Mabel Dodd (‘Freddie and Doddy’) were a legendary duo throughout Whitehall. He would have shouting matches with the combustible Chief Whip Michael Cocks, and even on occasion with Michael Foot – who, uncharacteristically, would sometimes shout back. But Foot realized that Warren, with his intense institutional loyalty and unique knowledge of parliamentary procedure and detail, was one of those officials indispensable to the operations of government, comparable with Ken Stowe in the Prime Minister’s private office. One of Warren’s colleagues also observed, ‘He knew where all the bodies were buried.’12
The civil servants became happily attuned to Foot’s weekly routine, both regular and irregular. Every Monday there would be a session with Michael Cocks; every Wednesday there would be talks with Freddie Warren about next week’s business; every Thursday Foot and a private secretary would walk from 68 to 70 Whitehall, then through 10 and 11 Downing Street via internal corridors to see Warren and Cocks together at number 12.13 But there was also Foot the free spirit, the man who hated being addressed as ‘Lord President’ (his Private Secretary called him ‘Mr Foot’). As before, his dog Vanessa would accompany him to his office. As before, a television might be left on with the sound turned down during Test matches. Foot’s book-reviewing, notably for the Observer, and writing of articles always claimed some of his time. In November 1977, with the minority government immured in devolution and other problems, Foot found time to write a full-page article in the Evening Standard on his cherished authors and the joys of reading. His desk and shelves were piled with books, all of them non-political. One of his secretaries learned how to spell names like ‘Montesquieu’.14 On occasion, Foot would simply take time off to wander about the bookshops of Charing Cross Road: on at least one such expedition he returned triumphantly with a copy of a Stendhal novel he had not previously read. Staff in his office would be given presents of books, sometimes books written by the Lord President himself. A woman secretary received a heavily inscribed copy of his life of Nye Bevan. Foot always generated warmth in the people around him.15
But his methods of work were chaotic, and civil servants often had to hunt around to find where he was. One aide, who greatly liked him, said, ‘You could never have had him as a junior minister.’ The pressure of routine business was evidently less in those days than it has since become, as was the obsession with personal security. As at Employment, work in the office could be fun, particularly late on Friday afternoons as the freedom of the weekend beckoned, or when the passing of some crisis was being celebrated. Women staff like Elizabeth Thomas, Vivian Williams and Jacqui Lait provided the food, while the minister obliged with decent white wine, French or Italian. Foot was always a popular figure at these events. Occasionally some criticism was directed towards Jill, who could make patronizing remarks about the food, and who was also thought to take insufficient trouble in making sure that Michael turned up for work in a respectable, stain-free suit.16
The main colleagues who worked with Foot were, of course, the Cabinet ministers. Among them he was in general a popular and much-respected figure: his most difficult relationship was probably with Tony Benn. Foot was number two in the pecking order (confirmed when he formally replaced Ted Short as deputy leader in October 1976), and in Cabinet he sat next to Callaghan. His relationship with the Prime Minister was strong and unbreakable. Foot’s loyalty and absolute refusal to engage in left-wing conspiracies against his leader were unqualified. The two men would meet before Cabinet to sort out their joint attitudes to issues, and Foot’s conduct in Cabinet was always totally supportive in every respect – to a degree that aroused some concern from old colleagues on the left like Barbara Castle, who felt he ‘fawned’ towards the Prime Minister. In 1977, when Foot refused to criticize the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees for deporting two radical American journalists, Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball, for publishing details about GCHQ, the government’s secret intelligence listening post at Cheltenham, Benn attacked him as ‘an extinct volcano’ who refused to ‘fight for anything [in] particular’.17 Potentially awkward topics like nuclear weapons were never to intrude into Cabinet business. Foot sat on the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the Cabinet, but this did not handle nuclear weapons policy. In 1978–79 the use of Polaris, Trident or Cruise missiles was never raised in Cabinet by Foot, or indeed by anybody else. On one occasion the Prime Minister’s adviser Tom McNally had the entertaining experience of seeing Foot brief members of CND, with some aplomb, on the government’s approach to nuclear weapons. Even during highly contentious discussions, as on the IMF loan in December 1976 or the problems with the unions during the ‘winter of discontent’, Foot, while arguing his case with due vigour, never made any fundamental difficulties for the government. Equally, he went to some lengths to protect Benn when it appeared likely that his free-wheeling behaviour might lead Callaghan to dismiss him. Foot’s fundamental role was to ensure that the Labour government kept together, in partnership with the unions, until the blessings of North Sea oil came on stream – at the end of the decade, it was hoped – and the nation’s balance of payments would be transformed.18
Foot’s relationship with Callaghan was an odd one. They were both men of 1945, and had been temporarily associated in the Keep Left movement in 1947. But they had radically diverged during Labour’s civil wars in the 1950s. Callaghan had not particularly liked Gaitskell, whom he saw as an Oxford intellectual prone to patronize him, but he agreed with his views on the bomb, multilateralism and the centrality of NATO. Foot, of course, was a veteran Bevanite, unilateralist and founder member of CND. The two were never close friends: Tom McCaffrey, who worked as Press Officer for both men and greatly admired both of them, said they were ‘not best buddies’.19 Neither ever invited the other to his home: Michael and Jill never visited Callaghan’s Sussex farm. But as a working relationship, that between Callaghan and Foot could not have been bettered. Each was resolutely loyal to the other: when he went to the Lords in 1987, Callaghan was to say that of all the people he had worked with, he would most like to work again with Michael Foot. He was much gratified when Foot became deputy leader. In a private note written during his retirement he wrote most warmly of Foot as ‘a great Englishman of the libertarian left’.20 There was another bond between them, too – a shared ancestral patriotism based on the Royal Navy and the freedom of the open sea. Callaghan was a Portsmouth boy, the son of a sailor who served on the royal yacht and fought at the Battle of Jutland. He himself served during the war on HMS Elizabeth, Beatty’s flagship after Jutland, and acted as an Admiralty minister under Attlee. The beguiling sound of the ‘Pompey Chimes’, the musical chant of Portsmouth FC’s supporters at their home ground of Fratton Park, was as emotionally powerful for Jim Callaghan as were Plymouth, the Armada and the throbbing beat of Drake’s Drum for Michael Foot. When it came to using the power of the Royal Navy to defend British subjects in the Falklands in 1982 against the fascist junta in Buenos Aires, the two old naval patriots stood instinctively shoulder to shoulder.
With Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey and Shirley Williams (now moved to Education) Foot retained a strong relationship too, as both fully acknowledged in later years.21 He also showed generosity to Roy Hattersley when he defended his short-lived Prices and Consumer Protection department from the Prime Minister’s wrath,22 while his performance as Leader of the House was thought to be incomparably skilful. The generally civilized tone of his role in Cabinet is captured in a letter to Tony Crosland. When the Foreign Secretary pointed out that a lunch with the Russian Ambassador should have been cleared with the Foreign Office first, Foot replied:
My lunch with the Soviet Ambassador was a less sinister or convivial occasion than might have been supposed. We spent more time than probably either of us would have wished discussing the difficulties of appreciating Pushkin in translation, the comparative claims of Turgenev and Oscar Wilde to have written the wittiest of all plays, the role of M. Maisky (an old friend of mine) in the Second World War, and many varied and comparable topics … When I accepted the invitation to go to the Embassy … I had no idea it would lead to the unrestrained carousals detailed above.
He concluded, ‘I did not, I fear, learn much except from the glimpse into the world of the single-minded pursuit of pleasure which must be the daily lot of the Foreign Secretary.’23
Such diversions aside, Foot was now to encounter crisis after crisis. There was a huge parliamentary storm on 26 May 1976 when the Speaker, George Thomas, no friend of his old party, declared that the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill was a hybrid measure that did not deal equally with every shipyard concerned. Foot then used a procedural motion to overrule him. He and Thomas were to have furious rows on the matter at the end of each session. The next day there was an even bigger row when, after a tied vote 303–303, the government managed a majority of just one, 304–303, on the main motion on the Bill. Even this was a relief, since two Labour backbenchers, John Mackintosh and Brian Walden, had threatened to abstain. Amid extraordinary confusion, a government whip, Tom Pendry, was recorded as having voted in the second division but not in the first: there was a dispute about whether a ‘pairing’ agreement had been broken, and Labour’s Willie Hamilton complained that the Serjeant-at-Arms, responsible for keeping order in the House, had used foul language. Foot was involved in heated exchanges with the Tories: the Liberal leader, Jo Grimond, twitted him for heavy-handed imposition of the whip after having argued for free votes in his pamphlet Parliament in Danger back in 1959. Michael Heseltine later observed, ‘It is curious how often the greatest self-styled champions of the constitution prove the most willing to indulge in ruthless suppression of those rights when they conflict with their narrower objectives.’24
Throughout the long and extremely hot summer of 1976 Foot was again heavily involved with the Chancellor Denis Healey and Jack Jones in the grind of ensuring another year of anti-inflationary wage restraint: Foot’s role, of course, was the indirect but crucial one of trying to win the agreement of the TUC. Back in March, when still at Employment, he had warned Healey that the TUC would have great difficulty in finding an acceptable successor to Jones’s £6 pay limit, and hoped for some extra pump-priming of the construction industry and private house-building to help reduce unemployment.25 With the assistance of Len Murray, Healey managed to win the unions over to a wage settlement for 1976–77, presented as 3 per cent plus tax concessions, and this was endorsed by a special TUC conference in June. Foot wrote a very warm letter of congratulation to Healey afterwards, rightly describing it as ‘a Herculean feat on your part, a sustained piece of intellectual argument with those who are born arguers themselves’.26 Intense Cabinet debates followed about the scale of public expenditure cuts. Divisions among ministers emerged, roughly similar to those that appeared during the IMF crisis in December 1976, with Foot and Benn heading a left-wing group opposed to major cuts. In the end, a programme of £1 billion of cuts was announced, with a further £1 billion to be raised via a surcharge on employers’ National Insurance contributions, broadly in line with the Treasury’s views.
After a relatively stable August, however, further economic troubles welled up in September, with the pound, notionally valued at $2.40, falling rapidly to a level of under $1.60, and Healey having to raise the minimum lending rate to a record 13 per cent. There was a huge slump in international confidence in the state of the economy, the balance of payments and the strength of the pound. Massive financial support would have to be found to prevent the country seemingly going bankrupt. The most damaging image was that of the Chancellor having to cancel a projected trip to meet the International Monetary Fund representatives in Manila and scurry back from Heathrow airport on 30 September to save a collapsing pound. Healey wrote in his diary, ‘Beautiful day, sterling going down.’27 He was also persuaded to attend the Labour Party conference at Blackpool, where he was shouted at for his pains by left-wing delegates. In return, he heaped scorn on his critics, prisoners of illusion, who wanted to stop the world and get off For once, Foot played no part. The most spectacular contribution came in a conference speech from Callaghan, who, in a passage written by his son-in-law Peter Jay, the financial journalist and future Ambassador to Washington, informed his stunned audience that it was not possible to spend your way out of a depression. Healey wryly told the present writer years later that the moral was ‘Never have a speech written by your son-in-law.’ Inflation, not unemployment, was henceforth to be identified as the major evil to be confronted. A generation of Keynesian finance seemed about to be overturned. The government in which Foot was second in command appeared likely to bury the basic, uncomplicated economic tenets in which he had believed all his adult life.
If this was a whirlwind deferred, Foot flew with Jill straight into one of his own creation in India. He went there in October 1976 at the invitation of Swraj Paul and others.28 He visited different parts of the country from Kashmir to Bombay, and delivered the Krishna Menon Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on 5 November. India was Foot’s favourite foreign country: he had been enrolled, along with the Conservative MP Reginald Maudling, as a Vice-President of an all-party British Indian Association a year earlier. Central to his view of India was his passionate admiration for the Nehru dynasty, including the Congress Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. November 1976, however, was a bad time to sing her praises. Following direct action by dissident groups, notably what were termed ‘Sikh extremists’, Mrs Gandhi had declared a State of Emergency in 1975. This democratic paradigm amongst the emerging nations now saw government increasingly run by ‘committed’ judges and civil servants, opposition leaders thrown into jail, press censorship imposed partly through cutting off electricity supplies to the main Delhi newspapers, and around 110,000 people thrown into prison without trial. When the courts condemned Mrs Gandhi for unconstitutional conduct and sought to deny her public office, she tampered with the constitution by passing legislation to deny the Supreme Court powers of judicial review. By the time Foot arrived India was in a state of turmoil, with some shocking cases of malpractice, including the imprisonment of the Socialist Party leader George Fernandes, and stories of prisoners appearing in court in chains. Even more disturbing, Indira’s son Sanjay (who held no elected position in government) began a programme of sterilization, and used financial and other methods of enforcing vasectomies. There was an outcry from socialist circles around the world, including Britain.
Foot had been cautioned by the Foreign Office not to embroil himself in the internal conflicts in India. In fact, he did the complete opposite. Following an official lunch with Indira Gandhi, he declared robustly that the Emergency was entirely justified in the light of the seditious threats faced by the Indian democracy. Foot was a great hero in India, and his support for the State of Emergency, delivered without qualification or reservation, caused shock and anger. Some years later the historian E. P. Thompson would write that the news that Foot had endorsed the Gandhi regime was ‘devastating’; at that time her only supporters were the Indian Communists, ‘perhaps the most slavish and unreconstructed Stalinist CP in the world’.29
India, the beacon of hope for progressives everywhere, had apparently turned into something approaching an authoritarian tyranny. The historian Professor Judith Brown described Mrs Gandhi at this time as ‘isolating herself from the harsh realities of public dissent and fear, and probably from the truth about the acts of oppression and the destruction of personal liberty and integrity done in the name of her government’. The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha has added that the decline in Pandit Nehru’s reputation after his death was partly due to the misdeeds of his daughter: ‘His Congress was a decentralized, democratic organization, her Congress was a one-woman show,’ which Indira Gandhi converted into a corrupt ‘family business’. Foot kept up his close connections with India, and later on in Dr Strangelove, I Presume? (1999) he appeared very mildly to admit that he might have gone too far in his support of Mrs Gandhi at this time.30 But he defended her by claiming that without the measures she took, the Indian state might have dissolved. He said she listened carefully to the concerns he had privately expressed – and had satisfied them, evidently. At an India League reception in London on 6 January 1977 he renewed his strong support for Mrs Gandhi’s regime, and denounced criticism of her from Bernard Levin in the London press as a ‘monstrous lie’. He also regarded it as a cause for praise that she had belatedly offered to hold a general election after all in 1977 – in which, to the great surprise of the Congress, she was heavily defeated despite much government pressure on voters. Foot also praised her, somewhat surprisingly, for accepting the verdict of the electorate and resigning office. He continued to support the Congress campaign against what were thought of as terrorist minorities. Thus in the early and mid 1980s he was involved with Indira’s successor as Prime Minister, her son Rajiv, in trying to get the Thatcher government to take action against Sikh militant groups operating from Britain.31
Foot’s view of India was idealistic. But several Indian friends such as the old Tribune cartoonist Abu thought that with his defence of Mrs Gandhi he had blundered, on the basis of one-sided and limited information, and out of blind loyalty to the Nehrus, whom he seemed to regard as incapable of error. He was strongly attacked by old comrades like James and Moni Cameron, and Frank Cousins. Moni Cameron was disturbed that Foot’s speech in London on India’s Republic Day in February 1976 failed to condemn ‘so much indefensible repression’, though they remained good friends. Foot had the particular embarrassment of meeting George Fernandes at the 1977 Labour Party conference, and listening to protests from the Secretary of the Socialist Party of India, Mehar Chand Yadev. His radicalism had seemingly lost its sheen through his impulsive intervention in Indian affairs. In the Times of India he had strongly denied that India was a dictatorship at a time when it was manifestly, for the moment at least, a one-party state.32 It seemed strange to many of his admirers that the disciple of Hazlitt, Byron and Heine should seek to justify the suspension of democratic freedoms and the rule of law for the sake of raisons d’état. To that degree the visit of Mrs Gandhi to open Swraj Paul’s steelworks in Ebbw Vale in November 1978 33 was less an honour than an embarrassment.
Foot returned from India to a mighty crisis at home that would define the entire course of the Callaghan government. By November 1976, negotiations were well under way with the International Monetary Fund to try to bail out the British economy. All other approaches had failed, including private initiatives by Callaghan to try to get assistance from the United States or from his friend Helmut Schmidt in Germany. The question was what terms, in other words what scale of public expenditure cuts, would accompany an IMF loan. Cabinet ministers with long memories, including Callaghan and Foot, talked gloomily of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, when Labour had been divided and forced out of office amidst a financial and political catastrophe. From 23 November until the resolution of the crisis on 14 December Callaghan held a series of almost daily exhaustive Cabinets to consider the cuts proposed by the IMF.34 There were four groups amongst ministers: the Treasury view, represented by Healey, Edmund Dell, Joel Barnett and Reg Prentice; a social democratic group of Keynesian expansionists, headed by Tony Crosland and including Shirley Williams, Harold Lever, Fred Mulley, William Rodgers and the newly promoted Secretary for Prices and Consumer Protection Roy Hattersley; Callaghan himself, keeping his own counsel, but with ministers who would follow his lead, Merlyn Rees, Lord Elwyn-Jones, Fred Peart, Eric Varley, Roy Mason, John Morris and Bruce Millan; and a left-wing group of Benn, Foot, John Silkin, Peter Shore, Albert Booth and Stan Orme. The debate went on and on about the level and type of cuts which might be acceptable. The left-wing group tended to endorse the ‘alternative economic strategy’ of no or few cuts, and a near-siege economy including import controls. Foot went along with this.
However, the left group of ministers was less unified than it seemed. Silkin, Booth, Shore and (more doubtfully) Orme were essentially Foot men rather than Bennites. Foot wanted the very minimum of cuts, but he also wanted to keep the government together, and the party unified at a time of economic peril. He intervened infrequently in the Cabinet discussions: he was not a specialist economist, and lacked the authority of Crosland or Shore. But his was also an important influence: the fact that he kept no diary has swayed some of the historians of the IMF crisis, perhaps unduly influenced by the diaries of Edmund Dell and Tony Benn, whose roles in the crisis were ultimately not decisive. Callaghan, with much skill, kept his views to himself as the discussion ground on and the terms demanded by the IMF were exhaustively investigated. Finally, on 2 December, Healey proposed cuts which he believed the IMF would accept – £1 billion in public sector borrowing requirement for 1977–78, plus the raising of £500 million from the sale of Burmah Oil shares, and other cuts of £1.5 billion for 1978–79. It was impossible to argue that this was another 1931, and Callaghan, as arranged, declared his support for the Treasury team. He had told Crosland on a flight back from a European finance ministers’ meeting in the Netherlands that a modified IMF loan would be the best solution, and that he would be backing Healey. In effect he was urging Crosland, a strong Keynesian, to do the same, and Crosland did so, with immense reluctance.35
Roy Hattersley, at forty-four the youngest member of the Cabinet, was the last minister to fall into line. His later judgement was that Foot’s final intervention in Cabinet, urging them all to pull together for the sake of the Labour movement, was a decisive moment. Tom McNally, Callaghan’s shrewd political adviser, saw the group of right-wing Keynesian ministers – Crosland, Hattersley, Williams – as fundamentally more inflexible than those on the left.36 Foot spoke with deep feeling in Cabinet on 2 December, his first intervention for many days. According to Callaghan’s diary, he told the Prime Minister that the proposed cuts of £2 billion, which would mean reductions in unemployment and other social benefits, along with a rise in unemployment to 1.75 million, were unacceptable. They risked creating a huge split in the party and a breach with the trade unions: ‘There was a whiff of 1931 in the air.’ But his alternative proposals were almost a cry of hopelessness: ‘Go back to the IMF with a different package, propose a few cuts … plus the protection of the exchange rate as Tony Benn suggested.’ After further debate, however, Foot was content to insist on it being recorded that the decision was the view of only a majority of the Cabinet, and that judgement be deferred until the details of the final package were known. In effect, Foot and his friends had given way to the Treasury.37 At a meeting of a group of five left-wing ministers on 6 December, Foot made it clear that he would not be resigning. In the light of this, Silkin, Shore and Booth, together with Orme after some hesitation, also took this view. The next morning, when Callaghan lost his temper about possible Cabinet resignations (almost certainly a prearranged tantrum), Foot at once intervened to smooth things over as a loyal deputy should.38
After that, negotiations with the IMF moved rapidly. Social benefits did not suffer; the defence budget did. The parliamentary party, almost punch-drunk, accepted the terms with something like relief A week later the IMF crisis was over, a great triumph of political management for Callaghan. There had been no 1931 after all; the cuts were severe but manageable; unlike 1931, social benefits had been protected. Thereafter, the economy entered upon eighteen months of remarkable stability, and the paying-off of the IMF loan (Denis Healey’s famous ‘Sod Off Day’) was soon achieved, with the balance of payments again in surplus and the pound rising in value to $US1.90, higher than Healey wanted, in fact. It turned out that, as many had forecast, the Treasury’s predicted statistics were far too pessimistic. In 1977–78 the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement proved to be only £8.5 billion, rather than the £10.5 billion estimated by the Treasury mandarins. But within Callaghan’s Cabinet, the centre had held. Michael Foot, one of the less heralded players in the drama, was important in ensuring that it had. Indeed, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Joel Barnett, who was responsible for ensuring that the public expenditure cuts following the IMF settlement were actually carried out, was struck by Foot’s making no difficulty at all over any of them. He showed himself to be, thought Barnett, ‘a realist’.39
Early in 1977 the government moved from a financial crisis to a political one. Labour was a minority government, dependent on small splinter groups of MPs, and simply had no reliable majority. Unusually, it seemed that their continuing in office might depend on the course of any one debate. This gave ample scope for Foot’s powers of rhetoric and abuse of the Tory enemy. A particular foe was Norman Tebbit, a rising Conservative and a dangerous opponent on union matters since he was that rara avis, a working-class Tory and, what is more, a former trade union activist in BALPA, the British Airline Pilots’ Association. He attacked Foot strongly over the dismissal of the so-called Ferry-bridge Six, power-station workers who had lost their jobs after refusing to join a closed shop and were then denied unemployment benefit. On 1 November 1975, he denounced this as ‘pure undiluted fascism’ which left Foot ‘exposed as a bitter enemy of freedom and liberty’. In retaliation, in the debate on the Queen’s Speech on 30 November Foot replied in kind, referring to Tebbit as ‘the most studiously offensive member of the House. He does not even have to rise to his feet to sustain his reputation.’ On a later, more famous occasion he dismissed Tebbit as ‘a semi-house-trained polecat’. Tebbit commented in his memoirs that he never recalled sharing a conversation with Foot: ‘He was always too securely wrapped up in the armour of self-righteousness – the uniform of the arrogant middle-class intellectuals.’ However, the bad blood between the two could be diluted. Years later, when he went to the House of Lords, Tebbit actually negotiated with Garter King of Arms that his coat of arms should include a polecat, a choice that reflects well on his sense of humour.40
Things reached a climax on 17 March 1977, when Callaghan learned that all the variegated opposition parties would unite against the government in a no confidence vote. After recent by-election defeats and Tony Crosland’s death, that meant that the government would lose. So Labour had no alternative but to abstain, allowing a Conservative motion on public expenditure cuts to be carried by 293 to none. The Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher then announced that the Conservatives were tabling a motion of no confidence for 23 March, which the government could be expected to lose, thus triggering a general election. With devolution in the melting pot, neither the Scottish nor the Welsh Nationalist MPs could be relied upon to support Labour. Approaches were made to the ten Ulster Unionist MPs, and Foot held talks with their spokesmen James Molyneaux and Enoch Powell about possibly increasing Northern Irish parliamentary representation at Westminster, but nothing conclusive emerged from this. The Irish Secretary, Roy Mason, had relatively poor relations with the Ulster Unionists, and virtually glacial ones with Gerry Fitt and the Catholic SDLP. Foot told him that the government could not go back on the idea of a Speaker’s Conference to consider Northern Ireland’s representation in Westminster, nor offer proportional representation (in the form of a single transferable vote) for the European elections in Northern Ireland to please the Catholic SDLP.41 Foot’s own relations with the various groups in Northern Ireland were much better, given his friendships with both Gerry Fitt of the SDLP and Enoch Powell amongst the Unionists. His standing in the Province was such that he would have been sent to the Northern Ireland Office had Labour won the general election in 1979.42 But for the moment there was nothing positive he could offer.
However, there was one possible lifeline for the beleaguered Callaghan government, and it was Michael Foot who went some way towards supplying it. The only remaining alternative to parliamentary defeat was a pact with the thirteen Liberals, now under the shrewd tactical leadership of David Steel, who had taken over from Jo Grimond in 1976. They were a mixed lot ideologically, but most were not too distant from Labour, including Steel himself Foot was not the first to establish contact with the Liberals: that seems to have arisen from meetings between two redoubtable products of the Aberystwyth University law school, Cledwyn Hughes, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Liberal MP Emlyn Hooson. But Foot, who knew both well as fellow Welsh Members, gave them ample encouragement, and on 18 March Callaghan asked him and Hughes to make formal overtures to David Steel.43 After further desperate telephone diplomacy over the weekend, on Monday, 21 March 1977 Steel made his offer to Callaghan about a possible pact. His first approach was unpromising, since Callaghan was much angered by the terms contained in Steel’s letter, which seemed to conflict with the government’s authority over policy, and furiously threw it to the floor. But others, including Kenneth Stowe, his Private Secretary, and his Press Officer Tom McCaffrey retrieved it and persuaded him to calm down. Callaghan and Steel had a very friendly meeting later that day. At some stage there seems even to have been a suggestion that Steel might join the government.44 The next day Foot had two pivotal meetings with Steel, at 12.30 p. m. and 6 p. m., which went well, even on the touchy subject of Europe.45 That evening it was clear that a Lib-Lab pact had been born.
There were four policy proposals contained in the pact. There would be a consultative committee between the two parties, to which any major departmental Bill would be referred: Foot would chair this. There would be regular meetings between Healey and the Liberals’ economic spokesman, John Pardoe – meetings which turned out to be noisily combustible. There would be rapid progress on Welsh and Scottish devolution, which would be separated into two measures, not one. On Europe, the most difficult problem, it was agreed that there would eventually be direct elections to the European Parliament, with the voting system, PR or otherwise, to be decided later.46 In the event, on a free vote, Foot was to support PR, which however a majority in the Commons rejected.47 On the morning of 23 March, before the no-confidence debate, the Cabinet discussed whether to accept the pact. Foot, according to Tony Benn’s diary, looked pale and drawn. But Callaghan put the case for a pact with great power. Healey endorsed what he said, and observed that a deal with ‘Nats and nutters’ was the only alternative. In the end, the Cabinet endorsed the pact by twenty to four, the dissentients being Shore, Benn, Orme and, surprisingly, Bruce Millan, the Scottish Secretary. Another left-winger, Albert Booth, had been persuaded by Foot to vote with the majority. Foot himself spoke firmly for it, saying the government could emerge stronger and stay in power longer. Callaghan’s personal note on the Cabinet meeting included the entry: ‘Foot. Get 18 months agreement with Liberals. Healey too cautious.’48 Later that day, the government won the no-confidence vote by 322 votes to 298. All thirteen Liberals voted for the government, David Steel talking of the need for ‘stability’, and three Ulster Unionists (including Enoch Powell) abstained. The Scottish Nationalists and (more surprisingly) Plaid Cymru voted with the Conservatives. In his winding-up speech, Foot had stoutly defended the pact: there was ‘no question of coalition’. The political crisis, like the economic one, was over for the time being.
The Callaghan government thus had an assured lease of life. The prospect of defeat in the Commons in the near future had disappeared. Callaghan and Steel built up a good, father-and-son-type, relationship. The pact proved to be much to Labour’s advantage, since it had conceded little of substance on policy. The Liberals gained an improvement in status – along with the promise of government soft-pedalling on tricky issues, of which the most delicate was a possible inquiry into the behaviour of the party’s former leader, Jeremy Thorpe, who had been forced to resign after a scandal involving homosexuality, blackmail and conspiracy to murder. For Michael Foot, it was an important turning of the ways. Tony Benn was furious with him, and considered that Foot had broken his word. At dinner with Foot on Sunday, 20 March Foot had referred only to a pact with the Ulster Unionists, not the Liberals. Benn wrote in his diary: ‘Jim and Michael have negotiated something absolutely contrary to what Michael told me on Sunday night.’ The rift between the two, as putative leaders of the left, began at this point. The sons of two earlier eminent Liberal MPs now clashed fundamentally.49 But Foot had no regrets. It had been a case of political necessity and simple parliamentary arithmetic. He was a socialist, not a Liberal. But he was not an anti-Liberal either – how could he be, with his political and family background? The disciple of Lloyd George, the protégé of Beaverbrook and the good friend of Enoch Powell was hardly tribal in his political associations, for all his vehement socialism. On most current issues, Europe aside, there was little enough policy difference between him and Steel. Public ownership had been left out of the pact entirely. During their discussion the Liberal leader noted the political strength of Foot, and how Callaghan tended to defer to him.
From the start, Michael Foot was the man who gave the Lib-Lab pact its essential dynamism, who chaired the key inter-party committees, who saw Steel regularly in one-on-one meetings, and who was, in Steel’s words, ‘the front man’ throughout.50 Foot wanted the pact to go on and on – he greeted the Liberals’ decision to end it in the summer of 1978 with dismay. It was a fudge, but an essential one to retrieve what was left of Foot’s democratic socialist mission. His break with his family’s ancestral Liberalism back in 1934 had caused a shock at the time. But he was also a key player in breathing new life, if only briefly, into the noble pre-1914 cause of the Progressive Alliance between the Liberal and Labour parties.
Michael Foot’s career at this time was concerned with more than ministerial fixes. It was also absorbed by a major legislative issue of fundamental importance, that of devolution for Scotland and Wales.51 Devolution had been on the political agenda since the nationalist by-election successes in the later 1960s. In Wales, Gwynfor Evans had won Carmarthen for Plaid Cymru in 1966, and the party had polled astonishingly strongly in Rhondda East and Caerphilly, two apparently impregnable Labour citadels. The veteran Labour MP James Griffiths had been persuaded to stay on in the House until 1970 lest a Welsh nationalist threaten his Llanelli constituency, with its many Welsh-speaking voters. Ebbw Vale, in anglicized Gwent, was not vulnerable to a nationalist challenge, but even there Plaid Cymru, as a non-Tory alternative to Labour, had made headway on the local authority in Rhymney, the most Welsh part of the constituency. In Scotland, the Scottish Nationalists in the person of Winnie Ewing had won Hamilton in 1967, in 1970 they won the Western Isles, and in 1973 in another by-election Margo MacDonald won the rock-solid Labour seat of Glasgow, Govan. Their tally of seats had risen to eleven in the October 1974 general election: Plaid Cymru had three, all in rural Wales. After forty years of unionism and basically two-party politics, a political transformation seemed to be at hand.
This caused panic in Transport House, and indeed in Labour’s Welsh headquarters in Charles Street, Cardiff, too. If they lost their Scottish and Welsh heartlands, fundamental to their vote since 1918, no Labour government could ever be elected at all. Harold Wilson, much concerned, had appointed a Royal Commission in 1968 to examine devolution and the structure of the constitution generally, under the chairmanship of Geoffrey Crowther. When Crowther died he was succeeded by Lord Kilbrandon, whose commission produced two reports in 1973. A majority proposed an elected Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh with primary legislative powers, and an elected Welsh Assembly in Cardiff which would have only executive powers in spending a block grant from Whitehall on domestic areas of policy.
The government was divided in its views. Some members of the Cabinet were strongly hostile, notably Willie Ross, the Secretary of State for Scotland. Major figures like Callaghan, Healey and Crosland were scarcely even lukewarm. Others, like William Rodgers, Member for Stockton-on-Tees, tended to oppose proposals that might give advantages to Scotland and Wales, for example in regional assistance, over regions like the north-east of England. But political circumstances made proposals for devolution inevitable: the relevant minister at the time, the Lord President, Ted Short, a laconic man, seemed to feel that achieving devolution might give him his niche in history.52 The government published a White Paper, Democracy and Devolution, in September 1974, just before the general election, committing itself to the Kilbrandon proposals, without a reduction in either Scottish or Welsh representation at Westminster. It was now poised to bring a joint Scottish and Welsh Bill before Parliament. The minister responsible for this massive departure from a thousand years of governmental centralization in Britain was now Michael Foot.
Devolution was not an issue to which he had devoted any attention earlier in his career. His hero, Aneurin Bevan, had been strongly centralist, on the grounds that socialist policies should be implemented equally in all parts of the kingdom. Bevan was a nationalizer, most obviously in the case of the National Health Service, where the hospitals had been taken out of the hands of the local authorities to be centrally administered. Constitutionally, he was a unionist who despised any concession to nationalism. He had spoken in the Commons during the first ‘Welsh day’ debate in 1944 against the notion of having such a day at all. He had also attacked the proposal to have a Welsh Secretary of State, which first appeared in Labour’s manifesto in 1959.53 There is no evidence that Michael Foot, for all his one-time Liberalism, differed from this view; indeed he had attacked the idea of devolution as divisive in the Daily Herald.54 Certainly, devolutionist views would not bring him any votes in Ebbw Vale. No pronouncement of his on devolution in Parliament can be detected prior to 1970.
However, he responded positively to the evidence of sympathy for devolution in Wales and more especially Scotland in the early 1970s: it could be recalled that old Labour heroes like Keir Hardie and George Lansbury had supported devolution and the idea of localized democracy, as against the bureaucratic centralism of the German SPD.55 A historically minded socialist like Foot could argue that Labour was coming home, returning to its own philosophical traditions: the Fabians had championed municipal socialism, and the Independent Labour Party, with its various Scottish and Welsh supporters, was devolutionist. His first thought was to call his two Bills ‘Home Rule’ Bills, with echoes of Gladstone’s crusade for Irish self-government, but the Cabinet overruled him. While Scotland was clearly the more enthusiastic for devolution, Foot also had enormous enthusiasm for the Welsh people, not only their instinctive socialism and egalitarianism, but also their vibrant culture and enthusiasm for their language. In later years he was to listen with rapt enthusiasm when the present author and Foot’s housekeepers conversed in Welsh. Jill Craigie was even more pro-Welsh than Michael. They might both have reflected on Nye Bevan’s observation – ‘The Welsh are good, boy, but they’re not that good.’ The notion of pluralism and a multicultural identity was naturally appealing to Foot. Therefore he took over the entire idea of devolution with all the zeal of a convert. It was an important development. Even if devolution failed in his own time in government, Foot did launch a great debate about participatory democracy in Britain. Two decades later the Blair government was to pursue this much more systematically, and devolution was pushed through and ratified in referendums in both Scotland and Wales in 1997. The concept of a United Kingdom was then transformed for ever.
To prepare legislation, Foot had set up a major Constitutional Unit of the Cabinet Office within his remit as Lord President. It was a self-contained unit of around thirty civil servants, chaired by Sir John Garlick. There were three Under-Secretaries: Michael Quinlan (who dealt with social and constitutional aspects), Stuart Scott-Whyte (economic aspects) and Gordon Gammie (legal aspects).56 The most powerful of these was Quinlan, whose role was to shape and coordinate legislation, and of course to direct matters with Michael Foot. John Smith, the Minister of State, would take devolution in Commons committee, but devolution would ultimately be the responsibility of the Lord President.
Quinlan and Foot did not have a straightforward relationship. Quinlan liked Foot personally, as a cultured and intelligent man, even if he thought he was ‘not a natural minister’, and Foot had a high regard for Quinlan’s abilities. Foot showed ‘patience and kindness’, Quinlan felt, when the Devolution Bill was going through the House – and indeed a good deal of personal resilience when he suffered from an unpleasant attack of shingles at the time. But the Civil Service machine was in many ways going through the motions, without commitment. Quinlan himself was not in sympathy with the Devolution Bill on which he worked. He felt that the entire exercise showed ‘Whitehall working well without conviction’.57 John Morris, Secretary of State for Wales, observed that ‘the whole of Whitehall was against devolution’, as was graphically shown during a civil servants’ gathering at Sunningdale.58 One of those present believed, with good reason, that the Devolution Bill on which he worked in 1976–77 was a great mess, and far too complicated. Another thought the Bill was ‘constipated’, and would never have worked.59 The Cabinet Committee on devolution, chaired by Shirley Williams, the civil servants saw as basically ‘an instrument for moaning’. The Welsh proposals, half-hearted as they were, were especially confusing, despite the Herculean efforts to make sense of them by the government’s legal adviser, Gwilym Prys-Davies. Quinlan moved on in February 1977, to the Department of Defence. He had been scheduled to go in December 1976, but the position of the Bill in the Commons was too delicate at that stage. It may be guessed that he left the Constitutional Unit in a mood of some relief.
More surprisingly, perhaps, certain civil servants felt that Foot himself had no great enthusiasm for the Bill either. This was a view shared by Tony Benn, who thought Foot was ‘bored’ by devolution. Certainly it was not a topic to which he had given his mind before, and he was far less involved in it than he had been in defending the trade unions with his labour legislation in 1974–76. The Secretary of the Cabinet, John Hunt, felt that Foot, as chairman of committees at least, tended to rely unduly on his brief – though it should be said that Hunt sprayed around criticisms of other ministers too, including Rees, Owen, Shore and Shirley Williams.60 Many of the official meetings on aspects of devolution seemed to Foot to be extremely boring – perhaps because they were. During such meetings the television set in the Lord President’s office seemed to be switched on a great deal, covering events in the 1976 Test series between England and the West Indies.61 Meetings on such matters as the possible tax-raising powers of the Scottish Assembly tended to be interrupted by the Secretary of State shouting out excitedly at the fall of a wicket. Cabinet committees on the Devolution Bill were complicated and immensely tedious: ministers were unenthusiastic about serving on them. Foot approached the devolution measure with the broadest of brushes. Many of its aspects were highly arcane or legalistic. It is not evident that he made any intellectual imprint on the Bill. On the other hand, he showed much persistence and great loyalty to the Celtic nations in pressing ahead with the Bill despite immense discouragement. Much of his work on behalf of devolution was at the level of private parliamentary discussions and arm-twisting, activities of which the civil servants would have been unaware. Even if Foot was not always intellectually engaged, he certainly was emotionally engaged, and prepared to take on all comers in defending his Bill.
The Scottish and Welsh Devolution Bill made very faltering progress in that hung Parliament. The Scottish Bill was especially long and needlessly complicated, the result of lengthy discussions between the Constitutional Unit and the Scottish Office over the precise boundaries, and what powers should be retained by the Scottish Office. The logical answer, that it had no reason to continue in being, was not offered at this stage. There were still turf wars between Quinlan and the senior Civil Service draughtsman, Henry Rose, who was ‘rather peppery’.62
Whatever the arguments behind the scenes, in the Commons chamber things were worse still. Both Labour and the Conservatives were divided on the question of devolution, while the Liberals and nationalists tended to argue that the Bill was far too weak. There was much opposition to Foot’s measure within the Labour Party, especially from English MPs in regions such as the north-east and north-west. One opponent was Eric Heffer, a Liverpool MP and a close associate of Michael Foot: MPs on both the left and the right were resistant. A number of Scottish Labour MPs were hostile to devolution, among them Robin Cook and Tam Dalyell; the latter posed his famous, and logically unanswerable, ‘West Lothian question’ about why Scottish MPs would be able to vote on English questions after devolution, whereas Scottish matters would be kept free of English interference. Thirty years on, the Blair government had no answer. Lord Irvine, the dynamic architect of the devolution settlement of 1997–99, memorably observed that the best way of dealing with the West Lothian question was not to ask it at all.
In Wales, five south Wales Labour MPs opposed devolution, which they saw as damaging to British domestic policy-making and in any case a sop to nationalists, who spoke Welsh, which none of them did. The five included some close friends of Michael Foot such as Leo Abse, the Member for Pontypool and a fierce critic of the motives of advocates of devolution in parts of rural, Welsh-speaking Wales. More serious was the defection of Foot’s young friend, political neighbour and protégé Neil Kinnock, whom Michael and Jill both saw as a future Nye Bevan. Kinnock blankly declared ‘I am a Unionist,’ cited Bevan in his support (correctly so), and opposed devolution at every opportunity. His wife Glenys, a friend of Jill and a Welsh-speaker from Holyhead, Anglesey, had a ferocious animosity towards the local Plaid Cymru activists there.63 The Foots’ relations with the Kinnocks remained astonishingly amicable despite this serious political rift, which does much credit to all four of them.
The second reading of the Devolution Bill was passed comfortably on 13 December 1976, by 294 votes to 249. Ten Labour MPs voted against it, and another forty-five abstained or were paired. Five Conservatives voted for the Bill, while forty-two abstained or were paired, including the party leader Edward Heath. The Liberals voted for it, of course, but David Steel threatened that they would oppose it in committee unless the government granted PR in Scottish and Welsh elections, and gave the Scottish Parliament powers to raise revenue through taxes. The committee stage was bumpy throughout. On 10 February 1977 the government was forced to accept an amendment by Leo Abse, signed by eighty Labour MPs, for referendums in both Scotland and Wales before devolution came into operation. This meant that the fourteen nationalists would be likely to vote against the Bill. Foot now had to consider imposing a guillotine to curtail debate in order to get the Bill through – something which was always anathema to him, and which he had persistently opposed as a backbencher himself. But on 22 February the guillotine motion was defeated by 312 to 283, with twenty-two Labour MPs voting against, and another twenty-three abstaining. Michael Quinlan’s office staff held a sweepstake on the likely majority against the motion.64 He did not prophesy twenty-nine as the figure, but was certain that it would be lost. The defeat was a considerable setback for Labour’s programme, and left John Smith in particular in a mood of some depression. But eventually Foot announced in July that the government would try again, with two separate Bills this time, a proposition against which he had previously argued with much fervour. The Liberals complained, not least because this pushed their vision of a federal Britain very far into an undiscernible future, but they had no choice but to agree.
On 14 and 15 November 1977 the two separate Bills for Scotland and Wales passed their second reading in the Commons, with only sixteen of the forty-five Labour dissentients of February withholding their votes. But there were still shoals ahead. There was much animation in the lobbies and in Annie’s Bar, notably amongst the convivial Scottish Nationalist MPs. For them, wrote the equally convivial political commentator Alan Watkins, every night was Burns Night.65 On 25 January 1978 (which actually was Burns Night) a potentially disastrous amendment was carried against the government. It was the work of George Cunningham, a Scottish Labour MP who sat for an Islington seat in London, and laid down that devolution would be carried only if 40 per cent of the voters on the electoral register supported it, rather than a simple majority of those who voted. It was carried by 166 to 151, with the Conservatives abstaining. This proposal, which became Section 85(2) of the Scotland Act, made the hurdle for achieving devolution much higher – indeed, in Wales quite impossibly higher. The most that could be argued, as Foot did, was that the referendum was advisory and not mandatory – the Secretary of State was required to lay down an order to repeal the decision if the vote in favour of devolution was below 40 per cent of those on the register, an aspect which Foot was to focus on in the last stages of the Callaghan government.66 In early May 1978 the two Devolution Bills were carried, and they received the royal assent on 31 July. Some Welsh Members sang their national anthem ‘Yr Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’. It was indeed a constitutional landmark.
But it was likely to be a token one only. The referendums were eventually scheduled for St David’s Day, 1 March 1979. By that time the government was to be engulfed in widespread industrial disputes which transcended the particular issues posed in the referendums. Locked-up schools and hospital wards, overflowing dustbins and unburied dead, the result of industrial action by the unions, overshadowed the minutiae of devolution. The government could not look forward to the result of the votes with any confidence. Polls showed that the cause was hopelessly lost in Wales, which had much the weaker urge for nationalism or separatism – after all, unlike Scotland, there had never been a Welsh state, and the various princedoms had been conquered by the English as long ago as 1283. Wales was never to establish a National Convention as Scotland was to do; there was little sense of Welsh citizenship. Michael Foot, therefore, had battled on, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, against all discouragement. The Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, showed no enthusiasm for devolution, and did nothing to campaign in either nation. Nor did ministers, either on the right or the left. The Chancellor Denis Healey and the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, a Welshman, were no less tepid; Tony Benn, the great supporter of democratic participation, was relatively silent. Only the constituencies of the Scots and the Welsh were enthusiastic, and as has been seen, only some of them. Cledwyn Hughes wrote warmly in his diary of Foot’s dedication to the cause:
He has made a greater effort to understand us, and to meet Welsh aspirations than any other non-Welsh politician I have ever known. He has stood up to cruel attacks which would have daunted lesser men. Foot has won an honourable place in Welsh history whatever may come of this Bill.67
So he had, but it was manifestly a losing cause. Foot was to see his project finally meet with victory in September 1997, triumphantly so in Scotland, by the tiniest of margins in Wales. But at the time of the Callaghan government devolution was largely seen, even in Scotland and Wales, as a political distraction, an irrelevance at a time when the country as a whole was facing crushing economic difficulties. Foot’s Bills were a testimony to his idealism, but not to his political judgement. Whatever his future place in history, in the context of the 1970s, through no fault of his own, he was contributing to a debate that further weakened a struggling government, and in the end contributed directly to its fall from power.
In the summer of 1978, things were going much better for the Callaghan government. The balance of payments and the value of the pound had shown a steady improvement for the past eighteen months; the trauma of the IMF crisis seemed very distant. The judgement of Callaghan and Foot at that time had been fully vindicated. Callaghan had grown in authority, and was widely endorsed as Prime Minister. There was an encouraging record of economic recovery and new initiatives of his own, such as the Ruskin Speech in October 1976 on educational standards. The Prime Minister had added to his prestige in foreign policy as a mediator between President Carter of the United States and the Europeans, especially Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of Germany. His advice had been crucial in helping Carter to conclude the Camp David Agreement between Egypt and Israel, which was signed in September. In the peace of his Sussex farm during the month of August, therefore, Callaghan meditated calling an early general election in October. There was a strong reason for it, since the Liberals had called an end to the Lib-Lab pact, which many of them had always disliked, and the government’s continuance in office was no longer guaranteed. In fact the precariousness of Labour’s position as a minority government was even more pronounced, after a sequence of surprising by-election defeats. There was a long-standing election team at the ready, chaired by Derek Gladwin of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (GMWU). Foot was a member of it.68
After discussing matters in a general way with TUC leaders, Callaghan consulted four key ministerial colleagues – the wrong four, in the view of Roy Hattersley. These were the Chancellor Denis Healey, the Foreign Secretary David Owen, the Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, and his trusty deputy Michael Foot. Healey gave no clear view, but felt there was no immediate financial reason for having an early poll. No new crises appeared to be around the corner. Owen was against, because of upcoming initiatives proposed to take on Rhodesia with the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. Rees was opposed on grounds of general caution.
But Michael Foot was the most opposed of all.69 He had pressed the case for carrying on through the winter as early as a meeting of the ‘inner group’ of ministers, including Callaghan, Healey and Rees, on 25 July. He then offered a series of arguments to Callaghan when he rang him at home during Sunday lunch on the August bank holiday weekend. Foot wanted to carry on with negotiations with friendly union leaders like David Basnett of the GMWU and Clive Jenkins of ASTMS, the more so as Jack Jones had retired as Secretary of the TGWU and had been succeeded by a Welsh former shop steward, Moss Evans. Evans commanded far less authority within a union in which Jones had promoted a more decentralized and pluralist structure. Foot was also in touch with MPs in marginal constituencies who were apprehensive. His fundamental point was that Labour had a mandate for a five-year Parliament, and that it should stay in office as long as possible to carry out its programme and await the benevolent advent of North Sea oil (even though any significant impact of oil on the balance of payments would not occur until after the next general election). It could carry on because the negotiations with the Ulster Unionists over increasing Northern Irish representation meant that there was a kind of ‘Labour-Unionist pact’ to replace the defunct Lib-Lab pact. Enoch Powell was not going to rock the boat. Callaghan was told by his Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, that Powell had called on his old friend Michael Foot on 3 August to say that the Unionists would not feel it right to bring down the government with the Northern Ireland Representation of the People Bill due to be included in the Queen’s Speech. These were all matters of political calculation. But Bernard Donoughue felt it might also simply have been a case, with Foot as with Rees and Harold Lever, of an older man preferring to hang on. When he returned from a talk with Callaghan, Foot was overjoyed – ‘We’ve won, we’ve won.’70
Callaghan was swayed by the views of his four senior Cabinet colleagues, even though almost every other minister, from Edmund Dell on the right to Tony Benn on the left, urged an early election. Only Eric Varley and Harold Lever amongst the others agreed with the arguments for delay. In a messy and unsatisfactory way, in which his customary political skills seemed to desert him, Callaghan then irritated the TUC Congress in early September with an unclear, almost frivolous speech in which he sang an old music-hall song, ‘There was I, waiting at the church’. He did not, however, declare himself to be for or against an early election, although most commentators still assumed there would be one. Then he astounded the Cabinet and his own Political Office on 7 September by telling them there would be no autumn election, and that he had written to the Queen to tell her so. His calculation, based on his reading of psephological data, was that an early election would at best lead to another hung Parliament, with the findings of the polls particularly worrying for the pivotal West Midlands constituencies. There was, indeed, a good deal to be said for this analysis, even though it led to a sharp quarrel with Labour’s private pollster, Bob Worcester of MORI. Significantly, Michael Foot had been the first to know. Callaghan had told him as early as 29 August that there would be no autumn election. Denis Healey and Callaghan’s Press Officer Tom McCaffrey were told that he would make a statement on 7 September, but Callaghan did not say what it might contain. There could have been no stronger indication of Foot’s absolute indispensability for the government’s remaining in office.71
But the decision, and even more the unsatisfactory way in which it was announced, led to dismay and even demoralization in Labour’s ranks. The finger of blame was pointed at over-cautious machine politicians, notably Michael Foot. The polls soon afterwards showed a Labour lead of 4 per cent, though its duration was very short-lived. The prevailing judgement later on was that Callaghan’s caution or cowardice in not going to the polls had been the origin of Labour’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher in May 1979. Neil Kinnock argued forcefully to Callaghan that the decision not to hold an election was a huge strategic mistake, since it left the government totally at the mercy of the nationalists and other small groups as soon as the Scottish and Welsh referendums were held on 1 March 1979. Callaghan’s view can certainly be defended from the polling evidence available to him. All politicians naturally prefer to stay in office if the alternative is a possible or probable defeat. But the remaining period of the Callaghan government was one of continuous and demoralizing crisis.
By November, it was clear that a further year of wage restraint would be almost impossible. Angry exchanges at the party conference in October had confirmed the fact. In particular, low-paid public sector workers, who had in effect enjoyed no pay rise at all for three years, were deeply angry. As after any pay pause, of however long a duration, the dam was likely to burst. Callaghan’s unexpected declaration in a radio interview in favour of a 5 per cent norm for wage increases (both Foot and Healey would have favoured 10 per cent) proved to be a major strategic blunder, and added significantly to the alienation of the unions. In fact it was far better-off workers like lorry drivers who led the way in strike action. A seven-week strike by TGWU workers at Ford Motors in October and November saw the pay norms shattered, with a pay rise of 17 per cent agreed with the employers. This was followed by another serious strike, by tanker drivers of four of the five main oil companies. The ‘Neddy Six’ of the TUC who sat on the National Economic Development Council seemed unable to exert control: key union leaders such as Alan Fisher of NUPE appeared oblivious to the need for any wage control at all.
The TUC General Council on 14 November failed to endorse its own proposals for ‘Collective Bargaining, Costs and Prices’. Three supporters of the document failed to vote for it for a variety of reasons. Sid Weighell of the NUR, the railwaymen’s union, was absent doing a broadcast. Bill Sirs, the distinctly right-wing leader of the steelworkers, actually voted against it because he did not wish to commit his union at that stage. Worse still, the TGWU’s Moss Evans, who had appended his signature to the document, was not present since he was enjoying a pre-booked holiday in sunny Malta. The Chairman, Tom Jackson of the postal workers, another supporter of the document, refused to use his casting vote, and the result was a fourteen-fourteen tied vote, which meant the motion failed. There could hardly have been a clearer demonstration of incompetence and irresponsibility by the union leaders.72
By the end of the year there was a growing torrent of strikes, variously by oil tanker drivers, road haulage drivers, British Leyland production workers, water and sewage workers (whose industrial muscle had not hitherto been appreciated) and a wide miscellany of local authority manual workers. The government seemed unable to offer a lead. It was decided not to make the Ford settlement an issue of confidence by putting forward a motion in the Commons, as David Owen wanted – both Callaghan and Foot argued against. A number of Tribune group members argued against the government’s pay restraint policy and abstained on the vote; among them was the future Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. The government was defeated by 285 votes to 279, and financial penalties on Ford had to be withdrawn. Labour’s problems were made worse by a series of quite unexpected political miscalculations by the normally shrewd Prime Minister. There followed in turn his almost off-the-cuff advocacy of a 5 per cent pay norm, without consulting the TUC, and then his unguarded words (perhaps significantly to a young woman journalist whose question irritated him) on returning to his frozen country suntanned from an international conference in Guadeloupe in January 1979. In disputing the view that there was chaos in the land, he used words which were translated in the popular press as ‘Crisis, what crisis?’ Callaghan shares slumped accordingly.
In January 1979 it looked as if there was indeed something close to industrial chaos as public sector workers stopped work. Hospital patients were unattended; vital anti-cancer drugs piled up on quaysides; schools were closed by striking caretakers or cooks; ambulances did not run; frozen roads were ungritted; dustbins were not emptied for weeks on end; on 21 January some gravediggers in Liverpool actually refused to bury the dead. Callaghan, a great patriot and also an old union stalwart seemingly betrayed by his own comrades, was in despair, the government machine in a state of total inertia. In later years he would say sadly, ‘I let the country down.’73 In February there was a slow return to work, and a ‘Valentine’s Day concordat’ was cobbled together with the TUC on 14 February. But industry and public services appeared to be in chaos, the Labour Party incapable of disciplining the unions, and Britain seemingly facing its darkest hour since the war, unruly, near bankruptcy, ‘as ungovernable as Chile’, in the excited words of one American politician. Titles of books on recent British history at this time commonly included works like ‘decline’ or ‘eclipse’.
Throughout this so-called ‘winter of discontent’ Michael Foot was a heroic but unavailing figure trying to stave off disaster. It was debatable whether he had anything new to offer now as an executive minister. Tom McNally believed that with the change of union leadership since the retirement of Jones and Scanlon, Foot no longer had any special status as a link to the unions. Bernard Donoughue suggested to Callaghan that he might refresh his government with a reshuffle, and appoint Foot as a libertarian Home Secretary.74 This was an interesting thought, but in fact Callaghan made no changes other than replacing the Paymaster-General Edmund Dell when he took up a post in the City. Foot was eventually earmarked for a future move to the Northern Ireland Office. The government otherwise ground on somewhat fatalistically, with no innovations in sight: new policies suggested by the Prime Minister’s think-tank, such as the sale of council houses, were deemed far too daring and unacceptable to the left. Foot slogged on as before in November and December 1978, spending much time in talks with union leaders. He urged upon them the government’s commitment to a voluntary approach to wage bargaining through unfettered collective bargaining, to be underpinned by the unions showing moderation, restraint and loyalty to the Labour movement. He had more than one fierce row with Moss Evans, who like many union leaders seemed almost oblivious to the facts of escalating inflation.75
But in the end Foot too was caught up in the anomie of the administrative machine in January 1979 when, for days on end, government seemed to come to a halt. In a Cabinet meeting of 15 January he threw his weight against the calling of a state of emergency, including the use of troops to keep supplies flowing; this was in any case the majority view amongst despairing ministers. Foot took the opportunity to remind his colleagues that hundreds of thousands of trade unionists believed they had a just cause. He opposed any thought of changing trade union law. Secondary picketing, a major feature of all the strikes, was allowed under the Trade Disputes Act of 1906, the unions’ Magna Carta.76 The government seemed to be drifting, its lease of office fast running out. Callaghan had a meeting with Foot, Healey, Varley and Booth on 22 January to consider ways of regaining the initiative, but it yielded nothing of substance. Foot made his usual spirited defence of government policy in the Commons debate on the Queen’s Speech on 25 January. He admitted that they had considered imposing a state of emergency before Christmas, and would have sought to do so if the strikes then had gone on for forty-eight hours longer. Under the Tories, he said, there would have been no free collective bargaining, while their industrial proposals would have given great impetus to both secondary picketing and the spread of the closed shop.77 Labour MPs had some oratory to cheer, but the overall mood was fatalistic, even after the strikers began to drift back to work in February. In Bernard Donoughue’s vivid words, ‘It was like being on board the sinking Titanic without the music’ Number 10 was enveloped in ‘a sort of quiet despair’.78
The only area which brought Foot good cheer was the progress made over the Public Lending Right Bill, designed to offer some recompense to authors of books borrowed from public libraries. He had worked hard on this with the writers Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy of the Society of Authors after it had been ‘talked out’ by both Tory and Labour backbenchers in 1977. Elizabeth Thomas was also an important influence. The Bill was reintroduced at the end of 1978 and, through the calm guidance of John Smith, made it through the Commons swiftly a second time, and then the Lords, receiving the royal assent on 6 March 1979. The scheme proved to be a great success. The literary world, most appropriately for Michael Foot, was thus a beneficiary of his work in the Callaghan government, which was otherwise running into the sands.
Another serious crisis emerged on 1 March, when the referendums took place on Foot’s Devolution Bills. In Wales the defeat was overwhelming, about four to one: only 11.8 per cent of the total electorate favoured it. Welsh devolution therefore disappeared as an issue. The Scottish referendum actually showed a majority for devolution, though by a narrow vote on a fairly low poll of 63 per cent. But only 32.85 per cent of the total Scottish electorate voted ‘Yes’, well below the 40 per cent stipulated by the Cunningham amendment, and that meant that devolution would lapse there too, unless the Lord President used his delaying powers by introducing a repeal order. The eleven Scottish Nationalist MPs then declared that they would vote against the government if it did not proceed with devolution: Callaghan was to deride this as ‘turkeys voting for an early Christmas’, but it did mean that the government could almost certainly be defeated in any Commons vote.
Foot was characteristically busy in negotiations to try to find a compromise. He was the only leading minister who actually believed in devolution, and was anxious to salvage something from the debris.79 He argued that the referendums were consultative, not mandatory: ministers still retained some initiative, and the last act had not necessarily been played out. On Sunday, 4 March he rang Callaghan with an ingenious strategy for survival. Through this, the Commencement Order for the Scotland Act would be delayed, and would not be implemented until the start of the next parliamentary session in October, by which time the electorate would have been given an opportunity to consider the matter afresh. This became known as ‘the Frankenstein solution’, and only someone with Foot’s encyclopaedic knowledge of parliamentary practice and procedure would have offered it. Although Callaghan received the idea without enthusiasm, Foot brought it up formally at a meeting of ministers on 5 March: he argued for delaying the Commencement Order, but putting forward a vote of confidence, in which the SNP would be politically obliged to support the government. Callaghan was negative. The plan was too convoluted, and he recalled the charges of gerrymandering made against him in 1969 when he delayed the redistribution of constituency boundaries for purely party reasons. The Scotland Act could not be forced through the House, but Callaghan then went off for private talks with David Steel to check out the Liberal attitude. On 8 March Foot returned to the charge in full Cabinet, arguing that rejecting the Scotland Act because of the referendum vote would merely be playing into the hands of the Scottish Nationalists.80 But Callaghan again seemed fatalistic, and unable to respond to what he felt was an oversubtle policy which ordinary electors would not understand. On 15 March Foot took time off in Cabinet to call for the repeal of the Official Secrets Act, almost as a relaxation.81
Foot’s last throw was on the evening of 21 March, after all other initiatives had failed, when he suggested that all-party talks be held and Repeal Orders be debated in the week beginning 7 May.82 He argued that this offered a chance to take the initiative out of the hands of either the Tories or the Scottish Nationalists. Callaghan did not appear unsympathetic to Foot’s ingenuity this time, but he rang Foot at home at 11.30 p. m. (‘a late hour for him’, wrote Foot) saying that it would not be right to proceed in this way.83 Foot did not argue. The next morning, 22 March, apparently deliberately, Callaghan found time to see Foot on the upstairs landing of 10 Downing Street for only a minute or two before the morning Cabinet, and told him that the matter should be dropped. Effectively Foot was being told he was being too clever by half.
Foot wrote later, ‘It seemed to me then … that his patience had suddenly snapped. He wanted to invite the election and the decision that would lead to it. It was in my opinion a considerable error.’84 But in Cabinet Callaghan had his way: Roy Hattersley, who had some sympathy with Foot’s ideas, felt the Prime Minister had decided to ‘play the noble Roman’ and await his fate.85 A Tory motion of no confidence would now be debated on 28 March, and frantic discussions went on with Plaid Cymru, Ulster Unionists and other minority groups to try to stave off defeat. Every single vote was vital. On 26 March Callaghan urged at a meeting with Foot, Healey, Rees and Michael Cocks, the Chief Whip, that no further negotiations should take place with the smaller parties, but on this occasion he was overborne by his colleagues: Foot defended his discussions with the three Plaid Cymru MPs about a Bill to compensate slate quarrymen who were victims of silicosis – such talks were in no way ‘discreditable’.86 In the end the Plaid Cymru MPs did agree to support the government: it would be difficult for any Welsh MP to be seen to be levering the Tories into power. So also did two Scottish Labour MPs and two Ulster Unionists, safely shepherded through the lobbies by Hattersley. It would go right down to the wire.
In the end the government was sunk by two other factors – the fatal illness of a Labour MP, Sir Alfred Broughton, who was physically unable to come to vote, and the decision of Gerry Fitt of the normally pro-Labour SDLP to abstain, along with his Republican colleague Frank Maguire, a Fermanagh publican who made a rare journey across the Irish Sea to ‘abstain in person’. Foot later came up with a number of subtle tactical scenarios which might perhaps have enabled defeat to be staved off by a vote or two.87 The Tories’ confidence motion could have been challenged by a government variant of it which would have left them isolated against all the other parties. Shirley Williams agreed with Foot’s suggestion that the SNP might have been conciliated by the offer of any early date for the debate on the Repeal Order. But as for Callaghan, ‘for one reason and another, many of them perfectly creditable, his patience had snapped’.88 Foot himself made a brilliant and sparkling, if rambling, final speech to wind up the debate. It had little enough substance, but plenty of debating ammunition trained on the various opposition groups. The SNP were compared with the gladiators of ancient Rome addressing their Emperor: ‘We who are about to die salute you.’ He satirized David Steel, ‘the boy David’, for having ‘passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever’.89 (When the Liberals’ David Alton won a by-election in Liverpool from Labour the next day, Steel greeted Foot cheerfully, ‘How’s Goliath this morning?’) But in the division the government met with defeat by just one vote, 311 to 310. For the first time since MacDonald in 1924, a government had fallen as the result of a defeat in a vote in the House of Commons. In view of Foot’s extraordinary and selfless labours over the past two years, it was bitterly ironic that the government had in the end fallen not as a result of wars or even strikes, but because of ‘ploughing the sands’, the term the old Gladstonians had applied to pressing on with Irish home rule. In Foot’s case it was the product of the thankless pursuit of Scottish devolution which had brought its main advocate down. To quote his old friend A. J. P. Taylor once again, it was one of history’s ‘curious twists’.
After his defeat in the Commons, Callaghan announced a general election. He then had a summit meeting with Foot, Healey, Merlyn Rees and the Whip, Michael Cocks: the election was called for 3 May. The campaign was preceded by difficult exchanges on the NEC, a harbinger of things to come, about the party manifesto. Here Callaghan, supported by Healey and usually Foot, refused to accept a series of radical socialist proposals from Benn, Heffer, Frank Allaun and others. One change that was endorsed was a proposal to abolish the House of Lords, supported by eleven votes to four, the majority on this occasion including Michael Foot.90 But Callaghan issued a straight leader’s veto, in a way that gave momentum to pressure for more grassroots democracy within the party, and more control for the left. There had been debate previously on the abolition of Clause Four. Now Clause Five, the drafting of the manifesto jointly by the National Executive and the party leadership, was equally under fire. Whatever the results of the election, the Labour Party would be racked with tension and crisis.
The five-week election campaign was desultory and disappointing. Labour focused heavily on Callaghan’s personal popularity; he was projected as the custodian of one-nation values, a kind of Labour Disraeli. Margaret Thatcher was written off as an extremist, and perhaps in some quarters as a woman (Foot strongly disapproved of this, though he objected to her on almost all other grounds). Callaghan spoke of Labour creating a just, unified, cooperative society, and adopted a slogan of ‘Fairness for All’. His press conferences, at which he was usually flanked by Healey, Hattersley and Shirley Williams, followed this line. Michael Foot made virtually no appearances there, or on television broadcasts. He was still thought of as an agitator who might scare the horses, not to mention the voters. His forte was, famously, nationwide stump speaking, and he threw himself into it with his usual gusto in a variety of industrial towns. He was clearly recognized now as one of Labour’s strongest electoral assets amongst its own people, nationally celebrated and the darling of the parliamentary left. On The World at One on BBC radio he declared that voting Labour meant voting for an increasingly socialist Britain, more planning and a more democratic society. He launched a fierce broadside on Lord Justice Denning, who had said, in distinctly confused fashion, that the trade unions were almost above the law.91 Foot’s personal contest in Ebbw Vale, as always, presented no problems: he finished up with a majority of 16,091 over the Conservative Geoffrey Inkin, a substantial Monmouthshire farmer, with the Liberal and Plaid Cymru candidates losing their deposits. Foot’s share of the poll fell slightly, to 69.1 per cent. Even in Ebbw Vale there were detectable, in minuscule form, the green shoots of Tory advance.
Nationally there was a predictable decline in Labour’s vote. Callaghan never expected to win: he made a famous remark to Bernard Donoughue towards the end of the campaign about the sea-change he observed in politics, whatever the politicians did: ‘I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’92 Labour’s vote fell to 36.9 per cent, the party’s worst result since 1931. The Conservatives ended up with 339 seats, Labour with 269. The Liberals won just eleven: the Lib-Lab pact had evidently done them no favours. Old Labour’s last throw had failed. Jim Callaghan went back to his Sussex farm. For Michael Foot it was not all bad news: had Labour won he would have become Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, a bed of nails more painful than Employment had ever been.
Now he returned to the familiar pastures of opposition. A brief parliamentary session followed. There was a brisk passage of arms between Foot and Tony Benn when the latter announced that he was not going to stand for the Shadow Cabinet, but would campaign in the country instead. Foot thought this disloyal. Then there was a holiday in Venice for him and Jill to lick their wounds. And time to write another book.
Jim Callaghan, probably unwisely, decided to continue for a time as party leader. He remained, with Michael Foot as his deputy, for a further seventeen months, until October 1980. It is difficult to find a more dismal and depressing time in the history of the Labour Party. It was a period of almost unrelieved internal quarrelling. Callaghan argued, in somewhat illogical cricketing terminology, that he was ‘taking the shine off the ball for Denis’. In fact he had the mortification of seeing almost the whole of his team, Michael Foot excepted, throw their wickets away.
In this depressing period, by far Foot’s most enjoyable experience was writing and publishing another book, Debts of Honour, published again by his friend Reg Davis-Poynter in 1980. Much of it had been published in one form or another long before, in book reviews or brief essays. But it is still an enchanting volume, revealing of Foot’s style and of his friends and heroes past and present. His heroes are literary and political, though it is clear that for Foot the categories merge into one common stream of aspiration. Of the fourteen people covered, the majority are dealt with in brief, affectionate sketches – Brailsford, Russell, Silone, Vicky and Randolph Churchill; Defoe, Paine and Hazlitt. The essay on Silone is particularly sensitive on his ideology as an ex-Communist, now treated in sympathetic detachment, on the lines of the post-war collection The God that Failed. There is a whimsical piece on Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, put in as an afterthought to please Jill, who had complained that it was a book without a woman. It is interesting that he chose not to write about a suffragette – indeed he never did.93
The remaining four pieces are of more substance. His already celebrated essay on his father, previously published in both the Evening Standard and the Daily Telegraph, leads off: Isaac’s personality and whims, especially as a bibliophile, set the tone for the book as a whole. The section devoted to Benjamin Disraeli, ‘the good Tory’, is largely a perceptive account of themes in his novels, although Foot also takes some time to defend Disraeli’s principled radicalism in social matters and feminism from the charges made in Robert Blake’s 1966 biography. Disraeli’s institutional conservatism, and even more his imperialism, are ignored entirely. In much the most scholarly essay, a brilliantly written sketch, Dean Swift is treated in the round as essayist, satirist and (to a degree) as lover, and the opportunity is taken to dress down critics, mainly on the right, from Dr Johnson to right-wing Oxford dons in the 1970s. But the commanding essay is that on Lord Beaverbrook, ‘The Case for Beelzebub’.94 It includes much fascinating material on Foot’s early acquaintance with his old master, from the time he joined the Evening Standard in the later 1930s. It is also totally uncritical, suffused with affection and gratitude towards one whom Foot still insisted was a genuine radical. No mention of, say, Munich, Empire or the election of 1945. He dwelled instead on his hero’s unlikely friendships with men of the left like H. G. Wells and A. J. P. Taylor. Of Beaverbrook’s personality, he wrote:
It is to his humour we must always return. ‘If Max gets to heaven,’ wrote H. G. Wells, ‘he won’t last long. He’ll be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell … after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.’ But the merger had already taken place under his roof; a mixture of Heaven and Hell was what it could be like but, after some moments of Miltonic doubt about the outcome, it was usually Heaven which triumphed in that combat, and a Heaven too which no Calvinist could recognize, one which was always liable to dissolve in laughter. Even at the gravest moment the chance of such a beneficent explosion would reappear, and the House of Rimmon might resound to the healing strains of ‘The Red Flag’, led, say, by another companion, treasured for company alone, say Stanley Morison of The Times, ex-jailbird, ex-pacifist, militant Catholic and, as far as I can recall, a light baritone … Not all the paroxysms of anger, of urgency, of frustration could shake those walls as the laughter did, and there was in it no vein of pretence or hysteria but rather a rich comic view of the human species. It could be called Dickensian or Chaplinesque were it not for the fact that Dickens and Chaplin, along with the Co-op or Covent Garden or the British Council, were listed among his absurd bêtes noires, and were it not that he lacked the last full measure of compassion which only the greatest comedians have. Anyhow, Beaverbrook’s was a volcano of laughter which went on erupting till the end. No one who ever lodged beneath that Vesuvius will ever forget.
This was the fullest version yet of an unbreakable attachment, but many on the left still found Foot’s view of his old patron hard to defend or even understand.
The book was widely commended by reviewers, with A. J. P. Taylor and Bernard Crick especially enthusiastic. It also had an inspirational effect on an idealistic young trainee barrister, Tony Blair. There is much in it for Foot’s biographer, but mainly on his earlier years. His studies are either of dead authors or of people he first got to know in the 1930s. None of them had been active in recent Labour politics – because Foot, now in his mid-sixties, considered that his role in active politics was far from over.
That role mainly consisted in 1979–80 of trying to act as a stabilizing force, as Labour attempted to recover from the trauma of the seventies and the sense of failure or betrayal that decade left. The party was in fact in growing turmoil. From the late seventies a powerful grassroots movement on the left had been making headway amongst both the constituency parties and the unions. The winter of discontent and the revolt of the public sector workers had given it more headway. The main agency for protest was the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), founded in the early seventies by a young émigré Czech, Vladimir Dederer. It argued that the failures of Labour in the seventies were the result of the lack of internal party democracy: Tony Benn and others on the Labour left who had pushed the cause of ‘participation’ enthusiastically took up the movement’s demands, somewhat on the lines of critics amongst the left of the ILP before 1914.
There were three demands in particular: there should be mandatory reselection of MPs by constituency parties, rather than leaving them as virtual representatives for life; the party manifesto should be the work of the National Executive alone, rather than being written jointly by ministers, and subject to the party leader’s veto if he wished to exercise it (as many believed Callaghan had done in April 1979); and the leader should be elected not by fellow MPs alone, but through an ‘electoral college’ with a heavy preponderance for the block votes of the trade unions, with constituency parties and associated socialist organizations receiving agreed smaller percentages.95 Many in the party were alarmed by these proposals, seeing them either as basically antidemocratic or as calculated sops to the far left in constituency parties. Yet many in the party centre and right also recognized how stale, elitist and out of touch the leadership had become during the Wilson and Callaghan era, how party membership was falling inexorably, and how many local parties in inner cities were tiny, decaying or perhaps corrupt rumps, ripe for entryism by Trotskyists or others, the depressing remnants of what in 1945 had been a mighty mass party. The state of the party in the London dockside constituency of Bermondsey was sometimes mentioned as an illustration.
All these disputes surged to the fore at a venomous party conference in Brighton in October 1979. As luck had it, the Chairman was the veteran Frank Allaun, a former Communist and a bitter opponent of Callaghan and Healey. Callaghan was subjected to the most savage attack from the left, as the guilty man who had blocked socialism and been the cause of electoral defeat. A defeated left-wing former MP, Tom Litterick, complained angrily how ‘Jim had fixed it’ for him. The most ferocious attack of all on the party leader came, astonishingly, from the party General Secretary, Ron Hayward: ‘I come not to praise Callaghan but to bury him [loud applause].’ He wished that a Labour Prime Minister could act in Labour’s interests the way that Tory Prime Ministers did for their people. A class-war rant from Derek Hatton of Liverpool City Council heralded the appearance of Militant Tendency, already a presence in such places as Liverpool, Walton, and Brighton, Kemptown. In plenary session the proposals for reselection or deselection of MPs and the writing of the manifesto were passed by conference with large majorities. Only on the question of an electoral college to appoint the leader was there some breathing space. The proposal was left to a committee of inquiry to work out the balance between the different segments of the party, though the committee’s composition left no doubt as to the outcome. Only Callaghan, Foot, David Basnett of the General and Municipal Workers and Terry Duffy, President of the engineers’ union, were of the mainstream, with Benn, Norman Atkinson, Frank Allaun, Jo Richardson, Joan Lestor, Eric Heffer and perhaps Moss Evans likely to be on the left. A left-wing steamroller seemed irresistible, and Benn and his supporters were joyous.
Michael Foot, by contrast, was disconsolate. His main conference speech had been on unemployment. He told the delegates, ‘It is easy to say that all you have to do is to obey Conference’s decisions. Sometimes Conference asks for contradictory things.’96 His view of the Labour Party was of a pluralist, tolerant body which strove to keep a balance between its different sections. As for the demands of the CLPD, basically he opposed them all. He felt that reselection would make MPs the creatures of highly unrepresentative management committees on the far left. His model was always of Members as independent spirits, as Edmund Burke had proclaimed to his electors in Bristol in 1780. On the manifesto, he thought the right balance had already been achieved, signifying the equal status of the NEC and the leadership as policy-makers, the kind of equipoise achieved in the original party constitution of Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb back in 1918. On the electoral college, he reluctantly conceded that the party as a whole might be offered some element of participation in the choice of party leader, but the party in Parliament could not have a leader imposed on them by unelected and perhaps unrepresentative elements outside.97
Foot’s essential view, then and always, was that socialism could only come through persuasion and the constitutional approach. The only acceptable version of socialism for Michael Foot was parliamentary socialism, and the independence of the Labour Party’s representatives in the House of Commons was inviolable. Marches, demonstrations, even strikes would be important but subordinate tactics, to strengthen the resolve of democratic socialists at Westminster. He did not accept any form of dragooning Labour MPs or local councillors into mindless loyalism, and had always seen the purges of comrades as McCarthyite witch-hunts. Of course, he had some experience of this himself in the Bevanite past. When in 1975 the National Executive had before it a report by Reg Underhill, former National Party Agent, on the infiltration of local parties by Trotskyists and other ‘entryists’, Foot was foremost amongst those who strove to bury it. He cited the historic judgement of Clem Attlee that there had always been Marxists in the Labour Party, and declared that there should be no witch-hunt.98 Soon the same issue – and the same entryists – was to re-emerge with the rise of Militant Tendency. By then, experience had forced Foot to think again.
This made him an obvious target for the far left. His attempts to defend Callaghan’s view at the 1979 party conference were shouted down by constituency delegates. The commission of inquiry due to report to party conference about the best composition for an electoral college lumbered on. The argument reached its climax on 13–15 June 1980 in an elegant country house near Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire belonging to the ASTMS union of Clive Jenkins. There was a major row over reselection, but the conference decision was reaffirmed by seven votes to six. On the crucial issue of the electoral college, the CLPD argued for 50 per cent for the unions, and 25 per cent each for the constituency parties and the MPs.99 In the end, the precise proportions were left to be determined at a special conference at Wembley in January 1981. At Bishop’s Stortford, Foot proposed sticking to the status quo, but he was defeated by nine votes to three, his only supporters being Callaghan and the engineers’ leader Terry Duffy.100 Callaghan made it clear that he totally disapproved of the change, but to the disappointment of many MPs he gave up the fight. William Rodgers, Shirley Williams and David Owen turned on their old leader and accused him of betrayal; the germ of a new political alignment could already be seen.
This was a totally dispiriting time for the party. At this period the Thatcher government was deeply unpopular, with rising unemployment and the severe erosion of manufacturing industry under the impact of monetarist economic theories. There were marches, in many of which Foot participated, on behalf of the right to work. But the Labour Party seemed almost oblivious to all this, obsessed with its own internal arguments about machinery. Callaghan was to plead with conference delegates on 30 September 1980, ‘For pity’s sake, stop arguing,’ but in vain.
Michael Foot was not a major player in these bitter controversies. His only conference contribution of note was introducing the party statement on ‘Trade and Industry’ on the first morning, 29 September. By his standards it was a low-key affair. He remained a deeply respected voice of the left, as was confirmed when he resumed his role as speaker and marcher in a revival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the summer of 1980. This followed proposals to renew the British nuclear deterrent, including the stationing of American Cruise missiles on British soil. They had emerged in the last stages of the Callaghan government, of which Foot had been a key member. But he fought desperately to avoid a party split: like Bevan in days of yore, he spoke of the urge for unity in the Labour movement, though it seemed scarcely visible now. After the party conference, with all its defeats for the leadership on issues of policy and organization, Callaghan’s resignation seemed inevitable. Ironically, many on the left who had been venomously condemning the leader for years past now begged him to stay, since the alternative appeared to be the succession of Denis Healey, an abrasive representative of the party right. On 14 October Michael Foot, far more consistently and honourably, made a public appeal to Callaghan to stay.101 But the next day his resignation was announced. The party would elect a new leader in November.
Whether Michael Foot would be involved in the leadership contest was eagerly debated. It seemed highly unlikely that he would stand. Healey was a clear front-runner. Foot had shown no instinct or taste for leadership before. He had first become a minister late in his political life, and he was now sixty-seven years of age. He looked even older. His own wish was for a quieter and more bookish life. But there were other factors at work. The leadership election would be fought in the old style, with MPs alone voting. Leftish union leaders such as Clive Jenkins begged Foot to stand, to save the movement. Left-wing MPs represented by Stuart Holland, the Member for Vauxhall, added pleas of their own; Peter Shore, Holland wrote, had failed to commit himself to conference resolutions either to leave the Common Market or to renounce nuclear weapons, and was not therefore a proper standard-bearer of the left.102 Others, not at all on the left, feared for party unity if Healey, seen to be abrasive and aloof, and felt to be on the far right, were elected.103 At the very least Foot would prevent the party from tearing itself apart.
During his visit to Dublin to give his famous lecture on Swift in St Patrick’s cathedral on Saturday, 18 October, Foot’s telephone was busy with callers begging him to run. He returned to Hampstead on the Sunday evening, to a dinner gathering arranged by Jill. She had ambitions for her husband in the twilight of his career, and some believed her influence might have been decisive. Foot always disputed this, but encouraged speculation by saying that if he didn’t stand, ‘Jill will never forgive me.’ During that weekend Eric Varley had dinner in Pontypool with its MP Leo Abse, who predicted that Jill would get Michael to stand.104 As Tribune’s editor Dick Clements left the Foots’ home and walked down Pilgrims Lane early that evening he caught sight of Clive Jenkins coming the other way, bearing flowers (believed to be fuchsias).105 Floral tributes meant that something was clearly up. The gathering included several union leaders: Clive Jenkins, Moss Evans, Bill Keys of SOGAT and the young miners’ militant Arthur Scargill. Even David Basnett, far from being on the left, would support Foot as a caretaker leader. They were pushing at an open door. Foot had already phoned Stan Orme from Dublin to say that he had decided to stand.106 The day before, he had rung the Observer’s political correspondent, Alan Watkins, to give him the same message. This news was duly reported on the Observer front page the next day.107 On the afternoon of Monday, 20 October, Foot announced his candidature. This was perfectly acceptable to the supporters of Tony Benn, who felt his time would soon come in a ‘real contest’ with an electoral college. The left-wing Geoff Bish of party headquarters proposed, ‘If Foot stands, we vote; if not, we boycott.’108 Far more upset was Peter Shore, who had anticipated being the main standard-bearer of the left, since he had understood that Foot would never take part.109 The truth was that Shore’s credentials as a left-winger lay in his being anti-Europe, and not much else.
Foot brilliantly seized an early opportunity to make his mark, in a Commons debate on unemployment on 29 October. He had the House in stitches as he tore apart the Secretary for Industry, Sir Keith Joseph:
I should not like to miss out the Secretary of State for Industry, who has had a tremendous effect on the government and our politics generally. As I see the right hon. gentleman walking round the country, looking puzzled, forlorn and wondering what has happened, I try to remember what he reminds me of. The other day I hit on it.
In my youth quite a long time ago, when I lived in Plymouth, every Saturday night I used to go to the Palace Theatre. My favourite act was a magician-conjuror who used to have sitting at the back of the audience a man dressed as a prominent alderman. The magician-conjuror used to say that he wanted a beautiful watch from a member of the audience. He would go up to the alderman and eventually take from him a marvellous gold watch. He would bring it back to the stage, enfold it in a beautiful red handkerchief, place it on the table in front of us, take out his mallet, hit the watch and smash it to smithereens. [Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, recalled how Foot struck the dispatch box sharply at this point.] Then on his countenance would come exactly the puzzled look of the Secretary of State for Industry. He would step to the front of the stage and say, ‘I am very sorry. I have forgotten the rest of the trick.’ It does not work. Lest any objector should suggest that the act at the Palace Theatre was only a trick, I should assure the House that the magician-conjuror used to come on at the end and say, ‘I am sorry. I have still forgotten the trick.’
He was able to pull Healey’s leg in genial fashion as well. Meanwhile Healey’s own speech, handicapped by a heavy cold, was wooden, and he sounded unexpectedly nervous.110
In the contest among MPs it was obvious that Foot was a strong runner. There were four candidates nominated: Healey, Foot, John Silkin and Peter Shore, the latter two of the soft left in broad terms. Foot himself seemed to make little effort to campaign: a supporter described his performance as ‘bloody awful’.111 His own view was that Denis Healey was certain to get it. But his campaign, led by one or two senior figures like Stan Orme, was vigorously conducted by three backbenchers, Neil Kinnock, Peter Snape and Jim Marshall, and made some headway across the party. Kinnock had initially felt that a Foot victory was impossible and that he would lose by anything between eight and sixteen votes, but he changed his view after analysing weaknesses in the potential Healey vote. There were other factors at work to help Foot on his way. As noted, Healey’s right-wing views and abrasive manner, including a talent for abuse, caused several on the centre-right to have doubts about him. He was said to show ‘uncharacteristic reticence’ during the leadership campaign for precisely this reason. At least one centrist MP, Phillip Whitehead, voted for Foot after Healey’s incomprehensible refusal to set out a manifesto in the Guardian as Foot, Silkin and Shore had done.112 Healey was thus open to criticism for being both too aggressive and not aggressive enough. He had a falling-out with some important supporters, notably William Rodgers and David Owen. Three MPs, Jeffrey Thomas (an alcoholic who sat for neighbouring Abertillery, whom Foot particularly disliked), Tom Ellis and Neville Sanderson, all later to join the SDP, are known to have voted for Foot in the belief that his left-wing views and lack of capacity to lead would destroy the Labour Party all the more quickly. Healey wrote in his memoirs that ‘several’ did this as a wrecking move. Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, in their authoritative SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (1995), traced at least five who did so.113 One alleged oddity was that Harold Wilson told Healey that he voted for him on the first ballot, but for Foot on the second. At any rate, these eccentric votes just made the difference.
On the first ballot, announced on 4 November, Healey polled less well than his campaign managers Eric Varley and Barry Jones had expected, with only 112 votes against eighty-three for Foot, thirty-eight for Silkin and thirty-two for Shore. The last two dropped out, declaring their support for Foot. The potential Healey vote was then marginally whittled down: Neil Kinnock’s persuasiveness won over Barry Sheerman, for instance. After the second ballot it was announced on 10 November, to widespread astonishment, that Foot had won with 139 votes against 129 for Healey. Foot made a generous acceptance speech, with much predictable reference to the eternal wisdom of Nye Bevan. One of Healey’s strong supporters, Giles Radice, thought the result was ‘catastrophic’ – ‘the last fling of a vain old “Bollinger Bolshevik”’.114 David Owen, perhaps psychologically already half out of the party, felt that with his views on NATO, defence and Europe, Foot’s victory was ‘something only for nightmares’.115 In the Guardian, Ian Aitken emphasized how dramatic a result this was. Foot was the first left-wing revivalist to be elected to lead the party since Keir Hardie.116 He confirmed this reputation by saying that his first action as leader would be to take part in a protest march against unemployment in Liverpool, the city where he had first become a socialist. Party members, not all on the far left, wrote of their unbridled joy. In Oxford, Councillor Olive Gibbs, a stalwart of CND, wrote, ‘What a magnificent victory for Socialism and commonsense it is … I feel a pride I haven’t felt for years in being a member of the Labour Party.’ Bruce Grocott, a former MP and a future Labour Chief Whip in the Lords, wrote, ‘Absolutely delighted – I always thought in politics the good guys lost.’ David Stoddart, MP for Swindon, wrote ecstatically, ‘Dreams seldom come true – mine did tonight!’ Spike Milligan of the ‘Goons’ wrote in characteristic vein, ‘Don’t forget dinner at No.10 and I don’t want Jill using old Harold Wilson recipes …’ A more weighty correspondent was Tony Benn – ‘a historic victory which will put new heart back into the party’.117
Michael Foot’s rise to become Labour’s leader was far from premeditated. It could never have been predicted until the previous year or two. Even compared to predecessors like Hardie or George Lansbury, he had never been educated in the kind of political experiences that would have helped him to mobilize a great political party. The words ‘Foot’ and ‘leader’ hardly seemed to go together. But it was a natural outcome of decisions Foot had successively made since he first took Cabinet office under Wilson, and then served as Callaghan’s deputy. He had shown unexpected skills as a minister, in a way that impressed the wider public, if not always the civil servants who saw him at close quarters. At every stage – the IMF crisis, the pact with the Liberals, the winter of discontent – the solidarity of the government and the movement had been decisive for him. When the Callaghan government fell from power, Foot was one of the relatively few ministers whose reputation had risen since being in office. As Leader of the House he had won golden opinions from colleagues as varied as Shirley Williams, Owen, Healey, Rees, Varley, Hattersley and Orme. Gerald Kaufman, often a critic later on, thought his performance had been uniformly excellent.118 In opposition since May 1979 he had battled for loyalty and unity without shedding his credentials as a man of the left.
Michael Foot as a possible Prime Minister was not on anyone’s radar screen in November 1980. But Foot as a credible, even inspiring, leader of the opposition, binding the forces of progressivism and protest together in a mood of solidarity and fraternity, was perfectly possible. Here was a cultured leader and a commanding orator with values and ideas, and also a patriot who saw himself as the natural heir of great popular movements rooted in Britain’s past. Whether these were values and ideas relevant only to that past, whether they could be reclaimed to revive a declining Labour Party, indeed whether democratic socialism in any form, Bevanite or even Gaitskellite, had a future in a post-imperial, post-industrial society, remained to be seen. Michael Foot’s experiment with power would be put to the severest of tests. But as a group of happy comrades, headed by Foot and Kinnock, went off to the Gay Hussar that evening, celebrating victory, and the merry refrain of ‘Avanti Populo’ and ‘The Red Flag’ rang down Greek Street, hope was for the moment reawakened. Seen from Soho Square at midnight, the political weather forecast was ‘Faint in the East behold the dawn appear.’