The Labour Party has always had problems with the idea of leadership.1 It used to think of itself as a socialist party, a body which exalts collectivity and the general will and plays down the role of individuals. ‘The goal is nothing, the movement is everything,’ the German SPD theorist Eduard Bernstein would proclaim. Labour has also prided itself on being a democratic party, confirmed in the 1918 constitution, where power lies in the grassroots, not in a triumphalist leader surveying his forces from his pedestal. Caesarism was for the Tories, not the people’s party or what Arthur Henderson called ‘this great movement of ours’. The first person to lead the Labour Party was called its ‘Chairman’: he was Keir Hardie, a great evangelist and crusader for whom, wrote his colleague and fellow socialist Bruce Glasier, leadership of the party was ‘a seat of misery’. The first man to be called party leader, Ramsay MacDonald, in 1922, gave leadership a bad name for ever through his secret manoeuvres in 1931 when he deserted his colleagues and formed a so-called National Government with the Conservatives and Liberals. All subsequent Labour leaders, from George Lansbury in the thirties to Neil Kinnock in the eighties, would regard it as an article of faith that ‘I will never be another Ramsay MacDonald.’
Successive post-war leaders – Attlee to some extent, Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan – were attacked at various times, largely from the left, for being too dictatorial and for ignoring, or even betraying, the rank and file membership. There is nothing more ironic in Labour’s history than when in 1996 Tony Blair, a more assertive leader than the party had ever known after his victory over abolishing Clause Four of the Labour constitution, pointed across the Commons chamber and told the Prime Minister, John Major, ‘You follow your party, I lead mine.’ After Winston Churchill, ‘Supermac’ Macmillan and the Iron Maiden, such a claim was role reversal indeed.
Michael Foot shared in full this traditional Labour suspicion of leadership. He was the natural heir of Hardie and Lansbury, if not quite of the firebrand Jimmy Maxton of the ILP. His historical models were the great rebels – the Levellers, Wilkes, Fox, the Chartists, the suffragettes, not to mention Benjamin Disraeli in his younger days. Like his idol Nye Bevan’s, much of Foot’s career had been a battle with the whips and successive leaders against the constraints of party discipline. He had championed the freedoms of individual MPs with a consistency few had shown since the famous declaration of independence delivered by Edmund Burke (one of Foot’s heroes) in the reign of George III in 1780. Foot’s line on his election as leader precisely two hundred years later was one of tolerance and pluralism. There would be no witch-hunts either of right-wing potential defectors at Westminster or of Trotskyist militants in the constituency parties. All would be comprehended within the big tent of the broadest of broad churches, to carry on the good fight for socialism in our time.
But Foot’s prejudice against leadership, and against seeming to act like a leader himself, was the root cause of many of his problems. Even close allies like Geoffrey Goodman felt that leadership did not come naturally to him. Several colleagues believed he did not have either the disposition or the political (or perhaps temperamental) equipment to be a leader. Eric Varley thought his election a ‘serious mistake’. Roy Hattersley could not understand why he sought to be a second-class Nye Bevan when he could be a first-class Michael Foot. Gerald Kaufman, shadow environment spokesman, felt that Foot was far too easily bullied by the left. When Kaufman urged that council house rents should be allowed to rise, Foot refused to change the policy after fierce pressure from the extreme hard-left NEC member Frank Allaun. Foot also allowed Tony Benn too much scope, Kaufman thought, as Chairman of the Home Policy Committee in 1980–82. Foot was too emollient, too vague, perhaps simply too nice. People who worked with him repeatedly, and rightly, called him ‘a lovely man’. Geoffrey Goodman has written of him as ‘almost too gentle a human being to be thrown into the snakepit of normal political life’. He was a man who ‘loathes cultivating enemies’. Foot’s personal generosity towards colleagues and staff was legendary, but in politics, like sport, nice guys tend to come last.2 When Labour lost the general election of 1983, a decisive factor cited by the voters in poll after poll was Michael Foot’s qualities as a leader. Compared with the abrasive, authoritarian image of Mrs Thatcher, who was admired as a leader if not widely liked, he always ended up far behind.
Whether this kind of analysis misinterpreted the nature of leadership, indeed what sort of leadership Foot might be expected to offer – disciplinary, ideological, moral or whatever – will be considered later. To assume that Denis Healey would have been a more effective leader, as right-wing Labour writers have been wont to do, begs too many questions. Many MPs who were far from radical voted for Foot in 1980 because they felt that he alone could keep the party together, whereas Healey’s more aggressive approach would perhaps have shattered it for all time. It can also be argued that the state of the Labour Party in 1980–83 was such, especially with the far-left tide in the constituencies and the attitude of several major trade union leaders, emboldened by their influence in the seventies, that no conceivable leader could have turned it around. Foot at least kept the ship afloat, even if it was listing and badly holed. After the catastrophic defeat in 1983 (which nevertheless was a better performance than the Conservatives were to manage in 1997, 2001 or 2005) there was a new mood for unity, and electoral recovery eventually followed. Nevertheless, for the whole of his two and a half years as Labour’s leader, Michael Foot’s role and standing were a constant source of anxiety.
He started off with a very small staff: no smack of Blairite presidential style here. The key appointment was Tom McCaffrey, who became Foot’s Press Officer, having played the same role for Callaghan during his premiership with great success. He was no Alastair Campbell spin-merchant, but a professional civil servant who, broadly, gave the unvarnished facts and was fully trusted by journalists and the media. He much liked Foot, admired his journalistic skills, and found him ‘perfect’ professionally in working on press statements and handling press conferences. He and Foot were often left beleaguered during the 1983 general election campaign, when the party organizers left the leader stranded in some remote and unhelpful part of the country with, as McCaffrey put it afterwards, ‘an entourage of one’, namely himself. In drawing up the notorious party manifesto of 1983, the so-called ‘longest suicide note in history’, McCaffrey was no more than a spectator.3 In 1982 he was given an assistant, the young Francis Beckett, who had formerly worked for the farmworkers’ union and was the son of a famous former left-wing MP who in the 1930s had turned to Oswald Mosley’s New Party. He was promptly drafted to run a key by-election at Darlington, which Labour won.4
Dick Clements was brought in from editing Tribune to run the Political Office. He dealt there primarily with the party, and had a far narrower remit than his predecessor Tom McNally had under Callaghan, when he was encouraged to range far and wide on issues of policy and strategy. Clements was widely liked, but some felt he was too gentle and insufficiently ruthless to perform his role with success. It should be said that, given the crises of his time with Foot, notably the long-running saga of Peter Tatchell and the Bermondsey by-election (see pages 420–5), his task was virtually hopeless. A charming and deeply loyal man, Clements never lost his sense of humour. After the 1983 debacle he was heard to comment, ‘At least we didn’t peak too early.’5 By Clements’s side, also from Tribune, was the ever-faithful Elizabeth Thomas, who continued as Foot’s personal assistant and helped with speechwriting, so far as that was possible. Then there was a young woman, Sue Nye, shortly to marry an economist, Gavyn Davies, who had worked in Callaghan’s private office during his premiership. Once a civil servant, she became a paid employee of the Labour Party from that time on. She had met Foot during his time at Employment, and warmly backed his leadership campaigns both in 1976 and 1980. She acted with McCaffrey on press communications, but increasingly ran major aspects of the office. During the darker days of the 1983 campaign she was often at Foot’s side, or rather at the side of Foot and his dog Vanessa. On one occasion she and Michael braved the wrath of angry fox-hunters. Sue Nye remained a major official in Labour’s ranks at the highest level, working particularly closely with Gordon Brown. Under Tony Blair she ran Brown’s office. One of her frequent duties even as late as 2006 was to put Michael Foot through for telephone conversations with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which both enjoyed as renewing the links between the generations of democratic socialists.6
McCaffrey, Clements, Elizabeth Thomas and Sue Nye worked alongside the endlessly loyal Una Cooze – rightly called by Nye ‘Michael’s conscience’ as well as his secretary. She had occasional assistance from her friend Sheila Noble, from the Tribune offices. That was all Foot’s private staff consisted of. It was an indefatigable thin red line, but nowhere near enough to help the leader impose his authority on the party and the country. It was almost impossible for him to spell out the main lines of policy that should be followed, or to give the party and the movement a sense of direction or of priorities.
His PPS was the first appointment he made, John Evans, MP for Newton and then St Helens North after 1983, later Lord Evans of Parkside (Caerwyn Roderick had lost his Brecon and Radnor seat in the general election). Evans was a man of the soft left, a supporter of CND who had voted for John Silkin in the recent leadership election, and was surprised, though thrilled, to be approached by Foot afterwards. A trade unionist of much shrewdness, he was to become an important aide for his leader, passing on gossip, acting as link with union leaders like Ron Todd of the TGWU, protecting Foot from tiresome backbenchers like Arthur Lewis, a regular correspondent who tried to pester him. He was a staunch ally in the battle against Militant in 1981–82, while at a different level of party activities his membership of the Party Conference Arrangements Committee, under its highly knowledgeable Chairman Derek Gladwin, made him helpful in exercising the arcane skills of handling composite resolutions. Evans got onto the National Executive in 1982, which meant that Foot gained a majority of one. In the undercover skirmishes against the hard left that occupied so much time and nervous tension during Foot’s period as leader, John Evans was an unheralded comrade who stood firm in crisis after crisis, and eventually helped John Golding of the Post Office engineers’ union and others to win the day.7
As for policy advisers, in contrast with the range of advice available to Kinnock, Smith and Blair after 1983, Foot had just one, the economist Henry Neuberger, seconded from the Treasury in 1981 to work as his economics adviser.8 He was a gifted man with a wide range of interests, including economic modelling and the plight of the low-paid. He argued the case for a Cost Effectiveness rather than a Cost Benefit form of analysis. He used his influence with Foot to try to recreate some form of incomes policy, and had a free run in the leader’s office on economic policy-making. Foot seems to have believed that the next Labour government could try to resurrect the social contract with the unions that had operated during the time of Jack Jones’s heyday, and many of his speeches contain hints in that direction.
Neuberger’s main dealings were not with Foot but with the Treasury team, headed by Peter Shore and also including Robert Sheldon, Robin Cook and Jack Straw, in producing an Alternative Economic Strategy. This included a commitment to reflation, planning agreements, more public ownership, price controls and a measure of industrial democracy, much as the left were arguing for at that time. He did not spend a great amount of time with Foot, in large measure because the leader never had any great interest in the minutiae of economic policy, compared with his concern with Europe and defence. It may be surmised that Neuberger did not find his time as adviser to the Labour leader particularly rewarding. He stayed on for a time as adviser to Neil Kinnock after 1983, and wrote important papers on the low-paid and a national minimum wage. But Neuberger seems to have been unhappy with a movement towards a more market-orientated approach to Labour’s economic policy and the abandonment of large-scale government intervention. Neil Kinnock saw him as ‘stuck with the Alternative Economic Policy’.9 In 1987 he was effectively replaced as economic adviser by John Eatwell, and he moved to work for Bryan Gould, the shadow economics spokesman, only to differ from the strongly anti-European line adopted by Gould (who was a New Zealander). He moved back to the Civil Service in 1990, then served at the Central Statistical Office and as head of the Economic Assessment and Strategy division, but died young in 1998. On balance, Neuberger’s experience was not a tribute to policy-making by the leadership in the Foot era.
Foot’s leadership method was distinctive, idiosyncratic and highly personal. It was directed mainly towards the party and to keeping it together. He was always available to backbenchers, and often a cheery figure in the Commons tea room. He once had a friendly chat with a junior whip, Norman Hogg, backing up his view of the importance of adjournment debates – after all, Neville Chamberlain had fallen in 1940 after such a debate.10 He also liked to have lunch with fellow MPs on the ‘Welsh table’. His previously close relations with union leaders remained, notably with Clive Jenkins of ASTMS, but it was the Treasury team which was required to cope with the Sisyphean burden of devising a wages and prices policy. As before, Foot took advice from an immense range of colleagues and friends, including many journalists, almost in a mood of serendipity. While he took the Socialist International, drawn from socialist parties worldwide, very seriously, his focus was almost entirely directed inwards towards Britain itself. There was no serious discussion of issues within the European Union, because Labour policy was that Britain should leave it.
Another striking feature of the Foot leadership was that he made virtually no formal visits abroad. The only exception was to the Soviet Union in September 1981, his first trip there since 1937. On this occasion he and Denis Healey, his Shadow Foreign Secretary, had talks in Moscow with President Brezhnev about Russian SS20 missiles and ways of restarting the SALT disarmament talks on arms limitation which had made some headway during the Callaghan premiership. Brezhnev’s offer to withdraw some SS20s threatening central European targets greatly excited Foot. But nothing came of it, partly perhaps because of Brezhnev’s growing senility. When Foot and Healey entered the room in the Kremlin, the Soviet President’s initial question was, ‘Who are these people?’11 Predictably perhaps, Foot never went to the United States, nor did he show any sign of wishing to. At the invitation of the Yugoslav government he went on his first visit to Dubrovnik in 1982, and was immensely to enjoy holidays there from then on. That first visit was not wholly successful, since photographs of Foot in bathing trunks were sent to the newspapers, which did not enhance his sense of dignity. Foot also paid a visit to Northern Ireland in February 1982 with the shadow ministers Judith Hart and Don Concannon, with the intention of getting away from endless security issues and discussing jobs and employment.12 But the general impression was of a well-meaning and cultured man intent mainly on keeping the party together rather than on playing the international statesman or setting out an agenda which he would take up as a future Prime Minister.
Foot’s style and even his personal appearance were used against him. He often appeared in public looking unkempt and even shabby. The shambling walks on Hampstead Heath with his dog, waving his stick, did not suggest the leader of the nation. His air of eccentric, donnish absent-mindedness, perhaps at the expense of hygiene at times, could be astonishing or endearing, according to taste. When they flew together to a meeting of the Socialist International, an aide, David Lipsey, was surprised to find Foot at the airport with scant luggage and no money at all. All he had with him was a volume on Hazlitt, which he proceeded to read throughout the flight.13 He improved his performances on television in interviews with sharp interrogators like Robin Day and Brian Walden, a former parliamentary colleague, but still tended to orate in unstructured fashion rather than give the brisk, concise comments that an interview demanded. In Parliament, colleagues felt that he should have run rings round Mrs Thatcher in debate, given his intellectual superiority and Callaghan’s earlier domination of her, but his natural courtesy towards women held him back. In any case, she gained considerably in confidence as her premiership went on. He also had some sheer bad luck. He was short-sighted, with a very poor left eye, and had difficulty in reading speeches from a lectern; John Evans, his PPS, had to arrange a ‘secure room’ where Foot could have a quiet half-hour’s meditation before making a speech.14
It was his bad eyesight which may have led to an immediate mishap on 12 November 1980, forty-eight hours after being elected party leader, when he stumbled down some stairs in the Commons and broke a bone in his ankle. His first major appearance on the opposition front bench on 14 November saw Foot in a wheelchair, to which he was confined for some time. On that occasion his physical disability did not stop him from being fiercely attacked from the Conservative benches for the unruly behaviour of some Labour backbenchers the previous evening, when ‘The Red Flag’ was sung and it was claimed that blows were struck. This had followed justified Labour anger at Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Heseltine’s distinctly improper method of announcing through a written answer a rise in council house rents of up to £3 a week, an announcement which the Speaker later got him to withdraw. Fred Emery in The Times said Heseltine should not have made explosive documents public through the subterfuge of a written parliamentary answer – it was a ‘rupture of civility’.15 But events like these did give the impression of a Labour Party in disarray, with its stricken leader unable to exert any kind of control.
Foot’s style came most under attack after a tragicomic episode in November 1981 when he appeared at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day for the first time, with Mrs Thatcher and the Liberal leader David Steel, wearing a short blue-green overcoat. It became hallowed in legend as a ‘donkey jacket’.16 It looked like a dufflecoat, of the kind familiar on Aldermaston marches. Walter Johnson, Labour MP for Derby South, a former government whip and an ex-serviceman, attacked his leader publicly for turning out looking like an ‘unemployed navvy’. Foot was also accused of looking around during the ceremony. (In fact he was a deeply courteous person, with immense respect for men who had given their lives fighting against fascism. He was always nervously restless, and no discourtesy towards the dead was intended.) He was also criticized for allegedly dropping the Labour wreath on the Cenotaph ‘as if putting out the rubbish’. The Evening Standard, which he had once edited, described him as wearing ‘an unbuttoned green duffle-coat, plaid tie and brown shoes’. The Guardian, more sympathetically, commented that he should not have turned up ‘looking as if he had just completed his Sunday constitutional on Hampstead Heath’, though it also noted that in his former job he had understandably refused to wear the set garb for the Lord President of the Council – ‘dark blue cloth, single-breasted coatee with a staid collar and nine gilt buttons with white Kerseymere breeches, white silk hose and a sword’.
The criticism of Foot’s appearance was particularly upsetting to Jill, who had recently bought his new overcoat and had taken care that her unpredictable husband wore a smart suit and tie. It attracted unhelpful publicity at a time when Labour was struggling in the polls. People wrote to Foot, thoughtfully or ironically sending him donations of banknotes or vouchers for suits at Marks & Spencer. The tailor ‘Herbie Frogg’ of 16 Savile Row wrote privately to him suggesting he consider ‘the possibility of changing his public image’ and inviting his custom. Foot replied amiably that he would try to drop in at their Jermyn Street branch ‘in the near future’. The entire episode was absurd, but sadly it became one of the defining images of Foot’s period in charge, suggesting someone who lacked the dignity or the sense of occasion to lead the nation. The Cenotaph donkey jacket proved to be a more troublesome garment than the Mantle of Nye ever was. Foot did, however, have one appreciative admirer of his attire. The Queen Mother came up to him in the Foreign Office after the ceremony and said, ‘Oh, hello, Michael. That’s a smart sensible coat for a day like this.’ Foot later reflected to a Guardian journalist, ‘Which it was, and d’you know, I’d far rather take the Queen Mother’s opinion than that dreadful woman Thatcher’s.’
In time, Foot and his admirers were perfectly happy to take the Cenotaph episode on board as part of his personal legend. When on 23 July 1998, his eighty-fifth birthday, a portrait of him by the Welsh artist Graham Jones was unveiled in Westminster, it was seen to general joy that he was depicted for all time in the famous green ‘donkey jacket’, as planned by Jill and cross-party friends like the Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack. Foot is shown against the congenial background of Waun-y-Pound mountain above Tredegar, the memorial site of Aneurin Bevan, looking down on his beloved valleys, the Rhymney, the Sirhowy and especially Ebbw Vale.
The main problem facing Foot, however, concerned neither his clothing nor his deportment, but something far more serious. This was the evidence of a massive rift in his party, with leading figures on the right appalled by the left-wing tide in the constituencies. William Rodgers, Shirley Williams and David Owen had all protested during Callaghan’s last year against the surrender to the left over deselection, the drafting of the party manifesto and the composition of the electoral college. They believed that the very democracy of the Labour Party was under threat. The party’s policy showed major lurches to the left, including withdrawing from Europe, cutting links with NATO over nuclear defence policies, mass nationalization and centralized planning agreements, which were a radical departure from the humane, broad-church social democracy in which these MPs had grown up under Attlee and Gaitskell. In the phrase of the time, ‘This was not the party I joined.’ Owen and Rodgers had written to Foot after the council rents disturbance in the Commons on 12 November, complaining of Labour MPs’ behaviour and openly accusing the party of connivance, trying to exploit council rent rises for opportunistic reasons. Meanwhile Shirley Williams, who had lost her Stevenage seat at the general election, but who was generally thought to be more likely than Owen to remain in the party, caused a stir on 28 November, telling her former constituents that unless the left-wing policies adopted at the party conference were dropped, she could not stand as a Labour candidate at a subsequent general election.17
When the parliamentary party regrouped after the leadership election, David Owen refused to stand for the Shadow Cabinet. But William Rodgers was elected in a contest which saw Roy Hattersley top the poll with 143 votes, and Neil Kinnock, with ninety votes, elected for the first time with the lowest total of the successful candidates. Foot and Rodgers never got on. Rodgers was, after all, not only a strong multilateralist in defence policy, but had also been the organizer of the pro-Gaitskell Campaign for Democratic Socialism twenty years earlier. He refused a succession of Shadow Cabinet offers, including Health, Social Security, Regional Policy and Northern Ireland; meetings with Foot were inconclusive. In the end, even though he of all the major dissidents was the most anxious to stay in the party, Rodgers withdrew altogether, and Tony Benn, who had the next highest tally of votes, replaced him on the Shadow Cabinet. Elsewhere, Foot worked desperately to conciliate the right and called for tolerance all round. His Shadow Cabinet was distinctly ‘Healeyite’, perhaps by seven to five. He retained allies like Shore, Silkin, Orme and Booth, though all of them were soft-left Tribunites, and he was under fire from Heffer and Reg Race, Member for Wood Green, on the further left for favouring the other side. Always he pledged himself to work for unity. He denied that he had been ‘soft on the unions’ when he was a minister, and while totally opposed to remaining in Europe, assured pro-European colleagues that they had ample opportunity to stay in the party and argue their case.
It was known that Roy Jenkins, who had returned to British politics in 1981 after his four-year term as President of the European Commission, was thinking about a new political formation of the centre to combat what he saw as the extremism both of the Thatcherite right and of the Bennite or militant left. His Dimbleby Lecture, delivered at the BBC in November 1979, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, had evoked this idea, with its echoing of Yeats’s famous passage about the centre being unable to hold: ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’. Jenkins was in close touch with Labour figures like Rodgers and David Marquand, former MP for Ashfield and a leading intellectual, in pursuit of this modest centrist ideal. Foot was understandably terrified of a mass defection, and devoted much time to intense discussions with colleagues he regarded as vital to the party’s future, especially Shirley Williams, but also the Labour MP for Woolwich East, John Cartwright. Williams, Owen and Rodgers were now commonly referred to in the press as ‘the Gang of Three’.
The conference to decide the composition of the electoral college was held at Wembley Conference Centre on 25 January 1981. It included the same membership as the annual party conference, and was a dreadful occasion in every respect, with vitriolic bitterness among many delegates towards the party right. Figures like David Owen and Robert Maclennan, Member for Caithness and Sutherland, were jeered at. An USDAW (shopworkers’ union) motion was carried, allotting 40 per cent of the votes to the unions and 30 per cent each to MPs and the constituency parties, as against a GMWU motion which would give MPs 50 per cent, with 25 per cent each for the unions and the constituencies. The AEU, committed to MPs having a majority in the electoral college, hobbled itself through muddle-headedness, while USDAW was far from being a natural ally of the left. It had been anticipated that Foot would make a strong speech, appealing for support for the GMWU motion, but for reasons that are not clear, he remained silent in the main debate. Michael White in the Guardian thought he ‘looked like someone who wished he had stuck to book reviewing’. He went on: ‘Mr Foot seemed disinclined to dissipate his moral authority with a major reproach and settled, instead, for slapping them on the wrist with a limp anecdote.’ This referred to Foot’s tame closing remarks, in which he quoted Keir Hardie and the Pankhursts, and implored delegates to stay together and ‘fight the real enemy’. Peter Jenkins, shortly to join the SDP himself, wrote in the same newspaper that Foot’s authority had been destroyed at Wembley, and that it had sunk to the record low for an opposition leader achieved by Heath back in 1967.18
Within the next three weeks a major Labour split took place. Foot had no great affection for either William Rodgers or David Owen, though he wanted them to stay in the party. Both men had a low opinion of him. Foot regarded Owen as a nuclear warrior of hard-line views. Memorably, he quoted a remark by the glamorous Hollywood film star Zsa Zsa Gabor in this connection: ‘Most men who are macho aren’t mucho.’19 Foot did devote much time, however, to trying to persuade Shirley Williams to remain. He had an immense regard for her, both as a Cabinet colleague and as the daughter of the famous feminist Vera Brittain. She was a popular politician, important in Labour’s appeal to the wider public. He appealed to her to stay on grounds of loyalty, and told her that her leaving would destroy the party. He promised that there would be no revenge on the party right, that he would keep the balance as leader, and that she could stay and fight her corner on Europe, the bomb, party democracy and everything else. But Shirley Williams at no time detected a feeling that the party was going to change on any of these issues. She was implacably hostile to anti-democratic pressures by left-wing constituency management committees over reselection and writing the party manifesto, after ‘entryism’ within the party which Foot had made no effort to check. She was also astonished that Hattersley, Shore and others of the party mainstream had been prepared to accept an electoral college on such a basis. Nor could she detect any change of mind on Europe. Foot saw in the EU a profound threat to parliamentary sovereignty and the British constitution as it had existed over the centuries, and regarded her as prepared to surrender it. She saw him as very British, with no real internationalist view or concern for global issues of development. He had travelled little: he had never, for example, gone to the Anglo – German conversations of political journalists and intellectuals held at Königswinter on the Rhine, launched in 1950, while she had. She had been to the Soviet Union in 1969, while he had not gone there at all between 1937 and 1981. There was no meeting of minds. Nor did Foot’s deputy leader Denis Healey offer any help. He stayed strangely aloof from these matters even though he was regarded as a potential saviour of the party by followers like Giles Radice.20
In any case, Shirley Williams was no longer in Parliament and was meditating on her political options with academic friends like Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. She had expressed her concern about Marxist extremists taking over the Labour Party: she compared the situation, hyperbolically, to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. On the morning of 26 January 1981, the day after the Wembley conference, what came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration was proclaimed by Rodgers, Owen, Williams and also Roy Jenkins outside Owen’s home in the East End of London: it outlined a new political initiative for moderates everywhere, not solely confined to Labour defectors. Foot and Healey had a final meeting with Rodgers, Owen and Williams at the Commons on 2 February, but no minds were changed. On 9 February Williams announced her resignation from the NEC. On 26 March a new party was born, to be called the Social Democratic Party, or SDP.21 In all, twenty-eight Labour MPs and one Conservative MP were to join it in 1981–82, as well as notables such as Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams who were outside Parliament. The political landscape seemed utterly transformed. The threat from the new party to Labour was illustrated in July when Roy Jenkins, running for the SDP, came close to defeating Labour’s leftish candidate Doug Hoyle in a by-election in the traditional industrial bastion of Warrington.
The defection of Shirley Williams, along with the formation of the SDP, was a massive blow to Michael Foot. It coloured the whole of his period as leader. It imposed the stigma of decline and decay upon the Labour Party, the more so as the new SDP seemed to make rapid progress, including in by-elections, and was touted in the press as a rising force simply because of its novelty. Britain appeared to have genuine three-party (or perhaps four-party) politics for the first time since Isaac Foot’s heyday in 1929. From then on, Foot’s prospects of coming anywhere near winning power seemed to disappear. In January, before the Wembley conference, Mrs Thatcher’s unpopularity had given Labour a lead of 13 per cent in the opinion polls. A month later, the Tories were just ahead. The most Foot could hope for was to work with the remainder of his party (much the largest part, after all) to ensure that it remained forward-looking and democratic. The priority now was to enable Labour to retain its balance as a broad social democratic movement, linked to the unions but trying to push out far beyond its old constituency, as it had done in 1945 and 1966.
There were many difficulties. One was that Jim Mortimer, previously of ACAS, proved a poor choice as Ron Hayward’s successor as Party Secretary. He did not have the political background to make a success of so sensitive a post, while in any case, as a man of the left, he was unsympathetic to moves to discipline Militant Tendency or any other far-left group within the party. Throughout his time as leader, Foot could not always rely on the apparatchiks in Walworth Road, the party’s new headquarters, some of whom, like the Policy Director Geoff Bish, were well-known Bennites. That merely intensified the strain of Foot’s constant struggle to defeat the doctrinaire militants of the far left, many of them young, with no sense of the historic Labour tradition that meant so much to a man like Foot. In turn that meant an unending conflict between the contending socialist visions held by Michael Foot and Tony Benn, two kinds of socialism, in the struggle between which tormented the party thenceforth.
The relationship between Foot and Benn, the two outstanding and charismatic exponents of left-wing socialism, had never been a straightforward one. They were both children of Edwardian progressivism. William Wedgwood Benn, Tony Benn’s father, had been a left-wing Liberal MP and ally of the radical Dr Christopher Addison before and after 1914, who had then joined Labour in the mid-1920s and served in the governments of both Ramsay MacDonald and Attlee. But beyond that, Benn and Foot had found cooperation tortuous. In the fifties and sixties, while Foot was frequently a rebel and critic, Benn had been first close to Gaitskell and then a centrist, pro-Europe, pro-NATO Postmaster-General and Minister of Technology under Harold Wilson. He regarded Foot, during the parliamentary debates on the reform of the House of Lords in 1969, as ‘a conservative of the left’.22 After the 1970 general election, as has been seen, Benn changed his standpoint very radically, and became a voice for all the main demands of the left. He and Foot were part of the left group of ministers during the governments of 1974–79, and participants in the ‘husbands and wives dinners’. Foot had put pressure on Wilson not to remove Benn from his Cabinet in 1975, and did the same under Callaghan.
However, they were never close, and increasingly their paths diverged. Foot thought Benn was fundamentally disloyal, both in his leaks about Cabinet discussions to the press and in his disavowal of collective responsibility. Benn, who was in awe of Foot’s literacy and was himself unfamiliar with the works of Swift, Hazlitt and the rest, felt that Foot ‘repudiated himself’ in his political attitude over time. He believed that the substance of the talks at the ‘husbands and wives dinners’ was relayed back to the leadership: they were nothing but ‘licensed dinners’. Foot was also seen as less vigorous than he might have been in the ‘No’ campaign on Europe. In the IMF crisis Benn felt that Foot was always prepared to give way ultimately, and was really ‘a Callaghanite’. Foot, he thought, was a conservative on internal democratization of the Labour Party, and agreed to an electoral college coming into being on the understanding that it would never be used.23 Benn did not stand in the leadership contest in November 1980, in the belief that Foot, who was twelve years older than him, would only be a temporary leader if he won, and Benn supporters like Alan Fisher of NUPE were sure that their man would make it next time. Benn came to be supported by an enormous variety of far-left radicals in a myriad of pressure groups and protest movements. But it should be noted that his supporters also included prominent members of the Blair governments after 1997, including Patricia Hewitt, Margaret Beckett, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, Margaret Hodge and many others; his secretary in Bristol South-East, Dawn Primarolo, later became Paymaster-General. Tony Benn embodied the aspirations of many idealistic younger socialists. Whereas Michael Foot was the honoured icon of a passing generation, Benn was truly a representative of a new Labour, even though ideologically light years away from that creed as interpreted after 1997.
From the start, colleagues noted an edginess between Foot and Benn; nor did Caroline Benn and Jill Craigie share the same enthusiasms. It was the 1647 Putney Debates once again, save that it was the leader who took his cue from the Levellers, while it was Benn the rebel who seemed the more Cromwellian. Foot profoundly distrusted his younger colleague, and his suspicions were widely shared on the Labour front bench. Row followed row. The biggest of all arose in April 1981, when Benn announced that he would challenge Denis Healey in the election for deputy leader. The deputy leadership was really a trivial post, invented to placate Herbert Morrison in the 1950s by giving him a seat on the NEC after defeat in the constituency section elections, but clearly a contest between these two major figures would plunge the party into a massive internal division. Foot spent over an hour with Benn pleading with him not to stand, and his view was reinforced by Judith Hart and John Silkin, but to no avail. A complication which might save the leadership was that John Silkin, a distinctly soft-left Tribunite, also entered the contest, and would clearly peel off some of the left-wing vote. Benn then tried Foot’s patience further on 20 May by leading seventy-four left-wing Labour MPs into voting against the government on the defence vote on the grounds of their hostility to nuclear weapons, thereby upstaging a possible Tory backbench revolt. Benn was joined by several Tribunites, including Jack Straw, Robin Cook, Jeff Rooker and Frank Field, all of them greatly to change their positions later on.24
The main battleground was the National Executive, which was now in the hands of the Bennites. Fifteen of the twenty-nine places were held by the hard left, and Foot found it difficult to get the other fourteen – eight ‘soft left’ and six on the right – to act together. The pressure placed on individual MPs by left-wing militants in constituency parties led to furious arguments. Stanley Clinton Davis, the MP for Hackney Central, who had voted for Foot in the leadership election in 1980, was one early target of local pressure, though he was in fact reselected. In the end only eight Labour MPs were to lose their seats in 1983 because of mandatory reselection, the best-known being the former Cabinet minister Fred Mulley in Sheffield, Park; but in many other places the procedures led to disputes and bad blood.25 There was journalists’ talk of ‘bedsit Trots’, young Marxists who infiltrated small and decaying constituency parties in the inner cities and virtually took them over; Private Eye immortalized them in the shambling class warrior ‘Dave Spart’. Other popular villains with walk-on parts were further-education lecturers in sociology, what Peter Jenkins in the Guardian called the ‘lumpen-polytechnic’, to be carefully distinguished from genuine university scholars. On 27 May Benn was part of a fifteen to nine majority on the NEC insisting that all MPs should have to go through reselection procedures. It was noted, though, that Foot now had with him a powerful young supporter in Neil Kinnock, no enthusiast for Benn. When Foot and Benn both addressed the TUC People’s March for Jobs on 31 May, it was observed that they did not address a word to each other.26 Then there came a dramatic scene in the Shadow Cabinet on 3 June. Foot read out a twenty-five-page prepared statement, attacking Benn for repeated disloyalty, and denying that Labour was dragging its feet on economic or defence policy, or Europe or Northern Ireland either. There had to be trust between colleagues: ‘There can’t be one rule for Tony and another for everybody else.’27 He urged Benn to fight him for the leadership, but the gauntlet was not picked up. One member of the Shadow Cabinet thought this showed Benn to be ‘a bit of a coward’, and that his conduct generally was disgraceful. Other colleagues were less flattering.28 Joyce Gould, a leading party organizer, thought him ‘a different breed of oppositionist’ from Foot, and with no firm principles.29 In his diary Benn noted that the atmosphere towards him was ‘poisonous’,30 but he does not speculate as to why that might have been.
Two days later, with MPs prepared for a disciplinary ‘crackdown’ by Foot in the face of Benn’s disobedience, Benn went to hospital for urgent medical examination after suffering pains in his legs, and the personal insults temporarily tailed off. But the tension continued all summer as Healey and Benn supporters campaigned for votes in the deputy leadership election. Benn’s campaign was largely run through the Rank and File Mobilizing Committee, in which a young militant, Jon Lansman, was a key influence, and which had strong backing from the mainly Trotskyite Outside Left movement: for them the quintessential objective was the destruction of Healey’s career. Polls, however, showed that Healey was overwhelmingly the choice of Labour Party supporters, and of voters generally. Eventually, to Foot’s huge relief, the result declared at party conference on 24 September showed that Healey had scraped home on a second ballot by less than 1 per cent, 50.426 per cent to 49.574 per cent. This was, of course, conducted under the new electoral arrangements, the first time they were used. Healey had clear majorities in the parliamentary party and the trade unions, but in the constituency parties Benn had a majority of five to one.
It was the closest of close-run things. Yet in retrospect it marked a turning of the tide. The vote was in some ways misleading. It showed up the inadequacy of union ‘consultation’ of members. The result was as close as it was in part because of malpractices by some trade union executives, notably those of the TGWU, who threw all their million-plus votes behind Benn despite having no mandate from their branches to do so. Their vote, which saw Healey apparently take 52.2 per cent of branches to Benn’s 24.6 per cent, was a total shambles from start to finish. Unions which held ballots, such as NUPE with its left-wing leadership, invariably found that their members preferred Healey: this was particularly the case among women. Benn’s majority in a union like ACATT was boosted by the votes of Communists. Benn was only defeated because Foot and Kinnock managed to mobilize the softer left, MPs like Stan Orme, Albert Booth and Joan Lestor, who all voted for Silkin on the first ballot but abstained on the second. An associate of Benn, Doug Hoyle, was persuaded to follow this course after intense personal pressure from Orme.
Healey thus scraped home against a background of the most bitter internal infighting, and indeed actual fighting in a Brighton hotel washroom, in which Kinnock was reportedly a combatant. Even so, Foot’s preferred candidate (he did not vote himself) had got home, just, and things began to get a little easier. The rejection of Benn’s methods and style, appealing to all left-wing dissenters without discrimination, by the older ex-Bevanite left, and by some key allies in the unions, gradually saw a change of mood, and was to prove important as Labour slowly recovered during the Thatcher years. The debate amongst the soft left was pivotal – at the Tribune rally at the party conference, Neil Kinnock was both cheered and booed by the membership for the role he had played. As in the past, there were somewhat pathetic evocations of the memory of Nye and his cry for unity. Outside the bitter, internecine world of Labour infighting, all the opinion polls showed that Healey’s victory was popular with the voters, and much more likely to make the party electable.
The Brighton conference saw other setbacks for Benn, as important as the result of the election for the deputy leadership. Norman Atkinson, one of his most vehement supporters, was defeated as Treasurer by Eric Varley, a Healey supporter. In the elections for the National Executive, five Bennites were defeated: Atkinson (dumped by his own union, the AEU, which was shifting to the right), Margaret Beckett, Renee Short, the recently elected Bernard Dix of NUPE, and Charlie Kelly of UCATT. In their place came Eric Varley, Gwyneth Dunwoody, Shirley Summerskill, Roy Evans (of the iron and steelworkers) and David Williams (COHSE), all on the right. The Executive was being slowly reconstituted by a formidable operator, the self-styled ‘hammer of the left’ from the postal engineers, John Golding MP.31 Foot brought the conference to its feet with a closing speech in which he referred to himself as ‘an inveterate and incurable peacemonger’. But he also talked a good deal about multilateral approaches to disarmament. Peter Jenkins of the Guardian, invariably scathing on everything about Foot, from his speeches to his suits, observed that ‘after a year of vacillation and ineffectiveness’ Foot had ‘slapped down Benn with an olive branch’.32
But there was still no ceasefire. Conference defeated the leadership over the NEC’s having sole control in writing the party manifesto (the consequences of which were shown to disastrous effect in the 1983 general election). Foot then put some effort into trying to persuade Benn to run for the Shadow Cabinet elections, but also to accept the principle of collective responsibility. Benn refused, because he declined to be gagged. With remarkable tolerance, Foot made him spokesman on energy. But he was then badly let down in a debate on nationalized industries on 10 November. Winding up for the opposition, Benn, after speaking well in orthodox fashion on Labour’s opposition to selling off part of the oil industry, then declared without prior warning that Labour favoured renationalization of the assets of the industry, without compensation. This was a bombshell on which the then Secretary of State for Energy Nigel Lawson immediately fastened, and Benn’s totally unauthorized response made matters worse.33 At an angry PLP meeting Foot denounced Benn’s remarks as ‘misleading and offensive’, and relations between the two reached a still more glacial level. This was the same week in which Foot had had his troubles at the Cenotaph. Nevertheless, the beleaguered leader, with his hatred of witch-hunts, was showing distinct signs of beginning to lead, as the battle with Benn moved on to become the battle for Bermondsey.
The long-running cold war between Michael Foot and Tony Benn, the two most gifted voices of the left, had obvious personal aspects. There were antagonisms that went back years. Many private issues, great and small, were involved. Foot’s essay ‘Brother Tony’ in his book Loyalists and Loners (1986) shows a controlled bitterness towards one whom he regards as very much a wilful ‘loner’, and not a team player at all. He writes that Benn fell out with virtually every colleague he ever had to work with.34 However, underlying these skirmishes was something more interesting, namely a major ideological debate about what the Labour Party was, and indeed what British socialism had become in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Neither Foot nor Benn was a political theorist, but their rival philosophies can be gleaned from their publications at this time. Foot’s viewpoint was set out most clearly in a pamphlet published by the Observer in December 1981, My Kind of Socialism. Benn’s had appeared at much more length, especially in two books, Arguments for Democracy (1978) and Arguments for Socialism (1981). When all the personal backbiting is set aside, their two kinds of socialism are well worth consideration.
Foot’s pamphlet is not long, a mere ten thousand words. Some of it is taken up with his familiar range of historical and literary quotations, featuring Oliver Goldsmith, the inevitable Hazlitt and Alexander Herzen among others. Nevertheless, it is the most substantial written elaboration of his socialist principles that Foot ever produced. His books were treatises on literary ideas, not political ones, other than his life of Bevan, in which Foot’s own ideology emerges vicariously through his hero. A key quotation in his 1981 pamphlet is from Ignazio Silone, one of his favourites: ‘Every means tends to become an end.’35 Foot’s pamphlet is entirely about means. That means is Parliament, placed almost romantically in centre stage in the very first sentences: ‘Why Parliament? Can those old arthritic limbs still move as the nation needs? Why parliamentary democracy? Why should democratic socialists … continue to assert their faith in the supremacy of Parliament?’ Nothing is said about local government or devolution. Foot wrote warmly of the demands of the unions in the early 1970s, but they needed the Labour Party in Parliament to put them into effect. The sometimes unlawful extra-parliamentary activities of the Chartists or the suffragettes in years past arose from the fact that in those times there was no alternative. R. H. Tawney, the prophet of socialism as equality who was once the cherished philosopher of the Gaitskellite right, is cited from 1953: ‘It is not certain, though it is probable, that Socialism can in England be achieved by the methods proper to democracy. It is certain that it cannot be achieved by any other.’ (Foot’s italics.)
The most effective part of Foot’s argument is at the end. He takes issue with Bennite demands that the parliamentary party be subordinated to the wishes of the delegates at the annual party conference, through reselection and other means. Foot denied that this was necessary. The party in Parliament had not betrayed the faith: he drew on his own experience of the Callaghan government to show how it had taken up socialist issues, nationalizing aircraft- and ship-building, abolishing tied cottages and the like. But his basic argument is an essay in tolerance and pluralism, even divided sovereignty. Twin sovereign bodies had been created in the party’s 1918 constitution: the annual conference and the parliamentary party: ‘Neither will bend the knee to the other’, wrote Foot. But then, neither need do so if party debates were conducted in a spirit of comradeship rather than doctrinaire zealotry. He was echoing Keir Hardie, who had called back in 1907 for ‘free play between the sections’.36 Foot’s view of the Labour Party was an organic one, as a pluralist popular movement which exerted pressure at a variety of points. Implicitly, he echoed the argument in Aristotle’s Politics: ‘A polis, advancing in unity, will cease to be a polis … It is as if you were to turn a harmony into mere unison, or to reduce a theme to a single beat. A polis is an aggregate of many members.’ So too was a great party, and its life force depended on what Tawney had called ‘the elementary decencies’ of parliamentary government.37
Foot’s view of socialism was parliamentary and Aristotelian. Benn’s was populist yet in some ways Platonic. In themselves as multi-faceted as Foot’s, his books, and even more his tactics, lent themselves to the discipline of the guardian class as outlined in Plato’s Republic. His Arguments for Socialism begin with some comments on historical strands, of which the most important is Christianity, but his vision lacked the historical grounding of Foot’s. However, while the socialist theme peters out some time after the Levellers, Benn certainly does focus on major contemporary issues, particularly energy resources (especially nuclear energy and oil), Europe, and democracy and open government. His vision of a socialist Britain was futuristic. Foot, on the other hand, offered no blueprint of what a socialist Britain might actually look like, other than some more 1945-type nationalization and planning policies to combat unemployment, alongside a reinforced welfare state. Benn’s enemy is the corporate multinational capitalism which had grown up since 1945. Unlike Foot, he did acknowledge that Keynesian economics had run its course by the 1970s, and that the kind of management model endorsed by Tony Crosland in The Future of Socialism (1956) was out of date. But his focus, unlike Foot’s, is on ends rather than means. Some of his incidental proposals on open government, for instance, were distinctly prophetic, and were to see partial fulfilment under Tony Blair’s government via its Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts.38 But Benn’s designated ends, and his apparent lack of fussiness at the miscellaneous forces enlisted to promote his objectives, weakened his cause.
Benn tried to be at one and the same time a technocrat and a populist. He advocated both centralism and localism, a kind of mixture between Jean Monnet and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the planner and the philosopher. While always stimulating, he was often inconsistent. Thus he saw the annual party conference, dominated by the union block vote, as the authentic voice of party democracy, yet consistently opposed the principle of one member one vote. He had much more ministerial experience than Foot. He had been a pro-NATO, pro-European Minister of Technology in the 1960s. In the second Wilson government he advocated a massive increase in nationalization and corporate planning agreements with the rest of major industry. Yet he also praised the Upper Clyde Shipyards work-in of August 1971, following the Heath government’s refusal to bail the company out with a £7 million loan, and strongly supported workers’ cooperatives such as he had himself encouraged as a minister in 1974–75, at Meriden motorcycles, Kirkby Mechanical Engineering and the Scottish Daily News, ignoring the fact that every single one had been a financial and managerial failure. He made scant effort to relate improved industrial efficiency to the larger role he foresaw for the trade unions (or rather their shop stewards): towards them he was uncritical (as Foot often was too), and ignored such matters as their antiquated attitude towards work practices or job demarcation, the prevalence of inter-union disputes, and their resistance to being involved in the management of industry, compared with the very different view taken by German, Dutch or Swedish workers. Deep-seated weaknesses in the British economy were traced to the malign role of foreign capital, not to internal weaknesses of productivity or rising wage inflation. Benn’s argument gradually dissolves into a series of fragments. Much the most interesting parts of his books relate to democracy rather than to socialism, an idea in which the author gradually loses interest.
Politically, for Benn the Labour Party is an important instrument of change. But it is an organization given its life force by socialist true believers in ‘the party nationally’. His book Arguments for Democracy (1981) is marked throughout by a deep suspicion of the idea of leadership, quite apart from the perceived errors of individual leaders such as Callaghan. Labour MPs, he writes, should be mandated to carry out decisions taken by the membership. If they did not do so, they should be deselected. The party leader and Cabinet (or Shadow Cabinet) members should then be controlled by Labour MPs, who should elect them and determine the portfolios which they would be allocated, following directives from party members. Despite this chilling iron discipline throughout the party hierarchy, Benn nevertheless calls for a spirit of tolerance within the movement, although this is not to be extended to any dissent from the manifesto. However, ‘anyone dissatisfied with any NEC vote should seek to have it reversed at the next meeting. This is the democratic way to act.’39 It reads more like a recipe for permanent civil war.
Unlike Aneurin Bevan, who drew a sharp distinction between democratic and undemocratic visions of socialism, and usually refused to conflate totally opposed forms of socialist belief, Benn endorsed dissidents of all kinds. Whereas Foot (eventually) turned against ‘entryism’ by Trotskyists and others, Benn welcomed it because it brought in ‘good socialists’. This meant paying less attention to what their objectives actually were – syndicalism, the recognition of Sinn Fein, animal rights, liberation theology or whatever – and trying to argue that small groups of infiltrating ideologues in the constituencies added up to a broad democracy. He had none of Foot’s distaste for ‘infantile leftism’, in Lenin’s famous phrase. Benn’s ‘arguments for socialism’ were undermined by the collapse of traditional forms of public intervention in the new global economy. Neither his planning agreements nor his workers’ co-ops showed any signs of working, let alone of bringing down inflation or creating viable jobs. Benn’s ‘arguments for democracy’ were undermined by the selective terms in which he interpreted it. Both his lines of argument were central targets for Michael Foot as he strove to educate as well as to lead his party.
The Foot and Benn conceptions of socialism and the Labour Party, while both untidy and often vague, were basically incompatible. Arguably, they were both fundamentally flawed. They were also, in the view of New Labour enthusiasts in the 1990s, fundamentally dated. To Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle in The Blair Revolution (1996), or Philip Gould in The Unfinished Revolution (1999), both Foot and Benn were products of an anachronistic, ill-defined Old Labour from which the party had ‘moved on’.40 Tony Blair vaulted above and beyond both Foot and Benn, with the modernizing of the ‘Third Way’ – not the ‘Middle Way’ of Foot’s colleagues during the Attlee government, but a post-modern creed set in a totally different continuum, which argued that Labour should base its values and ideas on quite other foundations than those which had gone before. Foot and Benn were lumped together by the Blairite managerialists not only with each other, but also with Attlee, Gaitskell and Bevan, so at least they were in good company.
In the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983, members had to choose between two contending visions, set against a background of long-term systemic decline. Foot’s commitment was to Parliament and the formal processes of democracy. Benn’s was to Parliament as simply one forum for protest in a world where corporate capitalism is incompatible with democracy, and forms the main threat to a civilized life. Foot’s commitment was to a strong, radical Labour Party, bound by strong internal loyalties from the grassroots to Westminster. During his most quarrelsome Bevanite days, he claimed always to have sustained the party. Even CND, to which he was passionately committed, he never saw as anything other than a pressure group out to convert his comrades. Benn, by contrast, regarded a fundamental restructuring of the party by socialists in the grassroots, and the discipline they imposed, as essential. Even heavy electoral defeats like those of 1979 and 1983 were only temporary setbacks as the cause advanced; two steps backwards but, in the fullness of time, three steps forward. Benn’s optimism seemed without limit; when he visited Crosby during the by-election in November 1981, he actually forecast a Labour victory in a contest eventually won by Shirley Williams for the SDP, with Labour losing its deposit. Foot’s Labour Party was still the classic Labour alliance, the grand old partnership with the trade unions as originally created by Keir Hardie. It was still ‘this great movement of ours’. Benn’s was more of a fluid popular front, where the official Labour leadership would rapidly be superseded. His socialism in 1979 was akin to what Foot’s had been in his Socialist League days in 1937. Foot’s party was the classic broad church, where a variety of belief systems and movements could contend within the broad flapping tent of the Labour tabernacle. Benn’s party was the priesthood of all believers, an extension of the Congregationalism of his father and his forebears, with groups like Militant as the new Anabaptists. Foot, he believed, had become a conventional mainstream figure and the ‘prisoner of the right’.
Foot’s socialism is evolutionary, and grows out of a sense of historic identity. It is an outgrowth of the radical Liberalism in which he had been brought up. It is fundamentally based on his own idiosyncratic sense of history. Benn’s, by contrast, is not really historical at all, despite some observations on the Levellers or the Chartists. It is curiously abstract, focusing on structures and mechanics, and unrelated to the political antecedents. Foot’s socialism is literary, cultural and humane, drawing heavily on traditions of protest and demands for democratic change from the time of the French Revolution. When he addressed mass marches on the meaning of socialism, Hazlitt and Byron were at his shoulder. He conveyed a vision of warmth and solidarity. Benn’s socialism is neither literary nor cultural. His bleak analysis seems on paper peculiarly mechanical, even bloodless, curiously lacking in humanity for so personally charming and cultured a man. No non-political author intrudes onto his pages, other than an interesting passage from H. G. Wells reflecting on the importance of Christ’s crucifixion.41 Foot sees British socialism as the custodian of a culture. Benn sees it as a weapon to be mobilized for social transformation.
As exponents of socialist theory, neither Foot nor Benn is significant, though Foot is much the more comfortable with Tawney. Neither begins to define socialism or to describe what a socialist society might actually be like. Both pay tribute to the inspiration of Marx, whose role in British socialist thought had been virtually ignored during the Cold War years. Even if neither was seriously a Marxist socialist, Marx had been an influence on both over the years. Both adopted Marx’s view of historic necessity and the centrality of class. Foot, as we have seen, spent time reading through the Marxian dialectic in his Socialist League days, and instructed Barbara Betts in the fundamentals of Marx’s message. Benn discovered Marx much later in life, and first read The Communist Manifesto in his fifties. But, as befits that versatile ideological genius, the Marx to whom each pays homage is distinct and drawn from different contexts. Foot’s Marx is the Marx of the years after Das Kapital (1867). These saw his attack on Bakunin’s anarchism at the Hague Socialist International in 1872, and his authorship of the German SPD’s Gotha Programme critique of 1875, which provided inspiration for young radicals like Karl Kautsky in the German Social Democrats, despite his criticizing many features of the Programme itself. Marx here came to acknowledge that the socialist revolution could eventually be achieved by parliamentary means, through the dynamic energy of universal suffrage. Foot himself had responded warmly to John Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism (1956), in which the Labour Party was identified as the instrument in Britain embodying Marx’s later view of democracy, one which had made violent class conflict unnecessary. Tony Benn’s Marx is a much earlier Marx, the revolutionary itinerant author of The Communist Manifesto of 1848, passionately condemning the economic slavery of the proletariat, and looking forward to the overthrow of capitalism in favour of a utopian, classless society, whose specific features are nowhere described. It is this almost metaphysical Marx whom Benn evokes, linking him with earlier mystics in a way reminiscent of William Morris’s Dream of John Ball (1886), set during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Foot and Benn each created his own personal Marx, as what the French call a lieu de mémoire, part real, part legend, part history, part memory.
Ultimately, both Foot and Benn seemed profoundly English, each a patrician rooted in his time. Indeed, there was an insularity about both, since each, in time, was strongly dismissive of the European Union, and they came together in condemning its threat to parliamentary sovereignty and the British constitution. In supporting CND, both Foot and Benn were calling for an independent British foreign policy, and a weakening, if not an abandonment, of overseas alliances. Both were products of a native radical tradition imbibed from their Liberal fathers. Neither had many close associations with Continental or Third World socialists. Foot did at least find kinship with the more intellectual European socialist leaders – Léon Blum, Willy Brandt, François Mitterrand. Benn thought all of them far too revisionist, and claimed to find his allies rather in eastern Europe, or perhaps Third World rebels in Latin America. Neither was pro-American. Despite Benn’s having an articulate and gifted American wife, the United States, whose capitalism he saw as in fundamental crisis, had little to attract him, and he found many of its characteristics deeply distasteful. Whereas Foot had once been excited by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, to Benn it had been an economic contradiction which demonstrated the futility of Keynesian capitalist economics.
And yet both Foot and Benn, English to the core, looked like outsiders in British politics too. Both stood outside the mainstream; neither was a party regular, not even Foot when he became leader. Neither could be seen as a central integrating figure in the Labour movement on the model of Henderson, Morrison or Callaghan. Each claimed the Levellers as ancestors (though Foot, confusingly, also paid ancestral tribute to Oliver Cromwell). But perhaps their true historical habitat, if anywhere, was rather the French Enlightenment, with its varied philosophical strands. Foot versus Benn was, by extension, Voltaire versus Rousseau, even if Foot’s attacks on his rival were a good deal more rational than Voltaire’s on Rousseau in his vituperative pamphlet Sentiment des citoyens (1764). Just as the two French philosophes lie near each other in death in silent dialectic in the distinctly secular Paris Pantheon, so the two ageing icons of the Labour left exchanged muffled broadsides between Hampstead and Holland Park. Almost romantically, Foot upheld the British Parliament as the true champion of free thought and the rule of law, what Lloyd George had called ‘the great assize of the people’. Benn advanced the Rousseau-esque general will, the impulses of citizens born free who would create a wider freedom within a contrived collectivity. It should be said that Foot had from time to time written enthusiastically about Rousseau, and liked to quote his friend A. J. P. Taylor, who claimed that ‘Rousseau was the man who invented democracy.’ It might be added, however, that on his only visit to England, in 1766, Rousseau, unlike Voltaire or Montesquieu, found the country distinctly unappealing and not at all democratic. But in any case Foot’s main interest lay in Rousseau’s literary not his political writings – the Confessions, with their enthusiasm for ‘bringing women into the game’, not the ambiguous doctrines of the Social Contract. Barbara Castle had shrewdly noted the basic rationalism of the ‘collective Foot type’, but it was directed towards a model of free thought shaped by institutions and culture over the centuries, not a metaphysical notion of a general will. Benn’s vision, like Rousseau’s, aimed at forcing men (and women) to be free. Foot’s, like Voltaire’s, celebrated tolerance and open government, alongside unremitting enmity towards modern versions of l’Infame. For him, freedom always came from within.
The bitter argument between these different approaches dragged on into 1982. Benn was losing ground in tactical skirmishing in the National Executive, and Foot seemed to have made progress since the 1981 party conference. On the other hand, in what remained of the Labour Party throughout the country, Militant Tendency, linked with other far-left fragments, was becoming ever more vocal, and putting pressure on local parties and centre-right MPs due for reselection. Then a totally different issue emerged, which put the contention between Foot and Benn in the background, and at least for the moment put Foot’s leadership of the party in a quite dramatic new light.
On 2 April 1982 Argentine forces invaded without warning the British territory of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Their tiny British population of just over a thousand, mainly farmers, was thrust under enemy occupation. The diplomatic conflict between British and Argentine governments over sovereignty of the ‘Malvinas’, as the islands were known in Buenos Aires, had been active for some years. In 1977 a British vessel, the Endurance, was sent to Falkland waters when it was feared that Argentina might attempt an invasion, and Prime Minister Callaghan sent firm messages privately to the Argentine government warning them not to take military action.42 Foot warmly approved of Callaghan’s handling of the issue. The Argentine government dropped its belligerent posture, and the threat of war died away. However, under the Thatcher government there were ministerial talks over a diplomatic compromise, with Nicholas Ridley sent to Buenos Aires to consider possible ‘lease-back’ arrangements. Then the withdrawal of the Endurance from the region gave a signal which the Argentine government interpreted as indicating that the British government was drawing back from a confrontation. On 2 April the invasion of the Falklands, with the detention of its Governor Sir Rex Hunt, appeared to be the consequence.
British public opinion, which had known virtually nothing of the distant Falklands previously, except perhaps the appeal of its postage stamps to philatelists, was outraged. Newspapers raged in patriotic fury at this assault on a tiny British outpost by a fascist government headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri. Parliament was recalled for emergency session on a Saturday, 3 April. But no one reacted with greater passion than that famous ‘inveterate peacemonger’, the pillar of CND and many other neo-pacifist organizations, Michael Foot. He was, of course, no pacifist – how could the co-author of Guilty Men ever be seen as such? Although totally opposed to the use of nuclear weapons, he had backed the Foreign Secretary David Owen in Cabinet in 1978 when it was suggested that Britain send troops to Rhodesia to enforce a military solution upon the Ian Smith government during the critical years of the UDI. But the sheer spontaneous force of Foot’s reaction to the Falklands invasion rocked his party and the country. The Prime Minister, often hailed as ‘the Iron Maiden’, was shaken to the core.43
Foot’s speech, perhaps his last great parliamentary performance, galvanized the nation as much as the spectacle of Arthur Greenwood ‘speaking for England’ had done in 1939. He was adamant that the Falklanders should be defended and liberated. He poured scorn in ‘guilty men’ style on the role of the Foreign Office, where indeed the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and two ministerial colleagues were shortly to resign:
The Falkland Islanders have been betrayed. The responsibility for the betrayal rests with the government. The government must now prove by deeds – they will never be able to do it by words – that they are not responsible for the betrayal and cannot be faced with that charge. That is the charge, I believe, that lies against them. Even though the position and circumstances of the people who live in the Falkland Islands are uppermost in our minds – it would be outrageous if that were not the case – there is the longer-term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands but to people all over this dangerous planet.
While Mrs Thatcher appeared strangely halting and subdued, Foot’s fiery utterances won massive acclaim on the Conservative benches. Edward du Cann congratulated him on his speech; Patrick Cormack praised him strongly – ‘For once he spoke for Britain.’ The Labour benches were somewhat stunned. Denis Healey was away in Greece, and had also been ill. Foot had not consulted him beforehand: it emerged that for once he was a good deal less hawkish than his leader. Colleagues like Hattersley, Varley and Kaufman were astonished, but also delighted. On the left, there were protests from Tony Benn, who urged the country not to give way to generals and admirals and their backers in the media, and from others including Ian Mikardo. One of Foot’s closest friends, James Cameron, wrote of his surprise: ‘I am so aghast at the Falklands shambles that I expect you to be as intemperate as I.’ Tam Dalyell criticized Foot’s belligerence in a parliamentary party meeting, whereupon his leader snapped back at him, with rare ferocity, ‘I know a fascist when I see one.’44 Foot was also attacked by the left-wing editor of Tribune, Chris Mullin, but ignored it.
Foot’s response to the crisis was unpremeditated and highly personal. The day before the invasion of the Falklands he had heard about the possibility of it at a meeting of the Socialist International in France. François Mitterrand had pledged to him that the French socialists would strongly support Britain in resisting an attack. Labour had in any case been contemplating what its policy should be for smaller, contested territories like the Falklands, Belize, Malta and especially Gibraltar, which caused difficulties with Spanish socialist comrades.45 Most of Foot’s close colleagues, including Neil Kinnock, gave him strong support, as did old friends at the naval base in Plymouth. He continued to utter belligerent noises. On 14 April he strongly backed the British task force being sent to the South Atlantic, though he combined this with trying to pursue ‘peaceful methods of solution’ at the United Nations. When Labour dissidents objected, he wryly observed that ‘they were putting too great a strain on the good nature of General Galtieri’. The friendly Guardian wrote that for a second time Foot ‘stole the show’ through force of oratory and command of language.46
By 27 April, however, Foot was striking a more balanced, or perhaps equivocal, note, after pressure from Healey and Shadow Cabinet colleagues. He was now asking Mrs Thatcher to accede to a request from Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, the Peruvian Secretary-General of the UN, to desist from an escalation of military action. Britain, he said, should make sure it kept worldwide support by maintaining its allegiance to the UN Charter. The consensual mood had gone, and there were angry exchanges now with Mrs Thatcher, she and Foot each claiming the other was putting British lives at risk. Peter Jenkins, writing in the Guardian and on the verge of joining the SDP, noted how Foot the peacemonger had ‘draped himself in the Union Jack’, but that Foot and Healey were showing signs of abandoning Mrs Thatcher and finding a bolt-hole in ‘that warren of lost causes, the United Nations’.47 One factor was that Healey and others of the party right had a clearer understanding than Foot of the military risks involved, and saw that much would depend on technological assistance from American early-warning systems.
Once the war began, though, Foot was strong in supporting the British cause. Denis Healey’s excellent biographer Edward Pearce is scathing about Foot’s attitude: ‘The man content with the bombing of Belgrade [in 1999] could have no difficulties over the Falklands. Hazlitt would have been ashamed of him.’ Foot called this view simple appeasement; he also disputed the interpretation of Hazlitt.48 In the most controversial episode of the war, the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the Belgrano with many hundreds of lives lost, Foot gave the action astonishingly belligerent support which he always refused to disavow later on. His argument was that even if the Belgrano was sailing away from the battle zone, it might have reversed course and wreaked death and destruction on British soldiers in the way that was done to the British ship the Sir Galahad. That is to say, it was a preventive strike, like the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He ignored an adjournment vote on 20 May, when thirty-three Labour MPs disobeyed the whips and voted against the government on the Falklands issue; they were nearly all from the harder left: Benn, Frank Allaun, Norman Atkinson, Bob Cryer, Joan Maynard, Reg Race and Dennis Skinner among others, but also included Judith Hart and Ian Mikardo from the old Bevanite left, and one frequent ally, Leo Abse.49 It should be noted that unease about the sinking of the Belgrano was very far from confined to the hard left. The most powerful critic was Tam Dalyell, who had been a Callaghan supporter. Concern was voiced higher up the party, notably by Denis Healey. Foot later noted in a book published after the 1983 general election that he and Healey came to an agreement not to mention the Belgrano during the campaign.50
The one precaution that he took was to decline the offer of sharing military intelligence with the government, an offer which the Liberal leader David Steel accepted. Foot would support the government, but would not be embraced by them. It was a view supported by Neil Kinnock, who said it would ‘not have secured the cause of parliamentary accountability or, accordingly, the public interest’.51 But right until the war’s ending on 14 June, after the capture of the islands’ capital Port Stanley by British forces, Foot was consistent in his belief in the rightness of the task force being sent and the war being fought to the end. Some thought it was Foot’s finest hour as leader. It certainly shows him as courageous and determined to take a moral stand, whatever view is taken of the Falklands War, about which friends of Denis Healey had doubts from the start. But, sadly for the Labour Party, the Falklands war was not at all its finest hour. The jingoism of wartime seldom helps a party of the left, whether in the Boer War or the Suez crisis, nor did the bloody aftermath of Iraq do anything but undermine Labour in 2005–07. In 1982–83 Labour’s standing in the polls slumped, the Social Democrat challenge to the Tories withered away, and Mrs Thatcher reinforced her control over her own ranks. Foot’s role during the Falklands War had perhaps increased his public credibility, but it had also made a Conservative victory at the next election all the more certain. All that was left was to call for a Committee of Inquiry into the origins of the war and the government policy that led up to it. In that same year one was indeed set up, under the chairmanship of Lord Franks. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Foot was to call for a similar inquiry into the origins of that war, its legality and the relationship of the government to the security services. The terms of reference of the Hutton Inquiry into Iraq were limited solely to the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. But Hutton and Franks had one thing in common. Each was a total whitewash.
Nor was the Falklands issue much to Foot’s advantage in the continuing battle with the left for control of the Labour Party. This was taking place at two levels. Within the party, Foot was gaining a much greater semblance of control. He had broad support in the parliamentary party and the Shadow Cabinet, even though strong doubts remained about his credibility as leader. Colleagues noted his preference for marches and ‘demos’, and how most of his weekends seemed to be spent this way, rallying the faithful in some of the unions and amongst the left, but having a negative impact on the electorate as a whole.
Foot’s main interests focused on unemployment and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Monetarist policies had led to unemployment rising by 300,000 since November 1981, manufacturing output had fallen by 16 per cent and taxes had risen by over 6 per cent. That meant frequent appearances on Marches for Jobs to denounce Thatcherite monetarism, alongside demonstrations on behalf of CND, which enjoyed a new lease of life after 1979. For Foot these were basically moral issues, to be supported on principle without regard to what the opinion polls said. On 3 September 1982 he told a peace and disarmament rally at Bristol that a Labour government would unilaterally scrap Trident and Cruise missiles, and ‘the so-called independent nuclear deterrent’, en bloc. He used a public lecture in Cardiff (‘Byron and the Bomb’) to press home what he saw as the message he was given by Brezhnev during his visit to Moscow in 1981 – that the Russians were likely to remove all their SS20 missiles threatening central Europe, provided that the Americans never introduced Cruise missiles or Pershings into western Europe again. There was criticism that he used his power as leader to take revenge on multilateralists. Thus at the end of 1981 the unilateralist John Silkin replaced Brynmor John as defence spokesman, while Peter Archer replaced John Morris as Shadow Attorney-General: Brynmor John and Morris were both multilateralists, and in the Healey camp. Foot wrote a compelling article on the dangers of nuclear proliferation in The Times in December 1982, headed ‘Why The Times is Wrong’. His argument was certainly placed in far broader context than the conventional Atlanticism of The Times, effectively citing not only the views of eminent scientists like Lord Zuckerman, but even the public apprehensions of President Reagan about a nuclear accident that could annihilate mankind. Nearer home, Foot made his enthusiasm plain for the women demonstrators against American Cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire – a cause that Jill also strongly supported, on feminist as well as anti-nuclear grounds. He was urged not to be too vocal in this connection, since the miscellaneous, if courageous, women involved were believed to be electorally unpopular. But on Boxing Day 1982 Michael, Jill and their latest dog, Dizzy, a Tibetan terrier, turned up amongst the Greenham Common women and gave them Christmas presents.52
On the whole, things were going much better for him within the party by this time. In the TUC David Basnett of the GMB was showing signs of shoring up support, in cooperation with the distinctly mercurial Clive Jenkins of ASTMS. On the National Executive, Tony Benn was gradually being sidelined, in some measure because of the stern policy of retribution against his followers (a ‘witch-hunt’, in the view of the left) led by that fixer extraordinary John Golding, Foot’s extremely tough right-wing ally from the Post Office Engineers’ Union. ‘Benn’s star is no longer in the ascendant,’ wrote Keith Harper in the Guardian.53 Foot showed signs of being alarmed at the extent of the right-led purge, and tried to have an old comrade, Eric Heffer, appointed as Chairman of the NEC Home Policy Committee, where he had hoped to follow Benn. But John Golding and his friends were unflinching. A major factor here was the ignoring of the views of NUR members by Sid Weighell, the railwaymen’s union leader, in failing to vote for the miners’ nominee, Eric Clarke. Ignoring the niceties of democratic processes came as naturally to the Labour right as it did to the left. On 27 October a series of votes for the chairmen of NEC committees saw all the hard left eliminated from the list of names put forward by Jim Mortimer, the General Secretary. The hallowed left-wing names of Tony Benn, Judith Hart, Dennis Skinner, Audrey Wise and Frank Allaun, along with Lawrence Coates of the neo-Trotskyist Young Socialists, were all purged as committee chairmen. Benn was replaced as Chairman of the key Home Policy Committee by John Golding himself, to make sure that nothing was left to chance. Party loyalists noted that the Tory lead over Labour in the polls had been cut from 12 per cent to 4 per cent (41 per cent to 37 per cent), with the Liberals and Social Democrats added together coming a poor third with 19 per cent.54
As a leader trying to control and manage his party, Foot was thus showing some real success in key institutions at various levels. He was winning the internal dialectic with Benn. There were also promising new recruits coming into the party. One who impressed Foot was an articulate and attractive young barrister, Tony Blair, who unsuccessfully fought the Beaconsfield by-election in May 1982. Blair was passionately inspired by reading Foot’s book Debts of Honour two months after Beaconsfield. The following week, on 28 July, he sent Foot an emotional, handwritten twenty-two-page letter:
The first thing that struck me about D[ebts] of H[onour] was the prison of ignorance which my generation has constructed for itself. How many of us have read Hazlitt, Paine, Brailsford or even Swift (apart from Gulliver’s Travels) in the original? … What is startling to me, reading D of H, is that your creditors have something so enduring and enriching to say. I actually want to go out and explore these people first hand. It has shown me how narrow is our source of modern political inspiration. Look at Thatcher and Tebbit and how they almost take pride in the rigid populism of their political thought. There is a new and profoundly unpleasant Tory abroad – the Tory party is now increasingly given over to the worst of petty bourgeois sentiments – the thought that there is something clever in cynicism; realistic in selfishness; and the granting of legitimacy to the barbaric idea of the survival of the fittest. Even in our own party (though to a much lesser degree) there is a tendency against letting the mind roam free. In this I can’t help feeling the continual association of Marxism with Socialism is to blame … For me at university, left-wing politics was Marx, and the liberal tradition was either scorned or analysed only in terms of its influence on Marx. It is so abundantly plain to me when I read D of H that there is a treasure trove of ideas that I never imagined existed. We need to recover the searching radicalism of these people.
Blair was impressed too by the variety of Foot’s heroes, ‘not least of all, your father. It was as much about your politics as theirs. There was hope and vigour and something irrepressibly optimistic that struck a deep chord in me.’ He concluded that the salvation of the Labour Party could only come through ‘the spirit of D of H’. To this end, he urged Foot to drive Militant out, and to appeal to ‘a sense of purpose in the party’ on the basis of its programmes for creating jobs and preventing nuclear annihilation. On this basis, Blair apparently believed, Foot would surely win the next election. He quoted a friend of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who once wrote: ‘If I were not your friend I would wish to be the friend of the man who wrote your poetry.’ Blair added emotionally, ‘I feel the same about D of H.’
Foot remained much impressed by this idealistic, perhaps naïve, young man. In April 1983 he threw his influence behind Tony Blair when the nomination for the safe Labour constituency of Sedgefield in County Durham came up – although a factor was the wish of Foot and many others to prevent the nomination of an erratic Bennite, Les Huckfield.55 A talented young Scotsman, Gordon Brown, also carried Foot’s good wishes when his search for a constituency ended in nomination for the safe seat of Dunfermline East in 1983. Brown had battled with some success on the Scottish Labour Party Executive to defend Foot against hard-left critics like George Galloway. Within the confines of Labour’s tabernacle, the mood was somewhat better.
However, Foot’s attempt to make a personal impact on opinion in the country at large was manifestly not succeeding, despite Mrs Thatcher’s low standing until she was given a boost by the jingoism of the Falklands War. This was partly because Foot was not perceived as a likely or even a credible Prime Minister. If he was not electable, then in the current presidential mode of politics, in contrast to Attlee’s day, neither was his party. But Foot’s problems were largely the result of the continued party disarray, which would have defeated any leader at that time.
The main cause of this was Militant Tendency.56 This tiny group, whose guru was Ted Grant, originally of the Revolutionary Socialist League in Liverpool in 1955, had the aim of capturing the Labour Party for the cause of revolutionary socialism. Rival protest movements like the Trotskyists were treated with contempt. The Militant Tendency first made progress after the creation of its propagandist newspaper Militant in 1964, with Peter Taafe as editor. They captured the place reserved for the Young Socialists on Labour’s NEC, and by 1970 could claim perhaps two hundred activist members. They kept their distance from the sharp shift to the left in the late seventies, and had little contact with the various Bennite groups in the constituency parties. They made their base in Liverpool, which in the 1970s was an old, decaying industrial city. When Labour won a majority on the city council in 1983, for the first time in ten years, of the fifty-one Labour councillors elected, sixteen were identified with Militant, including the self-publicist figure of Derek Hatton. Even if formal membership of the group remained very small, there were signs of it extending its influence across the country; in London ‘Red Ted’ Knight, the leader of Lambeth Council, was a prominent figure.
Growing anxiety about Militant’s role after 1979 was far from confined to the party’s right. Until his election as leader, Michael Foot had stoutly resisted inquiries into, or purges of, left-wing dissident elements; he had fought hard against their being directed towards himself in the fifties. He had been mainly responsible for the Underhill Report on ‘entryism’ being shelved in 1975–76, and had hitherto refused to use what would have been a casting vote on a finely-balanced NEC to drive Trotskyists out of the party. When the Organization Committee chaired by Eric Heffer took no action on this issue, Foot did not respond. But he was now under attack for being ‘indecisive and content to drift’. Some journalists were far more ferocious. Peter Jenkins in the Guardian compared the Wembley Conference with Munich, and Foot’s walking stick with Chamberlain’s umbrella.57
Things could not go on like that. In November 1981 Foot decided to forswear the habits of a lifetime and to take disciplinary action. He was strongly backed by Neil Kinnock, who saw Militant as endorsing Lenin’s programme of ‘democratic centralism’. On 9 December Foot managed to get the agreement of a ten–nine majority of the Organizational Sub-Committee to have a full investigation into the activities of Militant. It would be conducted by the Party General Secretary, Ron Hayward, and the National Agent, David Hughes. A fudge proposed by Eric Heffer was defeated by ten to nine. In other moves, the wealthy globetrotting International Socialist Tariq Ali was refused membership of the party, while Joan Lestor, a sentimental soft-left figure, now strongly condemned Benn. He responded with the astonishing and baseless charge that Foot was contemplating a coalition with the Liberals and the Social Democrats; memories of the 1977 pact evidently had a long life. On 17 December, by the surprisingly large majority of nineteen votes to ten, the inquiry into Militant was confirmed by the NEC, and Hayward and Hughes began work.58
The issue of Militant overlapped with a quite distinct matter, the problem of selecting a Labour candidate for the decaying London dockside constituency of Bermondsey. There was constant trouble over the operations of the far left, whether called Militant or not, in a variety of constituencies, including some in Liverpool, notably Wavertree, where Derek Hatton of Militant sought the parliamentary nomination. In February 1982 there was actually a Militant member formally nominated as Labour candidate, Pat Wall in Bradford North, after the sitting member, Ben Ford, had been deselected by his local party; Bob Clay, another Militant member, was to follow by being nominated for Sunderland North in July.59
A particularly bad, if unlikely, case was in the Home Counties constituency of Hemel Hempstead, also in July. Here Robin Corbett, who had been the sitting MP until 1979, and who sought renomination, was under attack from militants in the constituency party because he had voted for John Silkin rather than Benn in the deputy leadership election. Even though nine out of twelve constituency branches voted for Corbett in the nomination process, he was left off the shortlist as a result of hard-left pressure, and Paul Boateng of the Greater London Authority was put forward instead. It was said of Boateng that ‘his strong ambition to get into Parliament has stifled his principles’. Foot was told about this, and the intimidation and shouting down of pro-Corbett delegates. But since the authorized members of the local party confirmed the wholly undemocratic nomination procedures by fifty-four to thirty-seven, he felt there was nothing he could do. In the event Boateng proved an unpopular candidate and came in third in the 1983 general election, whereas Corbett found another, much safer constituency in Birmingham, Erdington, and was comfortably elected. Boateng, however, later moved sharply right-wards, as many ex-Bennites did, and became a Treasury minister under Tony Blair.60
But Bermondsey was by far the most notorious case. Here the party was moribund, and Bob Mellish’s resignation as MP was anticipated, since he had been offered a post as Vice-Chairman of the Docklands Urban Development Corporation by Michael Heseltine in February 1980. This would trigger a by-election. Key members of the local party, the so-called ‘Bermondsey Mafia’, headed by John O’Grady, leader of Southwark Council, were in open warfare with younger militants in the constituency. The Roman Catholic Church was a major, if divisive, factor in an area with strong Irish representation. A young Australian emigrant, a prominent figure in the homosexual world, Peter Tatchell, had moved into the constituency in late 1978, and was adopted as prospective Labour candidate by the constituency party in mid-1981, defeating a former Labour Tribunite MP, Arthur Latham, by thirty-seven votes to thirty.61
From the start, Tatchell was highly controversial. Apart from his unusual background for a candidate for a working-class London constituency, he had written an article in a party tract, London Labour Briefing, in which he called for a ‘tent city’ to be set up in the grounds of County Hall, a sit-down in Parliament Square, and ‘a siege of Parliament’ on behalf of the unemployed, and advocated ‘new, more militant forms of extra-parliamentary opposition’. Tatchell behaved with dignity when the press attacked him as a homosexual and a draft-dodger in Australia, and survived some element of physical threat. There was a scurrilous doorstep campaign by local Liberals, who presented their candidate, Simon Hughes, as ‘the Straight Choice’ (in 2006, when running for the Liberal Democrat party leadership, Hughes revealed that he too had been an active homosexual). The atmosphere in general was unsavoury. Nevertheless, as a Labour candidate trying to appeal to the traditional electors of Bermondsey, many of whom were Catholic, let alone to the electorate more widely, Tatchell appeared an unelectable choice.
Foot was incandescent at the selection of Tatchell, and in the Commons on 3 December, perhaps unwisely, declared that he would never be endorsed as a candidate. What made matters worse was that by a slip of the tongue, perhaps reflecting the pressure he was under, Foot actually said ‘member’ instead of ‘candidate’. In any event, whatever he meant to say, he was in error. It was the NEC, not the leader, which could debar prospective parliamentary candidates, and then only if there had been procedural irregularities. At an uneasy meeting with Tatchell in the Commons on 7 December, Foot told him that his London Labour Briefing article was clearly anti-parliamentary, not merely extra-parliamentary, and asked him to stand down. That afternoon the NEC passed by twelve to seven a motion proposed by John Golding and seconded by Denis Healey that Tatchell’s candidature should not be endorsed. Foot observed that Tatchell would be ‘an electoral disaster’. A few days later the NEC narrowly carried, by fifteen to fourteen, a motion refusing to let Tatchell put his case in person, with Neil Kinnock strongly backing Foot, but three soft-left members, Joan Lestor, Judith Hart and Alex Kitson, voting against him. Bob Mellish, after a talk with Foot, said that he would not be resigning as an MP after all. It was then that the committee of inquiry into Militant headed by Ron Hayward and David Hughes was set up.62
Matters were far from straightforward. Tatchell had apparently been selected correctly, and he was not a member of Militant Tendency. In any case, Militant claimed it was no more than a legally published newspaper, and did not have members as such. The distinction between what Tatchell wrote and what many others, including Michael Foot in the past, had said about the relation of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary activity was not easy to define. Tatchell had not advocated violence. Foot’s attitude looked like an attack on Tatchell’s right of free speech in response to what was undeniably a very minor publication indeed. Tatchell, in two effective articles in the Observer on 10 and 17 January 1982, cited technically unlawful activities which the Labour Party had supported at the time – Poplar’s Poor Rate rebellion in 1921 and, in the very recent past, the actions of Labour councillors in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, who were surcharged after refusing to implement the Conservative Housing Finance Act in 1972 because of the severe impact on the rents paid by working-class people. The real illegality, Tatchell argued, came from the capitalist classes seeking to bludgeon the socialist left and the working class in general. Foot received a torrent of letters of bitter protest from left-wingers in the constituency parties, including the future MP Kate Hoey from Dulwich. ‘You, comrade, are a walking disaster’, wrote one fraternal member.63 Foot also had a pained letter from a colleague on the soft left, Joan Lestor, who pointed out that Tatchell was not a Militant: ‘Michael, your position is crucial. You can’t be seen to be censoring a guy like Tatchell – it is not in keeping with your whole history in the Movement. It will be seen as sacrificing someone that the Movement will one day need in order to placate those that many feel we can do without.’64 This view was predictably echoed by Eric Heffer and Ian Mikardo, while Tony Benn was passionately angry.
The situation in Bermondsey went from bad to worse. In the May 1982 local elections, three old Labour opponents of Tatchell ran for the Riverside ward as ‘Independent Labour and Tenants’ candidates’, with the support not only of Southwark Council leader O’Grady but also of Bob Mellish, the sitting Labour MP. Labour’s vote fell to 22 per cent. Mellish was then expelled from the Labour Party, only promptly to break his word and announce in August that he was taking up his new post with the Docklands Urban Development Corporation after all, which would mean a by-election.65 Since it was known that the SDP/Liberal support in Bermondsey was growing, the difficulty for Labour was considerable, and Foot seemingly helpless. Tatchell was eventually overwhelmingly re-endorsed in a reconvened nomination meeting on 9 January 1983. Foot sent a written formal confirmation, and the NEC approved it. The most Foot could do now was to delay the by-election as long as possible.
However, his campaign against Militant received a strong boost in July, when the Hayward – Hughes report finally appeared. It got around the difficulty of disciplining a movement that claimed not to exist by proposing a ‘Register of Non-Affiliated Groups’, all of which had to be compatible with Clause 2 of the party constitution, defining the basis of membership and affiliation. Foot threw all his authority behind this report; the Tribune group of MPs backed him by thirty-nine to twenty-seven. Foot’s lengthy statement in Labour Weekly on 10 September fiercely attacked Militant for democratic centralism, entryism and using the democratic machinery of the Labour Party to undermine that democracy. At party conference the sins of Militant were spelled out, and a motion to endorse the register was overwhelmingly carried, 5,087,000 to 1,851,000, with all the big unions in favour.66
Foot made a powerful intervention, drawing a distinction between the Bennite left and dissenting movements with which he himself had been involved earlier in his career:
I also agree with the proposition that those who wish to present particular views to the party have a right not only to argue their case – Marxist ideas, if you like, Marxist ideas have always been a matter for debate in our labour movement as they have been in the labour movements of the Continent of Europe and elsewhere – but that all such ideas are to be debated in our party, and that anybody who said we should suppress them would perhaps be suppressing the very ideas of the future. I am absolutely opposed to that. But when people say to me that Militant Tendency are just like Stafford Cripps or Aneurin Bevan, or the Salvation Army … it is not like that at all. It is very different. There was no secret conspiracy with Stafford Cripps or Aneurin Bevan: they wanted everybody to know what they were doing. [Applause.] There were no false colours about the way in which they went about propagating their views. They were accused of trying to form a party within a party, but it was not true. It was not true, but in this case it is true, and that is a big difference.
These observations were greeted by delegates with loud applause, but what the effects of this decision would be was unclear. Foot hoped that people ‘linked with Militant’ would be deterred, but who they were seemed almost impossible to define. In the end, only five people were actually be expelled from the Labour Party: the known editorial board of Militant, Peter Taafe, Ted Grant, Lynne Walsh, Clare Doyle and Keith Dickinson. It was a token gesture and no more. Even expelling the five was difficult. The only clear grounds for expulsion from the party were working for a candidate opposed to a Labour candidate, and none of them had done that: the Militant moles had all been burrowing away from within. Foot had a report prepared on the legal aspects of expulsion by John Smith’s old university friend Derry Irvine, with the actual drafting done by his junior, Tony Blair, setting out the reasons for taking action, but also spelling out the legal difficulties. The five Militants challenged the party in the High Court over their expulsion. They had a strong case, and eventually lost, so Irvine believed, simply on a legal technicality. The National Executive confirmed the expulsion of these five – but only these five – from the party by nineteen to nine on 24 February 1983, the day before the Bermondsey by-election.67
Militant in general, and Bermondsey in particular, had done colossal harm to Foot’s leadership. A by-election in the neighbouring constituency of Peckham in October 1982, won by Harriet Harman, saw a large fall in the Labour majority. The dénouement came when the Bermondsey by-election eventually took place, on 25 February 1983. There was a row beforehand between Tatchell’s supporters and Labour’s National Agent David Hughes, when Hughes demanded that election literature should not be printed by Cambridge Heath Press, with which Militant was linked. Jim Mortimer had to order the local party to obey. The press printed a highly embarrassing photograph of Foot welcoming Tatchell at the House of Commons. There was talk of strong opposition to the candidate in Southwark’s union branches and Labour clubs. In the event, the Labour campaign was a catastrophe. With a 44 per cent swing from Labour, at a time when the now formal Liberal-SDP Alliance was trailing in the polls nationally, Simon Hughes (Liberal) won the seat with a 9,319 majority.68 A leftish figure, Hughes was to hold the seat comfortably beyond the 2005 general election. Peter Tatchell disappeared from Labour politics for ever, though not from public controversy, especially over gay rights. Foot had fought with courage and determination to hold his ground in Bermondsey. But his early tactical errors, plus the wider feebleness of grassroots Labour in such a constituency, made his task hopeless. Comments on air by colleagues like Gerald Kaufman were less than helpful. Paradoxically, one of the few to urge loyal support for Foot as leader was Tony Benn.
Buoyed up by Labour’s disasters, Margaret Thatcher called a general election for 9 June 1983. It was a challenge which the party had long been dreading. Foot knew that Labour was bound to lose.69 People on his staff were not optimistic, but would be shocked at the scale of the defeat. Of course, morale and organization in the con stituencies were in much disarray after all the troubles associated with Benn, Militant and the hard left. Demography was cutting away the sociological base of Old Labour, with the shrinking of manufacturing and the drift to the suburbs or outlying communities leaving just client groups like council house tenants and local government employees. Centrally, Labour began private opinion polling again at the start of 1983, through Robert Worcester’s MORI, which had been used by Wilson and (less happily) Callaghan in the 1970s, but which stopped being used after the defeat in 1979. This may have been partly for financial reasons, with Labour facing large debts after the cost of establishing their new headquarters in Walworth Road, where rents and rates were £250,000 a year higher than in Transport House. But it was also partly because the left, who dominated the NEC after the 1979 election, did not really believe in polls, and felt they were merely a consumerist attempt to emulate the meretricious approach of the Tories. When Worcester did start his polling in February 1983, and told Norman Atkinson, the left-wing Party Treasurer and MP for Tottenham, that Labour had the support of only 26 per cent of the public, 14 per cent behind the Tories, Atkinson was extremely angry.70 Foot himself at first took little interest in polls, an attitude he shared with Aneurin Bevan: psephology was for Oxford dons, not the real world. But he had become more interested in polling after 1979, as a guide to what the electors were thinking. On the other hand, since his own two main priorities, trade union policy and unilateral disarmament, were negatives with the voters, Foot’s response to MORI’s information was limited.
What all the evidence did show was that apart from a general lack of confidence in Labour handling the nation’s problems, there was also a massive lack of confidence in Michael Foot. He was thought to be neither competent in making and carrying out policy, nor in control of his party. In 1981 only 18 per cent of the electorate were satisfied with his performance as leader, and things hardly improved thereafter. MORI’s private poll for Labour on 16 May 1983, three weeks before polling, showed Foot’s satisfaction level running at ‘very well’ 6 per cent, ‘fairly well’ 21 percent, ‘not very well’ 27 per cent, and ‘not at all well’ the highest of all with 39 per cent.71 Nor did he show up well on television, as opposed to his sparkling performances as a mass orator: in an interview on Weekend World with Brian Walden, Foot appeared rambling. At the start of 1983 there had been much disaffection with his leadership amongst Labour MPs, voiced by Members like Jeff Rooker, Dale Campbell-Savours and Robert Kilroy-Silk, and also the more senior figure of Gerald Kaufman. There was talk of getting Denis Healey moved in as Labour’s leader to fight the next general election. After the Bermondsey disaster, the stream of criticism was turning into a torrent.
A critical test had been a by-election on 24 March in the northern town of Darlington, a seat narrowly won by Labour in the general election of 1979, with a majority of 1,052. Defeat there would make Foot’s position unsustainable. In fact, Labour fought a good, old-fashioned ‘Old Labour’ election, focusing not on nuclear weapons but on the party’s traditional domestic agenda. Its candidate, Ossie O’Brien, was a middle-aged local politician of moderate views, not remotely a ‘bedsit Trot’, and he got home with a solid majority of 2,412. Since many thought the main point of the coming election would be to ensure that Labour remained in second place as the main challenger to the Tories, it was significant that the SDP candidate in Darlington was back in third place. Run by the youthful Francis Beckett, Labour’s was a remarkably enthusiastic campaign, resulting in a turnout of 80.1 per cent, a figure of 1950-type proportions. It was a boost for Old Labour, but also its swansong. Not only was Foot destined not to remain leader for long, but poor O’Brien was to be defeated in the general election in June, after only two months at Westminster.72 His term in Parliament was so short that he did not even appear in the 1984 Who’s Who.
Labour was ill-prepared for a contest in every way. Its General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, was in no sense an electioneer, and though personally pleasant, was poor at public relations. Much of the electoral organization was shored up by the Assistant National Agent, Joyce Gould, reputed to be on the left. There were only sixty-two Labour agents in post: even in 1979, a bad year, there had been sixty-eight. At the centre there was a lack of preparation in making key appointments: the highly competent Nick Grant was appointed Head of Communications only in February 1983. For the election, younger, rising politicians were brought into the campaign team: Charles Clarke, John Reid, Patricia Hewitt; the staff was eventually built up to over thirty. However, Joyce Gould was to describe this unwieldy team as a ‘farce’, with trade union leaders with little expertise in running elections playing too large a part, and much suspicion between the different groups.73 Another serious but inescapable problem was that Labour was likely to suffer from the redistribution of constituency boundaries. The party challenged the implementation of these changes in the courts, but in the end had to settle for defeat, after much expenditure of money. Foot’s own constituency would transform from Ebbw Vale to Blaenau Gwent, losing the Rhymney Valley (which went to Ted Rowlands’s seat of Merthyr Tydfil) but gaining Brynmawr and Abertillery, which made it perhaps even more rock-solid for Labour.74
Foot himself was enthusiastic about the campaign, but his team seemed unable to establish any sense of priorities about policy or strategy. He seemed to regard the coming election as part of a long-term campaign of indoctrination, not a contest to win power. He could not understand how the Tories appeared likely to win with unemployment at such a high level. In fact, ever since Callaghan’s speech about ‘spending your way out of depression’ to party conference in 1976, price inflation had been replacing unemployment and growth as the main economic concern. It was a historic shift in priorities which the 1945 generation found hard to fathom. Even more unintelligible to Labour was that more trade unionists seemed likely to vote Conservative than Labour (which was indeed the case, the figure standing at 33 per cent Tory voters at the start of the campaign). As for unilateral nuclear disarmament, MORI repeatedly told Foot that this was deeply unpopular with the voters, but he ignored their advice. On 6 June, just before polling day, the figures showed that only 22 per cent of the electors thought disarmament was the main issue in any case.75
Perhaps the worst handicap from which Labour suffered was entirely self-inflicted, namely its election manifesto. Writing it was still under the control of the National Executive, despite the defeat of the Bennites since 1981, and the Executive’s views were shaped by conference decisions. Evidently the manifesto would include all the main demands of the left, including a non-nuclear defence policy, although here Healey was able to modify the previously starkly unilateralist statement on Britain’s nuclear-armed Polaris submarine by saying that it must form part of a multilateral package of disarmament measures. A pre-election book, Renewal: Labour Britain in the 1980s, edited by Gerald Kaufman, contained a piece by Foot denouncing Mrs Thatcher for blindly following American defence policies. These included having a ‘dual track’ decision on stationing Cruise and Pershing missiles in Britain without any British control, standing pat on Ronald Reagan’s ‘zero option’ of no further Western arms deployments in return for the Russians abandoning their missile programmes (a very unlikely prospect), and failing to ratify SALT II, the proposed arms limitation policy discussed by Carter and Brezhnev (and Callaghan) in 1979. On Europe, Foot won his battle to have a pledge to pull Britain out of the EC within the lifetime of a single Parliament (the word ‘immediately’ was dropped). At home, the economy would be expanded with more public ownership. Another hostage to fortune was the pledge that a National Economic Assessment of the state of employment and investment would be made, as a result of which unemployment, currently stable at around three million (after much creative accounting in presenting the figures), would be reduced to one million within five years, a proposal that originated from one of Foot’s speeches. The manifesto as unveiled on 29 March was said by the press to be the most left-wing Labour programme since 1945. Entitled The New Hope for Britain, it was a potpourri of every Labour policy statement since 1979. At thirty-seven pages, it was not overlong; as Roy Hattersley wrote, ‘it only seemed interminable’, including a miscellany of proposals from the abolition of the House of Lords to an end to fox-hunting.76 Gerald Kaufman’s description of it as the longest suicide note in history soon went the rounds.
The origins of this manifesto caused much bad blood afterwards, since it was believed, by Kaufman and others, that the published version was in fact only a draft, and that it should have been approved by the Shadow Cabinet. Kaufman had been assured by Foot that it would be. However, this did not happen. A day or two later Foot told his colleagues that it was indeed the final version. Only Peter Shore protested. John Golding, a strong figure, observed bleakly that it didn’t matter, since Labour was going to lose badly anyway. A crushing electoral defeat and the far left would be finished, perhaps for ever. At the start of May, Kaufman went on his own initiative to see Foot, after a sleepless night, and told him he should resign as leader in favour of Healey. Foot replied with courtesy that it was too late, which it probably was. He and Kaufman parted company on the most civil of terms, a sense of impending doom having settled on them both. With these inauspicious preliminaries, Labour’s electoral bandwagon lurched unsteadily and unconvincingly on its way.77
Foot threw himself into the campaign with astonishing energy for a man of nearly seventy who walked with a stick. Jill had done her best to help by buying him several suits from Jermyn Street tailors (possibly including Herbie Frogg of donkey jacket fame) and working on his television style. But the campaign planning was a total shambles. There was talk of the Conservative minister Cecil Parkinson offering to give Labour some organizational help in order to ward off the threat of the Liberal-SDP Alliance. The press commented on Labour’s ‘wilful amateurishness’.78 Jim Mortimer was ill at ease in his unfamiliar role. The press office was a mess, with a skilled professional like Tom McCaffrey unable to impose control. Michael Foot made matters worse on this front by regularly departing from prepared press releases and speaking to journalists off the cuff and at length, although London press conferences went rather better. Whereas Mrs Thatcher organized an exclusive interview on ITV, looking commanding, no one at Labour headquarters thought of arranging such a thing for Foot. Instead he appeared looking dishevelled on a windblown Welsh hillside.
The campaign planners, directed by the National Agent and his staff, made matters far worse by dispatching both Foot and Healey all around the country, to locations great and small. Foot visited in total over seventy marginal seats. He spoke at scores of meetings, usually with a very small entourage, perhaps only McCaffrey or Sue Nye, with him, and inevitably his dog Dizzy. It was sometimes difficult to keep in touch with what was happening in other places, and he and Healey occasionally got into difficulties with their respective, and sometimes conflicting, presentations of party policy. Foot looked relatively fresh after it all, but Healey (himself aged sixty-five) seemed exhausted afterwards, and complained bitterly at the speaking schedule imposed on him.79
Some of Foot’s campaign visits were almost senseless in their indirection. One particularly unfortunate one, well covered in the Conservative press, was of an aged-looking Foot visiting an old people’s home in Banbury in Oxfordshire. The congruence of visitor and residents was a point easily made. In any event, Banbury was not a marginal, but had a safe Conservative majority, and there was no point in Foot wasting his time by going there at all.80 He and Sue Nye had a difficult moment with a hundred angry fox-hunters in Holmfirth in Yorkshire, backed up by foxhounds and terriers. That may have done Foot no harm with core Labour supporters – he hated the cruelty of hunting with dogs anyway – but there was again no value to be gained by being there.81 Throughout, Foot found his progress around the constituencies hampered by the presence of four Special Branch officers, which he particularly disliked. He did best in ‘walkabouts’, despite a characteristic tongue-tied shyness in meeting the voters. Sometimes attempted meetings with electors could turn into ‘a media scrimmage’, although it was certainly not Foot alone to whom that applied. One pleasant touch came when a student in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy offered him a copy of Gulliver’s Travels to sign. He did so with much charm, and gave the audience a short discourse on Swift and how he had prophesied the existence of the bomb. It was one of the rare moments in the campaign when Foot was truly at ease.82
Foot was personally very warmly received. The affection widely felt for Labour’s Grand Old Man was manifest, and he drew large audiences. But his speeches were invariably invocations to the faithful, to a loyal but diminishing core of old Labour supporters. Nothing much was done to appeal to new voters or to those who had not voted Labour last time. The conversion of Tories was not the point. It was in many respects an old-fashioned campaign, a kind of mixture of Attlee and Nye Bevan. Foot was the last of the party leaders, as Bob Worcester was to observe, who combined the occasional snappy ‘soundbite’ with travels around the country.83 At times his progress resembled Attlee being driven erratically down country lanes by his wife in a battered old Humber saloon in the 1951 election. On other occasions there was flamboyant mass oratory that drew large and affectionate audiences to their feet. Towards the close of the campaign Foot addressed sixty thousand people in a People’s March for Jobs. It was the kind of event where he felt himself to be in his natural habitat.
But elections were no longer won at mass meetings, demos or protest marches, but in well-managed press conferences, and especially on the television screen, where passages were inserted into speeches to appeal to the unseen audience of millions, without regard for the much smaller audience who happened to be present. As far as Labour’s style was concerned, the medium was wrong, and so, often, was the message. Foot’s election speeches were too often full of references to historical events with which his audience was quite unfamiliar, or allusions to authors of whom less cultured or educated voters had never heard. An extreme case was his speech at Oxford Town Hall on 19 May, where he suddenly switched back in time and referred to the Oxford by-election just after Munich in 1938, an event that took place long before most of his mainly undergraduate audience were born. He launched an extraordinary attack on Lord Hailsham, now Lord Chancellor and (as Quintin Hogg) the pro-Chamberlain candidate then – ‘and he’s still in the government’. Foot’s assault was close to libellous, but Hailsham preferred to be tolerant and patronizing – ‘Poor old Worzel Gummidge.’84 Throughout, Foot kept campaigning on the issue of the bomb, and came out well in another discussion with Brian Walden on ITV’s Weekend World. But it did Labour little good. Asked whether they felt Britain would not be properly defended under a Labour government, 53 per cent agreed, and only 32 per cent disagreed. A television newsflash which featured Foot with the American harmonica player Larry Adler and the popular actress Miriam Karlin was not a bonus, since it showed them all happily singing ‘The Red Flag’. That did not play well in middle England.
Throughout the campaign Foot was mercilessly pilloried by right-wing journalists like Jean Rook in the Daily Express and George Gale. He was depicted as ‘a sad old man in the wrong place at the wrong time’. A particularly tasteless episode was a Young Conservative rally attended by Mrs Thatcher which was regaled by a television comedian, Kenny Everett. He urged his audience, ‘Let’s bomb Russia! Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away!’ The Tory throng roared with helpless laughter.85
Foot put in a massive effort. He began the campaign with major speeches in Glasgow (with reference to Keir Hardie), St George’s Hall, Liverpool (reference to his own time there), Portsmouth (reference to post-1945 reconstruction) and Cardiff (much reference to Nye Bevan). His most effective theme, about which he cared passionately, was unemployment, which 79 per cent of voters thought was a key issue. However, many of them also felt that unemployment was likely to go up faster under a Labour government. Foot seemed to get better as the campaign went on: a MORI private poll on 21 May showed his satisfaction level had gone up six points in four weeks.86
But Labour’s campaign was constantly disrupted by problems. Most of them arose from nuclear disarmament, on which Foot and Healey had concocted a precarious compromise between their contrasting positions. Healey had insisted that Polaris should not be scrapped unilaterally, but thrown into general disarmament negotiations. On 23 May Foot had to try to clear up confusion that arose when he and Healey had said contrary things on the topic. Healey, and also Peter Shore, had been careful to distance themselves from a commitment to unilateralism; Healey insisted that Labour would not get rid of Polaris if disarmament negotiations failed, whereas Foot had said the reverse. Even to a friendly journalist like Ian Aitken, Foot seemed ‘evasive’, but he had to say reluctantly that Polaris would only disappear after ‘adequate’ Soviet concessions. In effect he came to agree with Healey – only for his defence spokesman, John Silkin, to say the opposite. A statement of Foot’s to Channel Four on Polaris brought the headline ‘Labour Totters on the Brink’ in the Guardian.87 A more direct challenge came from the former Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, who roundly condemned a unilateralist approach in a speech to his Cardiff constituents.88 This left Foot and party headquarters angry and nonplussed. The truth was that a manifesto which claimed that ‘unilateralism and multilateralism went hand in hand’ was close to being meaningless. Quite unexpectedly, Foot also had to cover up for Healey, less belligerent than himself over the Falklands, who had accused Mrs Thatcher of ‘glorying in slaughter’. One personally difficult episode concerned Jill Craigie, not a politician herself, but under constant media pressure. After badgering from journalists, she appeared to say that Michael, who was almost seventy, was going to retire soon after the election, if he became Prime Minister.89 This aroused alarm, including the spectre of the demon Benn in number 10, and was negotiated only with much difficulty.
No one expected Labour to win. Bob Worcester’s sad judgement was that the party had no hope of winning in 1983 anyway, and that under the leadership of Michael Foot it could never win any election any time.90 But the results were calamitous, worse than anyone anticipated. Foot romped home in the redrawn Blaenau Gwent constituency with his majority at 23,625, larger than ever, swollen by the redistribution which gave him extra voters in Brynmawr, thereby helping to depress the Labour vote in Brecon and Radnor, which fell to the Liberals. But in the country as a whole results showed a massive swing against Labour, and a loss of sixty seats. Foot insisted that unilateralism had not damaged the party’s cause, though he did grieve for the defeat of Albert Booth in Barrow-in-Furness (where Polaris submarines were made), and wondered whether in fact it had in that case.91 Another casualty was Tony Benn in the redistributed Bristol South, which brought rather less grief. Foot delivered a courageous speech to his faithful electors in Ebbw Vale and then drove home to Hampstead through the night to see what future he might be able to salvage.
It was a landslide. The new House showed a total of 396 Conservatives against only 209 Labour and twenty-six for the Liberal-SDP Alliance. But the total of seats masked the full extent of Labour’s defeat. While the Conservatives polled 43.5 per cent of the votes, Labour managed to win a mere 28.3 per cent, with the Alliance on 26 per cent. Labour had only just clung on to second place. The immediate need was to ensure that it would not slip down to third. It was easily Labour’s worst result since it had become an organized nationwide party in 1918. Even in the disaster of 1931, Labour’s share of the poll had been 30.8 per cent. Foot kept cheerful. As he prepared to speak to a miners’ rally in Northumberland he insisted, ‘It’s only a setback.’ But no one believed him. Private Eye depicted him on its front cover, predictably, waving his stick as he took Dizzy for a walk on Hampstead Heath. The balloon from his mouth had him saying, ‘Hang on, I haven’t finished yet!’ But the cruel lead line below read ‘Not Waving but Drowning’.92
Foot now had to make up his mind about the future. In fact, union leaders, and more particularly Moss Evans and Clive Jenkins, promptly made it up for him. They decided on the evening following the election that Foot should go, and that Neil Kinnock should replace him.93 It was the last, decisive political throw by union barons. Jenkins saw his ASTMS executive the next day to tell them that Foot had resigned. After dinner with Michael and Jill at Pilgrims Lane that night, Jenkins went further and sent a press release to ITV’s Weekend World. It was all quite humiliating, with Foot seemingly a pawn in a game to ensure that the unions controlled the nomination, and that centre-right candidates like Hattersley or conceivably Healey would be sidetracked. Tom McCaffrey knew nothing of Jenkins’s manoeuvres, and was furious.94 The leader’s office staff were dumbstruck. As he bathed his wounds, Foot went with Jenkins and their wives on a cheerful visit to the cinema to see Richard Eyre’s political satire The Ploughman’s Lunch. Filmed in the aftermath of the Falklands War, it dealt with the rewriting of history to suit political purposes. It would be hard to find a more appropriate theme for Foot’s preoccupations in the twilight of his career.
The contest for his successor between Kinnock and Hattersley began immediately, with the unions already having stacked the odds in Kinnock’s favour. Foot’s political obituaries were set out in the broadsheets. Even in his resignation, the leader had been unable to lead. There was a last spat with Mrs Thatcher over the award of honours, not over a scandalous list like Harold Wilson’s notorious lavender-blue-paper nominations in 1976, but Foot’s proposal of twenty-seven new Labour peers. Mrs Thatcher promptly turned almost all of them down, even though they included eminent figures like Douglas Jay and despite the huge inbuilt Tory majority in the Lords. The former SDLP leader Gerry Fitt was one of the handful who scraped through. After that, even though he remained leader until party conference, and had the ordeal of addressing it on the election defeat, Michael Foot was effectively gone, off the front bench for ever.
The universal view of the commentators at the time, and of historians later, was that Foot had been totally miscast as leader, and that his years of leadership were disastrous for his party. This view needs qualification, but it is difficult to dissent from it. It is certainly a great exaggeration to say that Foot’s period began Labour’s recovery. To end up with the worst result in Labour’s history, a major defection of important figures to the SDP, and a mood of disaffection and dismay throughout the constituency parties, cannot be anything other than a chronicle of failure. It is true that Foot’s time did see the first significant moves to try to curb the hard left. The register which saw the expulsion of five Militants was a symbolic start, but no more than that. It took the brutal head-on confrontation which Neil Kinnock adopted at the 1985 party conference, along with a fundamental rethinking of unpopular policies on public ownership and more socialism, Europe and, most of all, the bomb, for Labour to clamber out of the trough. But Foot was far too tolerant and gentle in style to engage in any of these. However, almost certainly no one else could have succeeded either in 1980–83, so divided was Labour at that time. It is an illusion to imagine that Denis Healey, who took remarkably little interest in Labour’s internal squabbles over reselection and the like, and who had a genius for keeping intellectually aloof, would have been any more effective. It required the débâcle of 1983 for anyone to lead the party back. Neil Kinnock was one important participant who felt that in any case Foot had failed to receive the loyalty he might have expected from his own supporters. Many of the Tribune group who had persuaded him to run for the leadership failed to see the obligation to back him once he had been elected, and he suffered grievously for this.95
Foot was never elected as leader in order to win an election. To see him as a possible Prime Minister, then or ever, is to use the wrong yardstick. His election campaign in 1983 was always doomed to failure. His leadership rather was moral, educative, in the deepest sense cultural. In the crisis of 1980–83 his role was to keep the party together, and affirm its core values. This he did with patent sincerity and literary flair. In perspective, he clearly won the battle of the socialisms with Tony Benn. It was the constitutional, rational, non-doctrinaire model that triumphed, even if a centralizing Westminster and Whitehall were not necessarily the instruments for it, and Labour embraced devolution. Even in 1983 many felt that Foot had succeeded, since Benn could never be Labour’s leader. In later life Benn became a much-admired celebrity on TV chat shows, and travelling around the land reading out extracts from his diary made him the darling of the halls. He bequeathed his personal charisma, his diaries sold well, and the media lapped him up. Foot’s legacy was less spectacular – a great party, ailing but still alive, which others could shortly revive. In that sense, without Foot (certainly without Kinnock) there could have been no Blair. Just as Foot’s hero Edmund Burke had appealed from the Old Whigs to the New, so Michael Foot presented the face of Old Labour to New. In time, many felt, Gordon Brown might make the connection successfully. Some derided Foot, the ‘old bibliophile’, for his obsession with history, his intellectual involvement with Hazlitt, Byron or Wells, which often seemed sharper than his grasp of contemporary issues. But Foot had persuaded enough of his contemporaries that his kind of socialism was a faith worth fighting for; in the years after 1990, as the inevitable reaction against Thatcherism set in, his vision seemed increasingly attractive.
In the end it was the Tories, not Labour, who seemed to plummet into almost inexorable decline, and who would lose three elections running. As leaders of their party John Major, William Hague and Michael Howard did far worse than Michael Foot. In 2005 the Tories’ tally of seats was eleven below Labour’s in 1983. Opinion analysts showed that in 1997 the Tories were so unpopular that Labour would have defeated them even under a Foot leadership. Labour was not much of a machine in 1983. But there survived a ghost in the machine – the democratic socialism whose flame Foot had kept alive in the dark years. His favourite politician was Charles James Fox, who had kept the liberal ideal alive during decades of opposition, for the Whig Lord Grey and the reformers to reclaim after the war with Napoleon. Memory of Fox was the inspiration behind the triumph of Reform in 1832. In a similar way, Foot and his comrades lay behind Labour’s renewal in 1997. After retiring as leader, Foot would no longer be a major politician. But he would still have a role as author, journalist, polemicist, man of letters, icon of public life. Nye Bevan had famously said, ‘Tell me your truth and I’ll tell you mine.’ Like Saint-Simon, Michael Foot still had to get up because he had work to do, to make very sure that his truth kept marching on.