Michael Foot’s habitual response to electoral setbacks was to write a book. Not for him the comfortable, sometimes semi-corrupt directorships or consultancies of the defeated ranks of Majorism or ‘New Labour’, still less a peerage for services rendered. In 1955, after losing his seat at Devonport, he had found solace in writing about Jonathan Swift. In 1979, after the defeat of the government of which he was Deputy Prime Minister, he had turned to publishing Debts of Honour. Thus it was after his heavy defeat as party leader in 1983. He immediately began to write up an account of the ideological contest embodied in the general election. The title he chose was Another Heart and Other Pulses, taken from a sonnet by Keats. He also contemplated a much more substantial study of one of his admired authors of prose or poetry: either William Hazlitt or Lord Byron appeared to be a likely subject.
However, he was still Member of Parliament for Blaenau Gwent, and there was much to do in protesting against what he saw as the manifold iniquities of the Thatcher government. Foot had stepped down from the National Executive after he ceased to be leader, but there were many who saw him as likely to play a significant, if subterranean, role in advising and encouraging his successor Neil Kinnock, comfortably elected over Roy Hattersley in the 1983 leadership election, with most of the large unions solidly in his favour. The results announced at the party conference showed Kinnock receiving 71 per cent of the votes in the electoral college and Hattersley 19 per cent, with small votes for Eric Heffer and Peter Shore. Kinnock was a formidable politician in many ways, but also a neophyte, aged just forty-one, with no experience at all of office. Even in his modest projected role as Foot’s PPS at Employment back in 1974, his role had been a shadowy one. Certainly Foot and Kinnock were bound by the closest ties of personal affection and ideological affinity. Both were on the left, anti-European as conventionally understood, and staunch supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both were socialists whose all-time political hero was another Gwent MP, Nye Bevan. Many saw Kinnock, Member for Bedwellty, next door to Ebbw Vale, as the eventual heir to the legendary Mantle of Nye, and he did not altogether disavow this formidable inheritance. He was indeed reputed to be producing a book on Bevan, perhaps in the form of a new edition of In Place of Fear. Foot, his MP, who had originally encouraged him to enter Labour politics, had resigned in such a way as to make Kinnock’s succession to the leadership a near certainty. Kinnock had enormous admiration for Foot’s commitment to principle, his socialist sincerity and his strong feel for the social and ideological roots of the labour movement. If Kinnock now sat behind the wheel of the Old Labour jalopy, Foot was widely surmised to be a back-seat driver.
In fact, it did not work out like that. Kinnock retained his close bond of affection with his old mentor, with whom he had so often discussed socialist principles in their walks in the mountains above Tredegar. Glenys Kinnock and Jill Craigie were also very close. There were some issues on which Foot was able to influence Kinnock, notably persuading him to drop his opposition to Robert Maxwell’s buying up the strongly pro-Labour Daily Mirror. But as Foot perhaps anticipated, Neil Kinnock was going to be his own man, and to deal with Labour’s crisis in his own way. In any case, after the shambles of the 1983 general election campaign, it would seem prudent not to be identified with the old leadership or its style. After a period of uncertainty during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, which put Kinnock, a miner’s son, at a painful moral disadvantage through conflicting pressures, he began to assert himself with new force. His eloquent and aggressive challenge to the Militants of Merseyside at the 1985 party conference was hugely acclaimed for showing the mainstream of the party fighting back against the threat of the hard left. Foot warmly applauded Kinnock’s stand, but it was never something that a gentle, bookish socialist like himself could have attempted.
Kinnock then launched a fierce attack on Militant, embarking on a series of expulsions, especially of its leading figures in Liverpool, that went far beyond anything Foot had visualized. Tony Benn called it a witch-hunt, but by the end of the 1980s his authority in the party had vanished, along with that of other left figures like the former head of the Greater London Council and future Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. Benn stood against Kinnock for the leadership in 1988, and was duly crushed by an eight to one majority. It could be said that Kinnock was continuing the process that Foot had begun in 1982–83, but really the Labour Party was now in a quite different mood, and was looking electable in a way that was unthinkable then. Meanwhile many erstwhile Bennites or hard-leftists migrated rapidly to the centre or centre-right of the party, and were in due time to be happily located within the highly revisionist ranks of New Labour. One of them was Chris Mullin, the erstwhile strongly Bennite editor of Tribune, later to be a minister under Tony Blair. After Labour managed to ensure in the 1987 election that they would keep well clear of the Liberal-SDP Alliance as the main challengers to the Tories, a series of policy reviews was held in 1987–89. It was orchestrated by Tom Sawyer, the shrewd ‘soft left’ NUPE official who served as chairman of the NEC Home Policy Committee (and became Party General Secretary under Tony Blair). Labour entered the nineties with its policies on further nationalization, getting out of Europe and unilateral nuclear disarmament totally reversed. Former SDP intellectuals like David Marquand, Andrew Adonis and Roger Liddle came back to the fold. This was once again the Labour Party they had known, and in some cases loved. Symbolically, the veteran Michael Young, a founder member of the SDP in 1981, now rejoined the party whose manifesto he had actually written in the great election of 1945.
Not only were the method of leadership and the thrust of policies quite different from the Foot era, there was relatively little continuity of personnel. Some younger MPs who had once worked for Foot became key figures behind Kinnock, including Patricia Hewitt, John Reid and Charles Clarke. But otherwise, Foot’s people rapidly moved on. Dick Clements, who had faithfully run the Political Office under the former leader, briefly worked for Kinnock but then disappeared from party organization. Elizabeth Thomas, a personal appointment, naturally left the political scene with Foot. Tom McCaffrey, who had served Callaghan and Foot with such skill, now retired, although one or two much younger figures remained on the publicity side, including Hilary Coffman. Foot’s economics adviser Henry Neuberger worked briefly for Kinnock, producing papers on low pay amongst other issues, but was eventually supplanted by John Eatwell, then worked briefly for Bryan Gould (whose anti-European views he did not share) before returning happily to the Treasury. The most important change of all, however, was not amongst Foot’s personal staff but in the party machine. In 1984 Jim Mortimer retired as General Secretary after an unhappy reign, and was succeeded by Larry Whitty, a far more effective manager, both in reorganizing Walworth Road and in giving effect to the restructuring of the party demanded under Kinnock’s leadership. Most unusually, after Whitty’s ten-year reign the party finances were comfortably in the black.
Foot’s links with the top echelons of the party were therefore not strong, other than his and Jill’s personal friendship with Neil and Glenys Kinnock. However, there was still plenty for him to do as a prominent backbench MP. Mrs Thatcher’s hard-line foreign and defence policy was a wide-open target, especially with the eventual siting of American Cruise missiles at Greenham Common and a continuing strong nuclear policy. At home, the rapid rise of unemployment as monetarist fiscal policies followed their unhappy course, the sharp decline of manufacturing industry, and a rise in interest rates were also obvious themes for Foot to take up. Perhaps the most serious of all the Conservative policies that he attacked was that relating to the trade unions. Already with a moderate Trade Union Bill put through by Jim Prior in 1980, and then a far more swingeing one carried out by Norman Tebbit in 1982, much of the legislative achievement of Foot’s time at Employment in 1974–76 had been reversed. In the cautious words of Davies and Freedland, there had been ‘a cumulative reformulation of the role of labour law’.1
The biggest change came in Tebbit’s Bill, under which Section 14 of Foot’s 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act was repealed.2 This meant that trade union funds would now be open to claims for damages after unlawful actions carried out by union officials: the old immunity from tort in civil actions had been significantly eroded. A sliding scale was set for financial penalties that could be imposed. Exposing the unions’ funds to attack totally changed the legal context, and indeed placed the unions on much the same basis as all other organizations within the common law. Other measures seriously undermined the closed shop or ‘union-only’ activities, gave new legal protection to non-union labour, and redefined and greatly restricted the definition of trade disputes. Another Trade Union Act passed by Tebbit in 1984 laid down new conditions for industrial action, including compulsory ballots on possible strike action and continuing the political levy paid to the Labour Party. Not all of Foot’s legislation disappeared. ACAS continued, for instance, as a valuable machinery for conciliation. A number of the changes demanded by employers, such as bans on strikes in essential services, were not carried out by the government. Tebbit’s legislation in some respects was less forthright than it seemed, and many issues were left uncertain, such as the closed shop. But a series of often violent confrontations, notably in the Wapping dispute in 1986, when the power of the printing unions was broken after Rupert Murdoch’s News International moved from Fleet Street to new mechanized premises in London’s docklands, confirmed that the government had won. The enhanced status gained for trade unions by Michael Foot and Jack Jones had largely gone for ever. The new legislation, allied to rising unemployment, saw trade union membership falling rapidly throughout the 1980s. But even under Neil Kinnock, Labour showed little inclination to turn the clock back to 1974. Nor did the TUC have anyone remotely of the authority of Jack Jones to defend its interests. Foot’s legislation was a world we had lost.
Michael Foot viewed all this with impotent rage. The difficulties of fighting back emerged during an episode close to his heart and central to his Ebbw Vale constituents. The year-long miners’ strike of 1984–85 was one for which the government had carefully prepared, both by building up coal stocks at power stations and elsewhere, and by coordinating the police surveillance machinery nationwide. After the experience of 1972 and 1974, they sensed they had public opinion behind them. The strike ended in the total capitulation of the National Union of Mineworkers, or what was left of it, and the coal industry rapidly wound down in the following years.
Foot naturally spoke with warmth on behalf of the miners and their grievances over pay and working conditions. The mining industry was one of the legends of Labour’s historic past. But it was also clear to him that the miners themselves were divided. Mineworkers in the Nottinghamshire coalfield worked throughout the dispute, and after the new year in 1985 many others, who had been on strike for almost nine months, drifted back. Foot knew that in south Wales, as in Marine colliery at Cwm in his own constituency, while the strike was rock solid, the miners and their officials were bitterly hostile to Arthur Scargill, the far-left irreconcilable who led the strike nationally, since he was destroying their traditional industry. This was expressed strongly by the Welsh miners’ spokesman, a future government minister, Kim Howells. Foot’s main demand, therefore, was for a negotiated settlement through ACAS, and he attacked Mrs Thatcher and the National Coal Board’s Director, Ian MacGregor, for preventing one. The miners eventually marched back to work defiantly on 3 March 1985, ‘heads held high’, with brass bands and banners, and the defiant folk music of radical pop groups like the Geordies who formed Lindisfarne, to cheer them on their way. But by the end of the 1980s the Welsh coal industry, including Marine colliery, had effectively disappeared. Just one pit remained, Tower colliery near Maerdy, and that was only to survive at all through Herculean efforts by the local MP, Ann Clwyd, and the miners, headed by Tyrone O’Sullivan, who ran it as a cooperative. Much of the world in which Foot had grown up politically evaporated with its traditional staple industry.
Foot’s parliamentary career was further restricted by the result of the 1987 general election. Labour did stage something of a recovery, but the eventual results were very disappointing. There was a net gain of only twenty seats, from 209 to 229, and Labour’s share of the poll rose only to 30.8 per cent, against the Conservatives’ 42.2 per cent. Labour’s vote rose mainly at the expense of the Alliance parties, and Mrs Thatcher presided over a continuing overall majority of 101. In Blaenau Gwent (the redistributed Ebbw Vale constituency) there was the usual landslide: Foot’s majority of 27,861 was his largest ever, and the third largest in the country. His parliamentary activities now focused inevitably on more marginal, non-partisan themes – the televising of parliamentary debates, the working of Public Lending Right and, close to home, protecting the environment of Hampstead Heath. But as he entered his later seventies it was clear that a major parliamentary career was winding down. In 1991 it was formally announced that Michael Foot would retire from Parliament at the next general election.
But there were always books. Throughout the 1980s, and to some degree the 1990s as well, Foot was primarily at work as an author, not a politician. The first of his books was a political retrospective, his account of the 1983 general election, Another Heart and Other Pulses, published by Collins in 1984. It provided a selective chronicle of the campaign; emphasized Labour’s key themes such as a new Social Contract, the defence of the unions and the ending of the production and deployment of nuclear weapons; and pointed out, very fairly, the way in which heavily biased press coverage had distorted the public’s response to Labour’s campaign. There were a few revelations, such as the pre-election suggestions from Gerald Kaufman and Jeff Rooker that Foot should resign as leader, and the agreement between him and Healey not to mention the Belgrano sinking.3 The concluding passages were a passionate morality play, contrasting the injustice and inhumanity of Thatcherism with the warm values of the socialist society. The hearts and souls of all Labour voters would respond to such a call, so beautifully expressed, and would continue to do so as the polarization of the country continued in the Thatcher years. But there was nothing in the book to explain why this apparently evil alternative had been so strongly endorsed by the voters, nor why Labour’s vote had fallen to its worst ever. The reasons why more trade union voters had voted Conservative than Labour, after the dismantling of much of Foot’s own industrial legislation, were not explored. Foot’s book, like so much of his writing, was really a text for the converted.
Foot remained a most conscientious parliamentary representative for Ebbw Vale, and could never be accused of neglecting his duties there. He continued to be a pungent commentator and book reviewer in the pages of Tribune as it struggled through the eighties. He responded with enormous enthusiasm to the massive changes that occurred internationally in these years, the Gorbachev revolution in the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany and the winding up of the Cold War. In many ways, in his later years his aspirations for the world order were finally coming about. The old anti-apartheid campaigner also welcomed the eventual changes in South Africa and the new status for Nelson Mandela after his release from prison in February 1990. Foot had things to say and write on all of these. Past triumphs for the forces of progress also had contemporary resonance. Thus Foot flew to Paris in 1989 to celebrate the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, and won the gratitude of his friend President Mitterrand by rebutting some withering remarks about the French Revolution uttered by the non-historian Margaret Thatcher.
But the main emphasis in his activities now that he was on the backbenches was literary – the purchase, reading and above all writing of books. Thus he intensified his forays into second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, especially the establishments of Sam Joseph and David Low, to whom his book on Byron was to be partly dedicated. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Foot’s main prominence came in the world of letters; he worked partly from home, but mostly in a room in the Tribune offices in Gray’s Inn Road, in a building owned by the TGWU. He preferred to write in manuscript, or failing that by two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter. Like most older men, he never penetrated the world of the word processor. He reviewed regularly in the Guardian, the Observer and the highly intellectual neighbourhood newspaper, the Ham and High, usually on historical topics. As a reviewer he was unfailingly fair and generous: the vitriol he left to soured scholars. He was also a regular and popular speaker at literary festivals, especially the Cheltenham event, where he became close to the organizers, Peter Eaton and Alan Hancox. He often lectured at home and overseas on a variety of authors, spanning the centuries from Milton to the West Indian Marxist writer C. L. R. James. Thomas Paine was a topic that very occasionally persuaded him to visit America, but he would never linger there as he would in India or Croatia. He chaired the judges of the Booker Prize in 1988, and fought in vain to persuade Sebastian Faulks and the other judges to give the award to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, instead of to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. He then took a leading part in promoting Rushdie, and spoke strongly of his qualities in his Chairman’s address at the Booker award ceremony in October 1988. He wrote privately to Rushdie comparing The Satanic Verses with that famous satire on all religions, Swift’s The Tale of a Tub – than which, of course, praise could scarcely be higher.4 Foot was also involved in moves to protect Rushdie from physical harm when a fatwah was pronounced against him by Ayatollah Khomeini because of the perceived immorality and blasphemy of his book. Private protests from the Labour parties in Leicester and Blackburn, with their strong Muslim membership, were brushed aside.
Of all his literary heroes, Foot most ardently worshipped Byron, and it was on him rather than on Hazlitt that he decided to focus in his next major book. Byron’s poetry had long been a unique inspiration – it was very much a personal one, since Foot’s father Isaac, a great lover of Wordsworth like Michael, was not especially sympathetic to Byron’s mode of passionate romanticism. Byron was a major link with many of the other honoured members of Foot’s cultural genealogy, an enthusiastic devotee of Jonathan Swift, and in his own day a major influence on the lyricism and also the radicalism of Heinrich Heine. Foot was thus a very active member of the Byron Society, which he often addressed, and he served as its President for a time. Through this Society he forged close friendships with at least two eminent Conservatives, Ian (later Lord) Gilmour, who also served as President of the Byron Society and who wrote a fascinating book in 2002 on the early lives of Byron and Shelley, and Robert Blake, the biographer of Disraeli. For Blake, as for Foot, fascination with Disraeli and admiration for Byron went hand in hand. Both enjoyed the Byronesque exoticism of Disraeli’s novel Lothair, which as Blake wrote ‘was deemed by many to be his masterpiece’.5 Collins gave Foot a contract for his Byron book in 1985, and he spent the next three years working on it, going through the whole of Byron’s voluminous corpus of poetry, prose and private letters with an almost scholastic intensity. As in his work on Swift, Foot showed an academic passion for the minutiae of evidence, and the intellectual ability to handle a wide range of sources. He had revealed a similar scholarly enthusiasm in correspondence on the career of Hazlitt with the eminent authority Stanley Jones, who responded warmly to Foot’s pursuit of some of the more arcane details of Hazlitt’s life.6 In a different incarnation, Foot would have made a wonderfully imaginative, if discursive, university historian, a kind of politicized Richard Cobb. Equally, he never held back if he felt that professional historians were missing the point or debasing their subject: thus he smote Simon Schama hip and thigh for the disenchanted, anti-Jacobin, even anti-ideological tone of his book on the French Revolution, Citizens (1989). This work, declared Foot, consisted of ‘assault by innuendo’. Hazlitt, Stendhal and Heine, among other old friends, were called upon to denounce it.7
While working on his Byron book, Foot also produced another volume of collected essays, Loyalists and Loners, published by Collins in 1986. It is an enjoyable read, even if it lacks the central personalities who dominated Debts of Honour in 1980, such as Swift, Beaverbrook and Foot’s father Isaac. The book consists of thirty studies, many of them short book reviews published earlier, but a few more extended pieces, including a highly sympathetic study of Jennie Lee. The title of the book is an exegesis of the tension between party and principle. A subtle essay on Enoch Powell brings out the theme of the lifelong ‘loner’ with rare skill. It compares him effectively with a somewhat similar free-thinking rebel, the Birmingham radical imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, including their respective positions on Northern Ireland.8 The essays of most contemporary interest were the first ten, covering contemporary Labour personalities. There is a ferocious attack on George Thomas, Lord Tonypandy, for thirty years a Labour MP (and Cabinet minister) and also a recent Speaker of the House. His memoirs, Mr Speaker (1985), had included disloyal attacks on former Labour colleagues (his jealousy of Jim Callaghan, elected with him for Cardiff in 1945 and a far more significant politician, is very evident), the sly sycophancy of the Methodist ‘unco guid’ and, worst of all, the betrayal of confidences over private conversations with ministers behind the Speaker’s chair. Foot had strongly attacked this impropriety as ‘worse than [Clive] Ponting’ (a civil servant unsuccessfully prosecuted for releasing material covered by the Official Secrets Act about the sinking of the Belgrano). Reviewers like Robert Blake felt that Foot’s attack on Tonypandy was totally justified. Fortunately, no Speaker has written such a book since then.
Of Foot’s recent colleagues, there are fascinating, if savage, analyses of David Owen and Tony Benn. ‘Ex-Brother David’, defector extraordinary as he appears here, is examined via a quotation from Lord Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer (1688) – ‘the impudence of a Bawd is Modesty compared with that of a Convert’; Foot also has sharp things to say about Owen’s ‘reversionary interest in the future’, his eye on the main chance, as Foot saw it.9 Brother Tony is dealt with even more trenchantly, as his conversion from Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, patrician occupant of the centre ground, to Tony Benn, people’s tribune, is dissected. Foot lists as Benn’s crimes disloyalty, hypocrisy and unctuous pride. When we read elsewhere in the book of William Lovett deriding Feargus O’Connor in 1840 as ‘the great I am’ of the Chartist movement, it could be Foot on Benn in 1980.
There are also fascinating insights into Foot’s own mental and historical make-up. While due tribute is paid to Churchill as a great war leader, one moving essay shows how Michael, like all the Foots, idolized another premier, another famous Celtic outsider, David Lloyd George, the hero of his West Country youth. There is a memorable recherche du temps perdu with an account of the magical experience of a breakfast appointment with the old Prime Minister at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford when Foot was an undergraduate at Wadham.10 Also, along with tributes to such miscellaneous giants as Stendhal and Herzen, there is a keen appreciation of Heine in all his many-sidedness, his gift of irony, his humanity, his captivating Jewishness, his love of Venice, his importance for Foot’s dear departed friend, Vicky. There is a typically generous and well-merited tribute to the great author of Heine’s Jewish Comedy, Siegbert Prawer, a refugee from Nazism as a boy who became Fellow of Queen’s College and Professor of German Literature at Oxford. Prawer and Foot were introduced to each other by the present writer. They were left alone talking animatedly about their literary heroes in an otherwise deserted college dining hall. In Loyalists and Loners Foot quotes Heine’s self-description, ‘an unfrocked romantic’. He could well be writing about himself. Foot had once told the Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, who had published a poem on Heine in the Spectator, that ‘the company of Heine devotees [was] one of the most fortunate companies in the world’.11 One reader who much enjoyed the book was Jim Callaghan: ‘What I enjoyed particularly about the book was its reminder that when we were young we didn’t think of Socialism as only dreary economics and trade balances. If only some of our people would stop snarling at one another for long enough they would realize the uplifting of the spirit that Socialist values can bring.’12
Foot’s major work on Byron, The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron, was published in 1988. It attracted attention not only because of its eminent author but as an important contribution to a relatively neglected aspect of its much-discussed subject, his political outlook. The dedication page alone tells much of Foot’s lives and loves, since the dedicatees variously include Jill, two booksellers, the organizers of the Cheltenham Literary Festival and the electors of Blaenau Gwent, who understood ‘the meaning of Byronic resistance to the bomb’. There is also a passage at the end in praise of the Very Reverend Eric Abbott, Dean of Westminster, who in 1968 approved the placing of a plaque of Byron, hitherto excluded on moralistic grounds, in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey following entreaties from ‘a good Byronist, the late Lord Boothby’.13
It is a deeply personal book, in many ways an autobiography, and very moving as the work of a man in his seventies recollecting emotion in tranquillity in his later life. It may not be the most authoritative book on Byron in recent years, but it perhaps gets us closer to its subject’s ruling passions than any other. The novelist Brigid Brophy, whom Foot had got to know during the campaign for Public Lending Right, wrote warmly that ‘I admire the swiftness (and Swiftness) of your intellectual narrative, your learning, precision and conciseness … You have indeed vindicated Byron. Only you could have done so.’ She also noted his generosity to other authors. Foot has two tremendous chapters on what Venice meant to Byron and others, and to a degree the Serenissima is as much a hero of the book as Byron himself. ‘It is part of the city’s secret that she seems to be unveiling her charms individually to each newly arrived suitor,’ Foot writes in typically sensuous imagery.14 Byron, for Foot, rediscovered Venice and made her magic accessible to later generations. The poet was linked not only with Foot’s places but with his people. We read of Byron’s admiration for the writings of Montaigne, especially when he was returning to the writing of Don Juan in 1822. We learn of his praise for Oliver Cromwell. We discover the massive influence on Byron of the writings of Swift. The admiration of Heine for Byron as a spiritual liberator for a revolutionary Europe yearning for freedom is underlined. We are told at some length of Disraeli’s fascination with Byron. His Venetia was an apology for Byron, while his later novel Lothair has a Byronic heroine, ‘the divine Theodora’. We read of the particular appeal of Byron for women, who understood him better than men did. Thus Fanny Brawne had more awareness of Byron’s qualities than John Keats had, and he was best understood by women authors and literary critics like Elizabeth Boyd and Doris Langley Moore. (Whether Foot would apply this view to Fiona MacCarthy’s 2002 biography, with its suggestions of Byron’s bisexuality, seems more doubtful.)
Foot saw in Byron the free-thinking radical, the ‘democratical’ republican, the champion of freedom across the globe, the man who devoted his maiden speech in the Lords in 1812 to a passionate defence of the poor Nottinghamshire framework-knitters whose lives were being turned upside down by the introduction of new machinery by unfeeling capitalist entrepreneurs. Foot’s Byron is a citizen of the world, a man who loves the culture of Greece but whose generous liberalism is stirred above all by his love affair with Italy, ‘more tempestuous and languorous by turns, more adult and comprehensive’; he inspires a great hymn of affection from Mazzini, the prophet of Italian national self-determination.15 Foot denies the charge (once made by Shelley) that Childe Harold showed that Byron’s revolutionary impulse was waning. Byron is as implacable an opponent as Shelley of Tory ministers like Castlereagh and Sidmouth, he is equally appalled by the massacre of Peterloo and rejoices in the news of Castlereagh’s suicide.
Supremely, Byron, a man who witnessed scenes of carnage at first hand in Spain during the Peninsular War, is the opponent of war and the prophet of the horrors of a nuclear holocaust. Don Juan, writes Foot, is ‘the great anti-war epic in our language, or maybe any other’. Byron felt the cruelty of war to the very marrow of his being. His poem ‘Darkness’ was cited by Foot in his Cardiff lecture ‘Byron and the Bomb’ as an evocation of the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe. Fiona MacCarthy, who sees in it the influence of the child Byron’s reading of the Book of Revelation, considers this poem ‘grand and terrifying’, a study of the last survivors in a ravaged landscape, a Europe made desolate by the bestialities of war.16 Her book does not overemphasize Byron’s concern with political or social issues. But every author creates a new Byron, a Byron made in his or her own image. Foot sees him as ‘the poet of action: more than any other in our language, the poet who cannot watch the fearful human scene without incitement to protest or revenge or perpetual Promethean counterassault’.17 His Byron is a thrilling, Manichean poet – and also a therapeutic one. Foot, in recommending that Don Juan be read as a whole (a fairly gargantuan demand), notes: ‘I took a copy of Don Juan into hospital one week and read it all and recovered.’18
The Politics of Paradise – a reference to Byron’s comment on his own extremely obscure verse play Cain – is a serious, if characteristically partisan, study, one of the best books any politician has ever written about a poet. There are two problems that Foot had to overcome. One was reconciling his two heroes, Hazlitt and Byron. In the first chapter of his book, ‘A Cavanagh of a Critic’, Foot acknowledges that Hazlitt was a very fierce critic of Byron’s poetry, both in style and sense. Hazlitt’s essay ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (which Fiona MacCarthy does not mention at all) was scathing about what he called ‘the inordinate egotism of the Byronic odyssey’.19 He was also hugely critical of Byron’s use of language and what he saw as his needless obscurity. The poet was upset and angry at Hazlitt’s comments. Some of them are demonstrably unfair, or even tasteless, as when Byron’s poetic idiosyncrasies are linked to his club foot. Foot can hardly deny the frequently hostile view adopted by Hazlitt during Byron’s lifetime, but he also points out how he defended both Byron and Leigh Hunt from ‘the practised liars’ of the Tory press (compared by Foot with the modern Daily Mail and the Sun). Byron, Foot states, perhaps not altogether convincingly, was Hazlitt’s ‘poet-hero’.20 The other problem is Byron’s treatment of women, whom he could both idolize and seriously misuse. As with his other objects of admiration – Swift, Hazlitt and Wells in particular – Foot’s view tends to follow the varying lines that Byron’s poetic urge dictated a philandering course, and that the women were honoured or dignified by their treatment anyway. For Augusta Leigh and Teresa Guicciolli read Swift’s Stella and Vanessa, or perhaps Wells’s Amber Reeves and Rebecca West. Jill Craigie was always wary of Michael’s perspective in these matters, and she tended to be the more consistent of the two on them. But The Politics of Paradise is still a memorable and generous book, highly enjoyable to read, full of astonishingly detailed knowledge of the sources. It explains, as some more scholarly books do not, precisely how Byron could exert a compulsive international appeal for artists like Heine and Pushkin and Berlioz and Delacroix. It shows how Continental intellectual exiles, Mazzini, Herzen, Ledru-Rollin, even Marx, could not understand why the English placed the more passive poetry of Wordsworth or Coleridge above that of the revolutionary romanticism of Byron.21 It also shines a powerful beam on Michael Foot’s own moral and aesthetic values, his cry of conscience for human redemption.
To Foot, Byron represented the spirit of an ‘irrepressible hopefulness’. For all his advancing years, he now turned to another major literary enterprise. Hazlitt remained discarded as a topic for extended work, but there remained the beguiling prospect of one of Foot’s first literary and political loves, H. G. Wells. Much of the next seven years would be devoted to studying his life, loves and literature, and in 1995 The History of Mr Wells, another important, if equally controversial, biographical study appeared, another labour of love. The Foots’ travels at this period were closely linked to Michael’s literary enthusiasms – nearly all of which happened to be Jill’s also. Venice continued to be a cherished, magical location until the early eighties, when it was challenged and superseded by another sea-girt city with links with Byron and Heine, not to mention Rebecca West – the Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik, known to history as the Venetian Ragusa. Byron had called it ‘the pearl of the Adriatic’.
The Foots’ travels also encompassed other worlds, especially India, where the attraction was more political than cultural, with Foot’s particular contacts with the Gandhi family, partly mediated by the benevolent personality of Swraj Paul, who had brought new work to Ebbw Vale. Foot had never seriously recanted his support for Indira Gandhi during the state of emergency. On the contrary, he praised her for holding an election at all (and then accepting its verdict!) in 1977, and hailed her return to power in 1980 after a period of Janata rule. Throughout he continued to uphold the Indian point of view over Kashmir, and staunchly defended Mrs Gandhi’s strong action against the Sikhs, which had involved sending troops into the city of Amritsar and destroying the Golden Temple there. A fellow Labour MP, Oonagh McDonald, was told by Foot that Mrs Gandhi had a prime concern for the unity of India, and could not let Sikh terrorism continue. He strongly criticized the New Statesman, in a letter it published on 22 November 1984, for printing attacks on Indira Gandhi by the formerly leftish commentator David Selborne, and accused that old organ of the left of becoming ‘the last refuge of neo-colonialism’. He wrote to the cartoonist Abu, a critic of Mrs Gandhi, that ‘some appalling filth is being poured out on the subject in some of our newspapers here, led, I am sorry to say, by the New Statesman’.22 He was concerned that because of what the Indians saw as the failure of the Thatcher government to take action against Sikh extremist organizations in Britain, trade between Britain and India was being affected. A £100 million contract for British Aerospace to supply eight Harrier jets to the Indian navy and an £85 million contract for Westland helicopters had been suspended.23 Foot used his influence to build bridges on these matters with some effect.
In October 1984 he was horrified by news of the assassination of Mrs Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard; thousands of Sikhs were to be massacred in communal revenge by Hindus. Two long periods of premiership (1966–77, 1980–83) had ended in tragedy. Mrs Gandhi’s son Rajiv became the new Prime Minister, and shortly thereafter won a landslide election victory. Foot and Jill visited India at his invitation in January 1985. During his stay Foot gave interviews to the press, including one with the Calcutta Statesman in which he praised Indian initiatives on nuclear disarmament, and somewhat hopefully declared that India would not go in for the military use of nuclear technology.24 When he returned to Britain, he spent much time pressing the British Foreign Office on the need to deal with Sikh activities in the United Kingdom, and pointed out that the Canadian authorities had acted more speedily over extradition 25 – somewhat the same argument that would arise over alleged Muslim ‘extremists’ after the Iraq war in 2003–05. He had little success. However, India remained profoundly important to him. In 1987 he went again to the country, and took part in a major conference on non-violence and the moral order in Delhi in memory of Mrs Gandhi, along with Bishop Trevor Huddleston, the French politician Simone Veil and others. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 was a further source of much distress. On 16 June 1991 he gave a passionate address at a Rajiv Gandhi memorial meeting convened by the India League, declaring that both Indira and her son Rajiv had given their lives for a united India. Six years later he went on another visit to India to discuss world disarmament. This reawakened the now octogenarian Foot’s passion for a nuclear-free peace, and generated yet another book, Dr Strangelove, I Presume (1999). As throughout his life from the 1930s to the 1990s, from Krishna Menon to Foot’s friend the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Michael Foot always found in India a touchstone for his values, which the ‘Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’ embodied. He kept aloof from harsh criticisms by Indian commentators of Nehru’s legacy, and even more of Indira Gandhi and her sons for cronyism and undermining the institutions and processes of Indian liberal democracy.
But the Foots’ most regular and cherished travels were to the walled city of Dubrovnik on the Adriatic. They went originally in 1981 at the invitation of the Yugoslav government, while Foot was leader of the Labour Party. Michael and Jill had heard much of Dubrovnik before from their friend Rebecca West. Her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941), however, was far from complimentary about the city, and in conversation she was always inclined to be critical of the artistic priorities of the city fathers, even if she found the old city beautiful. But from the first the Foots were enchanted by Dubrovnik, its fortresses, palaces and cloisters, the cheerful cafes and restaurants around the Rector’s Palace and along the quayside, boat trips to the nearby islands, the scenic setting on the Adriatic looking out to the island of Lokrum. Until Jill died in 1999 they would spend a month in Dubrovnik every summer, and would sometimes go there in the spring as well, staying in the Villa Dubrovnik, set beside the sea and a short walk from the battlements of the city. The hotel manageress, Nada Maric, would receive messages from the Foots from other parts of the world saying that attractive as they were, they could not hold a candle to Dubrovnik. Foot resumed his visits to Dubrovnik after Jill’s death, seriously disabled though he now was, and they always meant much to him.26
When staying in the city, Foot preferred to lead a very private life. He would tend to rise early, soon after 6 a. m., before the staff of the Villa Dubrovnik were really up and about, walk the half-mile to the city, buy some papers, stroll along the main street, the Stradun, sip a coffee in the Kamenica restaurant, famous for its oysters, or perhaps the Festival bar, and generally relax in the leisurely ambience of the old city. He would talk to the locals when he could, but invariably about the arts, seldom about politics. Jill was equally under Dubrovnik’s spell, and got to know artists there. The Foots made some good friends amongst the local people, artistic primarily. One particularly close friend was Jan Pulitika, an imaginative landscape painter whom Jill got to know well and some of whose work, with its bright blue colours, was to adorn 66 Pilgrims Lane. Another warm friend, from the early 1990s, was Vesna Gamulin, a multilingual, much-travelled translator of much charm, who along with her seafaring husband Jadran greatly extended the Foots’ knowledge of the local community, its culture and Croatia’s international difficulties. A more strongly political friend was Dr Hrvoje Kacic, a maritime lawyer who served as Croatia’s representative at many international conferences, and a fierce critic of the Serb assault on his native land. As their beloved Venice became increasingly swamped by international tourism, the more private, more gentle charms of Dubrovnik, with its attractive people, became essential to the Foots’ way of life.27
They visited Dubrovnik at first solely as tourists, enamoured of its setting and culture. But there was soon a very important political dimension. The break-up of the old Yugoslavia in 1991–92 had serious implications for Dubrovnik, as indeed for Croatia as a whole. There were communal tensions throughout the region, especially involving conflict between the Croats (initially in alliance with the Slovenes) and the Serb government of Belgrade, which presided over Serbia and Montenegro, the remnant of the old Yugoslavia. By 1992 there were even worse fratricidal horrors in Bosnia. War broke out between Serbia-Montenegro and Croatia in the summer of 1991, and lasted until 1995. In October 1991 Dubrovnik was under siege, and remained so for the next eight months. Thousands of shells poured down from the mountains into the old city, where 70 per cent of the buildings suffered direct hits, and historic churches, monasteries, palaces and the old city walls were severely damaged, and the nearby airport destroyed. Over a hundred civilians were killed, along with scores of young men defending their city: their memory was to be movingly commemorated in a special gallery in the Sponga Palace in the city centre. Maps around the city walls testify to the extent of the damage for the instruction of tourists. Fifteen years after the war Croatian relations with Serbia, and indeed with Montenegro and Bosnia as well, were no more than tepid.
Michael Foot was utterly horrified at the Serb attacks. His and Jill’s sense of outrage at seeing a beautiful and historic city dear to both of them pounded into rubble was obvious. But in addition the siege of Dubrovnik stirred up all the old emotions once let loose in Guilty Men, about an almost helpless civilian population being attacked at will by an aggressive dictator. In the past, Foot had been a staunch supporter of Tito’s regime (Tito was a Croat, though one generally detested in his own native land) and critical of Croat politicians, especially the Ustasha, who openly sympathized with the Nazis during the war and fought against Tito’s Partisans. There were now those on the left (notably his nephew Paul) who felt that Foot was being, as in India and elsewhere, far too one-eyed and partisan, ignoring the attempts at ethnic cleansing of Serbs by President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, and also his notorious record of anti-Semitism. This was also the view, on the right of the spectrum, of an old opponent, Nora Beloff She wrote to Foot attacking his ‘transparent pro-Croatian bias’ and telling him he should be asking for negotiations between Serbia and Bosnia, ‘not more violence’. But the balance of aggression clearly came from the Serbs, under the brutal regime of Slobodan Milosevic, hurling weapons of war at a smaller neighbour while the rest of the world did very little. The British Foreign Office seemed to Foot particularly dishonest and spineless, as dishonourable as the appeasers had been in Spain in 1937. His response, therefore, was a final crusade of conscience. It was quite as moving in its way as that of his fellow octogenarian Gladstone’s at the massacre of the Armenians in 1896. Foot won new respect from unlikely quarters in Britain. In Dubrovnik, and indeed throughout Croatia, he moved from being a deeply honoured and respected visitor, patron of art and history, to being seen as an international crusader for liberation. There were moves to have him made an honorary citizen of the city, like Dr Kathy Wilkes, a courageous Oxford philosophy don who had made visits to underground groups in Czechoslovakia while it was still under Communist rule and who had stayed in Dubrovnik during the siege.28
He had begun his campaign on behalf of Croatia while still an MP in 1991–92. He called for international action to intervene against the Serbs’ campaign of intimidation and aggression along the Dalmatian coast, and was scathing about the inertia shown by Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary. He criticized the uncharacteristically inhumane approach of a friend, the Conservative historian Robert Blake, who had remarked, almost casually, ‘No one can stop these tribes slaughtering each other.’29 Among other things, the historian was guilty of bad history. On 5 March 1992 Foot made what was to be his last speech in the House of Commons, and it was in its way typical of one of the most charismatic and courageous backbenchers ever to sit in the historic chamber. He condemned the failure of the British government and the international community to take more effective action, both military and in terms of sending food supplies, and made acerbic comparison with the failures of the 1930s. He particularly emphasized the assault on Dubrovnik, which he felt was one of the worst acts since the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.30 Little regarded at the time, Foot’s speech left its legacy. Another Labour Member, Tony Blair, was to take note when he persuaded the Americans to instigate military action against the Serbs during the similar Kosovo crisis six years later, with heavy bombing raids directed at the heart of the Serbian capital Belgrade.
Foot pointed out in the Guardian on 25 August 1992 that the government had no excuse for claiming ignorance of the situation, since journalists had long been writing that the Serb armies were ‘destroying Yugoslavia in the name of Yugoslavia’. The Chamberlain government in the late 1930s had received similar press warnings about what was happening to the Jews in Germany, and had also turned several blind eyes. Another Munich was beckoning.31 Douglas Hurd would not take action to help Croatia. He cited the distinctly mixed record of President Tudjman (as many in the Labour Party did), and resisted pressure from the German government of Helmut Kohl, always traditionally sympathetic to Croatia.32 In the end, the Serb siege of Dubrovnik came to an end in August 1992, and the shelling of the old city finally ceased. Croatia had by then, like Slovenia, proclaimed itself an independent state, and was recognized officially by the British government. But an uneasy state of cold war continued, and not until 1996 did Croatia and Serbia formally conclude a peace settlement. Meanwhile, with some aid from international agencies, poor, battered Dubrovnik was rapidly rebuilt, until by 2005 its scars were no longer obviously visible and tourism was thriving as never before. In 2004, after a lengthy trial in The Hague, the Serbian General Miodrag Jokic was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for war crimes connected with the bombing of Dubrovnik. But it was one conviction only, and most of the Serb aggressors in government at the time, including the former President Radovan Karadzic, remained at large. Ex-President Milosevic died in The Hague in March 2006, his trial for war crimes having made only slow progress. Michael Foot’s reaction to the Serbs was one of unprecedented ferocity. Opponent of capital punishment though he was, he told Vesna Gamulin that he hoped that Milosevic would be hanged.33
Michael Foot witnessed the end of the siege of Dubrovnik as a non-parliamentarian. He had decided not to stand as the Labour candidate for Blaenau Gwent at the next general election, and gave some encouragement to Peter Hain, whom he had met when Hain was leading the ‘Stop the Tour’ campaign in 1969 to prevent the visit of the South African rugby team, as his possible successor. Hain did not make the shortlist, but was returned for Neath instead. Foot then hoped that he might be succeeded by a woman, but she was voted down by the local party in favour of Llew Smith, an exceptionally traditional Old Labour figure and opponent of Welsh devolution. Smith remained the Member until 2005, when his own retirement provoked a far more serious local dispute about a woman candidate. Foot played less part in the 1992 general election than in any election since that of 1935. He had a quiet start to the campaign, but then, against the wishes of Labour headquarters, went on a week’s speaking tour of Wales as far north as Anglesey. Labour made gains in Wales, though not in Monmouth, even though Foot had nostalgically insisted on visiting the constituency he had fought fifty-seven years earlier.34 Like most observers he thought that the general election would see Neil Kinnock returned to head a new Labour government, but in fact the Conservatives hung on under John Major. Indeed, although the margin in seats between the two main parties was relatively small, at sixty-five, the gap in the vote (42 per cent to the Conservatives, 35 per cent to Labour) was still a very large one. Recovery from the 1983 disaster was still far from complete.
Foot was grievously disappointed, but he departed quietly, saying his emotional goodbyes to the voters of Blaenau Gwent. After the election he began making arrangements with Jill to sell their little home in Morgan Street, Tredegar. A decade later the property was half derelict, the nearby shops boarded up, and almost all the local steelworks was closed down by its owner Corus in 2001. Half a century after the Attlee government’s regional policies had brought new hope and employment to the valleys, Tredegar was close to being a ghost town.
For Michael Foot it really was the end at Westminster, after a long and spectacular innings. He refuted with scorn suggestions in the press that he might accept a peerage, and declared that he was quite as strongly in favour of the abolition of the House of Lords as ever he had been.35 He had always been keenly aware of the history of the Labour and socialist movement. He also had regard for his own history and role in that movement. In 1993 it was announced that his private papers would go to the Labour [later People’s] History Museum in Princess Street, Manchester, its most important private collection, to go alongside the archive of the Labour Party, which had been transferred there from Walworth Road.36 Under the expert custody of Stephen Bird, the archivist, in the scholarly neutrality of the archive store-room, the old rebel’s records would be deposited side by side with those of the party apparatchiks he had for so long tormented, lion and lamb reunited.
Then it was back to the Balkans. The main interest had now swung from Croatia to Bosnia, and Dubrovnik returned to something nearer normality as ruined properties were rebuilt. In 1993 the Foots resumed their annual visitations to the Villa Dubrovnik as before. But the legacy of injustice and bitterness remained in the hearts and minds of their friends, and indeed in the Foots themselves. Foot now kept up a strong campaign in the press to get international action to protect Bosnia from ethnic cleansing, to enforce a proper settlement and to restore the authority of the United Nations Charter. He criticized, as did Croatians like Dr Kacic, the Owen/Vance plan for dividing up Bosnia Herzegovina as a victory for the Serbs: David Owen, himself a defector to the SDP, was always destined to be one of Foot’s particular bêtes noires. Michael and Jill were determined to do more to highlight the atrocities in the Balkans, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia, which the world chose to ignore.
Jill Craigie now revived her career as a film director. After encouragement from friends such as Salman Rushdie and the television presenter Jon Snow, she determined to make a film about Yugoslavia, with Michael as the presenter.37 They tried in vain to get financial assistance from a former Cabinet colleague, Harold Lever, and also from Sidney Bernstein of Granada Television, but in the end £50,000 was raised, including £12,000 from Michael’s superannuation. Michael and Jill went to Dubrovnik in bitterly cold weather in December 1993, and began work. Michael did the main presenting from the city battlements and elsewhere, while there were also appearances from Salman Rushdie, the Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack and the Labour MP Malcolm Wicks. Foot’s performance, given that he was severely handicapped in his mobility and that he had totally lost the sight of one eye after a severe attack of shingles in the late eighties, was an astonishing achievement of stamina and sheer guts. It was he who supplied a good deal of the substance of the film, after having had conversations with Kathy Wilkes, who had friends at the university in Dubrovnik.
The film was primarily an attack on the ethnic cleansing carried out so brutally by the Serbs in Bosnia, although the Foots were not allowed to go to Bosnia at all, and shot the film entirely in Dubrovnik. The film, entitled Two Hours from London, was also a fierce assault on the bland inertia towards Serb aggression shown by successive Tory Foreign Secretaries, Hurd and then Malcolm Rifkind, which, Foot declared on the film, ‘was an absolute go-ahead for Milosevic’. Comparisons were made with Munich. An Observer interview on 1 January 1995 was headlined ‘Foot Names the Guilty Men of Bosnia’.38 There was much difficulty in getting the film shown. In the end it was cut down by half, to one hour, and shown on BBC television on 1 April 1995. John Naughton in the Observer found it very one-sided in its descriptions of the Serbs’ ‘genocidal nightmare’ in Bosnia. Even a friend like Jon Snow noted the absence of any criticism of President Tudjman.39 But Naughton also found it deeply moving that an elderly couple, one of them in frail health, ‘who should be spending their twilight years enjoying the quiet, bookish celebrity to which they are richly entitled’, should be so outraged by events in central Europe that they would spend a year and sink their savings in ‘a magnificent attempt to counter some of the lies and equivocations which have underpinned the betrayal of the Bosnian people’.
But the cynics (hand-picked for BBC late shows) and British ministers (Naughton referred to the ‘Bugger Bosnia’ school) derided the Foots’ efforts. John Major assured his backbenchers that no British troops or other personnel would be sent to Bosnia. There were loud murmurs in the House of ‘Munich’. In Croatia, the film was shown on a national channel at peak viewing time in uncut two-hour form, and was regarded as a masterpiece. Vesna Gamulin thought it an extraordinary tribute to Jill Craigie’s professional skills as a film director. An Italian friend of the Foots in Brussels thought it ‘an important achievement in dispelling once and for all the myth of the “tribal civil war” in the ex-Yugoslavia’.40 It was generally felt to be easily the most effective portrayal for the world of the sufferings of the Croatian and Bosnian peoples.
Michael Foot’s health remained generally good for a man of his age – in his view, testimony to the eternal blessings of the NHS. In 1995, when he was almost eighty-two, he had a serious prostate operation, but soon recovered. Despite other physical problems – serious arthritis in a leg, the loss of sight in his left eye, the need for a hearing aid which he found difficult to assemble himself – he lived almost as active a life as before, much assisted by many affectionate friends. He was frequently in the news, usually through his own instigation, as in frequent letters to the Guardian and The Times, but sometimes unintentionally. The most extraordinary occasion was in February 1995, when he was suddenly accused of having been a long-term spy for the KGB. Rumours about Labour politicians were rife at this time. There had been some prior to the 1992 general election, when the names not only of Michael Foot but of Neil Kinnock and several others (including, astonishingly, David Owen) had appeared in the Sunday Times under the heading ‘Kinnock’s Kremlin Connection’, only to disappear very quickly. Years later, Dick Clements was to be another victim. Much of this had to do with the activities of Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB spy who had acted as a double agent for both Britain and the Soviet Union in the later 1970s, and who found an easy outlet for his suspicions in the British press. On 19 February the Sunday Times ran a front-page headline, ‘KGB: Michael Foot was our Agent’.41 The story was that Foot had regularly met Soviet agents in the 1960s, had had lunch with them in the Gay Hussar and had received occasional payments to help out the finances of Tribune. Foot was said by another retired KGB agent, Viktor Kubeykin, to have been an influential agent, while Mikhail Lyubimov, yet another old KGB hand, had had ‘several lunches in London restaurants’ – than which, clearly, nothing could be more sinister. The KGB men had also targeted Jack Jones, Ray Buckton of ASLEF, the engine drivers’ union, Ian Mikardo and the veteran socialist and internationalist Fenner Brockway, but Foot was thought especially important. He was apparently known in KGB code, not very originally it would seem, as ‘Agent Boot’.
The following week the Sunday Times embellished the original accusations, not with more facts, since there were none, but with more innuendo. Gordievsky’s memoirs, for which the Foot allegations were a trailer, began serialization. Andrew Neil, the paper’s former editor, declared that Foot was ‘a willing proselytizer of Soviet propaganda’.42 In almost any Cold War crisis, Neil wrote, Foot could be counted on by Moscow to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt – an accusation that was quite extraordinarily untrue, as earlier parts of this book demonstrate. Quoting Lenin, Neil described Foot as ‘one of Moscow’s useful idiots’. It may be wondered as what kind of idiot Neil himself might be classified.
The Guardian promptly dismissed the accusations as nonsense. There were indeed many odd features about the Sunday Times’s claims. They depended entirely on allegations from Gordievsky, a known double agent, and it may be asked how such credence could ever be put on evidence from so erratic a source. Tribune pointed out that his assertions were based on conversations he had had years before with another agent, and the claim that he had come across a file named ‘Boot’ which indicated that the Kremlin had once given money to Foot for Tribune.43 Most damagingly for Foot’s accusers, Viktor Kubeykin, one of the other KGB men named, denied in a Moscow interview that his meetings with Foot were anything but social. The new editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, had admitted in the issue of 19 February, and also on Radio Four’s World at One programme, that claims that Foot was ever a Soviet agent might well be ‘utter rubbish’, a massive own goal if ever there was one. The paper ended with vague and totally irrelevant meanderings about the huge damage the far left had done to Britain. Foot himself, still not in the most robust of health after his prostate operation, had an edited version of a letter of rebuttal published in the Sunday Times after a fierce row with the editors. He totally denied the allegations that he had ever been a traitor or an agent of a foreign power, and made comparisons with McCarthyism and the Zinoviev letter. His complete rebuttal appeared in the Observer of 26 February, under the heading ‘My Reply to the KGB Smear’. He wrote of his personal pain at being baselessly accused, in McCarthyite terms, of being a traitor to his country. Foot’s patriotic sentiments, then and always, could hardly be disputed.
One important figure privately involved was the former Prime Minister Lord Callaghan, whom Foot had contacted. Callaghan wrote to Foot on 23 February 1995, after discussions with the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Hunt of Tanworth. He told Foot that all ministers had been subjected to additional security procedures, as a matter of routine, when Harold Wilson took office in March 1974. ‘In your case there was no evidence that required any action and you were appointed.’ It may be of interest, perhaps, that Callaghan’s original draft phrased it as ‘not (sufficient) evidence to take action’. He added that Gordievsky had reported in the late 1970s that Foot had received some money for Tribune, and that the matter had been investigated. ‘The Security Service,’ wrote Callaghan, ‘completely discounted any suggestion of disloyalty or that it represented a security issue, but they did conclude that the Russians had targeted you.’44
Foot then sued the Sunday Times and its owners, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for libel. He hired a leading civil rights lawyer, the Australian Geoffrey Robertson, who looked forward to tangling with his fellow-countryman Murdoch (who vainly attempted to remove himself from the writ). At this point, in early April, Foot had to go into hospital for an emergency operation, but matters proceeded smoothly nevertheless. Foot won a simple victory without the case coming to court. He received many thousands of pounds of damages in instalments by the end of July, of which Tribune received ‘about 10,000 quid’, with some of the rest going towards a new kitchen in the basement of Pilgrims Lane. There followed a fierce clash with the solicitor for the defendants, Alastair Brett, who made allegations of unprofessional conduct against Foot’s own solicitor, David Price, and threw in other attacks on Foot, including a suggestion that he had been put up to the prosecution by Private Eye. Foot considered taking the matter further. Perhaps fortunately, this aspect of the affair died away. Michael Foot was strongly defended on all sides throughout, not only by Labour figures like Neil Kinnock and Robin Cook, but by the Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams and also by the maverick Conservative Alan Clark, who compared Foot with Princess Diana and the Queen Mother as ‘a national treasure’ who could do no wrong. Foot came out of the affair with his reputation and his acknowledged patriotism all the stronger.45
A far more palatable event in 1995 came when Doubleday published a three-hundred-page book on which Foot had been working for several years, H. G.: The History of Mr Wells. The saga of another literary icon, it was another labour of love, another perfectly serious book, and a further extraordinary achievement from a man of eighty-two. With H. G. Wells, of course, Foot had various important links. He had read Wells’s books avidly as a young man. It was works like Tono-Bungay and The New Machiavelli that made him a socialist in his time at Liverpool. Ann Veronica was a powerful text on liberated young womanhood. Foot had also known Wells personally: he had him write book reviews and other columns for the Evening Standard, and had joined him in campaigning on behalf of Indian independence and post-war reconstruction. At the time of Wells’s death in August 1946, Foot had written a passionate article in the Herald describing him as ‘the greatest educator of the century’. There was another important link, though perhaps a less straightforward one. The Foots, especially Jill through her work on the women’s movement and in promoting feminist literature through Virago Press, were friendly with the now elderly Rebecca West, Wells’s mistress and partner over a tumultuous period before, during and just after the First World War.46 Their son, Anthony West, had written a recent very hostile account of their relationship, of which Foot strongly disapproved. Foot had also been very friendly with Wells’s Russian mistress Moura Budberg and her daughter, Tanya Alexander. He went to Moscow with Tanya to make a film about Wells. There he met Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reform of the Soviet system in the glasnost period he greatly admired, and presented him with a copy of Wells’s book on the First World War, The World Set Free.
Foot’s book on Wells perhaps shows some sign of waning powers. It is discursive and somewhat padded out by overlong quotations from Wells’s books, but it is still a lively and rewarding read. In rehabilitating Wells, Foot had not set himself an easy task. Wells had long lost the cachet he had enjoyed earlier in the century, when he had been seen as one of the world’s most influential minds. In the summer of 1934 he had been granted long private interviews successively with Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, and had argued vigorously with both. After this, poor Wells had to endure jibes by Bernard Shaw and nagging from the New Statesman’s editor Kingsley Martin, in his most sententious vein, that he had failed to grasp the wisdom of Stalin’s views. At his seventieth birthday dinner at the Savoy there were speeches of tribute by J. M. Barrie, Julian Huxley, Sir Arthur Bliss, André Maurois and his old sparring partner Bernard Shaw. But after his death, his star rapidly waned. His earlier science fiction still excited attention, partly because of the interest of film-makers in books like The Time Machine, with its conflict between Eloi and Morlocks, or The War of the Worlds, an account of a Martian invasion of Surrey. Wells’s most famous novels, the sagas of the comic wage-slave Kipps and Mr Polly, written in his Edwardian high pomp, were seldom read, though in 1949 Mr Polly did inspire a fine film starring John Mills. Of Wells’s non-fiction, his Outline of History (1920), hugely influential in its day and selling two million copies in its first edition, had lost any claim to authority in the face of work by professional scholars, and was at best regarded as a popularizing introduction for the general reader.
Worse still, Wells had latterly not just been ignored but actually condemned. Praised by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in their 1973 biography, he was now widely seen as anti-democratic, regarding the masses as ‘dull’ or ‘base’. Other critics noted the anti-democratic elitism of the Samurai in A Modern Utopia (1905). John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) offers Wells as a prime example of the hostility and contempt with which intellectual authors had frequently viewed the common man. Carey instanced particularly the fears and misanthropy of the early science fiction. This is especially true of The Time Machine (1895), where the doltish masses are transmuted into the Morlochs, but Carey even saw novels like Kipps (1905) and Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) as full of scorn and condescension towards their lower-middle-class subjects. Even the attempts of the amiable Mr Polly (‘a failed shop-keeper’) at self-education are derided, along with his sense of sexual inadequacy as he sees a pretty young girl swinging her legs astride a wall.47 A later work like The Shape of Things to Come (1933) was a pessimist’s dirge. Arnold Bennett, on the other hand, is Carey’s hero, and Foot was to deplore Carey’s attempt to drive a wedge between him and Wells. Michael Coren’s biography of Wells The Invisible Man (1993) was more hostile still, laying emphasis on his open anti-Semitism and campaigns against Zionism, along with his attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. Coren claimed that Wells’s influence was, ‘taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive’.48
Foot’s response, as ever, is courageous, direct and wholly partisan. He hits back at the great man’s critics with much brio and to some effect. For him, Wells was always the literary and ideological inspiration of his younger days, the man who fired his cultural and political enthusiasms and made him a socialist as he took his tram journeys to work in proletarian Liverpool back in 1935. He writes with particular panache on the great Edwardian novels, many of them with autobiographical allusions. Tono-Bungay (1909), with its satirical comment on the financial and moral corruption of twentieth-century urban society, and The New Machiavelli (1911) with its examination of the value systems of modern politicians as seen through the tortuous career of the Liberal MP Richard Remington, are finely dealt with. Tono-Bungay had always been a special book for Foot, read by him and his brother John in turns during their cheerful visit to Paris in 1934. Ann Veronica (1909), with its sympathetic evocation of a daring young feminist, also strikes a chord with Foot (as, very much, it did with Jill Craigie). He is also significantly sympathetic to the patriotic tone of Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916), a wartime book accused in some quarters of jingoism (Wells, unlike Shaw, unhesitatingly supported the war). Wells’s role as a crusader for his own version of socialism is also defended, and his unquestionably destructive role in the Fabian Society (including in connection with numerous Fabian women) applauded, no doubt in part because his opponents were Foot’s bêtes noires, those disciples of bureaucracy Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He enjoyed the shock caused to their sensibilities by Wells’s proclaiming the heady doctrine of free love.
Where Foot was perhaps most open to criticism (of which he received many salvoes over the muesli and marmalade in Pilgrims Lane) was in the way he handled Wells’s treatment of women. Almost throughout his life, Wells was a compulsive and demanding womanizer, who disturbed and wrecked numerous lives. In Foot’s book this trait became fascinating, almost ennobling, an essential expression of a great mind and a free spirit. Women were part of his quest for experimentation, just as were his early dabblings in science, key specimens in the laboratory of life. Foot concentrates, with much delightful detail drawn from his personal acquaintance with them, on Rebecca West and Moura Budberg, two powerful personalities who gave as good as they got.49 Their partnerships with Wells enriched both sides. Foot’s view was shaped by his intense admiration for Rebecca West, a great friend of Jill’s as well as one of Beaverbrook’s various mistresses, and for the ‘magnificent Moura’. The daughter of the latter, Tanya Alexander, remained a close friend until her death in 2005.50 Jill was not alone in having doubts about the cruel selfishness of Wells’s behaviour, his obliviousness to the lives he ruined, and particularly the shattering effect on some of the younger women he encountered, such as Amber Reeves, far less well equipped to endure the strains involved than were Rebecca or Moura. But for Foot the restless, creative spirit of Wells, like those of Swift, Hazlitt and Byron, required constant female stimulation. His art soared to a new level when he wrote of the feminism of Ann Veronica and Isabel Rivers, the suffragette heroine of The New Machiavelli. His relationships with young women, as much as his writing of brilliant novels in which Foot’s book helped to revive interest, were all part of his genius as an artist and as a human being.
The book’s critical reception was somewhat mixed. As so often, the reviewers’ verdicts reflected their views of the subject rather than of the skills of the biographer. Foot much resented one notice by Peter Conrad in the Observer which bore the headline (drawn from Trotsky’s judgement on Wells) ‘What a Little Bourgeois’. Professor John Sutherland in the London Review of Books was far more balanced and generous.51 Michael Foot, at the age of eighty-two, could not be expected to turn the tide of disapproval or apathy towards Wells. But he does provide, without question, an important and extraordinarily well-informed contribution to debate, a necessary corrective, and a deeper personal insight into at least some of Wells’s impulses than any other living biographer could have offered.
People imagined that this would be Foot’s last book. He was now mainly active in writing brief introductions to new editions of works by Swift, Tom Paine, Orwell and Bertrand Russell; not to universal satisfaction – his brother John wrote of Russell, ‘Try as I may, I cannot like the man, any more than I like his son Conrad.’52 But, to general astonishment, this ceaselessly active man produced yet another book in 1999, Dr Strangelove, I Presume, published by Gollancz. This was a reprise of old anti-nuclear themes, a result of his attending the sixth Indira Gandhi Conference in New Delhi in November 1997. The title was a tribute to the American film director Stanley Kubrick, with whom Michael and Jill had become friendly and whom they had entertained in Pilgrims Lane. While in New Delhi Foot met, among others, Robert McNamara, the US Defense Secretary under Lyndon Johnson at the time of Vietnam, now converted into an opponent of the nuclear strategy whose viewpoint was scarcely different from Foot’s own long-held unilateralism. It was the stimulus of long, late-night discussions with McNamara which inspired Foot to write the book, along with much enthusiastic prodding from Jill, herself a strong CND partisan. The two-hundred-page book is loosely structured, with some interesting material on the founding of CND in 1958 and the responses of Labour to it thereafter. The case against nuclear weapons is again set out – and Foot rightly underlines how the passage of time, the ending of the Cold War, the change in the nature of conflict, the importance of economic and psychological factors, had made his argument all the more compelling.
But perhaps the book is most interesting about India, where Foot first discussed its themes. He half apologizes for his stand over Mrs Gandhi’s state of emergency in 1976, but he also praises her and Rajiv for taking a lead in calling for an end to the production, testing and use of nuclear weapons, advocating world disarmament, and holding back in their confrontation with Pakistan by starting negotiations over defence and other issues with President Bhutto.53 Nearing the end, as at the beginning, of his political odyssey, Michael Foot always followed events in India avidly. He kept close to Indian friends like Moni Cameron, Swraj Paul and Abu. The dining room table in Pilgrims Lane was always piled with copies of Asian Times or the Times of India, and he took a keen interest in the Indian cricket team and its leading batsman Sachin Tendulkar.
Foot was now an old man, but in many ways contentedly so. After all, the landslide election victory of 1997 saw a Labour government returned once again, with a strong grip on power that was to last for over a decade. Tony Blair made much of how New Labour had superseded the Old Labour values of which Michael Foot was the supreme living embodiment. Nationalization, economic planning, redistributive taxation, universal welfare, legal protection for the unions, non-selective education, withered and fell like the autumn leaves at Vallombrosa. Yet Foot was by no means uncomfortable with New Labour, and in any event was very loath to criticize his successors in any way. He revelled in the fact that Labour under Tony Blair was now a triumphant party of winners, in a way it had not been since 1945. He enjoyed strong relations with key ministers like Robin Cook at the Foreign Office. Cook’s successor, Jack Straw, was the former political adviser of Barbara Castle, and her successor as MP for Blackburn. Foot had a particularly good relationship with the Chancellor, Gordon Brown (whose office was run by Sue Nye, as Foot’s had once been), and warmly applauded his work at the Treasury. The day after his tenth budget on 22 March 2006, with its stimulus to public investment in the nation’s schools, Brown took a private phone call in the Treasury, conveying a cheery message of congratulation from his ninety-two-year-old comrade.
With Tony Blair, apparently distant from his vision of socialism, Foot’s relations were perfectly good, and with Cherie Blair better still. He had in fact voted for John Prescott in the leadership contest of 1994. However, Blair wrote warmly to Foot before he became Prime Minister, perhaps in 1996: ‘I remember so vividly when we first met and my writing to you afterwards what, when I look at it now, must have seemed a hopelessly naïve and idealistic letter. But I was inspired then, and remain so now, by your passion, commitment and total dedication to our cause. Let us hope it can now be brought to a successful conclusion. Love to Jill.’54 Blair had found the radical themes of Foot’s Loyalists and Loners an inspirational force in pushing him into working for the Labour Party. This, after all, was the bright, idealistic young man by whom Foot had been so impressed during the Beaconsfield by-election back in 1982, and whom he had strongly pushed for the Sedgefield nomination a year later. He commented with self-deprecating humour about Tony Blair, ‘Anyone who joined the Labour Party at the time I was leader can’t be accused of being an opportunist.’
Many of the Blair government’s policies were highly acceptable to the sage of Hampstead socialism. He warmly backed the controversial policy of military intervention over Kosovo in 1999 and endorsed the bombing of Belgrade by NATO air forces then: it should have happened long ago, when Dubrovnik was being shelled by the Serbs, in Foot’s view. Robin Cook’s stance of having ‘an ethical foreign policy’ was applauded, and thought far superior to that of his Conservative predecessors Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind. Foot also applauded the Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine’s constitutional and legal reforms, especially the entrenching of human rights in British law and the ending of hereditary peers’ right to sit in the House of Lords, while the passage of Scottish and Welsh devolution carried through his own unfinished business from 1979. His former lodger Donald Dewar became Scotland’s First Minister. His good friend Gordon Brown, the new Chancellor, devoted massive funding to bolster Nye’s National Health Service. Defence policy did not cause great ructions, although any decision to replace Trident as Britain’s nuclear deterrent, at a cost of perhaps £25 billion, after Polaris lapsed, could provoke a future great debate. On Europe, Foot, like his party, was a late, surprising convert. He had never been opposed to European union in the same way as Peter Shore or Enoch Powell, and had endorsed the idea back in the later 1940s. Now, influenced by European socialist leaders like Felipe Gonzales in Spain, Mário Soares in Portugal and George Papandreou in Greece, not to mention his cultural comrade François Mitterrand, Foot warmed at last to the idea of European solidarity, where the Social Chapter introduced by the EU brought such blessings as the minimum wage for which Hardie and Lansbury had once crusaded, improved conditions for working women and greater contractual rights for trade unionists. Fraternity was surely his natural creed, not isolationist and xenophobic little Englandism. His old Euroscepticism was given a decent unChristian burial.
Foot otherwise continued his well-tried range of activities in happy mode. He continued to write regularly for Tribune, and was very friendly with Mark Seddon, its young editor; he reviewed for the weeklies and gave frequent interviews to Labour historians and others; one honour, greatly appreciated, was honorary membership of his cherished National Union of Journalists. He also continued to enjoy an occasional holiday at the Villa Dubrovnik, despite his growing immobility. Every fortnight during the football season he was driven by his friend Peter Jones on the long journey to see Plymouth Argyle play at Home Park; a television documentary depicted some distinctly cheerful post-match Plymouth youths hailing him as ‘a living legend’. He was now a director of Argyle, and claimed that he had introduced them to Paul Sturrock, the manager who set them on the path to promotion out of Division Two into the Championship. Arguments when Sturrock left the club in March 2004, however, led to Peter Jones resigning from the club as director, and Michael Foot, with his habitual loyalty, joined him. Foot also continued to enjoy the comfortable ambience and cuisine of the Gay Hussar, and enjoyed Tuesday lunches there each month with a highly congenial group of friends, Ian (Lord) Gilmour, Ian Aitken, William Keegan, economics editor of the Observer, and sometimes Geoffrey Goodman. These lunches had stemmed originally from his friendship with Gilmour through the Byron Society.
His literary interests remained very active, despite his age. Indirectly, he produced yet another book in his ninetieth year. A warmly sympathetic young scholar, Professor Brian Brivati of the University of Kingston, who had already edited an abridged one-volume version of Foot’s Aneurin Bevan, also edited in 2003 The Uncollected Michael Foot, a large and attractive collection of Foot’s shorter pieces, notes and reviews. It was well received, and a copy ended up on the shelves of the downstairs restaurant room of the Gay Hussar, with his previous publications as its companions. Elsewhere, Foot continued to be eloquent on many fronts, often addressing the Swift Society, the Hazlitt Society, the Paine Society, the Byron and Irish Byron Societies, and the Wells Society on their respective heroes. He also kept in close touch with the Wordsworth Trust. On 1 April 2004 he opened an exhibition in Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s old home near Grasmere, and announced that most of the thousand volumes in his Hazlitt collection would pass to the Trust when he died. Sixteen years earlier he had ‘vindicated’ Byron (along with Venice) in a major book. On 10 April 2003 there was yet another vindication, that of Hazlitt, whose writings, both radical and moral (Liber Amoris above all), had met with the disapproval of the authorities of St Ann’s Church, Soho, at the time of his death, penniless, in nearby Frith Street in 1830. His memorial headstone had badly eroded over the years, and was also damaged during the Blitz. Foot now presided over a ceremony in the little churchyard, attended by notable writers and politicians, including the authors A. C. Grayling and Tom Paulin, and the Conservative peers Ian Gilmour and Kenneth Baker, which made amends to Hazlitt’s memory. A new headstone beside the church was unveiled. The indomitable white-haired old man, confined to a wheelchair but his voice firm and clear, spoke for about twenty minutes, first on the glory of Hazlitt, and then on the iniquities of the Tory Party in 2003, in Wells’s day in 1903, in Hazlitt’s and Byron’s in 1803, in Swift’s in 1703, and for all eternity. The immortal memory was recalled of ‘the hater of the Pride and Power of the Few … The unconquered Champion of Truth, Liberty and Humanity’. It was an unforgettable private moment in British political culture.55
There was one deep sadness to counter the contentedness of a placid old age. Although Michael looked so frail, and staggered along on his stick ever since the car accident of 1963, it was Jill, two years older than himself, whose health was more problematic. She showed signs of serious heart trouble in 1997–98 but remained stoic, intellectually active and mentally strong. She continued her indefatigable work on the suffragettes even though it was obvious that the book would never be finished. She wrote a delightful personal sketch in The State of the Nation, a book edited by Geoffrey Goodman and published in 1997 to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Nye Bevan. The sexual mores of the hero were dealt with delicately, but with some frankness. Bevan is quoted as saying of his marriage to Jennie Lee, ‘An element of antagonism kept sex alive.’56 Jill spoke splendidly at a Bevan centenary dinner in Congress House that autumn. When the story of the Koestler rape broke in mid-1998, after David Cesarani published a new biography of Koestler, she was robust in explaining why she had had to keep silent, and won immense public sympathy for her ordeal.57 She and Michael were never closer, the most tender of partnerships. Then catastrophe struck in May 1999. Jill fell in her bathroom and broke a hip. This was serious for a woman of eighty-eight (her age tended to be adjusted), and exacerbated her heart problems. The decline was rapid, and she died on 13 December 1999. Michael, almost uniquely in his life, burst into tears.
It was the end of one of the great partnerships in Labour’s pantheon, worthy of being placed alongside that of the Webbs, the Coles or Nye and Jennie Lee. Indeed, unlike the last-named, Michael’s and Jill’s was emphatically not an open marriage. With the one exception, the partners were faithful in a union based on trust as well as love. Jill was by instinct an artist, not a natural politician. But without her Michael’s career, as politician as well as author, would have lost many of its essential qualities. It was Jill who wove the connection for him, as few other women could have done, between culture and political change, and who opened his eyes to environmental and aesthetic issues. Equally, Michael encouraged her to develop her separate professional activities in the film world, and nurtured her deeply-held feminist beliefs. For the remainder of his life, the memory of Jill, her beauty and her radiance were Michael’s ever-present inspiration. A meeting of commemoration was held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, on 17 January 2000. Tributes were paid by a series of speakers including Michael himself, Paul Foot (now seriously ill himself and able to stand only with difficulty) and, perhaps unexpectedly, Barbara Castle. The ten speakers numbered four men and six women, an arrangement which Jill would no doubt have approved. Afterwards, Foot went with some friends on a quiet visit to Dubrovnik, a very personal way of mourning his dear Jill’s memory in their beloved city.
Michael’s family and friends were now passing away, the inevitable concomitant of old age. His brothers and sisters had all gone. Dingle died in 1978, Hugh in 1990, John in 1999. Michael, who had suffered from so many health problems earlier on, was the last of the brood. Old political associates were going, too. Harold Wilson had died in 1995, a shadow of his former self. Jim Callaghan, a year older than Foot, lived until March 2005, dying a day before his ninety-third birthday. But he and Foot had had relatively little contact since 1979. Three personal losses were particularly distressing. In 2001 his long-term personal secretary and warm friend Una Cooze died of cancer after a long and painful illness. Secretarial help thereafter came from the immense personal kindness of Jenny Stringer and Una Cooze’s close friend Sheila Noble. A significant blow came with the death of Barbara Castle in May 2002, to the end the closest living confidante of Michael’s hopes and dreams. He spoke with strength and humour at a memorial event in Westminster Hall. It was wholly appropriate that those attending should be picketed and leafleted by local public sector workers who were on strike, their own spiky tribute to the author of In Place of Strife. Another loss felt with particular acuteness was the death of his favourite nephew, Paul Foot, in July 2004 after a long and distressing illness. With his unique brilliance as a journalist of exposure and his writings on ‘Red’ Shelley, Paul had seemed to Michael in many ways his natural heir, save for his incomprehensible attachment to the fringe Socialist Workers Party. The death of Stan Orme in April 2005 removed another old Tribunite comrade.
But, as we have seen, Jill’s death was by no means the end for Michael. With the devoted and deeply loyal care of Jill’s close friend Jenny Stringer, he continued to enjoy a rich and multi-faceted life. He faced up with much resilience to a remarkable series of celebratory parties at the time of his ninetieth birthday in July 2003, with Tony Blair and Jack Straw among the various hosts. Close contact was maintained with Tribune, whose offices had now moved to Arkwright Road in Hampstead, near Pilgrims Lane. Foot found the time for another local issue, trying to persuade the local authority to keep the Hampstead ponds free for bathers, and the campaign, supported by many writers and artistic glitterati, was broadly successful.58 An important family commitment was working on a life of his father Isaac with his niece Alison Highet, the daughter of his sister Jennifer, at her home near Axminster. This work, much enriched by quotations from Isaac’s family letters, speeches and sermons, was fulfilling an obligation to write his father’s life first discussed when he was in government back in 1977, and in September 2006 the book was published. Its subtitle, Apostle of England, evoked Isaac’s description of the martyr William Tyndale, who first translated the Bible into English.59
Nor was Foot removed from the political controversies of the day. An interview with him covering the current political scene in the Independent in July 2002 led to a pained, but courteous, rejoinder from the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon: ‘I was disappointed that you should characterize me as talking as if “I might want to use nuclear weapons”. I have never spoken that way.’ Hoon’s letter, however, did not exactly remove Foot’s apprehensions.60 More seriously, when the British government joined the Bush administration in invading Iraq in March 2003 Foot broke with his own precedent and took a vigorous part in denouncing the war. He was one of the speakers who addressed the colossal public anti-war demonstration, probably of well over a million, which marched from Westminster to Hyde Park on 15 February 2003, and condemned any invasion outright. He also sent a message of support to the second anti-war march in March, which took place after the Iraq war had started. Foot would see the Iraq venture as symbolic of the worst features of British foreign policy during his lifetime. He listed the aspects to condemn – the serial untruths about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; the ignoring of the United Nations and the weapons inspections methodically being carried out for them by Dr Hans Blix; the illegality of a pre-emptive strike intended to carry through unlawful regime change without any UN mandate; the threats to the independence of reporting by the BBC and others in the media, later the interference of 10 Downing Street in the security services and the Attorney-General’s office; the loss of at least fifty thousand Iraqi lives, perhaps many more, through Anglo-American planes bombing homes, mosques, schools and hospitals; the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison; the chaos and carnage left in Iraq after the formal fighting was over, with many atrocities by US troops recorded. To Foot, it was even worse than the Suez conspiracy in 1956. At least the Americans had been on the right side then. Labour’s Iraq venture would be arraigned by history alongside those of Tories like Chamberlain and Eden in the chronicle of history’s Guilty Men.
Opinion polls showed, then and afterwards, that it was the anti-war sentiments of men like Michael Foot to which the great majority of people responded, not just in Britain but all over the world. Foot showed signs now of breaking with the loyalty that he had given to the Labour leadership since 1997. At the Tribune rally at party conference in Bournemouth in September 2003, a few months after the invasion, he made an unprecedented attack on the Prime Minister’s ‘lies’, and declared that Britain was now far less safe than before the war. In due time, in July 2005, devastating bomb attacks in London, the work of Muslim extremists stirred to insensate hate partly by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, were to confirm his predictions in terrifying fashion. Foot had made his point, and the press had noticed it. Two days later the accounts of the 2003 Bournemouth conference carried a smiling photograph of him with another nonagenarian comrade-in-arms, Jack Jones.61
But, despite Iraq, Foot retained his lifelong loyalty to his old party. This led to an unfortunate episode during the general election of May 2005 in his old constituency of Blaenau Gwent. Here, on the retirement of Llew Smith as MP, party headquarters had proposed an all-woman shortlist, as a result of which Maggie Jones was nominated as official Labour candidate. The local party, however, reacted strongly against having a candidate imposed on them, and many constituency supporters opted for a long-established local figure, Peter Law, Member of the Welsh Assembly. Finally Law stood as an independent candidate against Maggie Jones, who was resident in London though a native of the valleys. Michael Foot, perhaps unfortunately, was persuaded to come down to Ebbw Vale again to endorse a woman candidate, and to urge people not to split the party. He also claimed, most dubiously it has to be said, that Nye Bevan would have supported an all-woman shortlist. This was not well received, and he met with less than his usual cordial reception. In the election, in one of the most astonishing results of the day, there was a 48.2 per cent swing against Labour in Blaenau Gwent, and Peter Law, even though he had had a recent operation for a brain tumour, was elected with a majority of 9,121. Purges of some senior members of an already small local party then took place. The constituency of Nye Bevan and Michael Foot between 1929 and 1992 was the most rock-solid of industrial fortresses. Incredibly, Labour had lost it.62 Law died in April 2006, and this led to another difficult by-election on 29 June, in which Labour, remarkably, failed to recapture the seat, its candidate losing by 2,484 votes to an independent who had been Law’s agent.
Foot took the loss of his old seat with equanimity. In his twentieth election since he first campaigned as a Lloyd George Liberal in 1929, yet another crisis had passed by. His political life had been punctuated by storms and stresses ever since he began his crusading on soapboxes with the Socialist League. His father had taught him that politics was a rough old game, in which landing blows above or below the belt was a matter of tactics, not of ethics. Foot was simply experiencing one more of the extreme vicissitudes that he had known all his life. He was nothing if not a survivor. In the meantime, there was always next week’s piece for Tribune, and there was still a Labour government in office. Foot enjoyed the celebrations of the party’s centenary in February 2006, with a special meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party convened by an old friend, the PLP Chairman Ann Clwyd. Gordon Brown was congratulated on his budget, a misguided critic of Swift was put right in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement.63 The unopposed advent of Gordon Brown as prime minister in late June 2007 was greeted with great enthusiasm, while his former aide, Sue Nye, now became a powerful figure in the office at No. 10. At Foot’s monthly lunches upstairs in the Gay Hussar (sadly diminished by the death of Ian Gilmour on 21 September) he rejoiced in Labour’s growing lead in the opinion polls, which by October had soared to over 10 per cent before falling again. Inspired by history, Foot could still look forward to new challenges and hope that, one day in some blissful dawn, his England would finally arise. The otherwise unkind cover of Private Eye published in June 1983 perhaps unintentionally captured his spirit. The elderly man is shouting defiantly, indefatigably, at the world, ‘Hang on, I haven’t finished yet!’