‘No attempt is made at impartiality. Unbiased historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ These strong sentiments, included in the preface of his first book, Armistice, were written in February 1940, at a very early stage of Michael Foot’s professional life. But they may well be taken as a parable for his career as a whole. He typecast himself as the utterly committed symbol of permanent opposition, a rebel, a maverick, in eternal conflict with authority, including often within his own Labour Party. One of his favourite words was ‘audacity’, and his chosen heroes, Swift, Hazlitt, Byron and Wells amongst the authors, Cripps, Beaverbrook, Bevan amongst the politicians, all embodied this life-enhancing quality. Foot was most often seen as a neo-pacifist (though The Guilty Men, and his support for the task force in the Falklands war and the bombing of Belgrade suggest a strong opposing tendency). But he warmed to Danton’s ardent patriotism during the French Revolution, the era of human history from which he most drew inspiration – ‘L’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace.’ In a remarkably long public career, extending from the early 1930s to the dawn of the twenty-first century, he was audacious to the point of recklessness, as backbencher, agitator and journalist, as crusading literary critic, and as a romantic and deeply passionate human being.
Yet he ended up, to the surprise of close friends and probably to his own, as leader of the Labour Party. Certainly his commitment to the party was the mainspring of his career. Ever since he forswore his ancestral Liberalism amidst the dockyard slums of Liverpool in 1935, his selfless dedication to the cause was beyond question. But assessing the precise nature of Foot’s contribution both to the party and to the philosophy of democratic socialism is by no means straightforward. It would be difficult to see him as making any special contribution to socialist ideas. His political creed was a passionate response to the social disasters of the thirties, which he characteristically linked with defeatism in foreign policy as well. His views assumed a coherent shape during the collectivism of the ‘people’s war’, and were given practical expression in the Labour manifesto of 1945. Thereafter, Foot’s ideas certainly changed on some key policies. In the late 1940s, for instance, he favoured a wages policy and a federal Europe, both of which he vehemently resisted as a minister in the 1970s. But his overall view of corporate state socialism did not greatly change. It focused on public ownership, planning, the redistribution of wealth, full employment, and an enabling welfare state on the centralist model of Nye’s immortal National Health Service.
For the rest of his life, his outlook remained much the same; some critics complained that he was trapped in the past, the eternal prophet of a better yesterday. He offered characteristically British recipes, blending Tawney and Keynes with some minor sprinklings from Marx for seasoning. In the late 1960s he was endorsing John Strachey’s distinctly revisionist Contemporary Capitalism (1956), to the effect that ‘Keynesian economics plus democratic pressures’ had transformed capitalism and prevented Marx’s forebodings about the ‘immiseration’ of the common people coming about.1 Foot did not seriously engage with the major debates when the original impetus of the Attlee government’s programme had slackened after 1951. Bevanism was doctrinally repetitive. There is no Foot critique of Crosland’s Future of Socialism – the powerful revisionist view that public ownership was largely irrelevant in a transformed capitalism where management had superseded ownership, and that socialism was now ‘about equality’. Education and the argument for comprehensive schools, for instance, on which Crosland’s argument placed such emphasis, never seemed to be a topic of great interest to Foot (not that the content of education, as opposed to its organization, ever seemed of much concern to Crosland either), and his speeches on the theme were minimal. Foot countered the ideological challenge of Tony Benn in the 1970s, as he did with the emergence of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ twenty years later, with a reiteration of the traditional imperatives of Old Labour. His election campaign in 1983 seemed a rendition of the old tunes of forty years earlier. Newer themes, like the environment or globalization, seldom emerged. At the time, his parliamentary approach to socialism clearly carried the day over Benn’s more populist approach. It was a supreme irony that the emergence of New Labour in 1997 – heavily managerial, relatively non-ideological, favouring an approach to government that often bypassed not only the party membership but Parliament itself, and even the Cabinet – owed little to either the Foot or the Benn model of parliamentary socialism. After a decade of passionate struggle for the heart and soul of the Labour movement, both combatants appeared to have lost.
The limitations that shaped Foot’s ideology were clear enough. His broad lack of interest in economics at any stage of his career was a major factor: perhaps a deep, abiding suspicion of capitalism in any form, and hatred of its instruments within a global economy, made him reluctant to turn his mind to discussing fundamental economic principles. It is doubtful whether he ever really understood them. While in international and Commonwealth affairs he often played an innovative and courageous role, his inability to contribute to economic debates on international development, trade and Third World indebtedness curbed his effectiveness. Such matters did not seem to engage him. Also, his inattention to detail in analysing the machinery of government did not encourage enquiry on his part into how the apparatus of socialist planning might actually work, given the obstacles that it confronted in reality after 1945, 1964 and certainly in 1974, when he was a key minister. He had surprisingly little to say about workers’ control or industrial democratization, down to the 1976 Bullock Report. The daily experience of the workers was remote from him until he built up his links with the unions, and with Frank Cousins and Jack Jones in particular, relatively late in his career. His was a socialism of the book, of emotional sensibility rather than empirical analysis. He became a socialist through reading Wells and Arnold Bennett, Jack London and Robert Tressell, on Liverpool’s trams, reinforced by imaginative borrowings from radical essayists and poets of earlier generations. Socialism was a mood, a mystique, and it belonged to the ages.
As a result, other than his pamphlet My Kind of Socialism in 1980, there is no document that can be seen as Michael Foot’s contribution to socialist thought. In this he is unusual amongst Labour’s leaders. Keir Hardie, often accused of simple-minded sentimentalism, produced From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), an attempt to pull broad ethical principles together which is full of interest. Ramsay MacDonald’s stream of texts promoting Darwinian evolutionary socialism led him to be regarded for a time as an intellectual giant. He recognized that the fledgling Labour Party needed not just instincts but an ideology. The prophet George Lansbury produced a number of statements on the socialist idea, notably My England (1934). Even Clement Attlee, derided by the left as an unimaginative, colourless ‘calculating machine’, set down his credo in methodical fashion in The Labour Party in Perspective (1937). While Harold Wilson was essentially a technocrat, enriched by northern nonconformity, Jim Callaghan, no natural intellectual, came to socialism via its philosophy, through reading Harold Laski’s complicated texts on democratic pluralism while munching his sandwiches on Tower Hill. It is indeed strange that Michael Foot, so brilliant a communicator, and of immense intellectual stature in the roll-call of labour leaders, produced so little of substance here. But the answer is, no doubt, that this is to look in the wrong place. Foot’s socialism was neither ideological nor logical, but inspirational. His great and incomparable contribution to socialist understanding is undoubtedly his massive life of Aneurin Bevan, partisan and often unfair, but a thrilling evocation of what it meant to be a socialist, in philosophy and in the uses of power, seen not through abstract concepts but in what Foot sees as the courage and vision of one towering human being, under whose shadow he always remained. Foot’s two volumes on Bevan will survive, long after far more scholarly biographies, as a unique testament to the passion of the ethical socialist faith.
But if Foot the political philosopher is not a rewarding theme, his contribution elsewhere was vivid and consistent. He was the outstanding political publicist and pamphleteer of his day and, through Tribune, a crusading editor on the grand scale. His style was naturally pugnacious. As Hazlitt wrote of Cobbett, Michael Foot was the Tom Cribb of the journalistic prize ring, best on the attack. He announced himself in Guilty Men, the greatest radical tract since the time of Wilkes, and his unique blend of mordant wit, passionate sensibility and linguistic grace, backed up by a unique fund of historical and literary allusion, made him a celebrated and feared polemicist for the British left. Much of this was sadly ephemeral, cast in challenging newspaper articles or book reviews; Tribune, a genuine competitor to the New Statesman in 1945, with marvellous contributors like George Orwell, never sought to cut free from its base in Keep Left and its successors. It became from 1951 inextricably linked with Bevanism, and then CND later on, a persistent voice of criticism of Labour’s leadership, and widely seen as essentially destructive. It reinforced a perception of the party as inherently divided and unelectable. The defeat of CND and the absorption of many leading ex-Bevanites into Wilson’s government in 1964 seriously diminished Tribune’s influence thereafter. By 1974 the paper seemed the voice of the ‘soft left’, sometimes called the legitimate left, a licensed rebel and essentially safe. Nevertheless, it gave Foot an enduring and influential platform for agitation and protest, which survived the turmoil of the new left disputes of the sixties and seventies, and offered a unique long-term critique. In particular, it was unusual in its attention to international affairs, and here, including in its treatment of India, Palestine and the ideological divisions of Europe (in fact, almost everywhere except the United States), it was important and distinctive. Tribune is, among other things, a permanent tribute to Foot’s celebration of the profession of journalism. High in his pantheon of heroes were the great editors like Robert Blatchford of the Clarion, and of course he revered Beaverbrook as a spearhead of the crusading press. Foot’s friendships with journalists he admired were central to his life – Noel Brailsford, Frank Owen, James Cameron, Geoffrey Goodman, the immortal newspaper cartoonists Vicky and Abu. His membership of the National Union of Journalists was deeply important to him, and he fought the good fight on its behalf in the successful campaign for the closed shop in 1975–76. A free society he measured by its free press. It was also the way by which radicals and minority protesters could neutralize the brute force of capitalism. There was, after all, no real answer to the power of literacy.
A question, however, was how far the journalism and pamphleteering of Foot and his colleagues could be seen as basically socialist. With his Liberal background and his ingrained libertarianism, Foot’s campaigning almost instinctively took the form of a kind of broad patrician populism, working within a familiar parliamentary mould. Guilty Men, after all, was in no sense a socialist tract. If anybody, its hero was Winston Churchill. It focused on folly and corruption in high places, much as the ‘muckraking’ of the American Progressive journalists, Lincoln Steffens or Ida Tarbell or Upton Sinclair, had done earlier in the century. Foot’s captivating books of essays, Debts of Honour and Loyalists and Loners, certainly paid tribute to leftists of the remoter past, but also to colourful Tory outsiders like Disraeli, Churchill and Beaverbrook, well outside the socialist pantheon, not to mention Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. In ideology as well in style, Foot’s books seemed to belong to a much earlier age, perhaps that of his Whig hero Charles James Fox. In some ways they would seem more at home in the late eighteenth century than in the twentieth. Significantly, apart from his highly personal book on Nye, none of his works is a study of the British Labour movement.
Without doubt, one of Foot’s unique contributions to socialist and other politics was as a brilliant parliamentarian. Somewhat too rhetorical to be wholly successful in his first spell in Parliament up to 1955, after his return for Ebbw Vale in 1960 he became renowned as the most consistently articulate and powerful speaker in the House, a fusion of the Cornish chapels, the Oxford Union and the soapboxes of the Socialist League. He packed the Commons benches with eloquent and witty speeches, as hardly any other contemporary could do after the death of Bevan. Only Enoch Powell, perhaps, could challenge him, and he and Foot became significantly close friends. Foot was wonderful in Parliament, in large measure because he believed passionately in it – such it was, drawing its historic strength from the victory over Charles I in the seventeenth century, vindicated anew in 1832 and through the triumph of the suffragettes, surviving magnificently and preserving all its historic liberties in two world wars. Churchill and Bevan, in their contrasting styles, were the legitimate heirs of the men on Putney Heath in 1647, embodying the glorious vision of free citizenship. In 1940, whereas Pétain the President saw the French as his ‘children’, Churchill the parliamentarian regarded his people as freeborn Englishmen. Foot’s oratory added its own special nuances. In debate he was often thrilling, leaving much to chance and spontaneous combustion: he told Roy Hattersley that when speaking ‘you must always surprise people’. Contemporaries in the 1970s distinguished between the ministerial Foot reading out a civil servant’s brief with different glasses, and the uninhibited, spontaneous Foot declaiming his faith and lashing his opponents without mercy. Unfortunately, too many of his great parliamentary performances appeared negative (as with the campaign against Lords reform in 1969), or the products of defeat, as in his memorable performance in March 1979 when the Callaghan government fell, or his attack on Mrs Thatcher over the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands. But they still read finely and move the spirit.
At the same time, he derived strength as an orator from also being, outside the House, amongst the great stump orators of his day. Protest and parliamentarism went side by side. As party leader, Foot always seemed most at home on Marches for Jobs or at demonstrations against nuclear weapons. The Aldermaston marches he took especially seriously. Yet even they always remained a backdrop to the politics of Westminster, which he deeply respected. No one had a greater regard for, or knowledge of, the procedures and conventions of the House. As a backbencher he was zealous in condemning attempts by the whips to curtail the freedoms of honourable Members, and he could be devastating in the hand-to-hand combat of the committee stage. His was a deeply principled attachment to parliamentary sovereignty – yet also a romantic conservative one. It was the sovereignty of Parliament, not the defence of socialism, which provided the basis of his passionate opposition to entry into Europe. It was Parliament which provided the framework for his socialism, in opposition to the left-wing extra-parliamentary (or, as he felt, anti-parliamentary) movements like Militant. Parliament was the foundation of the democratic socialism with which he resisted Tony Benn. Parliament should be inviolable, as for centuries past. Thus he looked with scant enthusiasm at attempts to reform it, for example by voting reform or regional government. Even his taking up the cause of Scottish and Welsh devolution in the 1970s did not really contest the centralizing thrust of his parliamentary socialism. After all, that was Nye Bevan’s vision too.
Foot’s contribution as a Cabinet minister came late in the day, when he was already into his sixties and in the near-twilight of his career. Previously to that he had been a consistent critic and gadfly, from the Socialist League in the 1930s to the Tribune group in the 1960s. Yet when he became a minister he proved to be an important one, even if inevitably controversial. He moved to the party mainstream in response to what seemed to him the dangers of the historic Labour alliance splitting asunder, especially in relation to the trade unions. He needed little persuasion now to play a controlling role, largely though not entirely as the champion of the unions. As Secretary for Employment his ministerial style was unorthodox but highly effective. In his own fashion he passed no fewer than six major Bills in 1974–76, in a Commons in which Labour had effectively no majority at all. He succeeded for a time in reversing the legal tide in industrial relations. He tilted the balance more equitably in favour of working people in relation to employment rights, trade disputes, membership of unions, health and safety and much else. Many of the criticisms of him as being a creature of the unions, for instance over the protection of the closed shop, were exaggerated, and the import of his legislation was upheld in the courts by judicial notables like Lord Scarman and Lord Denning. It was not Foot’s fault that the unions so blighted their image and their popularity in the winter of discontent, after Jack Jones had left the scene. The outcome – the reversal of much of his legislation in the Thatcher years, and the consequent marginalization of the unions in British political life and a ‘flexible, deregulated free labour market’ – has not helped make Britain a more egalitarian society.
As Leader of the House, Foot’s role was different, adaptable, almost atmospheric, in keeping a minority government afloat with a variety of pacts with Liberals, nationalists and Ulstermen. The extraordinary nature of his achievement is often overlooked: certainly without Foot there would have been little enough life in the Labour governments of 1974–79. He acted with scrupulous loyalty, notably in the IMF crisis, and both Callaghan and Healey paid frequent and sincere tribute to him on this score. In his negotiations with the unions in pressing an anti-inflation wages policy he was remarkable in his dedication, and helped massively towards the Labour government’s success in the two crucial years 1976–78. As a result, Foot acquired in his later career a stature that went far beyond the narrow ranks of the Labour left. He had been a minister who had contrived to hold the balance between Callaghan and Benn, who had been respected by his civil servants, and who had a clear record of legislative achievement. It was the last, and in some ways, the most effective, phase of the history of the Ministry of Labour and the Department of Employment that succeeded it. It restored a social balance, last enshrined in Bevin’s pact with the unions in 1940. In the subsequent eighteen years of Conservative rule there were many former critics (some of whom returned to the fold after their experiment with the SDP) who saw new virtue in the social democracy of the Callaghan years, and felt that, in education, devolution and aspects of social policy, it had anticipated the best of New Labour, well ahead of its time.
As Labour leader, Foot was manifestly out of his element. The television newscaster Jon Snow wrote warmly that he was ‘far too honest and interesting ever to be Prime Minister’, but this may be over-romantic.2 Foot had neither the political background nor the temperament to make a success of the job. In the typology of Labour leaders he would be ranked with the minority of protesters – Hardie, Lansbury, the early Kinnock – not with the planners or the ‘plodders’. Labour was close to being ungovernable internally in 1980–83, and its election defeat was pre-ordained. It seldom looked like presenting a challenge to Mrs Thatcher, especially with the defections to the SDP, and Foot rarely made a positive impact – ironically, his belligerent speech on the Falklands invasion was one exception, and it eventually worked to Labour’s disadvantage, since the left does not normally benefit from jingoism, as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to confirm. Foot had no particular vision to offer his party, other than a reiteration of the Old Labour themes of 1945, along with an electorally unwise concentration once again on unilateral nuclear disarmament. Nor did he attempt to look outwards beyond the Labour Party, to try to reclaim those who had defected or who had never been Labour at all. Once a Tory, always a Tory, impenetrable and irredeemable.
But he offered something else, robust and warm, his own image of honesty and integrity. It was a preserving, not a reforming, Labour Party that Michael Foot offered, and after the 1983 general election its standing seemed fragile indeed. But the crisis had nevertheless moved beyond the darkest hour, and renewal was under way. Foot himself, no kind of witch-hunter, had begun the process of weeding out the anti-parliamentary, sectarian far left, Militant and otherwise, from the ranks of the party. His own natural supporters among the soft left turned decisively to uphold the parliamentary, gradualist model; his successor Neil Kinnock encouraged them with courageous leadership and drive that were beyond Michael Foot’s temperamental capacity. There was still in being a socialist alternative, however pallid, after Foot’s three sad years of leadership. He could never have captured power, but almost alone amongst his contemporaries (including Denis Healey) he supplied a unifying energy and focus, along with a capacity for enlisting trust, that gave his comrades a future still worth fighting for.
But Michael Foot the Labour politician is only part of his story, perhaps the less important part. He commands attention, even fascination, not so much because of what he did – his positive legislative and other achievements, after all, were relatively limited – but because of what he was. In a way unique in his time, he operated as the man of letters in politics. Like the Liberal intellectual grandees John Morley, James Bryce or Augustine Birrell of Edwardian days, he was a genuine voice for public culture, especially historical and literary culture, in British political life. Like them, he saw its origins in the seventeenth century, with Cromwell and Milton as its founding fathers. Journalists who ridiculed him as ‘the old bibliophile’ or a somewhat manic, dishevelled essayist and book reviewer who had somehow strayed into parliamentary affairs through inadvertence, simply misunderstood him. Foot quite genuinely saw his forays into politics as inextricably bound up with his vision of the culture of the past, its books above all. Inspired always by his father Isaac, he generated for himself a unique cultural genealogy, pivoting on Swift, the déclassé outsider who dished Marlborough and the Whigs, but going back to Montaigne, and then moving onwards to Hazlitt, Byron, Heine and H. G. Wells, with Orwell and Silone as more contemporary exhibits.
For Foot, these writers – and their ranks could variously be swollen by Defoe, Wordsworth, Cobbett, Disraeli, Conrad and Shaw, amongst others – were not a mere hobby or ‘hinterland’, to use the term in Denis Healey’s illuminating autobiography. They embodied his values, they shaped his rhetoric. They were custodians of a unique culture, all of them rebels against convention and sometimes driven into isolation or exile, yet all operating broadly within an acceptable context of British-style civility. They all embodied aspects of Foot’s political outlook, or at least he claimed that they did. All of them had a sense of history which they had mobilized to subvert present injustices. They also embodied aspects of Foot’s personality, especially his romantic vision of personal liberation. Each was a ‘sensual puritan’, as Foot saw Nye Bevan. Each responded to place and circumstance – not least to the beauties of Venice, almost as central a connecting thread in his literary heroes as were the ideas of Montaigne and Swift. Foot’s speeches and writings turned time and again to key statements from his favoured authors, not to strike any forced cultural pose, but because their ideas provided his essential driving force. Defining Jonathan Swift as a ‘militant Montaigne’ was not just an academic conceit, but a central component of Foot’s ideology. He liked to quote Logan Pearsall Smith’s aphorism, ‘To act and not to read is barbarism.’ He put it a different way when quoted in an article which appeared in the Guardian in May 2006: ‘Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.’3 No one in his time in politics has even come close to emulating his unifying vision of the synergy of books and action. With the present-day challenge to the book from electronic forms of information technology, and the relegation of an education that disciplines the intellect in favour of the inculcation of repetitive ‘skills’, no one is likely to do so again. Our public discourse will be much the poorer.
Apart from his bookishness, Foot’s more general public style needs close examination. He seems to offer a relatively simple vision of popular dissent, treasured in the values of the common people over the centuries. In fact, there were many complications in his views, different versions of grit in the oyster. His socialism was at least challenged, perhaps fundamentally modified, by a powerful ancestral background of Cromwellian parliamentarism and old Liberalism. Even when most caught up in protecting the trade unions, Foot always spoke for the free-thinking dissenter, the rebel whatever his or her cause. His endless protests against the Labour leadership from 1935 to 1970 were always framed in the form of a timeless libertarianism that went beyond a mere Liberal defence of civil liberties.
Again, he stood apparently for an internationalism of outlook, powerfully displayed in his enthusiasm for India and Israel, and in idealistic campaigns such as that for rehabilitating a crushed Germany after 1945. Like Wordsworth in 1789, Foot felt himself to be genuinely a citizen of the world. But his was a very British internationalism, indeed ‘mere English’: even his genuine affection for the Welsh voters of Ebbw Vale was conceived from the outside. Unlike Marx, he found it difficult to grasp an ‘unhistoric’ nation. In its institutions, its ethos and its culture, England was always his touchstone. Foot in many ways is a key exemplar in the recent annals of English nationalism, no less so than his friend George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn. Robert Colls’s fine book The Identity of England (2002) has shrewdly seen Orwell’s wartime idea of the English revolution as ‘home-grown’, an extension of the Englishness that already existed.4 This would apply equally to Michael Foot. More fully than most socialists, he responded to the clarion call ‘England arise.’ He felt rooted in his England, whereas a man like Koestler was always displaced and volatile. Foot’s opposition to ‘Europe’ spoke for a deep, abiding insularity. He did not identify politically with England’s European neighbours, none of whose languages he spoke, or perhaps wanted to speak, whose history too often was a series of lurches between Bonapartism and anarchy. Foot never drew on the ideas of intellectual socialists like Jean Jaurès or Léon Blum as he might have done, though he did respond strongly to eastern European dissidents like Milan Djilas. The same applied to the USA. American radicalism had had its positive impact on British radicals over the years, on Richard Cobden and Joseph Chamberlain, via Theodore Roosevelt’s influence on Lloyd George, down to J. K. Galbraith’s impact on the Labour Party of the 1950s. Some of Foot’s ideological heroes, Bertrand Russell or Harold Laski, had been genuinely transatlantic in seeing links between America and the British left. His father Isaac, the admirer of Lincoln, had been a strong supporter of the alliance with the United States, which he knew at first hand. But even when the New Deal is taken into account, Michael showed an indifference to the USA that bordered on distaste. Perhaps one of his greatest overseas heroes was Pandit Nehru. Significantly, Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge, a patrician socialist like Foot himself, though more ruthless in the uses of power.
Similarly, Foot’s feel for British history, genuine and deeply-felt, was a complex one. History as such was vitally important to him intellectually. He read voraciously Gibbon and Macaulay, Michelet’s history of the French Revolution (to which he was drawn by the writings of C. L. R. James) and especially (as an instinctive hero-worshipper) Thomas Carlyle’s mighty works on Cromwell and Napoleon. In pamphlets like Full Speed Ahead in 1950, or My Kind of Socialism in 1981, Foot outlined a kind of popular history of the English people, like E. P. Thompson’s vision of the ‘liberty tree’ down the ages. Those who raised their voices in protest for the common people, from John Ball in the Peasants’ Revolt, through the Levellers in the seventeenth century, the Foxite Whigs and radicals like Tom Paine a century and a half later, the Chartists in the early industrial age, the independent Labour Party of Hardie, Lansbury and Bevan more recently, were seen as marching along the long road to political and social liberation. Their eternal enemies were Tories, landlords, generals and industrial capitalists of all descriptions. But this simple-minded populist picture was complicated by other factors, notably a deep patriotic pride in English liberties and institutions (hence his enthusiasm for Fox, far from being any kind of social radical). Newspaper allegations that he indulged in anti-patriotic, even treasonable, activities with Soviet agents are therefore all the more ludicrous.
In his view of history, Foot responded passionately to earlier eras of national glory, the Stuart period above all. Like traditional chroniclers of ‘Our Island Story’ he believed in British exceptionalism. This Devon man saw not only the freebooting Francis Drake as a symbol of national greatness. Plymouth and the throb of Drake’s Drum were as central to his sense of patriotism as were Nelson and the Chimes of Pompey for his colleague Jim Callaghan. Foot extended this to naval heroes over the centuries, from Cromwell’s inspired Admiral Blake to Nelson himself, while, despite Swift, he felt there was much to be said for Marlborough and the later Churchills, not to mention Chatham. Like the Elizabethan Welsh mystic John Dee, Foot could even respond to the idea of a ‘British Empire’, though (like Dee) using neither word in its Victorian colonizing sense. Oliver Cromwell he revered not only as a champion of Parliament but also a powerful agent of maritime greatness, respected across the globe, later recalled by that old cynic Sam Pepys with nostalgic affection. Foot wanted his people to identify with visions of a great cohesive nation, but without its institutional forms being overturned. In practice, provided the rights of backbenchers were respected, he was happy enough with a relatively unreformed House of Commons, and also with leaving as they were institutions like the public schools and the older universities (after all, he had attended them himself, and had deep affection for Oxford in particular). Reforming the unelected Lords was no great priority, even with tales later surfacing of ‘cash for peerages’: after all, Labour had been content to indulge the corrupt figure of Robert Maxwell when he rescued Mirror Newspapers. There was even something to be said for the monarch, and he respected the patriotic commitment of the Queen, whom in any case he liked on personal grounds, as he did the Queen Mother. On matters like the Commonwealth, he noted, the Queen was far sounder in her instincts than the elected and female Prime Minister of the eighties.
Complexities in his historical outlook also emerged from the human agents of it that he admired. His values were variously embodied by Lloyd George, Stafford Cripps, Lord Beaverbrook, Aneurin Bevan (the strongest force of them all), Jack Jones, the Nehru family, and women in general, as a result of Jill’s tutorship. It was inevitably a very mixed vision of culture and social change that these personalities conveyed to him. The most they had in common, perhaps, was a sense that each was a kind of outsider, just as Swift, Hazlitt and Wells had been. Foot’s vision was shaped by history in fundamental ways, but a highly usable history, in which he was prepared to impose his principles on the past, and not merely draw from it as ‘another country’. He was not, after all, a scholar-historian. None of his books, other than The Pen and the Sword, could be called academic. Most were self-proclaimed ‘vindications’. What he did do, however, more powerfully than anyone in political life other than Winston Churchill, was to teach a respect for the past, to see our history as a humane civilizing force with its own validity. Foot was never more himself than when celebrating works of historical literature, especially British. It was in its almost total lack of interest in history that ‘New Labour’ in his own later years seemed to him most culpably deficient and spiritually dead, Gordon Brown being a distinguished exception. He was not reassured by the spectacle of Tony Blair proclaiming that ‘I feel the hand of history on our shoulders,’ or telling the American Congress that ‘history will forgive’ the invasion of Iraq. Dragging in the endorsement of Almighty God was even worse.5 The historical sense and sensibility of Michael Foot, humanist littérateur, reflected a world we had lost.
Michael Foot was a highly intellectual politician. But he was not really an intellectual in politics, certainly not in the same sense as Crosland, Crossman or Denis Healey in using a powerful mental apparatus to define, disentangle and decide on major political issues. Foot operated on a different level, romantic in style but with an ancestral underpinning of rationalism too, as Barbara Castle shrewdly noted of the ‘collective Foot type’. He was a fundamentally tolerant man. The frequent air of dogmatism, aggressively conveyed in public (especially towards some fellow socialists, like comrade Gaitskell, whom he seemed to hate more virulently than any Tory, living or dead), was misleading. Norman Tebbit saw Foot as a self-righteous bigot, incapable of being fair to his opponents’ position or even of listening to it.6 In fact, Foot’s politics were flexible and eclectic. He was neither moralistic nor Marxist. He preferred by far Disraeli’s colourful iconoclasm to Gladstone’s evangelical solemnity. The flirtation with Marxist theory undertaken by some of his colleagues in the thirties left him cold, and thereby unencumbered by the dialectic rigidity in his thought-processes which could emerge even in a good social democrat like Healey. After all, Foot’s most admired contemporary writers, Orwell, Koestler (with reservations), certainly Ignazio Silone, were all fugitives from the intellectual tyranny of Communism. Their god that had failed was one that Foot had never begun to worship in the first place. He escaped from Cripps’s Marxisant mélange in good time. He was in every sense a humanist. For a left-wing socialist devoted to his party, he was not at all tribal, either in his friendships or his instincts. The admirer of the French Jacobins who could revel in Burke’s reactionary reflections on the Revolution in France was also the liberal anti-racist who could build up a private friendship with Enoch Powell.
Michael Foot’s approach to public life was poetic, if partisan. It was also highly personal. People noted that he seemed to be a very private man, distant from children while kind to them, enjoying the solitude of the old books in his library, often curiously shy in conversation. He steered well clear of writing his autobiography. In a famous review of Barbara Castle’s published diaries he attacked the principle of Cabinet ministers keeping journals, and kept none himself. His books never penetrate or reveal his subconscious. Perhaps his enthusiasm for a rich variety of extrovert heroes and messiahs (nearly all male, save for Indira Gandhi), amongst past authors or present politicians, was a substitute for searching self-analysis. He cleaved to simple human values and loyalties, and very seldom deviated from them. Freud is as much an absentee as Marx in his world view. In so doing, he built up an image of humanity, personal integrity and outgoing generosity that was rare in his lifetime, indeed rare amongst politicians at any time, and he was admired, even loved, for it.
Michael Foot changed relatively few ideas. But he changed a good many lives. In the process he achieved an international respect (notably in the Commonwealth) which few British politicians could match. Like most of his friend A. J. P. Taylor’s ‘troublemakers’, Foot’s political legacy was an evanescent one. There was no more eager champion of causes that were irretrievably lost. But, helped always by Jill’s inspirational partnership, he taught his comrades how to read, how to feel, perhaps how to live. He brought warmth into his world. Britain’s unique contribution to world culture in the later twentieth century, especially powerful in the political class in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, was its democratic socialist middle way. Much of it flowed through the words and writings of Michael Foot. He touched it with a kind of magic, certainly with his cherished audacity. Like Voltaire (the friend of Dean Swift and the idol of H. N. Brailsford), he devoted a very long life to the pursuit of the highest ideals of free thought, tolerance and civil liberty.7 He did so with far more social insight, much less cynicism about humankind, than the old French philosophe ever managed. But, like Voltaire too, citizen Foot, libertarian and Jacobin, sans-culotte of the donkey jacket, was always a great humane reformer, not a revolutionary.