Michael Foot: A Life

Kenneth O. Morgan

MICHAEL FOOT

A LIFE

DEDICATION

For Joseph

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

1 Nonconformist Patrician (1913–1934)

2 Cripps to Beaverbrook (1934–1940)

3 Pursuing Guilty Men (1940–1945)

4 Loyal Oppositionist (1945–1951)

5 Bevanite and Tribunite (1951–1960)

6 Classic and Romantic

7 Towards the Mainstream (1960–1968)

8 Union Man (1968–1974)

9 Social Contract (1974–1976)

10 House and Party Leader (1976–1980)

11 Two Kinds of Socialism (1980–1983)

12 Into the Nineties

ENVOI: Toujours l’Audace

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

NOTES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

Michael Foot has had a very long and colourful life. He was chronicler and participant in central aspects of British twentieth-century history. His first general election found him crusading for Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in 1929. His twentieth and last saw him campaigning for Labour in his old seat, Ebbw Vale/Blaenau Gwent, seventy-six years later. He spans the worlds of Stafford Cripps and Tony Blair. He was a doughty opponent of appeasement in the later 1930s: his book Guilty Men made him famous at the age of twenty-seven. He was vocal in condemning the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He stands, and feels himself to stand, in the great and honourable tradition of dissenting ‘troublemakers’, the heir to Fox and Paine, Hazlitt and Cobbett. He played in his life many parts. As icon of the socialist left, he was custodian and communicator of British socialism. He was the greatest pamphleteer perhaps since John Wilkes, a formidable editor, and author of a glittering biography of his idol, Nye Bevan. He was a scintillating parliamentarian, an inveterate critic and peacemonger as Bevanite, Tribunite and founder member of CND, yet also a belligerent patriot and internationalist from Dunkirk to Dubrovnik. He was a central figure and champion of the unions in the Labour governments of the 1970s, a key player in Old Labour’s last phase. Less happily, he was for almost three tormented years Labour’s leader. Perhaps most important of all, he was a deeply cultured and literate man whose learning was absolutely central to his politics. He was heir to the Edwardian men of letters, the Liberals Morley or Birrell, and politically more innovative than either. Over sixty years he was an inspirational and civilizing force, if a deeply controversial one. His passing will symbolize a world we have lost.

When Michael Foot asked me if I would write a new authorized biography, I was, of course, both excited and honoured. At the same time, I had some doubts. After writing a large biography of one veteran Labour leader, Jim Callaghan, I wondered whether it would be wise to write another, especially on someone so removed from Callaghan’s own wing of the party. Although Callaghan and Foot worked with immense loyalty as colleagues in the Labour government of 1976–79, they were very different as men and as democratic socialists. Someone who worked for them both told me that they were not ‘best buddies’, while Jim Callaghan himself, just before he died in March 2005, showed himself to be a bit wary of my new project. Another point was that, while I had never really been on the right in Labour terms since I first joined the party in 1955, I was not really Old Labour either, despite the stereotypes of amiable journalists who have vainly tried to depict me as its ‘laureate’. On the contrary, I have always been a liberal devolutionist rather than a state centralist (being Welsh may have something to do with that), while on several major issues my views were not those of Michael Foot, notably on CND and on Europe. Although an admirer of Bevan (whose features adorn the sticker on my car window), I was not a Bevanite. And finally, at the start of 2003 I was doing something else, namely writing an academic book on the public memory in twentieth-century Britain. I have always been a historian rather than a biographer; only six of my books have been biographies. I was also an active member of the Lords (dissident Labour), an institution of whose abolition Michael Foot has always been an ardent supporter.

But as soon I began work and began talking to Michael Foot about his career, my doubts immediately dissolved. Having written on Jim Callaghan’s equally fascinating career proved to be a huge stimulus, both in seeing somewhat similar episodes from another perspective, and in finding contrasts and comparisons between two totally different men, each capable of the greatness of spirit to work with someone to whom he was not naturally attuned. The fact that I started from a somewhat different political (and perhaps literary) standpoint from Michael Foot was in itself exciting in trying to examine his principles and his crusades from the outside. Michael himself was typically honourable and honest in recognizing that I came from somewhere else on the Labour continuum, and that in any case I was writing as a detached scholar and lifelong academic. It is characteristic that he has made no effort to read, let alone censor, anything I have written. His view of freedom of expression and interpretation, and the need to pursue them uninhibitedly and audaciously, has been most admirably exemplified in his approach to his own biographer, and I greatly respect that. Even membership of a non-elected House has not, perhaps, been a barrier. And finally, to someone working on the public memory, there is no finer custodian or exemplar of it than Michael Foot, deeply aware, as hardly any contemporary politicians are, of the vital importance of the past – history, legend, memory and myth intertwined – in shaping the present and pointing the way ahead. So writing on Michael Foot has enormously stimulated my earlier interests. As I have moved into my eighth decade, it has given me several new ones: I know far more about Montaigne, Swift or Hazlitt, for example, than I ever did before, and my mind is much the richer for it. In all ways, I have found writing about Michael deeply stimulating. This book has been great fun to write, and it would be nice to think that some readers might find it fun to read. No doubt I shall find out.

There is another personal aspect too. Back in 1981 I received a letter from Jill Craigie, Michael’s wife, in effect suggesting that I might write his life. She invited my wife Jane and me to their house in Pilgrims Lane for a delightful dinner and talk. In fact, for whatever reason, the offer was never actually made – to my relief at that time, as I was then heavily involved with two long books, two small children and a beautiful and dynamic young wife, as well as being a busy Oxford tutor. I was not exactly looking out for ways of filling up my empty hours. I met Jill for the last time in the autumn of 1997 at an event at Congress House, near the British Museum, to celebrate the centenary of Nye Bevan’s birth. She had not been well, and she looked ill and rather sad as she came up to me and (without needing to explain) said quietly that we both knew she should have taken a different decision years earlier. I felt deeply moved, but mumbled something to the effect that I was still very much alive, and that there was still time. Jill died two years later. I would like to think that in writing this book I have been fulfilling a kind of secret bond of trust between us. I well know she would not have agreed with all its contents, but it would have been fun to have been appropriately chastised by this tough, determined but warm, loyal and lovable woman.

My main debt of gratitude is, of course, to Michael Foot himself. Apart from honouring me by asking me to write the book, he was always freely available for formal interviews or offhand chats, always open in making his papers (when they could be unearthed!) available to me, and quite astonishingly kind in giving me some of his own or his father’s books, several of them rare. He is an extraordinarily warm and generous person, a man of unforced, spontaneous learning. Simply to work through his personal edition of Montaigne’s writings, read in Hereford hospital after a serious car crash in late 1963 and covered with his own scholarly pencilled annotations, is in itself an education. Whether at home in his Pilgrims Lane basement rooms or cheerfully installed in an upstairs dining room over the goulash, raspberries and white wine at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, talking to this ever-young nonagenarian has been nothing less than a joy, and I count myself fortunate indeed. I am also greatly indebted to the quite selfless kindness of Jenny Stringer, who has not only looked after Michael but in many ways looked after me as well during the writing of this book. I am also very grateful to Sheila Noble, who allowed me to look through Michael’s papers in her own possession in Clapham. Kay, Baroness Andrews, was kind in making the initial connections, her interest in the book no doubt shaped by her background as a citizen of Tredegar. I am also grateful to Michael’s many nice housekeepers who gave me so many splendid lunches. I particularly recall lunchtime conversations in Welsh with two of them, observed by Michael with amused tolerance. I have never met the authors of two earlier biographies, Mervyn Jones, and Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, but I would also wish to thank them for valuable information in their books which has helped me, especially on the personal aspects.

I am also hugely indebted, of course, to the kindness of Michael’s friends and colleagues. I have greatly benefited from formal interviews with Ian Aitken, Lord Barnett, Francis Beckett, Tony Benn, Albert Booth, the late Lord Bruce, the late Lord Callaghan, the late Baroness Castle, the late Dick Clements, Roger Dawe, Lord Evans of Parkside, Alan Fox, Vesna Gamulin, Geoffrey Goodman, Brian Gosschalk, Baroness Gould, Lord Hattersley, Lord Healey, Lord Hunt of Tanworth, Jack Jones, Dr Hrvoje Kacic, Sir Gerald Kaufman MP, Lord Kinnock, Jacqui Lait MP, Sir Thomas McCaffrey, Keith McDowall, Lord McNally, Baroness Mallalieu, Nada Maric, the late Lord Merlyn-Rees, Lord Morris of Aberavon, the late Lord Murray of Epping Forest, Sue Nye, the late Lord Orme, Lord Owen, Lord Paul, Sir Michael Quinlan, Caerwyn Roderick, Clive Saville, Lord Steel, Sir Kenneth Stowe, Elizabeth Thomas, Hugh Thomas, Lord Varley, Lord Wedderburn, Baroness Williams of Crosby, Vivian Williams and Sir Robert Worcester.

I am also grateful for valuable information gained from, amongst others, Dr Christopher Allsopp, Lord Anderson of Swansea, Sir Kenneth Barnes, Lord Biffen, Lord Brookman, Dr Alan Budd, Lord Burlison, Lord Carter, Lord Corbett, Sir Patrick Cormack MP, Lord Dubs, Lord Eatwell, Robert Edwards, Dr Hywel Francis MP, John Fraser, Baroness Gale, Jadran Gamulin, Lord Gilmour, Baroness Golding, Dr Andrew Graham, Lord Graham of Edmonton, Peter Hain MP, Lord Hogg, Lord Howe of Aberavon, Lord Irvine, Baroness Jay of Paddington, the late Lord Jay of Battersea, Lord Jones of Deeside, William Keegan, Paul Levy, Lord Lipsey, Lord Mason, Mrs John Powell, Professor Siegbert Prawer, Lord Prior, Lord Rodgers, Lord Sheldon, Dr Elizabeth Shore, Robert Taylor, Baroness Turner of Camden, Dennis Turner and Alan Watkins. I am also indebted to Francis Beckett for audio-visual material.

All academic writers are massively indebted to the philanthropic race of librarians. The staff of the House of Lords Library have been extraordinarily helpful, not least their former chief, David Lewis Jones from Aberaeron – diolch yn fawr iawn i ti am dy caredigrwydd. The librarian of the Reform Club, Simon Blundell, has been eternally helpful. I am also much indebted to the staff of the People’s History Museum, Manchester, where Michael Foot’s formal papers are so admirably housed, especially my old friend Stephen Bird. The helpful staff of the New Bodleian Library in charge of the newspaper stacks; my old friend John Graham Jones of the Political Archive, the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; Drs Allen Packwood and Andrew Riley at Churchill College, Cambridge; Ms Mari Takayanagi of the House of Lords Record Office; Ms Sally Pagan of Edinburgh University Library; and Ms Rachel Hertz at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, the University of Texas at Austin, have all been kindness itself, while the library staff of The Queen’s College, Oxford, have served me cheerfully as they have done since 1966. I am truly fortunate in my college, its Provost and Fellows, and all its staff.

I am delighted that the Right Honourable Tony Blair allowed me to publish one of his private letters. I am also very grateful for permission to publish material where trustees own the copyright, notably the Beaverbrook Papers in the House of Lords Record Office; to Baroness Jay for material from the private papers of Lord Callaghan in her possession; and to Sir Patrick Cormack MP for showing me the portrait of Michael Foot in 1 Parliament Street as well as to the artist, Graham Jones, for allowing me to use it in illustrating this book.

For the second time, a manuscript of mine has been read by my old friend Professor David Howell of the University of York. His extraordinary learning and attention to detail have both saved me from many errors and much enriched my knowledge on matters ranging from trade union elections to the goal-scoring exploits of Plymouth Argyle. The Dictionary of Labour Biography is in the best of hands. My MS was also read by my daughter Katherine, and she too was immensely helpful for her insights both as a civil servant and as a young person.

I am also much indebted to Alison and Owain Morgan for generously giving me material on and insights into the career of Isaac Foot, whose life they have published with Michael; Chris Ballinger of Brasenose College, Oxford, for great help with the more recent National Archive records; to my colleague at Queen’s, Nick Owen, for giving me material on Indian politics in the thirties; to Clive Saville for sending me fascinating information on his time with Michael Foot in Whitehall; to my old friend Professor Dai Smith for material on Raymond Williams, whose biography he is writing; to another old friend, Professor Roger Morgan, and to John Allinson for sending much helpful information on Leighton Park School; to an almost lifelong colleague, Professor Wm Roger Louis, for help at the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas; and to Dr Peter Gaunt, Professor John Morrill and Dr Stephen Davies for informing me about the Cromwell Association. I have also benefited from the learning of Dr James Ward and my Lords colleague Ted Rowlands for guidance on Dean Swift. Indeed the companionship of many gifted and humane colleagues in the Lords has been a boon beyond measure, since I have had expert advice from Bhikhu, Lord Parekh, on Indian affairs, from Bill, Lord Wedderburn, on the complexities of labour law, and from Trevor, Lord Smith of Clifton, with shrewd thoughts on many matters from the benches of the Liberal Democrats. Anne-Marie Motard of the University of Montpellier has always been a reassuring force. My literary agent, Bruce Hunter, has been friend and wise adviser as for decades past, and my editor at HarperCollins, Richard Johnson, has made my first experience with that great publishing house quite delightful, as has my wonderful copy-editor, Robert Lacey. Since one of my unfortunate common experiences with Michael Foot is to have been the victim in a serious car crash, in my case in 2004, I would also like to thank Professor David Murray of the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford, for restoring me physically (twice).

Most authors owe much to their families. Partly through adversity, ours is closer than most. I am hugely grateful to my two amazing children, David and Katherine, for their love, moral support, knowledge of word processors and unfailing enthusiasm for their obsessive bookish father; to my lovely daughter-in-law Liz, another writer in the making; and to my little grandson Joseph, a free-thinking, free-walking radical to whom this book is dedicated. This is my first big book since 1973 in which my beloved late wife, Jane, played no part. Yet maybe she was present after all. In 1987, at the parliamentary launch party of my book Labour People, one of the politicians dealt with there (very favourably) ignored the publishers’ invitation. He also ignored us in the Commons corridor as we approached the terrace room. By contrast, Michael Foot had replied at once, and made a very warm and witty speech at the event. ‘No surprise there,’ said Jane with finality. ‘Michael Foot is a gentleman.’ As always, she was right.

KENNETH O. MORGAN

Long Hanborough,

May Day 2006

1 NONCONFORMIST PATRICIAN (1913–1934)

On a fine sunny evening on 14 July 2003, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, hosted a reception in Downing Street. But this was a New Labour event with a difference. It was attended not only by the predictable great and good of the British Labour movement and the associated media, but also by a rich variety of rebels and dissenters, veterans of CND, Tribune and Troops Out, a representative sample of those people that the historian A. J. P. Taylor had christened, in a famous book in 1957, Britain’s ‘troublemakers’. They were there to honour a frail old man of almost ninety, compelled to be seated but full of life and nodding his head in synchronized animation. This was Michael Foot, an almost legendary icon on the Old Left, one-time leader of the Labour Party, long-term oppositionist parliamentarian, editor and essayist, pamphleteer and man of letters, a scourge of Guilty Men in high places ever since he first made his name in that famous wartime tract published just after Dunkirk, sixty-three years earlier. This reception was merely the most spectacular of many events designed to make July 2003 a month of celebration of Michael’s latest landmark. That same week there was to be a massed gathering of his friends at his favourite Gay Hussar restaurant in Greek Street, Soho, at which the eminent journalist Geoffrey Goodman presided and Michael was awarded a shirt of his beloved Plymouth Argyle football team bearing the number 90 on its back. He had, he was told, been formally registered as part of the Argyle squad with the Football League, perhaps to reinforce his team’s left-wing attack. The following week there was another reception in the very epicentre of the establishment, this time the Foreign Office in Carlton Gardens, genially presided over by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Member for Blackburn and successor and protégé of Michael’s old comrade and love, Barbara Castle. He described how Michael had made in the House of Commons in 1981 the finest speech that he, Straw, had ever heard.

But the evening in the Downing Street garden on 14 July, Bastille Day appropriately, was the highlight. It was set, as Foot would have particularly appreciated, in a place steeped in history, where the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had convened his excited ministers in 1945 and Lloyd George’s ‘garden suburb’ of private advisers had once conducted intrigues and manoeuvres from temporary huts set amongst the flowerbeds. People wondered what Tony Blair himself might say about so traditional and committed an Old Labour stalwart. In fact his speech was charming, generous and relaxed. He recalled Michael’s dedication to human rights (though not to socialism), and paid especial tribute to his strong backing of the young Blair’s effort to become candidate for the Sedgefield constituency in 1983 – a reflection no doubt of Foot’s positive response to Blair’s early campaign in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, and also perhaps of his determination to ward off the selection of a hard-left Bennite, Les Huckfield. Michael, in response, spoke at much greater length and with less precision, although, to the joy of some present, he did manage an amiable throwaway reference to George Galloway, a far-left socialist shortly to be expelled from the Labour Party for his support for Saddam Hussein. The whole occasion was entirely relaxed and enjoyable, Old and New Labour as one, poachers and gamekeepers drinking in common celebratory cause. Vocal protests from demonstrators outside in Whitehall directed against Downing Street’s later visitor that evening, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (with which many in the garden sympathized), were satisfactorily inaudible. As they left, people commented on how relaxed Tony Blair looked even at a time of pressure during an inquiry by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee into the origins of the invasion of Iraq four months earlier. This was made especially difficult by the embarrassed evidence from the government scientist, arms expert and apparent whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly. Honouring Michael Foot, himself a vocal critic of the Iraq war, meant for the moment the burying of hatchets all round.

Four days later, the birthday bonhomie disappeared. The body of the tormented David Kelly was discovered in woodland at Southmoor, near his home in southern Oxfordshire. Suicide was suspected. Angry friends accused Tony Blair of indirect complicity. Foot’s birthday party was to prove almost the last happy evening that the Prime Minister would know for many months to come. The shadow of Kelly and the other consequences of the Iraq venture would haunt him right down to the general election of May 2005, which saw Labour’s majority fall by almost a hundred. But whatever these events meant for Tony Blair, they were perhaps not a bad symbol for the career of Michael Foot – loyal acclaim from the party, genial genuflection from the establishment, but an underlying background of conflict, tension and tragedy throughout the near century of which he was chronicler and survivor.

This unique combination of elitism and dissent went right back to Michael Foot’s ancestral roots. His family and forebears shaped his outlook and style more than they do for many public figures. More important, he himself believed that their influence was decisive, and often paid testimony to their historic importance, by word and by pen. It was a background of West Country dissent that dated from the historic conflict between Crown and Parliament under Charles I. Cromwell was very much the people’s Oliver for the tenant farmers and craftsmen of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. But it was also a tradition of patriotic dissent, of dissent militant. Francis Drake was an earlier hero for the community from which the Foots had sprung, his freebooting illegalities discounted amidst the beguiling beat of Drake’s Drum. In August 1940 Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was to give a famous broadcast, ‘Drake’s Drum Beats Again’, comparing the little boats at Dunkirk with Drake’s men o’war. Similarly it was Cromwell the warrior whom Michael and all the Foots celebrated – the victor of the battles of Marston Moor, Naseby and Dunbar, the man who supported the execution of his king and conducted a forceful, navy-based foreign and commercial policy – quite as much as the champion of civil and religious liberties. It is not at all surprising that Michael, ‘inveterate peacemonger’, unilateralist and moral disarmer, should also brandish the terrible swift sword of retribution in the Falklands and in Croatia and Bosnia later on. Like the legend of John Brown’s body, his prophetic truth would go marching on.

The Foot dynasty of Devon were robust specimens of West Country self-sufficient artisans. In the main they were village carpenters and wheelwrights, working on the Devon side of the river Tamar which separates that county from Cornwall. On balance, the Foot dynasty were Devonian English, indeed very English, not Brythonic or Cornish Celts. The earliest traced of them is John Foot, who is known to have married Grace Glanvill in the Devon village of Whitchurch, near Tavistock, on 21 October 1703. Then came successively Thomas Foot (born 1716), another Thomas Foot (1744–1823), John Foot (1775–1841) and James Foot (1803–58), all resident in the hinterland of Plymouth, all Methodists subscribing in their quiet way to that city’s tradition of vibrant nonconformity, and with folk memories of Plymouth’s role as a bastion of parliamentarianism, almost republicanism, during the civil wars of the 1640s. Men recalled the siege of Plymouth during those wars, and the citizens’ proud resolve not to be starved by the royalist armies into surrender. There was a permanent monument to it in Freedom Fields, close to the later home of Isaac Foot and his family. The man who really established the Foot tradition and mystique was Michael’s grandfather, the elder Isaac (1843–1927).1 A carpenter and part-time undertaker by profession, he moved to Plymouth from Horrabridge in north Devon, reportedly with just £5 in his pocket. He built his own house, branched out as a small entrepreneur and as such took a more public role in the civic life of Plymouth. A passionate Methodist and teetotaller, he was anxious to civilize the somewhat turbulent seaport in which he lived, and left as his legacy a Mission Hall in Notte Street, near the city centre, which he himself had financed and built, along with Congress Hall for the Salvation Army. His son, the younger Isaac (1880–1960), began life with clear expectations of a professional career. He qualified as a solicitor, and after a brief period in London was articled to a solicitor back in Plymouth, married a Scots fellow Methodist, Eva Mackintosh, in 1904, set up his own firm of solicitors, Foot and Bowden, in the same year, and moved to live in Lipson Terrace, a comfortable upmarket road in the northern part of the town. It was in this secure bourgeois enclave that the seven children of the Foot dynasty were born.