Michael Foot: A Life

After leaving Express Newspapers, Foot needed employment. In fact it had already been guaranteed. In the summer of 1944 he became a regular columnist for the Daily Herald, a post which he retained until 1963. He had not had much regard for the paper in recent years, after its brilliant beginning in the Lansbury years after 1913. It was taken over in 1929 by Lord Southwood, owner of Odhams Press, ‘a small-minded man interested only in profits’, in Foot’s view, and ‘an absurd figure to be in charge of a Labour paper’.31 However, Foot did have an immense regard for the Herald’s editor, Percy Cudlipp, a native of Cardiff Like Foot he had been a very youthful editor of the Evening Standard; indeed, he was appointed by Beaverbrook at the even younger age of twenty-seven. Along with his brother Hugh of the Daily Mirror, Percy transformed the popular left-wing press: ‘He could do anything on a newspaper. He could take anybody’s copy and make it better.’ In later life Foot declared that Cudlipp was ‘the greatest of all the popular editors’.32 He was also an autodidact, a man of considerable culture, with a love of music, a flair for light verse and a close friendship with John Betjeman. Cudlipp had long been angling for Foot’s services, and he moved to the Herald immediately on leaving the Standard. He would write two columns a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, for less remuneration than on the Standard, but with more scope to do other things, including write for Tribune. Cudlipp would prove to be a stout defender of him when he later got into trouble with Transport House.

The newspaper introduced Foot as ‘the brilliant young left-wing author and journalist’, and his first column appeared on 15 August 1944. After an initial appeal to idealism, it dealt with the congenial theme of the need to avoid any secret treaties that might pervert a post-war settlement. His columns gave Foot ample scope to cover a vast swathe of topics, mostly international, succinctly and even violently, with ample use of historical analogy and literary quotation. On 25 August he hailed the liberation of Paris, with much citation of Fox, Tom Paine, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and others from his Valhalla of heroes. He took time out on 15 September to rebut Bernard Shaw’s characteristically perverse clarion call against all political parties, and advised him to look at the reconstruction needs in Plymouth which the Tory caucus was trying to wreck. Two weeks later came the cry that ‘only the international faith of Socialism can win the final triumph – Shout it from the housetops!’ There followed a lengthy series of familiar assaults on individual Tories, ‘guilty men’ one and all – Leslie Burgin, W. S. Morrison, Lord Woolton, Lord Linlithgow (the Viceroy who had imprisoned Nehru), Lord Croft. There is on 5 December a good Labour kick at the Liberal William Beveridge for wanting industry to remain in private hands and opposing redistributive taxation: ‘He travels on the Queen Mary yet believes he is Columbus!’ Over the new year he is denouncing the ‘tragedy’ of Britain’s intervention in Greece, though also challenging far-left critics by condemning Russian involvement through the Lublin government in Poland: ‘Will the Poles have liberty?’ On 20 March 1945 he is drenching with ridicule the hapless National Liberals like Ernest Brown. The opportunity is predictably seized to stick more darts into the Member for Devonport, Leslie Hore-Belisha, ‘a lonely giant’ who not only received a medal from Mussolini but also voted to remove Churchill from office in 1942, while Rommel was close to Alexandria. On 5 April there is a moving tribute to a genuine Liberal, David Lloyd George, whose great life had come to an end, but whose career was marked by tragedy because he had been compelled to govern with the Tories (this, of course, at a time when Labour ministers were still entrenched in Churchill’s coalition). It is lively, knockabout stuff, but fierce, even vicious, with skilful one-sided argument and a populist approach for the voting public.

But his most serious enterprise was becoming an MP, and Plymouth therefore called him more and more. A seat Labour had never looked like winning, Devonport was located in a part of Britain in which, as Andrew Thorpe has shown, Labour was traditionally very weak. It was clearly going to be a tough contest. Isaac had anticipated this with some relish: ‘You didn’t commit yourself to a clean fight, I hope?’33 Early on, Foot was challenged at meetings there in 1944 about his not doing military service, and had to explain his medical circumstances, the asthma which led to his being given Grade IV. He insisted he had not been a conscientious objector. He was also interrogated about having worked for the right-wing Beaverbrook press. The Standard was a very good paper under his editorship, he said: ‘He had left of his own free will because someone was trying to interfere with his rights as to what he wanted to write in that newspaper.’34 Needlessly, he threw back provocations of his own, including much personal insult (never anti-Semitic) of Hore-Belisha.

The Labour Party had made progress in Plymouth since the early 1930s. The council had a Labour majority, and Foot was later to pay tribute to some of the key local personalities, Harry Mason (the council leader), Harry Wright (its finance officer) and Bert Medland, one of the MPs elected in 1945, and later to serve as Foot’s election adviser in 1950.35 But it was still going to be a very tough contest in a city that had undergone tough experiences. Plymouth, a place with much ancient slum housing, had also been a significant victim of the blitz, as was the fate of all seaports and naval centres. On 20–21 March 1941 there was heavy bombing by Heinkels, as it happened while George VI and Queen Elizabeth were visiting the naval barracks and dockyards. The centre of the city was set ablaze, leaving 292 civilians dead. Worse was to follow on 21–23 and 28–29 April, when many tragedies occurred. Seventy-two people were killed when an air-raid shelter in Portland Square was hit, and so were ninety-six sailors in the naval barracks. In the final assault on 29 April, the Devonport High School for Girls was hit, forty-three sailors were killed on HMS Raleigh, and 100,000 books destroyed by fire in the Central Library. The rebuilding of Plymouth after the war inevitably became a theme of bitter political contention. Foot wrote an article in Reynolds News in October 1944, ‘Plymouth is Betrayed’, condemning the government for refusing to grant national funding to assist the local council’s Plymouth Plan. Lord Astor, the outgoing Conservative Mayor of Plymouth, supported the plan, as did his wife.36 So too did the incoming Mayor, none other than Isaac Foot. But Hore-Belisha insisted that local reconstruction could only be a local responsibility. The entire issue occasioned intense debate. The clerk of a local district council warned Isaac Foot that his son’s support of the ‘extravagant’ city plan, ‘creating unnecessary overspill’, might lose him half his supporters.37 Foot also gave his backing to the plan of the celebrated town planner Patrick Abercrombie for Plymouth in 1943, which would have created a large, multi-purpose Tamarside local authority.

By the early spring of 1945, the end of the war was clearly in sight. Twelve days after VE-Day on 8 May, the Labour Party decided to leave the Churchill coalition. A purely Conservative ‘caretaker’ government took over, to prepare the way for a general election, eventually announced as to be held on 5 July – or rather, it was a government which also included some of the ghostly National Liberals, known briskly to Michael’s brother Dingle as the ‘Vichy Liberals’.38 To Foot’s immense derision, the man appointed as the new Minister of National Insurance in Churchill’s ‘caretaker’ government was none other than Mussolini’s erstwhile acquaintance Leslie Hore-Belisha, perhaps another Caligula’s horse; though not of Cabinet rank.

Michael Foot’s journalism reached a climax now. In mid-April he was sent by the Herald to San Francisco to cover the conference to launch the new United Nations; it was his first visit to America since his debating tour with John Cripps in 1934. He wrote eight somewhat atmospheric articles describing the conference, which were published in the Herald between 17 April and 29 May. He focused mainly on trying to convey the mood of the conference, discussed some of the issues, notably Poland and the Lublin government, and assessed some key personalities including the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, whom he found ‘mysterious’ and who of course he knew as a key figure in the pre-war show trials. He had a number of interesting encounters, notably with the future Australian Foreign Minister Dr H. V. Evatt. In a relaxed aside he noted that at one meeting he sat next to the romantic French film actor Charles Boyer.39

But Foot was anxious to return home. There was a vital election to fight, and time was getting short. He also had an even more pressing reason to get back, something to change his life even more fundamentally than his election to Parliament. He had met Jill Craigie.40 Previously his affections had focused strongly on Connie Ernst, who had returned to New York at the end of 1944 and whom he had asked to marry him. He travelled to San Francisco via New York, and was with Connie on 12 April 1945, the day President Roosevelt died. But, to the disappointment of Koestler amongst others, Connie regretfully but decisively declined the offer: she did not wish to live in post-war London. She went on to marry Simon Michael Bessie, a publisher who in the 1960s actually became Foot’s publisher and remained friendly with him, even though his marriage to Connie ended in divorce. Bessie was also to publish in America the works of Jill’s later great friend and heroine Rebecca West.

Jill Craigie was quite a different proposition from Connie. Part Scots, part Russian, she was two years older than Michael. Although only thirty-four, she had already been married twice, and had a young daughter. Her first marriage had ended before the war, and she was now in an unsatisfactory marriage with a playwright and screenwriter, Jeffrey Dell. Jill was a notable example of how London’s cultural life was galvanized by the experience of war. She went into films, and wrote an ambitious documentary, Out of Chaos, in 1943, inspired by the socialist philosophy of William Morris. She focused on the war artists, and got to know eminent figures like Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and especially Henry Moore. She also met the writer on urban theory Lewis Mumford during the war, and the influence of his book The City in History inspired her to make a documentary on the rebuilding of a war-damaged city. A title that suggested itself was ‘The Way we Live Now’, and one possible city for the location of the film was Plymouth, where Patrick Abercrombie was to be part-architect of a post-war city plan.

In the autumn of 1944 she met Michael Foot at a party given at his home in Montpellier Row, Twickenham, by the eminent architect Sir Charles Reilly, the father of Foot’s Oxford friend Paul. Foot invited her to dinner at ‘a very posh restaurant’, the Ivy in Covent Garden. Evidently they instantly attracted each other. Foot was captivated by her charm and beauty. She was ‘a raging beauty thrust on susceptible wartime London … She had the colouring of an English rose but everything else was a romantic, mysterious addition.’41 He told his mother, who worried about his bachelor status, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ Her attraction for him is very understandable. Apart from her beauty, throughout her life Jill had a sensitive, rapt way of being deeply appealing to men of all ages. No woman listened with more intense attention to the conversation of men, not least Welsh men. But she also had close women friends, including Jenny Stringer in later life. She had in her few years in London attracted the interest, personal as well as intellectual, of an extraordinary group of celebrities: Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Charles Reilly and even the aged Ralph Vaughan-Williams all flirted with her. Another strong admirer was the former Cabinet minister and son of the former Prime Minister, Malcolm MacDonald, who proposed marriage. She looked after his Hampstead house for a time, her neighbour, improbably enough, being General de Gaulle.42

Jill also attracted Michael with her quick intelligence, her artistic flair, her social poise and (possibly) her vigorous feminism. She herself was immediately smitten by Michael, his honesty, his air of myopic charm. It was love at first sight, even if in Michael’s case it was short sight. The severe eczema which had worried him in his relationships with women was of no consequence to her. She and Michael both had unfinished relationships to unscramble. Jill ended matters with Jeffrey Dell and briefly moved into the Hampstead house of a fellow film-maker, William Macquitty: she was a Hampstead personality years before Michael. Meanwhile Michael had to sort matters out with Connie Ernst.

The relationship between Jill and Michael developed rapidly. His still somewhat undeveloped sexual experience flourished under her confident tutelage. She visited her ‘Mayfair socialist’ several times in 62 Park Street, bought him a new gramophone and encouraged his interests in Mozart and in opera generally.43 Most important, she told him of her plan to make a documentary on Plymouth, and came down there to work with him on it. Foot himself appeared in the film, looking unusually well-tailored in a smart dark suit. She promised to help in his election campaign. When he went off to America the prospect of her moving into 62 Park Street, cramped though it would be, was a real one.

The partnership of Michael and Jill is a leitmotiv through the rest of this book. It was a marriage of two strong-minded people, each of whom had powerful relationships with the opposite sex, while remaining faithful and trusting. Each gave the other a kind of radiant confidence that lasted for the next fifty-five years. Jill admired Michael’s socialist passion, his literacy, his lack of affectation, his generosity in personal relationships, his humanity. Without changing his personality or his style, she wanted him to succeed. He admired her dedication to work on the feminist movement, while her artistic interests and many friends in the cultural world greatly developed his own somewhat eclectic interests. They did almost everything together: the constituency visits, the trips to Venice or later Dubrovnik, the joint reading of lyric poetry or the prose of Wells or Conrad. Just Plymouth Argyle remained for men only. For Michael, a romantic, passionate man, Jill was the perfect partner.

To what extent her tastes fitted in with his kind of politics is another question. She was not a person with naturally strong political understanding, even though she would respond to great campaigns and was as committed a supporter of nuclear disarmament as Foot himself In old age they crusaded passionately together about the plight of Croatia and Bosnia after the collapse of Yugoslavia, when her expertise in film direction was invaluable. Her advice on political matters, beyond the purely personal, could be unhelpful, and her strong views encouraged Foot’s own fierce and unyielding dogmatism. This trait could be offputting for powerful women of similar outlook, notably Barbara Castle and sometimes Jennie Lee. Barbara Castle’s letters would address Jill, in not altogether friendly fashion, as ‘my feminist friend’. She observed of Jill in her memoirs, ‘Michael used to be as brutal with her as he was with me.’44 There were other close political women friends of Michael who found Jill difficult to warm to. She was better liked in Ebbw Vale/Blaenau Gwent, Michael’s constituency from 1960 to 1992, than she ever was in Devonport. Many criticized her after they married for not looking after Michael properly and for allowing him to go to work, even as a minister, scruffily dressed, with shabby suits or cardigans worn out at the elbows. But even in politics Jill could be an invaluable ally, smoothing Beaverbrook’s feathers, rebuilding ties with Bevan after the clash of 1957, nurturing links with the labour movement across the spectrum in the troubles of the early eighties. The Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.

Foot came back post-haste to Plymouth at the end of 1944, urged to do so by Jill Craigie, who was waiting in the city for him. He was formally endorsed as candidate at Victory Hall, Keysham, on 8 June 1945. He warmed up with yet more abuse of Hore-Belisha, enquiring as to which party he thought he belonged. In the Herald he derided the term ‘National’ which was being appropriated by the Conservatives, and referred to ‘the sheer native density of the Tory mind’. He ridiculed ‘the antics of the Beaverbrooks and the Baxters, the Brackens and the Belishas – yes, and the Churchills’, lumping together friends and foes new and old.45 His Herald articles rammed his message home with the aid of old friends from the past – Hazlitt on Peterloo, Paine, Cobbett, the Chartists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Keir Hardie, Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, a legendary roll-call of all the saints who for their labours rest. Like other Labour candidates, he raged at the extraordinary campaign being conducted for the Tories by Beaverbrook and Bracken. The first radio election broadcast by Churchill, in which he compared Attlee and his colleagues to some kind of Gestapo, ‘no doubt humanely administered in the first instance’, seemed totally repulsive so soon after newsreels had appeared of the German concentration camps. Attlee won applause in saying that the voice was that of Churchill but the mind was that of Foot’s former patron, Beaverbrook.

On the stump in Plymouth, Foot fought a fiercely socialist campaign. Inevitably he confined himself to his constituency, with the occasional foray to help Lucy Middleton, the Labour candidate in the neighbouring constituency of Plymouth Sutton. Housing and employment were perhaps the major issues. Foot pressed again the need for help for the Plymouth plan, and for financial aid from the Admiralty for an extension of the Devonport dockyard. He had powerful support from Aneurin Bevan at the Guildhall in Devonport. The Tories, Bevan declared, were only puppets of big business: ‘I have seen their limbs twitch as the puppet-masters pull the string.’ He called for the nationalization of coal, steel and the Bank of England. With reference to the Conservatives in the Lords, Bevan demanded, with rhetoric and reason, ‘Why should we have to put up with this antediluvian chamber of pampered parasites?’46 Foot himself, for all his neo-pacifist past, strongly upheld the need to refurbish the dockyard and strengthen the Royal Navy (cue for more references to the Spanish Armada and Drake’s Drum).

The hapless Hore-Belisha was battered to the end. He was accused of failing to give the British Army proper equipment in Belgium in 1940, of having contemplated war with Russia, and of genuflection before Mussolini and also Franco. ‘Where, oh where, is our wandering boy tonight?’ speculated Foot.47 Hore-Belisha’s brief record as Minister for National Insurance was said to have included refusing full compensation for servicemen and their families, and the idea of family allowances. Credit for the invention of Belisha beacons was omitted. Michael was not the only Foot engaged in these polemics against an old adversary compared by Isaac Foot back in 1935 with Judas Iscariot. Not far away in Liskeard, Cornwall, brother John (‘Major’) Foot repeated, with even greater passion, Michael’s points about the Mussolini medal and the vote against Churchill in 1942 that disfigured Hore-Belisha’s past. He shouted at Hore-Belisha from the balcony of the Liskeard Liberal Club as he passed through the town centre a few yards away: ‘Has such a reckless adventurer ever come into politics and public life who has had [sic] so much folly in such a short time? I hope my brother is going to do a very good job of clearing up and putting this man out of public life for ever.’48 The family solidarity of the Foots took precedence over any thought of narrow partisanship.

The influence of Michael Foot and his works was also apparent in Labour’s national campaign. Ernest Bevin and scores of other Labour candidates used ‘guilty men’ themes and vocabulary in attacking the Tories’ pre-war record on foreign and defence policy, and drawing a distinction between Winston Churchill, the war leader, and the party which he was now leading in the election. Labour published a pamphlet on these lines entitled The Guilty Party, while the Conservatives’ riposte, perhaps unwisely entitled Guilty Men?, which focused on such themes as Labour’s pre-war opposition to conscription, tended to have its concluding question mark forgotten.49

On polling day, 5 July, the local Plymouth newspaper, the Conservative-inclined Western Morning News, forecast a five thousand majority for Hore-Belisha. It also prophesied that Isaac Foot would ‘sweep’ Tavistock and John Foot would carry Bodmin.50 In the Foot household it was agreed that the three Liberals, including Dingle in Dundee, would all get home. The one member of the family who stood no chance at all, despite his plucky campaign, was Michael in his straight fight in Devonport. There followed an uneasy wait of three weeks while service votes were collected. On 26 July the dramatic news came through. The dams had broken. Labour had made over two hundred gains and won 393 seats, a landslide majority of more than 180 over the Tories. The great war leader, Churchill, had been cataclysmically overthrown by the almost anonymous Attlee, on whom Hore-Belisha had poured derision as Harold Laski’s ‘office-boy’. And Devonport had shared in this triumph, as had indeed the other two Plymouth constituencies. A brief tenure of Plymouth Drake in 1929–31 had been Labour’s sole victory in the city before. Now Bert Medland, a retired civil servant who had been Labour’s Mayor of Plymouth in 1935, won the Drake constituency, while Lucy Middleton, the wife of the long-term former party General Secretary whom Michael had met before the 1935 election, captured Sutton as well.

In Devonport Michael Foot had won on a 14 per cent swing, gained on a poll of 71.1 per cent, with 13,395 votes to Hore-Belisha’s 11,382, a majority of 2,013, or 8.2 per cent. The election expenses showed how frugal the Labour campaign had been. Foot had just £30 of charged personal expenses, plus £23.18s.3d. for his agent. By contrast, the defeated Hore-Belisha ran up £148.7s. personal expenses and no less than £106.10s.10d. for his agent.51 Contrary to forecasts, Michael was in fact the only Foot to be returned amidst a general Liberal collapse everywhere in the country. Isaac, now Lord Mayor of Plymouth, lost to the Tories in Tavistock by nearly six thousand. John trailed by over two thousand in Bodmin. Most stunning of all, Dingle came fifteen thousand votes behind the two Labour candidates (one being John Strachey) in the two-Member constituency of Dundee. In the News Chronicle Ian Mackay noted that Michael Foot was one of several Labour journalists elected, including J. P. W. Mallalieu, Maurice Webb, Haydn Davies, Garry Allighan, Hector McNeill, Tom Driberg, Vernon Bartlett and Konni Zilliacus, a new sociological trend.52 After the Devonport result was declared there was mass public rejoicing around the Guildhall in Plymouth. Then Michael and his new love Jill more privately celebrated victory and the new dawn, political and personal, that it would surely bring.

His election to Parliament marked the climax of an extraordinary war for Michael Foot. It had made him a prominent editor, an instantly known countrywide campaigner and a nationally celebrated author. Guilty Men had made him a celebrity of a kind while still in his late twenties. It attached the sheen of patriotism to his socialism. Some critics later surmised that he remained stuck in that war, eternally berating Chamberlain and his acolytes, celebrating El Alamein, Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy, still holding fast to the values and ideas of that increasingly distant conflict. Memories of the Second World War, nourished more avidly in Britain than in any other combatant country, right down to the sixtieth anniversary of VE-Day in 2005, remained an essential framework for the sense of historic identity. They encouraged a vision of a dauntless island race standing alone while other, feebler Continental nations plunged into collaboration or collapse. The memory worked against the sense that Britain was part of Europe. It fostered a long-term anti-Germanism. But it was legitimate, too, to declare that the war had brought not only a great triumph for courage and perseverance, but also a great opportunity to avoid the betrayals of post-1918 which older men like Attlee, Bevin, Morrison and Cripps recalled all too well. After all, it was their victory, just as much as Churchill’s. One government minister, the seventy-six-year-old Lord Addison, had actually been part of that earlier post-war government as Minister of Health, and was well aware of the broken pledges then which had led to his own eventual resignation from the Liberals to join the Labour Party.