Michael Foot: A Life

For Michael Foot, for all his bewildering changes of outlook and occupation since his Oxford days, it was a thrilling moment, another 1789. As his old friend A. J. P. Taylor was memorably to write in the final sentence of English History 1914–1945, ‘England had risen, just the same.’53 In the columns of the press the new Michael Foot MP recalled the French socialist thinker Saint-Simon asking his servant to tell him every morning: ‘Get up, M. le Comte, because you have great things to do.’ It was a story he had picked up from one of his cherished books, Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators. Foot did not believe in servants, but the mood and the message were no less resonant, just the same.

4 LOYAL OPPOSITIONIST (1945–1951)

Like the legendary shot fired at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, that heralded the American War of Independence, ‘the Election rings around the World!’, Foot excitedly told the readers of the Daily Herald.1 Labour’s socialist programme, as announced in the King’s Speech, was ‘the Boldest Adventure, the Greatest Crusade’. Labour had become the nation. Historical analogies with past revolutionaries from Cromwell to Garibaldi poured from his pen. In Westminster the new soi-disant revolutionaries, the 393 (shortly 394) Labour MPs, were sworn in immediately. Will Griffiths led a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ in the Commons in which Foot joined enthusiastically. From the very start, dramatic events unfolded: the next four weeks saw the Potsdam conference, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, VJ-Day marking the end of the war in Japan on 15 August, the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease by the Americans on 21 August, the new committee on the use of atomic energy, all of them to colour Foot’s views fundamentally for the remainder of his career. He felt thoroughly at home in his new surroundings. He enjoyed the buzz in the lobbies as a great progressive programme was launched – a National Health Service, nationalization of the mines, independence for India, all part of what the new Chancellor Hugh Dalton called ‘the flowing tide’ of socialism. Foot also liked the parliamentary atmosphere, the chatter and conspiracy in smoking room and tea room, the ready access to Fleet Street friends. He enjoyed too some of the extra-mural activities, especially the group of MPs who played chess. Leslie Hale was his favoured opponent. Foot was recognized as being amongst the best parliamentary players, though it was agreed that the strongest was Julius Silverman. Others of note were Douglas Jay, Reginald Paget, Maurice Edelman and Maurice Orbach, with Jim Callaghan another, less talented, enthusiast. The world’s dominant players were Russian, and Foot met several grandmasters when an international tournament was held in London in 1946.

Best of all, Foot made attractive new friends amongst the Labour backbenchers. All of them, predictably, were on the left, paid-up members of the awkward squad. Four were particularly important for him. Richard Crossman was a didactic former Oxford philosophy don who had written on Plato and Socrates. Foot first met him when Crossman arranged a social event at the Savoy Grill after Parliament assembled. It was Palestine that first drew them together, but they remained intellectual comrades from then on, even posthumously, when Foot was involved in the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Another long-term ally was Ian Mikardo, a bright but prickly left-winger who, unusually for Labour, was a business consultant. He was of rabbinical Jewish background and had strong views on Palestine. It was he who had moved the famous Reading resolution committing the party firmly to wholesale nationalization at party conference in December 1944, when Foot first met him. Mikardo later described his friendship with Foot as ‘one of the most precious things in my life’. Tom Driberg was an old colleague on Beaverbrook newspapers, writer of the ‘William Hickey’ column. Foot remained tolerant of his ex-Communism and particularly conspicuous homosexual exploits, which almost led to his prosecution, and reacted loyally when journalists asserted that Driberg had been a double agent, both for the KGB and MI5. There is no doubt that many of his contemporaries placed less trust in Driberg’s character and reliability than Foot did.2

Perhaps Foot’s most congenial friend was J. P. W. Mallalieu, commonly known as ‘Curly’, a man of many talents. He had been a fine sportsman at Cheltenham College and Oxford, and won a rugby blue as a stand-off half He had an exciting war in the navy, and published a best-selling book about it, Very Ordinary Seaman. He wrote a financial column in the New Statesman, ‘Other People’s Money’, and a weekly parliamentary sketch in Tribune. He became a great admirer of Nye Bevan, while his friendship with Foot was such that for a few months in 1953 Michael and Jill lived with him and his family. However, Mallalieu never supported CND, and actually became a navy minister under Harold Wilson in 1964, which put him beyond the pale for many on the left. Foot’s memories of him, however, were always affectionate. As a sign of it he gave his daughter Ann (later Baroness) Mallalieu a present of a book on fox-hunting, a strong enthusiasm of hers even though Foot detested the pastime.3

These men found other left-wing comrades early on in the new Parliament. Others with whom Foot had close relations were Harold Davies, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler, Will Griffiths, Hugh Delargy and the playwright Benn Levy (along with his beautiful American actress wife, Constance Cummings). Along with them was a friend of far longer standing, Barbara Castle, in the House as MP for Blackburn and the only one of them who had a government job, as PPS for Cripps at the Board of Trade. In his memoirs Mikardo lists some others in their circle: the Australian lawyer and keen European federalist R. W. G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, George Wigg, Donald Bruce and Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, who had been returned as a Common Wealth candidate at the election but then joined Labour. Occasionally they were joined by mavericks like Woodrow Wyatt, or even figures on the party right like the independent-minded barrister R. T. Paget, who simply enjoyed their company on social grounds. In addition, there were one or two incorrigible rebels who flitted in and out but really pursued their own path, like Sydney Silverman, a disputatious Jewish lawyer, and S. O. Davies, ex-miner and Marxist Welsh nationalist who sat for Keir Hardie’s old seat of Merthyr Tydfil and like him supported Welsh home rule. In 1946 came another maverick, Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s Welsh son-in-law who sat for South Ayrshire. He too was almost impossible to tie down.

This distinctly miscellaneous group of around twenty or so formed an identifiable collection of dissenters. Michael Foot was one of its most eminent members, and the most highly esteemed as a communicator. It is difficult to discern any wider influence on the labour movement. Only Crossman attempted to write a statement of political philosophy. Their socialism came across most clearly in their view of foreign policy. Most of them were middle-class journalists: trade unionists (other than members of the NUJ) were very rare. Until the growth of unrest over the anti-Soviet drift of Bevin’s foreign policy the following spring, they were little more than just kindred souls, closet critics in the tea room and the bar. They all favoured strongly socialist policies at home, which meant planning, controls and an uncompromising programme of public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. But in its first two years, the government itself seemed to pursue this policy with such zest that there was little to complain about. It was really in the more difficult period of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ in 1948–50, when the nationalizations effectively came to an end, that complaints arose. Nor did Commonwealth or colonial policy generate any great dissent. The left could justify everything, from the transfer of power in India to an unsuccessful attempt to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika. The major areas of criticism almost entirely involved foreign relations, and were largely offshoots of the early stages of the Cold War. To this should be added concern over Palestine, since almost all of them were passionately pro-Jewish and totally opposed to Bevin’s policy.

The members of the group were all instinctively oppositionists. Not one was seriously considered for government office, nor did they expect (or perhaps want) to be. Men like Mikardo or Driberg had backbench mindsets then and always. Until Bevan’s resignation as Minister of Health in April 1951, their influence upon either government or party policy was minimal, and in inverse proportion to their prominence as journalists. To call them ‘Labour’s Conscience’, as one text has done, seems remarkably inflated.4 Foot himself, a highly individual journalist with a past record of campaigns for the Socialist League and employment by Lord Beaverbrook, was considered unreliable, a gadfly, a meteor, the ultimate symbol of a party of protest, not a party of power. His activity was largely focused outside Parliament. The prospect of front-bench status seemed at this stage quite bizarre.

These Labour MPs were soft left, but no more than that. With the possible exception of Geoffrey Bing, a barrister later to be Kwame Nkrumah’s Attorney-General in Ghana, they all felt themselves to be located within the capacious reaches of the party’s broad church – only just, in some cases. They were quite distinct from a much smaller, more extreme group – D. N. Pritt, John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson (all later to be expelled from the party), along with William Warbey, Tom Braddock and Ronald Chamberlain. The French political commentator Bertrand de Jouvenel distinguished in 1949 between what he curiously called ‘the pacifist head’ of Cross-man and ‘the Russophil head’ of Zilliacus.5 These hard-left dissentients, consistently pro-Soviet and anti-American, were scarcely within the Labour tabernacle at all. They tended to keep their own counsel. Their role in the party was minute, though they could sometimes ally with Foot’s friends, as in the famous ‘stab in the back’ motion on foreign affairs in November 1946 (see page 121). They might be joined also by virtual pacifists like Rhys Davies or Reg Sorensen. But Foot’s friends were more in the mainstream. Foot himself, like Crossman, had always been anti-Stalinist. He never took the sentimental view that ‘left could speak to left’. From 1948 his attitude towards the Soviet Union hardened, as did that of Bevan. Foot and Crossman were foremost among those inspired by the anti-Communist thrust of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, not to mention those famous tracts against totalitarianism, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, written by the eminent recent Tribune columnist George Orwell. However blurred the boundaries might be on the more sectarian left of the parliamentary Labour Party, a fundamental divide between the future Bevanites and Tribunites, and the fellow-travelling fringe, was always apparent. With the two Communist MPs, William Gallacher and Philip Piratin, Foot had almost nothing to do, although he retained his admiration for Harry Pollitt, whom he considered a more considerable politician. He always felt that Pollitt’s return to Parliament for Rhondda West in 1945 (the Labour candidate, Mainwaring, beat him by just 972 votes) would have been politically valuable.

Foot’s contacts and manoeuvres in the new House were always with other backbenchers. His links with government ministers were mostly tenuous. He had scant enthusiasm for either Attlee or the Lord President Herbert Morrison, and clearly underestimated them both. The former he regarded as colourless and uninspired, and a wartime advocate of coalitionism; Morrison he saw as just a machine man, who wanted to curb backbenchers’ independence – unfairly so, since Morrison had shown much interest in ideas and policy-making before the war. For Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, Foot began with a higher regard. Relations were sufficiently good for Bevin to ask him to go on a fact-finding mission to Persia (Iran) in February 1946. The purpose was to assess Russian infiltration in that country, from which Russian and British troops were due to withdraw on 2 March (in fact the British had already left). There was also anxiety that the Russians were taking root in Persian Azerbaijan, through the Tudeh party. Foot’s colleague was a Conservative ex-brigadier, Anthony Head, which led to predictable jokes about ‘Head and Foot’, and they had extensive talks with Tudeh leaders. Foot was convinced after this visit that there was abundant evidence for Soviet Russia’s intended domination of Iran. He also wrote in the Daily Herald in somewhat prophetic terms about the dangers to Anglo-American oil, including the refinery at Abadan, and made many sensible suggestions about changing the relationship between the British heirs of imperialism and the Persian authorities. But Bevin took little interest, and nothing tangible resulted from what was Foot’s one and only official activity on behalf of a British government until 1974.6 But by the end of 1946, Bevin’s robust confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, and even more his blatantly anti-Jewish policy in Palestine, had earned him Foot’s anathema.

Nor was Foot in any sense a protégé of Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and patron of youth, as were centre-right figures like Gaitskell and Callaghan, along with Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey (neither yet an MP), to whom was added for a time Barbara Castle. In one rare exchange, Dalton wrote to rebuke Foot over factual inaccuracies in Tribune over the convertibility of sterling, with particular reference to the precise roles as advisers of Otto Niemeyer, Lord Catto and Wilfred Eady. Foot replied courteously, although he pressed the need for the Treasury to employ ‘more socialist economists’ to assist in ‘carrying out a Socialist policy’.7 The only one of the government’s big five with whom he had ever been close was, of course, Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade and eventually Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had shed his links with Tribune and they seldom saw each other now. Cripps replied to a query from Foot about the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 in purely formal terms.8

Foot was close to no other minister, with the obvious and seminal exception of Aneurin Bevan. With Foot working closely with Jennie Lee on the editorial board of Tribune, he served as a permanent socialist sounding-board for Labour’s Minister of Health as he pushed through the National Health Service. Their relationship became closer still after 1949, as Bevan found himself increasingly at odds with the drift of foreign and defence policy. Indeed, Foot, while increasingly critical of Attlee’s government, found his special relationship with Bevan made this one aspect of his parliamentary role rewarding, as he pressed Bevan to challenge government policy. Jennie Lee by contrast found the entire experience between 1945 and 1951 frustrating and depressing.9

Foot later felt his speeches in the 1945–51 Parliament fell short of the highest standard. They were too complicated in structure, and perhaps too rhetorical. Sometimes the Oxford Union debates did not seem far away. He sounded more like a journalist in Parliament than a parliamentarian; his father was later to express concern on this point. But he began splendidly. His maiden speech, focusing on foreign policy, on 20 August 1945, was a clear success.10 He complimented the King’s Speech in characteristic terms: ‘Oliver Cromwell could have hardly done a better job himself in the realm of foreign affairs.’ He proceeded with Guilty Men-type attacks on Churchill and other leading Conservatives for their pre-war sympathies with Mussolini and Franco, along with right-wing monarchs like King George of the Hellenes. He declared that Britain enjoyed both a conception of political liberty denied to the Russians and a conception of economic liberty not shared by the Americans. This ‘unique combination of treasures’ gave it ‘the commanding position of leadership if we choose to exercise it’. He wound up with a passionate affirmation of the socialist patriotism common at the time:

At the end of this great war and after this great election, the British people can play as conspicuous a part before the gaze of all mankind as they played in 1940. Hitler has left behind his terrible legacies – racial hatred, love of violence, hunger, homelessness, famine and death. Surely it is the duty of our great country not to be content with some secondary role, but rather to seek the abatement of those evils by the assertion and example of a much more positive democracy. As we look out across this stricken Continent and as we see a new hope in the struggle to be born across this wilderness of shattered faiths, may it not be our destiny as the freest and most democratic and a socialist power to stand between the living and the dead and stay the flames?

The following speaker, the Conservative Ian Orr-Ewing, congratulated Foot in the customary fashion as ‘the sole survivor of a family which has been for many years represented in this House’. Back home, Father Isaac wrote with paternal pride: ‘Congratulations! I knew you could do it. When people have said you had not the [parliamentary] style I said to myself “Just you wait, my lads!” And now you’ve shown the beggars.’11 Journalists also gave Foot a good press. Even The Times gave him some prominence.12 The New Statesman commented that the speech and its reception showed that ‘the House still likes a first rate verbal pamphleteer’. Hannen Swaffer observed that Foot spoke ‘with the vehemence of a Hyde Park orator’, presumably meant as a compliment, while his colleague Tom Driberg, himself no great orator, wrote in the Sunday Express that Foot was ‘a little too platform but fiery and fluent’.13

He made another major speech that autumn, on one of his special themes, Germany – the destruction of its economy, the diminution of its boundaries, the impoverishment of its people. The leitmotiv was obviously the need not to repeat the errors of 1919. But what stamped him as one of the awkward squad of the parliamentary left was the famous vote against the terms of the American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes with much difficulty.14 There was criticism in Cabinet both of the reduced amount of the loan, $4 billion, and the commercial rate of interest attached to it. But most criticisms focused on two other aspects. They were both part of what Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky has shown was a calculated American attempt to undermine Britain’s financial predominance, with a dogmatic US insistence on free-market arrangements and scant regard for Britain’s post-war difficulties which Keynes called ‘an economic Dunkirk’. The first of these two provisions was an insistence on an immediate multilateral liberalization of trade; the second was that sterling should become freely convertible into dollars, this to take effect in July 1947. Emanuel Shinwell and Bevan had both fiercely attacked these proposals in Cabinet on 5 December, but had been rebuffed.15

In the Commons, over seventy Conservatives voted against the terms on 13 December: their most effective voice was Robert Boothby, later Michael Foot’s weekly sparring partner on television’s In the News, who called the loan ‘an economic Munich’. They were joined by twenty-three Labour rebels, nearly all on the soft left – Foot, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle, Benn Levy, Raymond Blackburn, W. G. Cove – along with some less likely rebels like Maurice Edelman and James Callaghan. Those on the furthest left like Konni Zilliacus, along with the two Communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, supported the government. Foot did not speak in the debate, but his general view emerged in Tribune.16 He saw the terms of the loan as reflecting the advice of defeatist economists about a huge balance of payments deficit looming in 1946, and a victory for ‘money power’ which would prevent the payment of sterling debts to India, Egypt, Palestine and other colonized powers. Foot had no expertise in international finance (and he was hostile to the Bretton Woods agreement for international currency stabilization concluded with the US in 1944), but he felt instinctively that the loan was part of a long-term American strategy to destroy British independence in foreign as well as economic policy. He told Dalton of his total opposition to convertibility. Hard-headed economic historians have in the main endorsed the general line of his instinctive criticisms. The catastrophic convertibility of sterling in July – August 1947 lasted barely a month.

The vote against the US loan (which the government won easily) confirmed Foot’s role as a critic. He spoke thereafter on domestic matters many times. On his home base, he dutifully paid due attention to the needs of Devonport and other dockyards, for all his frequent calls for cuts in arms spending. But he made most impact in the House on foreign policy issues. A central one throughout 1946–47 was the condition of Germany, made the more desperate by the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of German refugees from eastern Europe. Here his closest associate was his old publisher, Victor Gollancz, whose compassion was moved by the starvation amongst the German population. He and Foot spoke at a mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 26 November 1945 to raise awareness of the plight of German children. Other speakers were Labour’s Richard Stokes, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (who had almost won Newark for Labour in 1945), and Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Arthur Salter, both independents.17 Foot also came together with Gollancz and Stokes to form the Save Europe Now (SEN) campaign; Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins were amongst the other committee members, and Peggy Duff was secretary, so there was some overlap with CND later. Others prominent were Lord Lindsay, former Master of Balliol, and the Bishop of Chichester. The campaign went on for two years, attempting to persuade the government to encourage British citizens to either surrender some of their food coupons for the Germans or else send food parcels. SEN saw Foot at his most idealistic and far-sighted.18

In the House, he described how ‘something like famine’ prevailed in Germany, where food rations had fallen from the starvation level of 1,500 calories per day to as low as seven hundred. His solution for finding the relevant resources was to cease to pay for large occupying forces in Germany, and to make further arms reductions in the Middle and Far East. He pleaded for a discussion of the principles underlying British foreign policy. One ray of light was the compassionate, if short-lived, policy for social reconstruction of Lord Pakenham as Minister for Germany after 1945, which Foot saw as a kind of anticipation of the Marshall Plan. Foot’s view of the German problem was a comprehensive one. He urged the need for a political reconstruction with decentralized institutions, but also warned of the long-term dangers of Germany’s being divided into eastern and western zones. He warned against ‘an anti-German mania’ like the lunatic plan devised during the war by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office for Germany to be reduced to a purely pastoral economy. On the other hand, like other British socialists he found it hard to make common cause with his comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, since their leader, Kurt Schumacher, demanded early German reunification and spoke in alarmingly nationalist terms, with frequent use of the word Reich. Not until 1949, with the impact of the Marshall Plan on its economy and a stable constitution, did West Germany progress, albeit under the long-term rule of Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Christian Democrats, and not under the still notionally Marxist SDP.

An even stronger concern in Foot’s Commons speeches was the growing violence and political disintegration in Palestine. By 1946 the region was in near chaos. There was unending tension between Jews and Arabs; a mounting exodus of Jews to Palestine after the Holocaust, with US support, despite determined efforts by Bevin and the British government to prevent it; and open guerrilla warfare by Jewish paramilitary or terrorist groups, the Haganah and Irgun Zvei Leumi, against the British forces stationed in Palestine. They were reinforced by the violent Stern Gang. The destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, with the loss of ninety-one lives, caused an especial shock to a populace not inured to long-term terrorism.