Michael Foot: A Life

Foot’s years at Wadham down to June 1934 were enriching in every way. After eighteen years in the evangelical intensity of Plymouth, Pencrebar and Leighton Park, he moved into a different atmosphere and he blossomed in it. Previously somewhat withdrawn and bookish, worried about his health and his complexion, he emerged as an attractive, gregarious young man. He had interesting and intelligent friends (almost all male, as befitted the ethos of the time) of various backgrounds and nationalities, and enjoyed a full social life, quite apart from his ventures into student politics. There were lectures by eminent scholars in the examination schools – G. D. H. Cole’s lectures on William Cobbett he particularly enjoyed – and visiting celebrities of all kinds. One such he got to know personally, and with whom he was destined to have a complex relationship, was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who lectured to the Oxford Liberal Club during Foot’s term as chairman. His book The Conquest of Happiness (1933) had a powerful effect on the young Michael Foot, not only in his views on political matters but also on personal morality.29 Foot, a natural romantic much influenced by his reading of Rousseau, was fast moving on from the Methodist ethic. To apply his own memorable description of Aneurin Bevan, the puritan was an increasingly sensual puritan.

His prime objective, of course, was to gain a reasonable degree. Here the results were adequate, but perhaps no more. Michael had chosen not to read History, the natural choice for him, his passion and hobby for many years past, but the newer school of Politics, Philosophy and Economics, also known as Modern Greats. This was not perhaps the best choice. The Politics papers were fine, not least because they were heavily historical in slant, and were to remain so until the 1960s. He did, however, regret that his passion for late-eighteenth-century history, through liberal authors such as George Otto Trevelyan and J. L. Hammond’s study of Charles James Fox, was diverted to having to focus on Lewis Namier’s structural studies of Georgian politics and his ‘formidable lists of figures’.30 Economics he found less appealing, in part because of his relative lack of interest in maths or statistics. His tutor, Russell Bretherton, a brilliant twenty-five-year-old who taught both economics and modern history, was congenial enough as a staunch supporter of the expansionist economic theories of J. M. Keynes (as understood before the latter’s General Theory of 1936). He was also friendly with the Christ Church economics don Roy Harrod, Keynes’s later biographer. Bretherton was certainly a man of parts. His later publications included Country Inns and Alehouses, while he also developed much expertise as an entomologist specializing in butterflies. After the war he was to become an important civil servant, working under Harold Wilson at the Board of Trade and under Peter Thorneycroft at the Treasury (where he proved to be a strong European). At any rate, Bretherton’s Keynesian doctrines got Foot through his economics papers in the schools. But Philosophy, even in the days before Oxford plunged into the arid realms of logical positivism, he found less than riveting, too abstract and detached from real life. In the end last-minute swotting of a textbook survey by Bertrand Russell, one of his political heroes, saw him stagger through. He told The Leightonian that ‘after two years’ hard work at Philosophy, I know less about it than when I began’.31 But his eventual honourable but unremarkable second-class honours suggested that perhaps PPE was not the ideal school for him. Then as always Michael Foot was never a man for socio-economic detail. He was a sounding board for historical mood and movement, and literary interpretation of it, rather than an analyst, still less a desiccated calculating machine.

In every other respect, Michael found life at Oxford great fun. He operated on a broad university basis and soon became a celebrated figure in journals and political clubs. Photographs of the time show a smart young man with neatly trimmed hair, a broad forehead and spectacles, invariably with a serious expression on his face, but evidently with a sense of humour. He played a little gentle soccer for Wadham. His old school magazine was told that ‘in the intervals of debating, politics and work … on occasions he announces pontifically from the depths of an armchair that one should constantly aim at acquiring not knowledge, but the Larger Vision. He also tells us that he has fully recovered from the effects of a recent holiday involving “cricket and all that” in Denmark.’32

The most interesting of the various social bodies he joined was the Lotus Club, an Anglo-Indian dining club of around fifty members at a time, twenty-five British and twenty-five Indian. It had been formed by an Indian, G. A. Chettur, in the mid-twenties to counter charges that Indians at Oxford were inbred and cliquey, basing their social life on the Majlis. Michael was always attracted to Indians, and at Oxford he made friends with several of them, notably D. F. Karaka, who was to succeed him as President of the Union, the first Indian so to serve, and whose early autobiographical work The Pulse of Oxford, published in 1933, conveys much of the gaiety of university life at that time. The Lotus Club invited guest speakers, and to Michael’s joy one of them was his father Isaac. The club, Michael wrote to him, ‘is a society existing for the promotion of friendship between Englishmen and Indians. Presumably you are supposed to make a speech about India.’ He stoked up his father’s enthusiasm for a visit to Oxford by mentioning a recent successful visit by Lloyd George, with whom Michael had breakfast.33

But activities like the Lotus Club were really indications that by far Michael’s strongest interests during his three years at Oxford were political. Even measured against the university careers of his brothers Dingle and John, with whom he was constantly compared, his progress was remarkable. He became President of the Liberal Club in 1932, at the start of his second year, and was triumphantly elected President of the Oxford Union in June 1933, at the end of it. In October 1933 the undergraduate magazine Isis made him an ‘Isis Idol’, a supreme accolade amongst the student body. Quite apart from his powerful background in Liberal politics, Michael went up to Oxford at a critical moment which would have stirred any politically sensitive young man. In August 1931, just before he started at Wadham, a huge political and financial crisis in Britain saw the collapse of the second Labour government, and Ramsay MacDonald become, totally unexpectedly, Prime Minister of an all-party National Government. The Labour Party was divided and crushed at the general election that October, while the economy plunged into mass depression and heavy unemployment. For all subsequent Labour leaders, from Lansbury to Foot, MacDonald went down in the party’s annals as a legendary traitor who blackened the very name of leadership in the people’s party. Foot would mention his name darkly when he was a Cabinet minister during the financial crisis of the IMF loan in 1976. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party divided into three after the election: the National Liberals led by Sir John Simon (allied to the Tories), the mainstream followers of Sir Herbert Samuel, and Lloyd George’s family group of just four. Isaac Foot was returned unopposed at the election at Bodmin as a supporter of the mainstream group which followed Sir Herbert Samuel as wary members of the new government, rather than of Lloyd George, who led his family group into permanent opposition. Dingle Foot, returned for Dundee, took the same line as his father, though he later veered somewhat to the right.

Michael, a devoted Lloyd Georgian, did not approve at all of his family’s near apostasy. He chided his father amiably enough in early 1932:

Well, I hope you are feeling thoroughly uncomfortable in your present position. I hope that the responsibility for a niggardly disarmament policy and blustering (?) dealing with Ireland rests heavily on your shoulders. I hope that you squirm in your pronouncement of each tariff order. I suppose you will vote with patriotic resignation for the further cuts and a raising of the school leaving age. I suppose you shout with the best of them when Sir Samuel Hoare exclaims ‘that the dogs bark but the caravan still goes on’. Nevertheless, this is the greatest economic crisis in the history of mankind and national unity must be preserved.

Much love. Michael.34

In fact the Samuel Liberals left the government en bloc in October 1932, when the government introduced tariffs and imperial preference to protect British industry and thus end a century of free trade, so father and son were for a time politically reunited. Dingle, however, remained alarmingly acceptable to the National Government, so much so that he was comfortably returned again for the two-Member Dundee constituency in 1935 without Conservative opposition, in harness with Florence Horsburgh.

Beyond the local vagaries of British politics it was an alarming world, in which democracy and international peace themselves were increasingly threatened. The menace posed itself most sharply when Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933. With totalitarian regimes installed in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, and the economies of major industrial nations in ruins as a result of the Depression, the relative tranquillity of Foot’s childhood in the twenties had disappeared. However, these were developments about which he read, rather than experiencing them at first hand as did the young Hugh Gaitskell or Denis Healey, say. Certainly they reaffirmed his commitment to liberal values. Unlike some famous Cambridge contemporaries, the siren call of Communism never seduced him.

Michael Foot was at this time still unshakeably a Liberal, albeit a left-wing one. The Liberal Club was then a powerful force in Oxford, with Lloyd George especially, according to Foot’s friend D. F. Karaka, evoking ‘little short of hero-worship’.35 This was no mere youthful staging post: Foot’s Liberalism went to the core of his being. He was a devout free trader and civil libertarian. Although he had effectively lost his religious faith, the popular ethic of West Country nonconformity was still a guiding star. The Oxford Magazine recorded a speech of his at the Union in October 1932 in which ‘he destroyed the case for tariffs, condemned the Tariff Boards and laughed at Peter Pan industries which never grew up’. The writer added wryly, ‘This is the first speech, I think, in which Mr Foot has not mentioned the name of Mr Lloyd George. It was perhaps the best speech of the evening.’36 Foot’s Liberalism remained unflinching throughout his undergraduate years, and he affirmed it in an article, ‘Why I am a Liberal’, published in the News Chronicle in 4 April 1934, commissioned by that Liberal newspaper’s editor, Aylmer Vallance. Liberalism, he claimed, had largely created the ‘social and democratic institutions which this country already enjoys’. Above all, it was committed to the League of Nations and international peace: ‘I am a Liberal, first of all, because of the unfaltering resistance which liberalism is pledged to offer to those twin dangers of fascism and war.’37 There and elsewhere, his undergraduate speeches and articles show the centrality of international issues in underlining his liberalism, but it went to the core of his being. In later years, Barbara Castle would note that referring to his ‘Why I am a Liberal’ article could annoy Michael Foot and move him on to other subjects.38

However, it can scarcely be doubted that essential aspects of his early student beliefs stayed with him thereafter, even after his transformation to left-wing socialism. He always remained a strong champion of human rights, active in the National Council for Civil Liberties or in campaigns against censorship; even more strongly was he the Whiggish champion of parliamentary liberties. His jousting with Tony Benn in the early 1980s testified to his unshakeable commitment to the parliamentary route to socialism. Shirley Williams, a Cabinet colleague in the later 1970s, always saw Foot as a man who was never a statist nor a natural centralizer, a natural champion of devolution and popular participation, in some sense always a Liberal.39 It was a view shared, more improbably, by Barbara Castle, who confided in her diaries her irritation with the basic rationalist Liberalism of ‘the collective Foot type’.40 To her he was a kind of conformist amongst the nonconformists.

The centrality of international issues in underpinning Michael’s Liberalism emerged even more strongly in his activities in the Oxford Union. From his first performances in debates in the autumn of 1931 he showed himself to have star quality, and to be a quite outstanding debater even in a House of remarkably talented young men. His speeches were lively and well spiced with humour. In a debate in May 1933 on a motion ‘That this House would prefer Fascism to Socialism’, the President, the future Labour minister Anthony Greenwood, recorded that Foot ‘made a delightful speech which had nothing at all to do with the motion’. He cheerfully moved a frivolous end-of-term motion in December 1932 that ‘This House would hang up its Christmas stocking’. The following summer he ridiculed a government of which its Prime Minister ‘would never rest until German measles was called the pox Britannica’.41

But his ultimate purposes were always deadly serious, and he could stir heart, mind and soul as very few speakers could. Foot indeed, Liberal as he was, is a central exhibit in the left-wing pacifism widely prevalent in the Oxford of the time. Frank Hardie, a famous President of the Union, wrote later of the sea-change in the attitudes of speakers in debates after the crisis of 1931. A serious tone replaced the flippancy of the recent past. The significance of the famous motion of 9 February 1933 ‘That this House would not fight for King and Country’ (in which Foot, perhaps surprisingly, did not speak, though he certainly voted for it) may have been exaggerated by Churchill and others as a symbol of the feebleness of the public mood at the time, but it certainly reflected important currents amongst the undergraduate population. Foot himself wrote in the Cherwell in October 1933 of how ‘Oxford politics in the past few years have taken a decidedly radical turn’.42 The new mood of undergraduates was shown by an anti-war demonstration alongside the Martyrs’ Memorial on Armistice Day in November 1932, which caused much controversy. There were important new left-wing clubs formed, notably the far-left October Club and the Anti-War Committee, whose members came into conflict with the university proctors for its verbal attacks on the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps.43 Attempts at censorship like Randolph Churchill’s ill-judged motion at the Union later on, which tried to expunge the ‘King and Country’ vote from the record, provoked violent reaction. Many of the movers and shakers amongst undergraduates were associated with radical, anti-war positions.

Several of them became close friends of Michael Foot. Among them were men of high talent (women were marginalized in a highly chauvinist university at that time). Frank Hardie, President of the Union in Hilary term 1933 during the King and Country debate, was a charismatic President of the University Labour Club. Anthony Greenwood, President of the Union in Trinity term 1933 and a handsome man popular with women undergraduates, saw the pro-Communist October Club founded in his rooms in Balliol – and later suppressed by the proctors. Paul Reilly of Hertford College, the son of a famous architect, was another young man of the far left, and a long-term friend of Michael Foot. He was later to be an important figure in industrial design and director of the Design Council. Foot’s most important close friendship was with John Cripps of Balliol College. He was a patrician socialist with whom Foot shared a house in his final year at Oxford and with whom he was to visit America on a debating tour in 1934, and who was to become a major figure in countryside matters. Unlike his friends Reilly and Foot, he gained a first in the Schools. It was through John’s father, Sir Stafford Cripps, an outspoken MP and voice of far-left views after the collapse of the Labour government (in which he had served as Solicitor-General) in 1931, that Michael Foot was to secure his first important entrée into the Labour Party.

For Michael the Union, as the focus of Oxford social and political life, was the institution to conquer, and he made astonishingly swift progress. Dingle and John had both been Presidents in the twenties, and as it happened both spoke in Union debates in the Trinity term of 1932. A speech of John’s was described as ‘stupendous’ in the Oxford Magazine.44 As for Michael, his brand of revivalist Liberal oratory swept opponents aside. Elected early on to the Library Committee, he was elected Treasurer for Hilary term 1932, then became Librarian, and in June 1933 defeated David Graham, ex-Librarian, in winning the presidency by a large majority. Anthony Greenwood graciously wrote a balanced and delicate appraisal of his election: ‘He would do well to pay a little more attention to the serious parts of his speeches. At present he seldom really deals with the subject. But it was a great oratorical effort and fully justified the result of the polling. I hope that Mr Foot will have a very happy term in the chair which has become almost a monopoly of his family.’ Foot’s election brought much joy. Greenwood wrote privately to congratulate him: ‘I thought your speech last Thursday was first rate, as it was in the Eights Week debate.’45 His mother Eva wrote with almost a sense of inevitability: ‘Do you think Graham really thought of getting it?’ Isaac combined paternal warmth with practicality:

The Foot colours have been kept flying high. I send you a cheque for ten pounds and made a further pull in the overdraft. If invested in the Abbey Road it will be worth about eighty pounds at the age of ninety. No swollen head, my lad.46

In the event, Michael’s term as President passed by satisfactorily, though inevitably silently on his part. He returned to debating the following term in loud support of a motion that ‘the presence of four hundred and seventy Conservatives in the House is a national disaster’. Towards Tories, Foot observed, he had ‘an inflexible loathing’.

His experiences in the Oxford Union profoundly shaped Foot’s political image. The Union nurtured his particular style of oratory, heavily sarcastic towards opponents, the swift marshalling of key points of an argument, the deliberate focus on the opposition’s strongest point before destroying it, the inexorable advance towards an unanswerable conclusion. Reinforced by ample quotations from historical and literary eminences, Foot’s speeches were hard to rebut. From this time on he was to become celebrated as an incomparable revivalist stump speaker. Equally, the sometimes more measured approach necessary in House of Commons debates, or in television interviews, was much harder to capture. But his unique debating style, with a distinctive rhythm and cadences, and unorthodox changes of emphasis that made him hard to interrupt, was central to his political fame.

The dominant theme of his speeches at the time was always resistance to war. Foot is a good example of the rebellion of the young in the later twenties and earlier thirties, responding eagerly to anti-war works like All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That, using images that exposed ‘merchants of death’, denouncing the ‘system of Versailles’ and calling for a new international order with open covenants openly arrived at. One book on the wartime experience that made a particularly deep impression on him was the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928). Foot’s credo came out very clearly in a compilation of four essays by recent Oxford undergraduates, Young Oxford and War, published by Selwyn Blount in 1934, under the unexpected editorship of a rising Indian politician, V. K. Krishna Menon, and with a brief foreword by Harold Laski.47 The authors were a varied group. R. G. Freeman was a Communist and President of the short-lived October Club. Frank Hardie, the former Union President, wrote ‘as a pacifist and a socialist’. Keith Steel-Maitland, whose chapter was easily the most practical and down-to-earth, was a moderate Conservative.

Finally there was Michael Foot, writing passionately as a near-pacifist Liberal. He condemned the rise of militarism in schools and universities in recent years: ‘There can be no real distinction between defence and offence in the modern world.’ He quoted freely from anti-war Union of Democratic Control authors like G. Lowes Dickinson and Norman Angell, author of International Anarchy, a phrase which appeared with much frequency in Foot’s early writings. He applauded the pacifist arguments advanced by Quakers and others, and pointed to the success of German Protestants in, so he claimed, resisting Hitler. Pacifism implied ‘unilateral disarmament’ and argued that evil should not be resisted with evil. The broad pacifist movement was plagued by internal divisions but could focus on ending international anarchy and ‘the elimination of force from the conduct of international affairs’. His was by no means a complete or unqualified pacifist argument. A properly constituted collective peace force to provide a backing of law ‘does not contain the elements objected to by the pacifist’. But instances in which resort to arms could ever be accepted by one of Foot’s outlook seemed hard to spell out in practical terms. It was a young man’s tract, rich in idealism, uncertain in logic, lacking in any kind of practical detail. But it embodied themes that were constantly to recur in Foot’s later career.

Foot emerged from Oxford with a glowing reputation as a potential young politician, even perhaps a future minister, Cripps and others thought. As noted, he announced his release from Oxford life with a trip to Paris with his brother John, spent in part breaking their vow of abstinence from alcohol, in part pursuing in vain a pretty young French girl Michael had met at Pencrebar the previous year. His student days had officially come to an end, but there was an interesting coda that autumn. With his close friend John Cripps he went to the United States for the first time in a debating tour on behalf of the Oxford Union. America was neither a country nor a culture that had impinged greatly on Michael’s early years, although he enjoyed aspects of its artistic life such as the films of Walt Disney and the voluptuous Mae West, and had some emerging interest in writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. Politically, like many young Englishmen, he had much enthusiasm for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, which he regarded as an attempt to shore up social welfare and progressive economics against backwoods Republican reactionaries during the Great Depression, and indeed as an inspiration to the world. But it belonged ‘over there’, and had little directly to offer the young Foot (though this was equally true of young Labour economists like Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay or Evan Durbin at the same period).

It was a gruelling visit, with twenty-two debates between 26 October and 4 December 1934.48 They went mostly to universities on the eastern seaboard, ranging from Yale and Penn State to Bates College, Maine. The last two debates took them almost seven hundred miles west, as far as Michigan. Michael Foot and John Cripps, ‘two quiet young chaps wearing glasses’, as they were described in the Atlanta Journal,49 were usually given left-wing motions to defend, which they both did with much success, defending trade unions, condemning military training in schools, attacking isolationism in American foreign policy. The old Liberal in Foot emerged in a robust attack on American trade policy at New Rochelle, New York, on 26 November: ‘If you uphold an isolationist policy, you can no longer remain a great creditor nation, you can no longer remain a great exporting nation.’ The result would be the same economic collapse and mass unemployment that were then so visible in Britain. He and Cripps were invariably triumphant in these debating jousts, and a succession of student newspapers wrote in praise of their wit and eloquence. Foot’s ‘brilliant rebuttal’ in a motion on the need for trade unions was praised in Yale News,50 although there were some murmurs that the Oxford Union seemed a bit facetious by American standards. There were also random interviews in which Michael told the Americans of the importance of Mickey Mouse to the British view of transatlantic culture.51 The tour was, in its way, an important episode for Foot. America was never so appealing that it shaped his political or other views: despite his enthusiasm for most aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he was too intensely English for that. But the visit enlarged his vision in many respects. For instance, one aspect he noticed was the apparently much greater prominence of women in higher education in the US, notably in some distinguished women’s colleges at which he and Cripps spoke. The trip took him out of his familiar English radical world for a while, and helped him to grow up.