Michael Foot: A Life

Michael Foot’s early years made him a distinctive, perhaps unique, kind of politician. He somehow bridged new and old, the brave new world radicalism of the post-war generation alongside the cultural depth of a Victorian man of letters. He was in many ways an old young man; equally he remained an eternally youthful spirit well into extreme old age. He drew from his origins a passionate attachment to the traditions of his family, and of Plymouth and the West Country more generally. He acquired an immense stock of vivid, easily mobilized political and literary influences and allusions. An apt quotation from Foot could spear opponents at will. His political connections were strong, first with Lloyd Georgian Liberalism, though perhaps Stafford Cripps might direct him towards new horizons. As a young debater at Oxford he acquired a fluency and poise in debate, buttressed by a kind of cultural confidence that pushed him towards a public career. He discovered that he could speak and he could write, with passion, conviction and often brilliance. He had all the idealistic fervour of a young anti-war radical at that time. Yet perhaps the abiding legacy from his younger days was an ability to place himself in historical context. When he reflected on current political and social issues, Drake and Cromwell, Tom Paine and Hazlitt, even aberrant turncoats like Edmund Burke, were at his shoulder. He felt himself to be somehow their heir, a past and future king of libertarian dissent, but searching still for a coherent movement to lead or even to join. But, whatever his future, he would share with the inspirational Isaac a demonic energy to pursue great causes. For ‘He trespasses upon his duty who sleeps upon his watch.’ No Foot ever dared do that.

2 CRIPPS TO BEAVERBROOK (1934–1940)

When Michael Foot’s hero, David Lloyd George, came to London as a young man at the age of seventeen in November 1880, he set eyes on the House of Commons for the first time. In his diary he admitted to having ‘eyed the assembly in a spirit similar to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor, the region of his future domain. Oh, vanity!’1 Five years later he unveiled to his future wife, Maggie Owen, the force of his terrifying ambition: ‘My supreme idea is to get on … I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way,’2 and he was as good as his word. Michael Foot, by contrast, felt no such overpowering urge. Although the son and brother of Liberal MPs (and possessed of a good deal more historical knowledge of the Norman Conquest than Lloyd George), he had no driving political ambition. To none of his friends did he suggest that he might consider becoming a parliamentary candidate. Indeed, when he came down from Oxford in June 1934, even when he returned from the United States six months later, he had no idea of what he might do in life. His brothers were finding their feet professionally, Dingle in chambers as a barrister as well as being an MP, Hugh in the Colonial Service, John in the solicitors’ firm Foot & Bowden back in Plymouth. But none of these routine occupations appealed to Michael’s imagination even though he too, in his way, sought ‘to get on’.

In fact he spent his first six months after graduating very much on the move. There was the jolly visit to Paris with John mentioned earlier, on which he spent a small legacy of £50 from his grandfather, a reward for earlier abstemiousness, successfully chasing culture, less successfully chasing girls, gleefully downing his windfall with glasses of Pernod. There followed a far more significant trip for the longer term when he went on across Europe, taking a train to Venice – very much his cherished city in later years – and then a boat from Trieste to Haifa to join his elder brother Hugh (‘Mac’), now serving in the Colonial Service amongst the continuing tensions of Palestine. Hitherto Michael had had no particular interest in the tensions between Jews and Arabs, although most British Liberals, from Lloyd George downwards, had a broad sympathy for the Jews and for the Zionist movement. Churchill’s philo-Semitism when a pre-war Liberal MP was well known. But Michael Foot’s trip in 1934 had a major impact upon him. It was to stimulate the first of many controversial crusades. He first became aware of the qualities of the Jews on the slow boat to Haifa, since virtually all the other passengers on it were Jewish. One of them was an ardent chess player with whom Foot first played serious chess. On this voyage his Jewish friend won every time, but Foot was to become ‘one of the strongest players in the House of Commons’ in later years.3

When he reached Palestine Michael stayed with his brother Hugh at Nablus, in the famous biblical region of Samaria. For one hellfire Welsh nonconformist preacher the very name had been a symbol of communal turbulence: ‘What was Samaria? Samaria was the Merthyr Tydfil of the land of Canaan.’4 In 1934 it was no more tranquil, with a small number of Jewish settlers in a prolonged stand-off with a large Arab community scattered throughout desert villages. Michael quickly realized the complexities of the situation in Palestine, a region left in conflict and possible chaos after the ambiguous pledges to both communities made by Lloyd George’s government after the disastrously imprecise Balfour Declaration of 1917. But whereas brother Hugh, like most in the Colonial Service, was a warm sympathizer with the Arabs, it was the plight of the beleaguered Jewish minority that haunted Michael all his life. After a few tense weeks in Nablus he returned home by a circuitous route, including a cheap ship from Beirut, his first flight, from Athens to Salonika, and a stopping train through Yugoslavia and back to England. There followed his debating tour in America with John Cripps. He returned home just in time for Christmas, after which the more practical problems of getting and spending had to be resolved.

The way that things worked out for him had a critical effect on his entire life. In the absence of any attractive alternative his thoughts turned to writing a work of history, in which the present-day moral would emerge. His chosen area was the life of Charles James Fox, to whom he had been pointed by his reading of George Otto Trevelyan and others, and who had interested him when working for prizes at Leighton Park school. Fox had much appeal as a subject. He was a critic of the overmighty authority of George III and his King’s Friends. He was a colourful personality, sexually liberated – usually a feature of Foot’s chosen heroes, including Hazlitt, Byron and H. G. Wells. He was a literate apostle of the Enlightenment. Above all, he championed the ideals of the French Revolution and of civil liberty through dark times in peace and in war. Foot was always a passionate supporter of the revolutionaries of 1789: they drew him to Tom Paine and to Hazlitt in his reading. A fellow chess enthusiast, Charles James Fox inspired Foot as an essential link in a native English radical tradition that bound the Levellers in Putney church to Cobden and Bright and Lloyd George and Bertrand Russell and the anti-war apostles of the Union of Democratic Control in 1914: the relationship of all this to the separate complexities of the socialist tradition was something he had yet to work out. Fox was naturally opposition-minded; he was seen by A. J. P. Taylor as the founder of the dynasty of ‘trouble-makers’ which his 1957 Ford’s Lectures at Oxford celebrated, and whose steps the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament consciously followed. Fox had kept alive the red flame of radical courage during the bleak Pittite years. He was the most natural of subjects for the post-Oxford idealist Michael Foot.

But the book never happened. Foot had no money, no publisher, not even a synopsis to wave around. Instead he found himself trapped in a humdrum office job, which was to change his life. It was to become a central point of self-reference and self-definition in his own later interpretation of his career. This arose from his friendship with John Cripps, which led him to spend much time in vacations at ‘Goodfellows’ in the west Oxfordshire village of Filkins, the squire’s home of John’s father, the famous advocate and by now socialist firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. He also went on holiday with the Cripps family to the Scilly Isles. Foot’s relationship with Stafford Cripps soon became a decisive one. He needed a hero and a patron: in Cripps, as later in Beaverbrook, he found both. ‘Goodfellows’ fascinated him with its array of visiting Labour, trade union and socialist celebrities. He met George Lansbury, Labour’s current evangelistic pacifist leader, whose pacifism appeared even to Foot surreal, but with whom he became friendly in Lansbury’s last years. He was impressed by Ernest Bevin, the Transport and General Workers Union’s General Secretary, as an authentic working-class leader of much strength of personality; much less so by the taciturn Clem Attlee. A far more potent influence than either was one occasional visitor, the young Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan, who was to shape his destiny for ever. There were also young people like Geoffrey Wilson, an idealistic Quaker who was to become Stafford Cripps’s private secretary on his ambassadorial visit to Moscow in 1940. Clearly, amidst such company Foot’s traditional Liberalism would be facing a severe challenge. But Cripps was attracted by his son’s interesting and knowledgeable young friend, anxious to help him forward and to enlist his literary and oratorical talents for his own versions of the socialist cause. Cripps’s brother Leonard, a ship-owner and a director of the Holt shipping firm’s Blue Funnel Line which traded with southern Africa and the Far East, needed a personal assistant. His nephew John had been pencilled in for this post, but John (a caustic critic of his uncle’s right-wing views) suggested his friend Michael instead. Thus it was that on 1 January 1935 the impressionable young Foot began work amidst the cranes and bunkers of the alien shipyards of Liverpool’s docks.

Michael Foot’s time in industrial Liverpool was not a relaxed one, and he left after barely nine months. But for ever afterwards he would give this period a legendary Damascus-like status as the time when he first witnessed social hardship and became a left-wing socialist. It is important to try to establish how far the poverty of working-class Liverpool was pivotal in this conversion, and indeed what kind of socialism it was to which he was drawn. Certainly he found his job in the Blue Funnel Line boring and undemanding. He used as much time as he could in making notes on the back of business correspondence on the career and ideas of Charles James Fox. He had hoped that his new job might entail some overseas travel, for which he had now acquired a taste, but none was forthcoming and he was office-bound. Foot told his mother how heartily he disliked all the people he worked with and for. Leonard Cripps was boring, Sir Richard Holt ‘the last word in malignant density’. Others had ‘stunted intelligences’, while the routine duties were ‘dull as ditchwater’.5

But Liverpool, the first industrial working-class city of which he had any experience, was far more compelling. He found lodgings in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish home which his recent visit to Palestine made congenial. He spent time exploring the shabby backstreets of the dock-side areas. He also transferred his footballing interests, at least for a time, to supporting Everton at Goodison Park. He treasured in later life an ‘Ode to Everton’ that he composed in 1935, which was printed in the Liverpool Daily Post. It laid particular emphasis on ‘Dixie’s priceless head’, a reference to the prolific goal-scoring centre-forward ‘Dixie’ Dean.6 But crucially, within a month of arriving on Merseyside the old West Country Liberal had joined the Labour Party as an active, ardent crusader and canvasser. (Oddly, in accounts of his career he tends to give 1934, not 1935, as the date of his conversion.) Michael had got religion, and wanted the world to know. Soon he was an energetic participant in the committee meetings and street-corner campaigning of the Liverpool Labour Party. He met congenial comrades here, including two future parliamentary colleagues, Sydney Silverman, an eloquent Jewish lawyer, and the formidable and pugnacious Bessie Braddock and her husband Jack, both ex-Communists. To what extent Michael’s conversion was the consequence of empirical observation might, however, be examined. After all, commentators have wondered how far George Orwell’s famous book of the same period was actually the product of first-hand observation of Wigan Pier. John Vincent once commented in an Observer book review that ‘a man who describes as flabby Lancashire cheese which is crumbly gives himself away at once’.

Without doubt, Michael Foot’s compassionate heart and soul were deeply stirred by the poverty he saw in the dockside community and in Liverpool’s backstreets. It was a maritime city with a weak manufacturing base, and thus very high unemployment, painfully evident on street corners amidst its shabby terraces. Equally clearly, his speeches and articles while at Oxford show a young man moving rapidly leftwards in his revulsion for militarism and dictatorship. His criticisms of socialism in ‘Why I am a Liberal’ are half-hearted questionings of the merits of centralization. Most of his close friends at Oxford – John Cripps, Paul Reilly, Tony Greenwood – were emphatically Labour. And without doubt his acquaintance with Stafford Cripps and the bracing radical atmosphere of ‘Goodfellows’ were a powerful influence too. But, most characteristically, Michael’s conversion came through the medium of books – and indeed not sober works of socio-economic analysis, but imaginative works of fiction. While crawling to his office on Liverpool’s trams, his mind was focused not only on the slums through which he passed but on the books he read on his journey. Arnold Bennett was a particularly powerful stimulant: his How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) made a lasting impact on the young socialist. It is actually a short book, not at all one of Bennett’s masterpieces, but Foot no doubt appreciated the chapter on ‘Serious Reading’, which lavished great praise on Hazlitt’s essay ‘Poetry in General’ – ‘the best thing of its kind in English’.7 Foot also read extensively the novels of H. G. Wells, destined to loom alongside Cripps and Bevan as supreme inspirations. Tono-Bungay’s relatively brief account of socialist ideas was exciting to him, more perhaps for its subtle exposé of the immoralities of free-market competitive capitalism. Bernard Shaw was another important influence, though he was less favoured because of his criticisms of Wells’s Short History of the World.8 Foot’s was an undoctrinaire ethical socialism, a gospel of words and ideas, similar to that which had impelled young men like Attlee or Dalton into the Independent Labour Party. On more immediate matters, Foot was excited by Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom. Economic theory does not seem to have interested him. At first he was innocent of connections with Marxism, although by 1937 he was instructing the equally young Barbara Betts (the future Barbara Castle) in the intellectual delights of Das Kapital. His ideology, such as it was, kept its distance from the formal programmes of the Labour Party, still in 1935 trying to redefine its policies after the catastrophe of 1931 had laid bare the emptiness of its economic notions, and perhaps also the wider problem of attempting to modify and humanize a capitalist order which it ultimately wished to abolish.

Nor was Michael Foot a Fabian. He had met Beatrice Webb at Stafford Cripps’s home, and did not take to her admonitory style. He did not become a socialist in order to promote orderly administration by a bureaucratic elite; nor, without a background in local government at any level, was he inspired by the heady vision of ‘gas and water socialism’. The first book by the Webbs that he read, and indeed responded to positively, was their Industrial Democracy, which he read together with Barbara Betts at her Bloomsbury flat. Years later, in 1959, he took sharp issue with the Fabian historian Margaret Cole on the Webbs’ vision of socialism: ‘I think there is running through a great deal of what they wrote … a strong bureaucratic, anti-libertarian attitude which often reveals what I think is a real contempt for those who are engaged in Socialist agitation, protest and activities of that nature.’ He pointed out Beatrice’s patrician absence of interest in the great propaganda work of Robert Blatchford, editor of the early socialist newspaper the Clarion (he might have added her contempt for Keir Hardie and George Lansbury as well). For much of their career the Webbs were unconvinced that the Labour movement was the instrument of change, rather than a generally-defined ‘permeation’ and gradualism. Revealingly, Foot added as a criticism the Webbs’ uncritical adulation of the Soviet Union and Communist doctrine, in contrast to the far more critical approach of his old journalist friend and mentor H. N. Brailsford, historian and intellectual guru of the socialist left.9 Foot’s conclusions appear to endorse many of H. G. Wells’s assaults on the Fabian high command in the Edwardian period, and the general line of criticism indicated in one of his favourite books, The New Machiavelli. It was a battle of the books which Margaret Cole was most unlikely ever to win. For Foot, then, socialism was a greater liberalism, a doctrine of social and aesthetic liberation. It implied new values and a new society. It made Michael in time the natural disciple of the imaginative crusader Aneurin Bevan and the natural husband of the cultural socialist, Jill.

In this quest, Stafford Cripps seemed at this period the natural messiah. Since the 1931 schism, with the defection of MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden to become allies of the Tories, Cripps had led a sharp advance to the left. He preached a style of socialism that went far beyond the cautious parliamentary parameters within which Labour had grown up. He joined the far-left Socialist League, a movement of middle-class intellectuals, formed in 1932, in large part from the ILP when it disaffiliated from the Labour Party. It was a movement in which Michael Foot was shortly to enlist. Cripps campaigned to promote a new foreign policy in alliance with the Soviet Union: the League of Nations was dismissed as ‘the International Burglars’ Union’. He also pressed for the social ownership of all major industries and utilities, based not on state nationalization but on workers’ control. At the 1933 party conference Cripps proclaimed in Marxist terms that a socialist government would never receive fair treatment under capitalism, with the City, the Civil Service and the establishment all ranged against it. He called for some form of emergency government to entrench socialism in our time. In January 1934 he caused even greater alarm and shock by suggesting that Buckingham Palace would be foremost amongst the institutions seeking to defeat an incoming Labour government. This doctrine horrified leaders such as Dalton, Attlee and Morrison: Beatrice Webb thought him an extremist and his ideas revolutionary. By the 1935 general election Cripps’s erratic behaviour meant that his star was soon to wane. He himself recognized the fact by giving private financial help to Clem Attlee as assistant party leader in Lansbury’s last phase. But to the young Michael Foot, a books-driven evangelist yearning for a cause, Cripps was the most obvious instrument of creating a new socialist society.

Foot’s conversion to socialism was, naturally, a huge shock to his traditionally Liberal family. Nothing like it had ever happened at Pencrebar. What made things worse was that they discovered his conversion to Labour indirectly, when the Daily Herald picked up a short comment in the Oxford undergraduate magazine Isis. But the shock was far from terminal: it was nowhere near as bad as a Foot becoming a Tory (the family’s response to Dingle’s effective electoral pact with the Tories in Dundee is not recorded). Isaac was shaken at first by his son’s transformation. However, he cheerfully told Michael that if he was to move from liberalism to socialism, he ought to absorb the thoughts of a real radical. An even more intense perusal was needed of the thoughts of William Hazlitt (who, among other things, was a republican who voiced public grief on hearing of Napoleon’s deeply regrettable defeat at Waterloo).10 Even the Labour Party could be better understood by recourse to the bookshelves of Pencrebar. Michael’s mother Eva seems to have been more immediately upset by the news, and he had to write to her explaining his belief that only socialism, rather than any form of liberalism, had the answer to problems of poverty and peace. But in time his mother came to a more complete appreciation than Isaac ever did of the reasons for Michael’s becoming a socialist. Certainly her Labour son’s political advance was as important to her as that of any of her Liberal brood.

Michael Foot’s earliest activities as a left socialist in the streets of Liverpool had, of course, immediate social evils to condemn. But what is striking about his socialism, then and always, is how far this very English rebel, who travelled relatively little until his old age and was dedicated to worshipping the liberty tree of his country’s past, framed his socialism in an international context. This, of course, was common to many idealistic young people in the thirties, with the rise of totalitarian dictatorship and the threat of a global confrontation with the democratic peoples. Foot played his full part in campaigning against fascism, for the Popular Front in Spain, and in denouncing Chamberlainite appeasement. But he had perspectives of his own in relation to two important countries further afield – India and Palestine.

Since his undergraduate days, Foot had had a special affinity with India and the Indians. He liked their food, he admired their culture; perhaps, as Philip Snowden said of Keir Hardie, India ‘appealed to the seer and the mystic in him’. He had listened avidly to his father’s accounts of the views of Mahatma Gandhi during the Round Table conference which explored the future government of India in 1930–31. He had been active in the Anglo-Indian Lotus Club. In the Oxford Union he was friendly with progressive Indians like the sharp young Parsee D. F. Karaka, whose memoirs testified to Foot’s generosity of spirit and enthusiasm for multiculturalism.11 Foot carried on this involvement right through the thirties. Long after Indian independence in 1947, devotion to India was a golden thread in his career. India embodied key political and cultural values that he cherished. A major influence from 1934 onwards was his contact with Krishna Menon, a member of St Pancras borough council until 1947. Menon’s energetic work as chairman of the St Pancras Education and Library Committee, especially on library and arts provision for children, was greatly admired. He first met Michael when he edited the book Young Oxford and War, to which Michael contributed, and Michael was to be much associated with him in campaigning for the Socialist League in London. Krishna Menon was an exciting guru: Foot’s visits to his legal office at 169 The Strand always remained memorable for him. He joined the strongly pro-Congress Commonwealth of India League (previously the Home Rule for India League), of which Krishna Menon had been General Secretary since 1930, and read Indian newspapers avidly. At this period Foot’s instinct was to call for gradualism in the demands of the Congress, and he wrote urging Indian nationalists to cooperate with the authorities as the new Indian constitution was being drafted at Westminster in 1934–35. Krishna Menon’s tendency to build links between Congress and the British Communist Party was something that disturbed Foot later in that decade.

But Indian self-government was a glowing ideal for him throughout the thirties, merged into the Labour Party’s campaigns for social justice and world peace. This was widely true of younger socialists in Britain, contrasting with a relative lack of interest in Africa. Several of Foot’s most admired fellow-socialists were zealous in the Commonwealth of India League. Thus he discussed the subcontinent on long walks with H. N. Brailsford, who had first-hand knowledge of India, was a personal friend of Gandhi and was to write Subject India for the Left Book Club during the war.12 Harold Laski was another key socialist intellectual much concerned with Indian independence: he had after all served on the special jury in the O’Dwyer v. Nair libel case that followed the dismissal of General Dyer, the perpetrator of the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, and was shocked by the sheer racialism that it revealed, especially from the judge. Aneurin Bevan, shortly to be Foot’s closest political ally and mentor, always gave India a high priority, as did Bevan’s wife Jennie Lee, while amongst Foot’s literary heroes H. G. Wells was another ally on Indian matters: The New Machiavelli was an important text for opponents of the Raj. Amongst Indian leaders, in addition to Krishna Menon, Foot also met Pandit Nehru and heard him speak in 1938 at a meeting on Spain. Foot’s continuing links with the Nehru family – Nehru’s daughter Indira and her sons Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi especially – remained important for the next half-century and more.