Michael Foot: A Life

The book is an obvious patchwork, but a pungent and powerful one. Foot himself later felt that Guilty Men had been overrated, and that it had less merit than his next book, The Trial of Mussolini (1943) – which, of course, was his work alone. There is a moving introduction, a brisk, highly personalized scene-setting, then a series of mostly effective personality studies, and an upbeat finale. Government ministers are skewered in turn; a digression is the treatment of the Civil Service head Sir Horace Wilson, chief appeaser and responsible for the fact that ‘the dead hand of bureaucracy grips us by the throat’. There is a catchphrase or anecdote on almost every page. Many of them have had eternal life in popular memory ever since. It was Guilty Men that first drilled permanently into the public consciousness Chamberlain’s umbrella, Baldwin’s ‘appalling frankness’, ‘peace in our time’, faraway countries of which we know nothing, Hitler ‘missing the bus’. They are as much part of the essential cultural equipment of British people now as are nursery rhymes or pop songs. Appeasement is guaranteed always to be a dirty word.

The broader public interpretation of the thirties, of course, is owed to Churchill, maker of history during the war, writer of it subsequently. But Churchill’s majestic, if often misleading, volumes were offered to a public whose images were already set in stone. The leftish journalists had blazed the trail. Everyone knew who the villains of the thirties were, and why they could never be forgiven. Since the heroes of Guilty Men, apart from Churchill, were really the ordinary British people, seen as citizens no less than as subjects, the book fostered a natural sense of a people’s war which should be followed by a people’s peace. Successive polls of historians designed to assess the rating of twentieth-century British Prime Ministers always saw Neville Chamberlain close to bottom of the poll, his considerable achievements in promoting economic recovery in the thirties set aside even by scholars. If the purpose of popular tracts is to create a demonology, Guilty Men was an outstanding success.

Like any popularized version of historical fact, its simplistic analysis has since been seriously undermined. As the pre-1939 public records became available, revisionist scholars such as David Edgerton showed that the rearmament record of Baldwin and his colleagues over warships and aircraft production was far more commendable than the Express Newspapers journalists allowed. They have even been given credit for encouraging a mood of national defiance after Munich. Chamberlain, of course, has had many defenders. So have Hoare, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood and his predecessor John Simon. Even Thomas Inskip’s entry in the new version of the Dictionary of National Biography in 2004 concluded that he was far from hopeless; in coordinating defence he showed the, perhaps unheroic, qualities of ‘weighing evidence and drawing unemotional conclusions’. Halifax has been the subject of a sympathetic biography (1991) by Andrew Roberts – though oddly the Foreign Secretary makes no appearance at all in the pages of Foot and his colleagues. But of course Guilty Men was concerned not with timeless verities but with transforming the public mood. This it did with great brilliance and brio. It would not have done so if its arguments were historically worthless. The combined learning of subsequent scholars like Donald Cameron Watt, Alastair Parker, Richard Overy and Martin Gilbert suggests that the verdict on Britain’s political leadership in the thirties still strongly favours the journalistic critics rather than the academic dissenters. Parker’s brilliant Chamberlain and Appeasement (1997) fatally undermines the counter-revisionists and lists all Chamberlain’s calamitous miscalculations. Watt’s definitive How the War Came (1989) is a shattering indictment of Chamberlain and his ministers. Guilty Men, a rough-and-tumble polemic of no scholarly quality at all, has been proved right in its instincts, and the British public knew it to be so.

From the start the book sold by the tens of thousands – over 200,000 by the end of the year, and 220,000 in all. It went through no fewer than seven reprints during July 1940 alone. Gollancz and Foot’s nervousness about gambling on so daring a book at such a tense time was shown to be baseless.4 Many technical obstacles in marketing were successfully overcome, notably the wilful refusal of W. H. Smith’s and Wyman’s bookshops to have it on their shelves (a far more serious problem then than it would later have been). Other shops showed great caution in confessing that the dread work was actually in stock. Most unusually for him, Gollancz had to distribute it on a ‘sale or return’ basis. Thousands of copies were sold not in shops at all but on street kerbs. Foot and friends pushed barrowloads of the book for a quick sale in London’s West End. Their sales pitches in Soho and Leicester Square caused some excitement among prostitutes and their clients, who thought it was an instruction manual on sex. Sales swept on and on; Guilty Men went through more than thirty impressions in six months, and received plenty of reviews. In an excellent diversion, the anonymous book was actually reviewed by Michael Foot himself in the Standard, where he inevitably found points for disagreement. No one had any idea who the author might be: journalistic licence seems to have been more restrained in those days, though of course the book had been produced in unusually secretive circumstances, and without secretarial help. Some wondered whether the former First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper, who had famously resigned from the government after Munich, might be responsible, but the prose style would surely quash such an idea. Only slightly more plausible was the suggested authorship of Randolph Churchill. Not until a good deal later, via sources still unclear, did the truth sneak out.

Guilty Men was the work of a trio, but it has always been Michael Foot with whom it has been identified. As Frank Owen and particularly Peter Howard retreated from the public eye, Foot’s continued prominence, and continued identification with its message, meant that man and book were inextricably linked for ever. Crises in the Falklands, Croatia or Bosnia, involving alleged surrender in foreign affairs, made the connection all the firmer. The book did not make him rich; unfortunately the authors lost serious money because Pinker, their agent, appears to have run away with some of the proceeds. But Foot gained something more precious – what Gibbon called ‘everlasting fame’. It was a mixed blessing in some ways, as it was hard to have a satisfactory career after peaking so young. It also meant that Foot was typecast as a partisan polemicist, a caustic critic rather than a constructive politician. This diminished his public image. It could also make him seem a dated figure, stuck in a time-warp. Analogies with the bad old days of the thirties would continue to come all too easily to him, to the point of self-parody. Even during the 1983 general election campaign he was still returning to the themes and personalities of Guilty Men.

As a publicist and commentator Foot would henceforth stand on a pedestal all his own. His work chimed in with a sense of 1940 as a climactic moment for the national identity. He was a socialist, but also manifestly a patriotic one, admired across the spectrum. At the age of twenty-seven, or at least when his identity was known, he became at a stroke almost the most celebrated journalist of his day, quite as famous as Brailsford, Lowes Dickinson or others of the anti-war writers he had so admired in his youth. In a wider sense, his identification with the thesis of Guilty Men moved him on to a new level of authority. Popular contempt for appeasing dictators became a theme endlessly fanned in the media over the next sixty years through the obsessive interest of the British in the Second World War – on stage, screen and television. Heroic young men fighting the Battle of Britain, escaping from Colditz, blowing up the Mohne and Eder dams, would follow the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. ‘The Dambusters March’ rivalled ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as an alternative national anthem. There were endless uncritical historical sagas on Churchill, as well as several magisterial biographies. Popular polls found Churchill to be the greatest Briton of all time, leaving Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin trailing in his wake.

But in a way Foot had already pointed the way for him, like a socialists’ John the Baptist. His timeless journalism had become an essential part of the triumph over Nazism. The message stuck, and in unlikely places. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush, on whose study desk a bust of Churchill reportedly stood, repeatedly cited the perils of appeasement of dictators, as shown by British policy in the thirties (when, incidentally, the United States was made almost inert by its policy of isolation). Bush urged that Saddam Hussein be resisted as uncompromisingly as Hitler had been. Tony Blair, whose own rhetoric became increasingly Churchillian as he neared a pre-planned war (presented as a response to an alleged threat to national security from non-existent weapons), took the same line. Yet one of their mentors in their subconscious (or those of their speechwriters or spinners) was none other than the aged socialist peacemonger and Hampstead sage, himself a fierce opponent of the Iraq war, who addressed the massive anti-war march in London on 15 February 2003 to that effect. Since Saddam Hussein was manifestly no Hitler, and he had no Mein Kampf on display, perhaps Foot’s grasp of logic and of the historical facts was more robust than theirs. At any rate, as his old friend A. J. P. Taylor would have said, here was one of history’s ‘curious twists’.

After the publication of Guilty Men, Foot’s work for Beaverbrook on the Standard continued to flourish. In May 1941 he took over the influential ‘Londoner’s Diary’ column. Then, in April 1942, still well short of his thirtieth birthday, he actually became the newspaper’s editor when Frank Owen was called up to serve in the RAF. Beaverbrook himself had not known at all about the authorship of Guilty Men: it was technically in breach of contract for Foot and the others to write their book while employed by him. But when he did discover the truth, he showed no particular concern. Indeed, he was cheerfully to tell Halifax, who had asked about his personal finances, that he lived comfortably enough from the royalties from Guilty Men.5 In any case, far from being attacked in the book as the appeaser he was, he had received honourable mention at the end, along with Churchill, Bevin and Morrison, as one of the four strong men in the new government who could rescue the nation.

Foot had no crises of conscience about writing leading articles or otherwise producing copy for a newspaper owned by a right-wing capitalist he was to denounce in 1944 as an ‘ante-deluvian monster’. In fact Beaverbrook himself agreed entirely with Standard campaigns such as that to promote a second front in western Europe, and became strongly supportive of the Soviet Union long before it was invaded by Hitler. His own wartime career also fitted in comfortably with his newspaper’s challenging line. His appointments, first as Minister of Aircraft Production and then Minister of Supply, fulfilling a role somewhat similar to the one Lloyd George had played so brilliantly at Munitions in 1915–16, were exactly in line with the strong executive leadership for which the Standard called.

Relations between editor and proprietor, then, continued to flourish. Foot’s letters, which had begun with ‘Dear Lord Beaverbrook’, now started with ‘Dear Max’. Beaverbrook himself seemed generally pleased with the way his young protégé was handling matters. Later on, addressing the Royal Commission on the Press, he did appear to make some slightly dismissive remarks about Foot: ‘He is a very clever fellow, a most excellent boy. And then suddenly he was projected into the editorship of the paper before he was ready for it … Michael Foot believed that I made him a journalist.’6 But Beaverbrook offered these views in March 1948, when he and Foot were estranged politically. There is no evidence that he felt any major concern in the two wartime years when Foot sat behind the editor’s desk. There were those who surmised that Foot was getting too comfortable in his editorial role. Beaverbrook’s right-hand man E. J. Robertson, the long-term general manager of Express Newspapers, wrote in August 1942 that ‘On a number of occasions I have noted that Frank [Owen] is jealous of Michael Foot.’ Owen feared losing his editorship for good as a result of being called up by the RAF, but put up a façade to cover his anxieties. Whether these fears were justified is impossible to say although the prospect of Owen’s possibly standing as an independent candidate in the Maldon by-election two months earlier had ruffled some of Beaverbrook’s feathers. In the event Maldon was captured by another Beaverbrook journalist standing as an independent, Tom Driberg, who appeared in the pages of the Express as ‘William Hickey’. Foot and Owen actually remained very good friends. Owen went on to serve as Press Editor in South East Asia Command later in the war, and apparently turned somewhat against Beaverbrook in 1945, as did Foot. His later decline into penury and alcoholism elicited a good deal of sympathy from Foot, who took up his case to receive benefits with the social services while serving as a Cabinet minister in 1977–78. Owen’s death in 1979 was marked by a particularly warm tribute from his old comrade, appropriately in the columns of the Evening Standard they had both once edited. In addition, Foot wrote a vivid celebration of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.7

Beaverbrook, as was his wont, continued to take a keen interest in the contents of his newspapers, and Foot received occasional queries, which had to be handled carefully. In September 1942 he vigorously rebutted complaints from George Malcolm Thomson, Beaverbrook’s ghost writer on foreign affairs and general sidekick, about the Standard’s campaign for a second front in 1943. Thomson’s remarks on Germany’s 1914 Schlieffen Plan to invade France through Belgium betrayed ‘a gross historical ignorance and give me much pain’. Thomson would have to ‘find other grounds for his sinister campaign against the second front’.8 In November 1942 Foot dealt no less vigorously with Beaverbrook’s own murmurings that Standard leaders were damaging relations with Franco’s Spain. Foot responded that almost any honest report on Spain, detailing the well-known German influence there, would be used as a pretext for saying the British press was stirring up trouble, and trying to censor it.9 This Beaverbrook steadfastly refused to do. Foot also defended comments about the Finns. While expressing sympathy with them for being invaded by the Soviet Union, he insisted that the Standard had always resisted ‘giving them assistance which would land us in difficulties with the Russians’.

More serious were Beaverbrook’s reservations about three articles in May 1942 signed by ‘Thomas Rainboro’, the name of the famous Leveller of 1647. These appeared not in the Standard but in a very different paper, Tribune, with which Foot retained an unofficial personal connection. They consisted of stinging attacks on Churchill, called ‘the modern War Lord’, for major strategic errors including the failure to protect Greece and resistance to a second front. Remarkably, these were written from an RAF camp in Andover by Frank Owen, recently called up, and drew on his military expertise acquired from Liddell Hart, Wingate and others. Beaverbrook, as Mervyn Jones has shown, evidently knew the secret of their authorship, and indeed agreed with their main thrust, but then became alarmed at possible consequences; he demanded that any future articles be suppressed, and Foot drove to Andover to ensure that they were.10 His only direct connection with the articles had been to write an erudite explanation in Tribune as to who the original Rainboro was. As regards the Standard, one area where Foot was willing to concede error was when Beaverbrook turned to matters of literary style amongst his columnists, and to phrases that ‘will not do’. He instanced ‘generations yet unborn’ and ‘bore his burdens bravely’ as infelicities; we might simply see them as journalistic clichés.11

But on wider matters, until well into 1943 Foot’s Beaverbrook connection remained brisk and effective. His employer warmly approved of his consistent support for the Soviet Union before and after Hitler’s invasion: on 22 June 1941 Foot, who was staying at a house party at Cherkley at the time, went downstairs in the morning and played ‘The Internationale’ on the gramophone at high volume. He warmly applauded his old patron Sir Stafford Cripps for his work in fostering Anglo – Soviet friendship in his time as ambassador in Moscow up to the start of 1942. Beaverbrook gave moral support to this. Indeed, his tolerance for his young editor was remarkable. He learnt without apparent dismay of Foot’s presence at meetings shared with Communists like Harry Pollitt on behalf of the ‘Russia Today’ movement in 1941, urging a firm Anglo – Soviet alliance in full Popular Front mode. Russia’s involvement in the war greatly excited Foot. He and Frank Owen had frequent sessions in Owen’s Lincoln’s Inn flat in 1941 with Harry Pollitt, the British Communist Party leader, for whom Foot had especial admiration. Jon Kimche was another important link with Communist activists like Wilfred McCartney. Bevan and Jennie Lee, however, also in contact with the Communists in ‘Russia Today’, were far less ‘forgiving’ than Foot was inclined to be.12 By contrast, the entry of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor did not excite anything like the same obsessive enthusiasm from Foot and his friends. Roosevelt the war leader seemed less captivating than Roosevelt the New Dealer, while in any case America was never a country that captured Foot’s sustained attention.

Under Foot the Standard became a more radical newspaper. It also became a more high-quality one. He drew to its columns a wide range of eminent contributors. A highly influential one was H. G. Wells, whom Foot saw as a prophetic figure and who had enormously influenced his conversion to socialism in his Liverpool days. Foot became personally friendly with Wells, and equally so with his Russian partner Moura Budberg, ‘the magnificent Moura’, whose colourful life had included being the long-term mistress of both the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart and the great Russian writer Maxim Gorki. A learned Polish follower of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, wrote for the Standard on contemporary themes. So did Jon Kimche of the ILP, an ardent Zionist and another émigré, later to edit Tribune. He owned a socialist bookshop near Ludgate Circus and shared to the full Foot’s literary enthusiasm for Hazlitt and others, but he also supplied essential military expertise for Foot’s paper, which had been somewhat lost when Frank Owen left the editorship. Kimche’s role illustrates the close links between Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and Tribune at this time, for which Foot and indeed Owen were in large measure responsible. The two publications worked closely in covert ways, notably over the campaign for a second front or affairs in Greece. The Standard’s coverage of international affairs greatly gained from expertise gleaned through people writing for Tribune. In addition to Kimche on military matters and Deutscher on eastern Europe, there was also excellent analysis of Franco’s Spain by the Spanish socialist historian A. Ramon Olivera.

A more exciting journalistic recruit still was Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew and ex-Communist. Foot first met him when Koestler was wearing the uniform of the Pioneer Corps, albeit in the comfortable ambience of the Savoy Grill. A previous place of residence for him, as an ex-Communist immigrant, had been Pentonville prison. His breathtaking book Darkness at Noon (1940) had exposed the Stalin show trials in unforgettable language, and explained his earlier conversion to Communism in terms of a psychoanalytical theory of political neurosis. In Loyalists and Loners (1986), Foot later described the book’s indelible impact upon him: ‘I can recall reading it right through one night, horror-struck, over-powered, enthralled.’13 Koestler on his side was much attracted by Foot as a highly intelligent, literate socialist ‘whose projection about the future was untrammelled by a sense of guilt about the past’.14 Despite Koestler’s notoriously combustible, even violent, temperament, he and Foot struck up a strong political affinity. They also shared an enthusiasm for chess and for Foot’s girlfriend from 1942, Connie Ernst (no relation to Lily). Koestler’s biographer has commented that Koestler was important for Foot, and later for Richard Crossman, for ‘unshackling their socialism from the Soviet incubus’, but he was very much pushing at an open door on that front. Foot helped him in introducing him to a rich range of socialist writers, intellectuals and activists, and their relationship was often very close. However, Koestler’s relations with the Standard came to a shuddering end when he revealed a darker side of his personality. A series of articles in the Standard in June and July 1942, ‘The Idle Thoughts of Sidney Sound’, supposedly conveying the reveries of ‘typical’ figures on the London underground, caused alarm for their erotic quality, and they were wound up.15 Foot remained on warm terms with Koestler for several years, and worked closely with him in promoting the cause of the Jews after the war. But this other Koestler, with an almost sadistic approach to young women, was eventually to reveal himself to Foot, to his personal anguish. He was startled later on to hear that Koestler had been involved with British espionage work, and lamented his sympathies with ideological anti-Communism, what Crossman was to call Koestler’s ‘entry ticket into McCarthyite America’.

Koestler was one of three remarkable writers who imposed themselves on Foot’s sensibilities at this time, and was the one with whom Foot was most intimate. The other two were George Orwell and Ignazio Silone.16 As it happened, two of this trio, Koestler and Silone, heartily disliked one another. After the war, at the international Congress of Writers in 1949, Silone advocated ‘spiritual resistance’ towards Communism, whereas Koestler urged an aggressive head-on confrontation and sneered at Silone as a pacifist. Koestler and Silone were two of the six famous ex-Communist, though still left-wing, writers who contributed to the famous volume The God that Failed after the war, while of course Orwell’s anti-Communism became legendary from his account of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia (1938) onwards. Their influence is essential to the understanding of Michael Foot as a public figure; they also demonstrate the foolishness of attempts by shadowy agents in later years to depict Foot as any kind of Communist dupe. Foot got to know Orwell through Tribune, where he wrote a famous column, ‘As I Please’, which was often attacked by the Tribune management for being over-critical of the Soviet Union, but was always defended by Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. These wartime years saw Orwell at his greatest, in Foot’s view. He was thrilled by The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, and the way it uniquely captured ‘a patriotic English socialist moment’, in the words of their joint friend Tosco Fyvel. But Orwell had left Tribune by the time Foot became editor after the war, and disappeared to a remote Scottish island. Michael and Jill were closer to Orwell’s controversial widow Sonia in the decades after his death. Later revelations that Orwell, like Koestler, had been providing information about his friends to MI 5 did not increase Foot’s affection for him, though he remained an admirer of his writings, including Animal Farm and (to a degree) Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latter, however, he claimed had been taken by American cold warriors (and the Daily Mail) to be more of an anti-Soviet document than was in fact the case. In Loyalists and Loners Foot wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four leaving a ‘taste of sourness, even defeatism’. He applauded Bernard Crick’s fine biography (1980) for showing that Orwell, to his dying day, was a democratic socialist.