Michael Foot: A Life

Perhaps the biggest impact on Foot’s literary and political sensibilities, however, came from the third of the trio, the Italian ex-Communist Ignazio Silone, at the time in long-term exile from Mussolini’s Italy in Switzerland. He had joined the Communist Party when very young in the 1920s, but soon found its intellectual tyranny unbearable and was expelled in 1931 when he refused to denounce the ideas of Trot-sky. Foot first became aware of Silone’s work when he read a translation of the social novel Fontemara, originally published in Zürich in German in 1933. It remained an iconic work for Foot all his life, and in 1984 he wrote a foreword to a new English-language edition which explained how Silone’s taut but passionate prose enshrined the idea of democratic socialism for him. At this time Silone was little known in the English-speaking world, and Foot played a major role in familiarizing the British public with him after 1945. Most of Silone’s books, including perhaps the most famous, Bread and Wine, were novels, but the one that made the most intense impression on Foot was a work of non-fiction, School for Dictators (1939), a vivid account of the horrors of Mussolini’s fascism and the persecution of the Italian left during his period of power. Foot’s introduction to Fontemara even compares School for Dictators with Machiavelli’s The Prince. After the war Foot found Silone’s affirmation of socialist values inspirational, and quotations from him appeared frequently in Foot’s writings thereafter, including the famous story about Saint-Simon, ‘Get up M. le Comte, you have work to do.’ By the time of his death in 1978, Silone had become an honoured figure in the literary canon of the socialist left. He was a central figure in Foot’s political odyssey. The first of Foot’s three meetings with him in Rome in 1949, when Foot was on a Labour National Executive delegation, was among the most memorable encounters of his life. Most movingly, he quoted Stendhal in relation to Silone as a thinker: ‘Only a great mind dares to express itself simply.’

One way and another, the Standard years meant that Foot was having a thoroughly good, comfortable war. Jill Craigie was later to twit him as a ‘Mayfair socialist’. He had built up an impressive social reputation as a man worth knowing. He moved in attractive intellectual and literary circles, friendly with a rich array of writers like Koestler, Orwell, H. G. Wells and Moura Budberg and others. Koestler’s friend Dylan Thomas, then living in Chelsea and hanging around its pubs, was also a visitor to Foot’s top-floor flat at 62 Park Street, Mayfair, keeping pace with Koestler in drinking the drinks cabinet dry. As a younger man Foot kept up an extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyle – no exercise, little fresh air, a good deal of drink, mainly of spirits, and smoking sixty to seventy Woodbines a day, which did not help his asthma. But he remained remarkably energetic nevertheless. He also acquired a new, much closer girlfriend, Connie Ernst, a dark-haired Jewish New Yorker working in London for the US Office of War Information. With her he had a serious relationship from 1943 onwards, and he was to propose marriage on a visit to New York in 1945. They became for two years a consistent partnership, and would invite friends to dine with them at the White Tower, a Greek restaurant in Soho. Through Connie he got to know other American intellectuals, notably Ernest Hemingway, whom he greatly liked, and his second wife Mary Welsh. It was Mary who helped him in renting the flat in Park Street (drawn to his attention by Connie Ernst). Here he could live in some style, pore over Swift and Hazlitt, listen to music, play chess with Koestler and others. Nor was the rent crippling – just thirty shillings a week. There he stored some of his precious wartime literary purchases, many bought from Kimche, including a first edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To the joy of Isaac, Michael’s rising salary enabled him to pursue his literary enthusiasms further, and to buy S. S. Howe’s famous library of volumes of Hazlitt. The master essayist’s thoughts gripped him with ever greater intensity (and as a result often featured in the columns of the Evening Standard). Foot was later to tell Edmund Blunden how being a ‘worshipper’ of Hazlitt led to a strong interest in Leigh Hunt and his Examiner, subjects of two of Blunden’s own books which Foot enormously enjoyed: ‘My criticism of your book on Leigh Hunt was that Hazlitt did not come out as well as his blindest admirers insist he must. But that is a mere trifle compared with so much on the other side.’17

In many respects there was a remarkable ferment of intellectual life during the war. It was one of the great formative periods in modern British history, when creative writers, commentators, planners, economists and artists came together with new blueprints for reconstruction and new dreams of renewal. Michael Foot, man of words and putative man of action, was a pivotal figure in it.

But by late 1943 it was clear that his somewhat unnatural base in the Tory Evening Standard, and his filial relationship with Beaverbrook, were undergoing a change. After all, Foot was Labour candidate for Plymouth, Devonport, and a post-war election was perhaps on the horizon. In addition, he was increasingly restless for a wider crusading role, far beyond the editorial desk. His book published by Gollancz in late 1943, The Trial of Mussolini, written once again in breach of his editorial contract with the Standard, was a sign of this and caused Beaverbrook some anxiety. He remained keen to retain Foot’s services, and offered him a new role instead, as feature writer and book reviewer. Foot’s generous, even affectionate, response on 1 November 1943 suggested that a parting of the ways might not be too far off. He suggested two possible courses of action to Beaverbrook. The first was continuing to act as editor of the Standard for just one more year, since he intended to fight Devonport for Labour at the next general election: ‘I certainly intend to become a politician and to devote what energies I possess to the annihilation of the Conservative influence in politics.’ The second was that he continue to write for Beaverbrook newspapers on such terms as their owner proposed, so long as ‘I am not required to do anything in defiance of my views and that I have freedom to engage in such nefarious activities as I choose in writing books or on the platform’.18 They chose the first course, amicably enough, but things were getting progressively more difficult, especially after D-Day the following June, which made the ending of the war a far more proximate possibility.

So Foot wrote a letter of transparent honesty and integrity to Beaverbrook a few days later:

The main idea I have is that your ideas and mine are bound to become more and more irreconcilable … There does not seem to be much sense in my continuing to write leaders for a newspaper group whose opinions I do not share and some of whose opinions I strongly dissent from … The leaders which I now write are hardly worth writing since they are non-commital and from my point of view I am associated with a newspaper group against whose policies (but not against the proprietor) I am resolved to wage perpetual war. Somehow things were different before. The compromise worked and certainly greatly to my advantage. But I do not see how it could work very much longer.

Foot felt, ‘as an ambitious and intransigent socialist’, that he could find another newspaper in which to express himself He did not see how Beaverbrook could reasonably run a column by him: ‘At the present I am engaged in writing stuff in which I have no particular interest, and I would like to do something different.’ He therefore asked Beaverbrook to release him from his obligations to newspaper and owner.19 Beaverbrook did release him, in tones of sadness and regret. It was a deeply civilized break-up on both sides. But it was a peculiarly sharp one. In a few months Foot was denouncing his old patron’s right-wing views with fire and fury in newspaper columns and speeches. Much more completely than before, he was his own man.

He now threw himself into an even more frenetic range of activities than before. Chief amongst them, given his now perceived talent as part-author of Guilty Men, was inevitably the writing of books. He produced two short but effective tracts in the later wartime period, both highly partisan in a way that the earlier book never was. Each was written at Pencrebar. The Trial of Mussolini, as noted, appeared without Beaverbrook’s knowledge and caused him concern. It was written, Foot told him, to protest against the hypocrisy of those who denounced Mussolini at his fall but had upheld his views for twenty years previously. The idea came to him at the time of the removal of Mussolini and the appointment of Marshal Badoglio as potential peace-making head of the Italian government in July 1943. Foot visualized the forthcoming post-war trial of the dictator and, using the same theatrical method as in Guilty Men, cast the various pre-war British ministers who had appeased him as witnesses at the tribunal. He had been given much information on circumstances in Italy by the son of Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister during the 1919 Paris peace conference.20 A more profound underlying influence was Ignazio Silone. But the book would really be about British foreign policy, not Italy. He offered the idea once again to Victor Gollancz, who seized it avidly for another of his ‘yellow perils’, as the volumes of the yellow-jacketed Left Book Club were known. He received the manuscript on 20 August, and it was published in October, with a confident print run of 100,000 copies. Foot wrote the book in three weeks. His nom de plume, again, was drawn from classical antiquity – not ‘Cato’ this time but ‘Cassius’, the assassin of an earlier not-so-sawdust Caesar.

The Trial of Mussolini is a short polemic, only eighty-two pages and perhaps forty thousand words long, but it is most cleverly written, with much subtle argument. Its style of dramatic personal confrontation between judge and witnesses meant that it lent itself to being turned into dramatic form by political and dramatic societies. George Orwell praised it as such in his review in Tribune. Foot himself considered it a better and more complete book than Guilty Men.21 The conceit of a public trial with eminent witnesses is skilfully sustained throughout. Although the action concerns the trial of Mussolini, the dictator in many ways comes out strongly, giving a vigorous defence of his policies and making short work of any British claims to moral superiority in the area of ‘wars of aggression’. Really it is the witnesses who are in the dock. Successively, Austen Chamberlain describes an amiable meeting with Mussolini in 1924, when Chamberlain was Foreign Secretary. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, relates how in 1928 he stated that ‘Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated that of the early nineteenth century.’ Neville Chamberlain confirms the long-held support of British Tories for the Italian dictator. Lord Simon testifies to British double-dealing over Abyssinia. Sir Samuel Hoare is condemned by counsel as ‘disingenuous’ over his notorious pact with Pierre Laval, the future Prime Minister of the Vichy government, about the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Halifax and Leo Amery offer similar testimony. Special attention is paid to Hore-Belisha, Foot’s target in Devonport, who had visited Rome in 1938 and received a bronze medallion from Mussolini. Even Churchill receives a momentary glance of disapproval. The judge concludes in emotional tones to draw a distinction between the English people and ‘the England of the Chamberlains, the Simons, the Hoares’ and the rest of the Tory Party which consorted with Fascism and connived at imperialist war.22

The Guilty Men are thus given another pasting, though perhaps in an over-complex way. The Trial of Mussolini sold slightly less well than ‘Cato’s’ work of 1940, but sales still rose to 150,000. It aroused some criticism as being anti-patriotic. Gollancz sturdily defended the author: ‘Michael Foot … would be interested to find himself described as seditious. So would his father, old Isaac … So would the electors of Devonport, who, if they have the wit to understand the true meaning of British honour and British interests, will in a few weeks’ time [sic] be returning Michael to Parliament.’ The reviews, however, were very favourable, especially one from the Conservative Catholic Christopher Hollis. Another, more predictable admirer was Isaac Foot: ‘He is a fine boy and … he has a fire in his belly.’23 But Foot this time made less of an impact. At least the book made him more money than its predecessor, with no absconding agent this time. It also confirmed his unique skill as a patriotic pamphleteer.

There had been announced another project of Foot’s, to appear in the ‘Searchlight Books’ series published by Secker & Warburg under the editorship of George Orwell and Tosco Fyvel, both active in the world of Tribune/New Statesman left journalism. Ten books appeared in the series in 1941–42, covering various projections for post-war reconstruction, by such notable authors as Sebastian Haffner, T. C. Worsley, Ritchie Calder and Joyce Cary. The series was launched in 1941 by Orwell’s own famous study of the British national character The Lion and the Unicorn, which, rather modestly, sold over ten thousand copies. Michael Foot was announced as the author of a forthcoming work entitled Above All Things – Liberty. But the publishers’ printers at Portsmouth, along with their stock and paper, were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1942, so nothing came of it.

In November 1944 Foot published another squib with Gollancz, this time of overtly party political slant, with an election now on the horizon. This was Brendan and Beverley, a book of just seventy-eight pages. Foot’s name appeared as the author, and he was now formally identified as the writer and co-writer of the two earlier works. This one was a parody of an imagined conversation between two Conservatives, Brendan Bracken, who was close to Churchill and was now Minister of Information, and Sir Beverley Baxter, a right-wing Canadian MP, a strongly imperialist Chamberlainite throughout, and Member for Wood Green and Southgate. In the same month Foot wrote savagely to The Times denouncing Baxter as a pro-Chamberlain appeaser, and dismissing a book of his as ‘a satire on political sycophancy’.24 Brendan and Beverley takes the form of a dialogue between the two Conservatives named in Disraeli’s Coningsby, ‘Taper’ (Bracken) and ‘Tadpole’ (Baxter). They give their different versions of Conservative philosophy, but neither is convincing. Baxter was a particular běte noire of Foot’s, and he is the more obvious target, but ‘Taper’ also gives a poor performance. He defends the Churchill coalition, of which Foot was now a strong critic, ‘since it can do down ideas of reform’. There is a patriotic peroration on Churchillian lines, but it is given to an unnamed Labour politician.25

This book did not sell well: its message was too oblique for the general public, and it anticipated an election which was not yet called. What it did do was confirm the sharp breach with Beaverbrook, who was close to both Taper and Tadpole. Brendan Bracken was a frequent house-guest at Cherkley, and was actively involved with Beaverbrook in preparing the Conservatives’ propaganda campaign in the coming election. Baxter had actually been editor of the Daily Express up to 1933, and was later to serve as theatre critic of the Evening Standard. Attacking them both, as a way of pronouncing anathema on all Tories and their works, was Foot’s clearest possible declaration of divorce.

Foot was now very much a doer as much as a commentator. From 1943 to 1945 he engaged in a bewildering miscellany of protest movements, all characteristic of the rich crucible of the war years. He remained active in the India League and friendly with Krishna Menon. He was now campaigning actively for the Zionist cause, and was prominent on the Anglo-Palestine Committee, chaired by Israel Sieff, managing director of Marks & Spencer, and also including Frank Owen, Kingsley Martin, David Astor and Lord Pakenham. Foot himself addressed it on the plight of Hungarian Jewry in 1944.26 There was the League for the Rights of Man, with which Gollancz was identified and which became more vigorous after the United Nations came into being after the war. He was also a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, founded in 1934, which had kept watch on the preservation of civil liberties during wartime. There were various bodies to affirm solidarity with the Soviet Union. Foot also kept very close to the intense milieu of political and literary protest, the natural habitat of writers like Orwell, Koestler and Fyvel, the world of the Penguin Special, the Left Book Club, Searchlight Books, Cyril Connolly’s literary periodical Horizon, and such transatlantic equivalents as Partisan Review and Dissent in New York. All this protest literature was fundamental to the wartime cultural hegemony of the British dissenting left. Michael Foot, barely into his thirties, was an increasingly influential part of it.

Finally, in this potpourri of leftish idealism, Foot was a member of the so-called ‘1941 Committee’ formed by J. B. Priestley and well described by the historian Paul Addison as ‘a perfect photosnap of the new progressive Establishment rising from the waves’.27 It included not only Priestley himself and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes (both of whom Foot now got to know for the first time) but also Richard Acland, Thomas Balogh, Ritchie Calder, Kingsley Martin, Tom Wintringham and the Rev. Mervyn Stockwood, all of whom were later colleagues of Foot in CND, which it partly anticipated. However, the 1941 Committee was more broadly based, since it also included mainstream Labour figures like Douglas Jay and Christopher Mayhew, and even a one-nation Conservative, Peter Thorneycroft, leader of the Tory Reform Group. It faded away when several of its key figures (though not Foot) joined Acland’s new Common Wealth Party the following year.

Despite all this manifold activity, which began long before his resignation as editor of the Standard in August 1944, the bedrock of Foot’s world was now the Labour Party, albeit via left-wing movements, non-Communist though pro-Russian, kicking hard against the restraints of being yoked in Churchill’s coalition. Foot was never an admirer of Attlee’s leadership, and the wartime years underlined the fact. One protest in which he was involved was the Bristol Central by-election of February 1943, one of many awkward by-elections for the government at this time. Here there was an Independent Labour candidate in the person of Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s wife, who had recently left the ILP but who declined Acland’s invitation to join the Common Wealth Party and ran on an Independent Labour platform to campaign for socialist policies and a break with the coalition. The ILP ran a candidate against her out of revenge. The entire affair was distinctly embarrassing for the Labour Party. However, Foot (despite being editor of the Standard) went to Bristol to campaign hard on behalf of Jennie Lee and against the idea of an electoral truce. Unfortunately Bristol Central, which included the city’s central business area, was the least promising of the five Bristol seats, and there was a very low poll since so many voters were away during wartime. Jennie Lee lost by 1,500 votes to the widow of the former Conservative Member, Lady Apsley, and there was actually a swing to the government, in contrast to almost all other contests at the time.28 This was a solitary venture by Foot, who of course was free to electioneer without inhibition after he left employment with Beaverbrook.

Bristol Central tended to confirm that Foot, having broken with Cripps, was finding another inspirational guru in Jennie Lee’s husband. Going out of his way to campaign for her showed how he was swinging from Beaverbrook to Bevan. He had known Nye for some years, dating from a meeting during the Monmouth election in 1935, and had got much closer to him during his time on Tribune. Bevan, as we have seen, was one of Beaverbrook’s many left-wing associates, and it was he who recommended Foot for a job with Express Newspapers in 1938. He was at this time editor of Tribune himself, though his talents did not really lie in the field of journalism. But in the wartime period, with Bevan emerging as a towering critic of Churchill and the coalition on many issues, Foot became his most intimate ally. In 1944 they collaborated in campaigns on the future of Poland, and especially in attacking Churchill for British military intervention in the civil war in Greece. Foot would be more than his comrade. He would be his Boswell, his Engels, his John the Baptist, and of course his parliamentary heir.

Long after his death in 1960 Bevan remained the most important person in Foot’s life, not excluding Jill. He was central to Foot’s every crisis of conscience, the permanent sounding board for his socialist values. Their difference of view over nuclear weapons was more searing for Foot’s psychology than any divorce could have been. Foot’s passionate admiration for this brilliant, articulate tribune, who came not from the literate suburban bourgeoisie but from Tredegar in the working-class cauldron of the Welsh mining valleys, was unshakeable. Bevan stood with Foot on every possible issue. He was a citizen of the world. He strongly endorsed Indian independence, a free state for the Jews, friendship with the Soviet Union and an early second front, public ownership as the basis of a socialist transformation, a welfare state, and a free and open society. Foot was excited by the nature of Bevan’s socialism, with its background in south Wales syndicalism and ideas of industrial democracy as opposed to bureaucratic statism. He admired his libertarian Marxism, his natural use of language, his open-mindedness towards other cultures, his brilliance as an orator both on the stump and increasingly in the Commons.

Most of all, he admired his style. Bevan was a vivid, colourful man, with a love of painting and literature; he was captivated by a book like Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir. He shared with Foot a liking for the more exotic versions of liberal philosophy, notably the works of the Uruguayan author José Rodo. He had a genuine love of complex ideological debate, attacking the enemy’s argument at its strongest point. Also, in Foot’s brilliant phrase, he was ‘a sensual puritan’, with a shared love of Venice and an attraction to women that went far beyond his own beguiling but wayward wife. He dressed well, he liked to dine well at the Café Royal, he enjoyed wine, especially Italian. He far transcended the other, more staid Welsh MPs dining on the ‘Welsh table’ in the Commons: Jim Callaghan would say Nye would only join them for a meal when he was in political trouble.29 Bevan straddled the worlds of politics, the arts and journalism. His associates ranged from Koestler to Brendan Bracken, who provoked him by calling him a ‘lounge lizard, a Bollinger Bolshevik’. Bevan was a captivating figure. If often difficult and egotistic, he was also perhaps the most original and visionary politician ever produced by the British working-class movement. In addition he had a range of skills that left his people the National Health Service, Britain’s greatest contribution to civilization in the twentieth century. He proved himself an artist in the uses of power. He loved Michael for his literacy, his integrity and his courage, his love of the romantics. Bevan liked to declaim aloud the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth, and was another enthusiast for Wells, though he could never quite fathom Foot’s regard for Swift. Bevan’s Why Not Trust the Tories?, a brilliant philippic published in 1944, showed a heavy influence from Foot, not least the famous peroration citing Rainboro of the Levellers in the Putney debates. To Foot, nothing more confirmed his low opinion of Attlee and his near-hatred of Gaitskell than what he felt was their conspiracy to remove Nye in 1951. For Bevan represented everything he felt was most worthwhile in this world: ‘More than any other in his age he kept alive the idea of democratic socialism,’ and gave it a vibrant and audacious quality.30 Foot’s own equally audacious biography was to provide him with the most glittering of memorials after he was gone.