Michael Foot: A Life

Foot was always amongst those who encouraged Indian nationalists when war broke out in 1939 to try to work with the British government, certainly not to join the radical nationalist movement associated with Subhas Chandra Bose, who sought aid from the invading Japanese to overthrow the Raj. On the other hand, the authoritarian policies of the Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, which saw the arrest of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders following the ‘Quit India’ campaign in 1942, aroused Foot’s shock and fury. They made the downfall of empire all the more inevitable. His involvement with Indian nationalism was such that, not for the last time in his career, he aroused the interest of MI5. It sponsored Indian Political Intelligence, a secret espionage body which infiltrated the India Office to keep watch on ‘subversives’ such as Communists, nationalists and ‘terrorists’ (undefined) operating outside India. It reported direct to the Secretary of State for India through the Public and Judicial Department of the India Office, and to the government of India through the intelligence bureau of the Home Department. Thus it reported on a meeting organized by Mrs Rebecca Sieff, of the Marks & Spencer family, in the Savoy Hotel on 28 October 1941 to consider asking the British government to include India within the scope of the Atlantic Charter. The thirty-four people present included intellectuals of great distinction such as H. G. Wells and Professor J. B. S. Haldane, along with Kingsley Martin and the Labour MPs Sydney Silverman, W. G. Cove and Reg Sorensen. There were two Indians present, Dr P. C. Bhandari and Krishna Menon. Michael Foot, still only twenty-nine, chaired this august meeting. After a diversionary protest from a sole Fabian present it was decided to send a deputation to Churchill, to include Julian Huxley, the writer Storm Jameson, Mrs Sieff, Krishna Menon and Michael Foot, though to no effect.13

Foot’s passion for India provided an important context for his socialism. He remained on good terms with the notoriously prickly Krishna Menon after Nehru appointed him High Commissioner in London in 1947. There were also continuing links with people like Karaka, editor of a famous weekly, Current, a great admirer of Gandhi in his last period but a critic of Nehru.14 Foot continued to enjoy fame in India as a man sympathetic to the country even at the time of difficulties with Pakistan in the 1960s, and with close access to Mrs Gandhi during some important visits to the subcontinent in the 1970s. On the long-running dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and the 1975 State of Emergency, Foot always resolutely took the Indian side, even at the cost of much flak from close friends like the journalist James Cameron and his Indian wife Moni. He encouraged Sheikh Abdullah, the Muslim nationalist leader in Kashmir, to promote the cause of integration into India.

Foot retained close relations with leading Indians. An early one was the author Mulk Raj Anand, ‘India’s Dickens’, a well-known habitué of Bloomsbury in the 1930s and a friend of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. Foot was especially moved by Anand’s sensitive chronicle of the world of the Untouchables, as indeed was Foot’s friend Indira Gandhi.15 Another Indian friend and admirer, years later, was the industrialist Swraj Paul, who established a steel mill (opened there by Indira Gandhi) in Foot’s Ebbw Vale constituency after the closure of much of its old steelworks. Yet another was the celebrated Observer cartoonist ‘Abu’ (Abu Abraham), a kind of Indian version of Foot’s friend ‘Vicky’.16 Foot’s later visits to India between 1973 and 1997 were of central importance for him, not only for Indian matters but also in pursuing the cause of world disarmament. He rejoiced in the Congress’s return to power in 2004, since the new Prime Minister, the Sikh Manmohan Singh, was an old personal friend.

India thus provided an important early dimension of Foot’s socialism, even if he was always inclined to exaggerate the degree to which the post-Menon Congress really had a socialist philosophy. It made him close to socialist authors like Brailsford, Wells and Laski, all much engaged in the affairs of the subcontinent. At the same time Cripps, himself highly knowledgeable about India, became more distant from the Congress as time went on, and the controversial episode of his disastrously ambiguous ‘offer’ of dominion status in 1942 led to a serious breach with Nehru. India, then, intensified Foot’s socialism. But it also proved to be a major factor for him in questioning Cripps’s political judgement, and they quarrelled again, as they had done over the Unity campaign with the Communists in the late thirties. India thus partly led Foot to measure his distance from the man who had been his major inspiration in making him a socialist in the first place. It should also be added that Foot’s deep political interest in India never extended to a serious concern with problems of trade, aid or development in Third World countries. In this, as in other respects, his lack of interest in economic questions limited his curiosity about matters that stimulated his socialist conscience on other grounds.

Palestine was the other country to attract his attention as a newborn socialist. Ever since his visit to see Hugh there in 1934, he had been deeply absorbed by the country. He had by now met Jewish friends like Sydney Silverman in the Labour movement, while the Labour Party considered itself to have important bonds with Jewish Labour figures in Palestine like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. Indeed, there was a small Jewish movement in Britain, Poale Zion, that was affiliated to the Labour Party. Michael’s visit to see Hugh ‘Mac’ in 1934 inspired his intuitive concern, but also a sense of the complexities of the region. An instinctive attachment to Zionism was challenged by a sense of the Arab desperation which broke into open rebellion in the later 1930s. Hugh Foot himself took the strongly pro-Arab line dominant in the Foreign and Colonial Service. In the 1960s, at the UN and in Harold Wilson’s government, he was passionately pro-Palestinian. In 1967 he largely drafted UN Resolution 242, which for the first time attempted to check perceived Israeli aggressive incursions and settlements over the West Bank of the Jordan. Most of the other Foots tended to gravitate to this line also. When Hugh died in 1990, remarkably enough, Palestinian Arab flags were draped over his coffin, at the request of his son Paul.17 But in this, as in other ways, Michael was a dissenter within his dissenting family.

By the time war was under way, his support for the Jews was a pivot of his political outlook. It became even more pronounced after the war when he, Richard Crossman, Ian Mikardo and others on the left became passionate critics of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s strongly pro-Arab policy. There were important personal factors in shaping Michael’s views: friends in the party like Teddy Kollek, later Mayor of Jerusalem and both friend and foe of Arthur Koestler; and certainly his fondness for Lily Ernst, the Jewish Yugoslav girlfriend/mistress of Lord Beaverbrook. In the war years he met Arthur Koestler, the most ardent of Zionists, who went as far as endorsing the attacks of the terrorist Stern gang on British troops. Foot’s newspaper Tribune was to employ influential Jewish, and strongly pro-Israel, contributors like Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson and its literary editor, Tosco Fyvel. But obviously the dominant element was the torment of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime, even if the dimensions of the Holocaust were not yet widely known. It made Michael Foot a strong champion of a partitioned Palestine with recognition of a Jewish state of Israel. Only much later, in the 1970s, following, among other things, fierce debate on the Palestine issue amongst the Tribune group of MPs, did he come to modify an old entrenched position, and to join others on the left to call for an Israeli withdrawal from settlements on the West Bank. The Jews, he felt, ‘had wrecked their own case’.18 In any case, a sternly nationalist Likud-led administration seemed far removed from the old comradeship in the era of Ben-Gurion and the socialism of the kibbutz.

Otherwise the new-born socialist followed the standard position of the Liberal-Labour left, endorsing European regimes such as the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in 1936, condemning terrorist dictatorship in Germany and Italy (especially the latter, in the case of one who had many Italian friends and who revered the works of the socialist novelist Ignazio Silone). Towards the League of Nations Foot’s view was a characteristic confusion of pacifism with pacificism, collective security being bracketed with the ending of all wars. After all, the Soviet Union itself was now a member of Cripps’s ‘burglars’ union’ (as he had once called the League of Nations). Only some on the Labour left began to recognize the emptiness of their diagnosis, individual MPs like Hugh Dalton and especially the TUC, concerned for the fate of trade union comrades under Hitler and Mussolini.

One country, however, was never close to Michael Foot’s world view – the Soviet Union. His growing interest in the Marxist interpretation of history never translated into sympathy for Russia under Stalin. He did not share the simple-minded certainties of contemporary young Cambridge intellectuals like Blunt, Burgess and Maclean. It is utterly ironic that in the 1990s disaffected and unreliable informants of MI 5 such as Oleg Gordievsky began to spread rumours that Foot (or ‘Agent Boot’) had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’. right-wingers in the security service who had let genuine spies such as Kim Philby slip through the net actually gave them some credence. On the contrary, Foot rejected with scorn the totally uncritical enthusiasm for Russia shown by the Webbs or Bernard Shaw. He praised H. G. Wells for having a famous dialogue with Stalin in 1934 but in no way being taken in by him. It was a cause of a breach with Cripps that his old icon proved so undiscriminating in his allies in the Unity Front, seeking common cause with the Communists in the later thirties. Foot was quick to respond to news of Stalin’s purges in 1937–38; least of all those on the democratic socialist left could he be accused of fellow-travelling. The simple-minded journalistic claims at the time of l’affaire Blunt that all intelligent young people inevitably migrated towards Communism as the strongest resistance to fascism in the thirties have little substance. A broad-church Labour Party was the invariable destination of almost all of them, even in the pro-Russia climate of the later stages of the war. Like most of his fellow Bevanites and Tribunites, Michael Foot was a redoubtable voice of anti-Communism. Nor did he ever accord to the Russian Revolution of 1917 the special place in his historical affections that was claimed by the events in France in 1789.

By the late summer of 1935, for all the seductive appeal of Liverpool socialism, Michael Foot was restless. He was thoroughly bored in his job with the Blue Funnel Line. His thoughts turned again to writing a biography of Charles James Fox, and publishers were approached about this for a ‘Brief Lives’ series. Another historical subject that appealed to him was English radicals during the time of the French Revolution, a special place being accorded to Tom Paine. He did discuss the possibility of a book on this theme with Harold Laski, whom he heard lecture at the LSE and who was an inspirational force for so many young socialists in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But nothing came of it, and it was politics which seemed to beckon more powerfully. The Labour Party had been making some headway since the dark days of 1931, winning famous by-elections such as that in East Fulham in 1933. Foot himself was active in a by-election in the Wavertree division of Liverpool in February 1935. Here J. J. Cleary won the seat for Labour for the first time, after the Conservative vote had been badly split by an independent candidature from Randolph Churchill, standing on behalf of his father’s distinctly illiberal views on India. Pacifist-inclined though he was, Foot recognized the departure of George Lansbury as Labour leader after the 1935 party conference as inevitable. Who precisely he would have favoured as Lansbury’s successor is unclear. He had no trust in Herbert Morrison, and regarded Attlee as taciturn and colourless. On balance, perhaps, he tended to favour that patriotic (if drunken) Freemason Arthur Greenwood, father of his student friend Tony.

Suddenly in October, right on cue after successful Royal Jubilee celebrations which the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, orchestrated with characteristic deftness, a general election was called. Michael Foot suddenly decided that he wished to be part of it. He travelled down to Labour’s headquarters in Transport House to see the party’s General Secretary, Jim Middleton (whose wife Lucy was to be a fellow Plymouth MP in 1945), and asked if there were any vacancies for Labour candidates. Given a list of long-shot constituencies with no record of Labour strength at all, Michael Foot, for no clear reason, selected Monmouth in south Wales. It had never been a seat that Labour expected to capture, although in a by-election in 1934 their candidate had won 35 per cent of the vote. That evening he took a train down to Monmouthshire, and was seen by the local agent Tom Powell and a handful of local officials. On the last day of October he was formally adopted as Labour candidate at a meeting chaired by Ivor Harries, President of the Monmouth division Labour Party. Polling day was barely a fortnight away. It was a disgracefully short period of campaigning and a forlorn hope for Labour, in a constituency the new candidate had never previously visited or even seen. Still, Michael Foot, at the age of twenty-two, was into serious politics for the first time.19

Monmouth was the most Tory seat in Wales. Indeed, English in speech, squirearchical in tradition, it was hardly a Welsh seat at all. It lay in what the literary theorist Raymond Williams, a native, was to call ‘border country’. It was mostly an anglicized enclave along the Welsh marches, far more similar to rural Herefordshire or Worcestershire than to the radical or socialist traditions of Wales. Its outlook bore little resemblance to the nonconformist values of West Country England either. It was marked by the remaining influences of great houses – Lord Tredegar or the Dukes of Beaufort. It was strong hunting country, and the Beaufort Hunt was an ancient local institution: here was a pastime that Foot particularly disliked, for social as much as for humane reasons. Monmouth was also an area of immense natural beauty, hailed by early enthusiasts for the ‘picturesque’, along the river Wye and around Tintern Abbey, immortalized by Michael Foot’s much-admired Wordsworth. The South Wales Argus, published in Newport, detailed the placid panorama of rural Gwent ‘from Grosmont to Magor, and from Llanfihangel-Crossenny to Chepstow’.20 There were pockets of Labour strength in the western parts of the constituency close to the mining valleys further west, while there was a strong railway interest around Abergavenny in the north-east, including the family of Raymond Williams. The fifteen-year-old Williams and his railwayman father, an activist in the Labour Party, campaigned for Foot. In fact the youthful Labour candidate did not impress the schoolboy Williams: ‘He was a new phenomenon, straight out of the Oxford Union, who did sound a bit odd in Pandy village hall. I said to my father: “What has this to do with the Labour Party?”’21

Monmouth had remained stolidly Conservative/Unionist during the Liberal ascendancy in Wales in the later nineteenth century, until the famous Liberal upsurge of 1906 when Major-General Sir Ivor Philipps captured the seat and held it until the end of the First World War. Since then it had been solidly Tory. In 1931 the Conservative candidate, Sir Leolin Forestier-Walker, held it easily in a straight fight with Labour, with a fourteen-thousand majority and 70 per cent of the vote. Michael Foot’s slender hopes were given an early buffeting at a meeting in Usk when his agent greeted the electors with the immortal words, ‘Here we are again in bloody old Tory Usk.’ The Conservative member since a by-election in 1934 was Major J. A. Herbert, a Tory of imperialist persuasion, later to be Governor of Bengal.

Nevertheless, the fledgling Labour candidate fought a spirited, even sparkling, campaign. Foot’s address and his speeches focused on the twin themes of peace and poverty. ‘The armaments race must be stopped now,’ and the League of Nations must be supported, including in the current crisis caused by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. At home there should be public ownership of all major industries and banks (‘exchange’ had been added to ‘production’ and ‘distribution’ in Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution at the 1934 party conference) together with social reforms, some of which were targeted on farm labourers, including a minimum wage and the abolition of tied cottages.22 His early speeches at Caerleon and Chepstow defied the ethos of the constituency by being uncompromisingly socialist: ‘The community should take into its own hands the factories and land in order that the masses should share in the abundance.’ ‘One small section’ should not be allowed to ‘exploit the masses’ (applause).23 In an article in the local newspaper he wrote that ‘Labour advocates as the main feature of its programme the national ownership of the factories and other wealth.’ The private owners of the means of production were ‘enemies of society at large’. There were vague echoes of Wells in imprecise calls to adopt scientific methods of production and to promote new inventions.24 At Caldecot he urged that unemployment (rife in many parts of the constituency) should be made a national charge. Always there were assaults on the National Government’s record on international peace and its failure to promote disarmament. He attributed the recent increase in stock exchange prices to the rise in armament shares. He shrugged off criticisms that, at twenty-two, he was too young to be a Member of Parliament. After an evening meeting at Rolls Hall, Monmouth, the press recorded that ‘never before has a Labour candidate received such applause at the close of an address’.25

There were, inevitably, few outside speakers in Labour’s forlorn Monmouth campaign. Foot was assisted by Stafford Cripps’s youthful protégé, the Quaker Geoffrey Wilson, and indeed Cripps came down to pay the young candidate a remarkable tribute, saying that he hoped to see him in an incoming Labour administration after the polls. Cripps was as robust as Foot: the Labour Party ‘sought to get rid of private ownership of production … in order to give the workers a decent life’.26 There was also a resounding eve-of-poll meeting, addressed by two coming stars, Aneurin Bevan and James Griffiths. It rained heavily on polling day. The outcome was a reduced Conservative majority of 9,848. Major Herbert polled 23,262 votes and Foot 13,454. Labour was to remain a relatively weak force in the constituency thereafter, until a passing victory in 1966 and a more sustained period of power in 1997–2005 under the banner of New Labour. But old or new, the Labour Party was never going to find it easy in so traditional an area.

Nevertheless, Foot had fought a spirited and creditable campaign. He told the post-election crowd in Agincourt Square, Monmouth, ‘We shall go on fighting until we are victorious.’27 The Labour poll had increased by three thousand, and was the highest ever in the constituency. The Tory Western Mail, which had left Foot’s campaign virtually unreported, quoted him as saying: ‘I have enjoyed myself in the Monmouth division more than I can say.’28 He never thought of fighting Monmouth again, and in 1938 was to be adopted in his native Plymouth for the Devonport division, not obviously a more hopeful prospect. But he had caught the bug for electioneering. This general election, incidentally, was mostly unfortunate for the Foots. While Dingle, bolstered by an electoral pact with the Tories, romped home in two-Member Dundee, John Foot came eight thousand behind the Conservative in Basingstoke. More calamitous, father Isaac was unseated by the Tories at Bodmin after a ferocious personalized campaign directed against ‘Pussyfoot’. He particularly resented the campaign against him by two neighbouring ‘National Liberal’ ministers, Walter Runciman (Member for St Ives) and Leslie Hore-Belisha (Member for Plymouth, Devonport). Isaac bitterly quoted against them Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem of betrayal, ‘The Broken Covenant’:

And when all men shall sing his praise to me

I’ll not gainsay. But I shall know his soul

Lies in the bosom of Iscariot.

Hore-Belisha, representing part of Isaac’s own Plymouth, was one who would lodge in the collective Foot memory, leaving the entire family eager for revenge. Another sharp critic of Isaac, as it happened, was the author of the ‘Crossbencher’ column of Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. This was a young journalist called Peter Howard – with whom Michael was later to co-author Guilty Men. Isaac was to try to return to Westminster when he fought a by-election in 1937 after the egregious Runciman went to the Lords. Narrowly, by 210 votes only, he lost again.

After the election, Foot had no job and no immediate objective. He lived in lodgings in London, at 33 Cambridge Terrace, near Paddington station, which he rented for thirty shillings a week, and often seemed lonely. Nearly seventy years later, he recalled how on Christmas Day 1935, at the age of twenty-two, he found himself all alone in London with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no girlfriend for comfort. Then he discovered that Plymouth Argyle were playing Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane on Christmas morning. He took the bus to Tottenham and saw Argyle triumph by 2–1, one of their goals being scored by their record goal-scorer Sammy Black, perhaps the finest player ever to don the black-and-green shirt of the ‘Pilgrims’. To celebrate, Foot went to the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly to enjoy his Christmas turkey: ‘Never in the realms of human conflict had two away points been so spectacularly or insouciantly garnered by one man.’29 To add to the joy, the next day Plymouth defeated Spurs again, this time at Home Park. But it still sounds like a bleak and lonely time in an unfriendly metropolis.

In fact, he found a role and companionship for the next year or more through the Socialist League and the patronage of Sir Stafford Cripps. The Socialist League was still a lively force amongst urban intellectuals after the 1935 election campaign, though in retrospect it may have passed such a peak as it attained following defeats at the 1934 Labour Party conference at Southport.30 Certainly it had no mass appeal, and membership was at best a couple of thousand. Its programme consisted of the immediate abolition of capitalism at home, with mass nationalization and the extinction of the rich. It opposed rearmament, called for a general strike against war, and declared socialism to be the remedy for imperialistic rivalries between the great powers. Even at the time, it seemed a programme of remarkable emptiness. The dream of a general strike by workers of all countries had been shown to be a total chimera in August 1914. Nevertheless it was, characteristically, to this fringe movement of intellectuals rather than to the mainstream party that the young Foot now devoted his energies, basing himself on the militant London Area Committee of the League. In 1936 much of his time was taken up with propaganda work, making tub-thumping speeches on socialism in our time on street corners in places like Mornington Crescent and Camden Town in north London, and sometimes on Hampstead Heath. His close friend Barbara Castle has left a striking picture of him at this period – witty, learned and articulate, his spectacles giving him a diffident and myopic air which young women might find attractive, a general air of casualness, perhaps outright scruffiness in his dress, whirling his arms around theatrically in high passion.31 More courageously, he often attended Mosleyite fascist meetings, engaging in loud heckling with an almost foolhardy recklessness, but getting away unscathed – unlike Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford, who was severely beaten up and hospitalized after a blackshirt meeting in Oxford town hall.