Michael Foot: A Life

The Socialist League had some hopes of progress in 1936. Like the Bennites decades later, its adherents felt that Labour’s ability to win no more than 154 seats at the previous year’s general election showed the need for a far more radical, even revolutionary, approach. It based itself on a variety of fragments – former members of the ILP, which had disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932, intellectuals like William Mellor, linked with G. D. H. Cole in his SSIP (Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda), some like D. N. Pritt who were effectively Communists under another name. It was a melange of the English (or Anglo-Scottish) far left. The election of Popular Front governments in France and Spain, with Communist backing, in the summer of 1936, gave the movement some encouragement. But it remained a fringe movement always: Ben Pimlott has cited evidence to show that eight ‘mass demonstrations’ attracted only twelve thousand supporters in total, and that the League’s almost one hundred local committees were extremely small, save perhaps for Foot’s London Area Committee.32 A fatal weakness was the total absence of any trade union base: it was seen as a fringe body of middle-class suburban intellectuals. In 1937 it embarked on a new initiative, the Unity Campaign, which aimed to forge an alliance with the Communists: Stafford Cripps and Harry Pollitt spoke from the same platform. Pollitt indeed, uniquely amongst British Communists, was to become someone Foot particularly admired from that time onwards. A new newspaper was created on 1 January 1937, under the powerful editorship of William Mellor – this was Tribune, of which very much more anon, to which Foot was a founding contributor.

But the League’s campaign soon plunged into fatal difficulties. Internally there was endless ideological and tactical bickering between myriad socialist splinter groups. More seriously, externally the Labour Party’s NEC inevitably reacted strongly to any kind of formal link with the Communists, whose approaches it had always firmly rebuffed. Leading figures like Morrison and Bevin spoke out aggressively against the League. On 24 March Labour’s NEC declared that all members of the League would be expelled. Less than two months later, on 17 May, the League held a conference at Leicester in which anguished debate occurred: H. N. Brailsford, a veteran socialist intellectual and one of Foot’s heroes, wrote that he wished to resign from the League. The decision was taken to disband the Socialist League, and it never re-emerged. Stafford Cripps pursued his crusade for a Unity Front of all on the left on his own, drawing on his own immense funds acquired as a celebrated lawyer, and became a fringe figure, destined in 1939 to be expelled from the Labour Party himself.

Foot’s involvement in the Socialist League was therefore quixotic and fruitless. But it left an important personal legacy in the important friends the lonely young bachelor now acquired. It was in the League that he became close to Krishna Menon, unwell for much of the time but soon to become a local councillor in St Pancras. Another colleague was the Daily Mirror journalist and future MP Garry Allighan, later defended by Foot in 1947 when he was harshly expelled by the House of Commons for breach of parliamentary privilege. But much his most important new friend, who filled personal as well as political needs, was the fiery and distinctly attractive red-haired Bradford girl Barbara Betts, with whom he campaigned for the League throughout London. She had been engaged in left-wing politics since graduating from St Hilda’s in Oxford, and was now deeply involved in a passionate affair with William Mellor, a leading League intellectual and also a married man.33 But she and Michael Foot took to each other at once. She found his air of intellectual diffidence combined with political passion deeply attractive. Foot was manifestly in love with her, while understanding and respecting her relationship with Mellor. They spent much time in each other’s company, and when Barbara in the course of 1936 rented a new flat in Coram Street, Bloomsbury, Michael was a frequent visitor for whom she cooked many meals. Sometimes they found the money to have dinner together at Chez Victor in Soho. They also paid joint visits to see Cripps in Filkins.

At this time the relationship seems to have been a fairly equal one, with perhaps Foot the more important intellectual force, but Barbara far from docile. Foot, not normally an enthusiast for political philosophy, had recently discovered Marx’s socialist writings. He spent many evenings in Barbara’s attic flat, sometimes on the roof outside, reading passages from Das Kapital to her and discussing their importance, thereby deflecting her from perhaps the more congenial task of reading Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. More alarmingly, he gave her driving lessons in his new car. Eventually, as he gaily commented at Barbara’s memorial service in 2002, his car became a write-off, while Barbara went on to become Minister of Transport. Despite hints from Foot to the contrary in later life and her own lifelong flirtatious style, Barbara insisted that there was never any sexual dimension to their friendship at all.34 When they went on holiday together to Brittany in 1938, at the time of the Munich conference, despite the encouragement of a cheerful landlady they slept in separate rooms, though with a connecting door: the only excitement came when Michael had a severe bronchial attack in the middle of the night and took refuge in his inhaler. For all that, Barbara Castle (as she became when she married the journalist Ted Castle in 1944) and Michael Foot were basic points of socialist reference for each other, yardsticks for each other’s socialist purity. They became less close when Foot came under the spell of Beaverbrook, but the relationship remained strong. Colleagues felt they shared a kind of instinctive closeness that was sublime but asexual. It survived various conflicts – the row over In Place of Strife in 1969, Barbara’s sacking from his government by Jim Callaghan in 1976, even a sharp book review of the Castle Diaries by Michael Foot. Throughout their long lives, she was one of the few who always called him ‘Mike’.

Perhaps, despite the wishes of his mother (who had never met her), Michael could never have married Barbara anyway. He soon became far more confident with young women, and Barbara speculated that he did not find her beautiful enough. He might also have found her relentless ideological nagging tiresome. On their Brittany holiday she ‘lectured Michael relentlessly about world politics’. Michael himself commented that a week with Barbara gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Peace in our Time’.35 Two other personal points may be made. They were both deeply involved with the career of Nye Bevan, a red-blooded Celt who made frequent passes at Barbara which she did not obviously discourage. Also Barbara, who tended not to get on with other attractive young women, never had a friendly relationship with Michael’s later wife, Jill. Indeed, like Jennie Lee, whom Bevan had married in 1934, she positively rejected the central tenet of Jill Craigie’s value system, her unyielding feminism.

Overshadowing Foot’s world in 1936–37 was the erratic but charismatic presence of Stafford Cripps, his point of entry into socialist politics. It was Cripps who directed one somewhat strange venture in 1936, in effect Foot’s first book, though one he chose not to mention in his Who’s Who entry. This was a volume of nearly three hundred pages, published by the left-wing publisher newly set up by Victor Gollancz. It was entitled The Struggle for Peace. Just over 150 pages consisted of a text on international affairs by Cripps; the remaining 127 pages consisted of ‘References’ written by Foot, in effect around forty thousand words of extended notes on Cripps’s text.36 These show Foot in the most intensely Marxist vein he was ever to demonstrate throughout his life. They do not provide a tribute to the young man’s critical faculties, and it is not surprising that he should try to expunge the memory of them thereafter. They focus on armaments expenditure by the great powers, on economic imperialism, on the cruelties and exploitation by Britain of its colonies, in a seemingly mechanical fashion.

In this book, while Foot often quotes from left-wing authors at home, notably Brailsford and Leonard Barnes, most of his sources come from the far left or from Communists, especially the famous Indian theoretician of the Leninist view of empire, R. Palme Dutt, who is repeatedly praised. He is commended for his ‘graphic description’ of world rearmament; his account of the prospects for increasing productive capacity in Fascism and Social Revolution is ‘a brilliant analysis’. As it happened, when Foot met the doctrinaire Palme Dutt later on, he never got on with him.37 Other works cited are even more remarkable. The source for a stated link between military strategy and the profit motive is Bukharin’s article on ‘Imperial Communism’. Most remarkable of all is the work on which a treatment of the economic exploitation of the colonies is based – Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question. Stalin’s conclusion that colonial rebellions must inevitably be socialist is endorsed (and a letter from a young African nationalist resident in London, Joshua Nkomo, is thrown in for confirmation). Foot adds: ‘The methods by which the Soviet government has dealt with the colonial peoples reveal a real basis for cooperation with so-called backward peoples as soon as the power of capitalism within the imperialist nation has been effectively broken. This subject is dealt with in the Webbs’ Soviet Communism and Joshua Kunitz’s book Dawn Over Samarkand.’38 At least Foot’s notes are more fun to read than Cripps’s leaden text on such themes as ‘working-class unity is the only true foundation for world peace’. But they too are eminently forgettable. Equally, it is clear that they are quite untypical of Foot’s libertarian and pluralist approach to socialism, and reflect contemporary pressure from Stafford Cripps on his young co-author. Unlike young men such as Denis Healey who joined the Communist Party in the thirties, Foot’s thinking never advanced any formal structural analysis based on the dialectic. He seldom made important reference to Marx in his later writings, other than to say how thrilling his (remarkably vague) vision of a post-capitalist utopia really was. Nor did he find the one contemporary example of Communism in practice at all appealing. He visited Stalin’s Russia for just two days – a stay in Leningrad at the end of a holiday in Helsinki with brother Dingle in 1937 – and disliked it. He was not to go again until an official visit as Labour leader in 1981.

Foot now did show signs of having a clearer idea of his career. For a young man obsessed with words and politics, journalism beckoned as an inevitably appealing career. But it was a slow start. He persuaded Kingsley Martin, editor of the establishment organ of the left the New Statesman, to give him a temporary job on his magazine. He spent almost a year there in 1936–37 to little effect, on a meagre annual stipend of £250. His abiding memory was of sessions every Thursday night with Allen Hutt of the Daily Worker, who taught him about the intricacies of typography as well as stimulating his ideas on socialism and his resistance to fascism. But Kingsley Martin was not over-impressed with his young recruit. Foot, he thought, was ‘not a bad journalist but not A plus’. It seems in retrospect an amazing misjudgement by an often dangerously opinionated and dogmatic man. Michael himself looked back without affection on ‘semi-freelance penury’ in Martin’s offices.39 Martin later realized his mistake. In November 1943 he wrote to Beaverbrook saying that he had heard that Foot was ceasing to be editor of the Evening Standard and asking permission for him to write occasional articles for the New Statesman, but Beaverbrook courteously refused.40 Despite much subsequent collaboration, from the Second Front campaign in 1943 to CND in 1958, Foot and Martin, like the New Statesman and Tribune, were never close. In the late thirties, and for much of his career, Martin, like Victor Gollancz, was a sentimental fellow-traveller, liable to suppress material by Wells, Orwell and others which criticized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Contrary to what was sometimes implied by right-wing commentators, that could never be said of the libertarian democrat Michael Foot.

Stafford Cripps ensured that his distinctly hard-up protégé found a more enjoyable job almost immediately. In January 1937, as noted above, the weekly Tribune came into being as the voice of the far left. Its editor was William Mellor, the paramour of Barbara Betts. Michael Foot received a staff post on it, while Barbara also contributed as a freelance. They wrote a column together on trade union matters under the name of ‘Judex’. Foot wrote later of his own role as ‘cook’s assistant and chief bottle-washer in the backroom’.41 So, in fairly humble fashion, began Foot’s association with this famous organ of the Labour left, which continued for the rest of his life, as editor, director, board member and patron. It was to Tribune rather than Victor Gollancz’s more conventional Left Book Club, let alone the official Labour Party, that he hitched his star.

For a time working on Tribune seemed rather fun. It kept Foot in close touch with Cripps, whose massive private funding enabled the paper, with its few thousand readers, to keep going. Writing twenty-one years later, Foot cheerfully recalled that working with Mellor was ‘like living in the foothills of Vesuvius. Yet, between the eruptions, the exhilaration was tremendous.’ For Mellor, ‘socialist principles were as hard as granite’.42 The newspaper had a distinguished editorial board of Cripps (the chairman), Laski, Brailsford, George Strauss, Ellen Wilkinson and an up-and-coming and highly charismatic Welsh backbench MP, Aneurin Bevan, who wrote a weekly parliamentary column. Foot saw him only occasionally at this time, but the ideological and personal spell that Bevan cast was largely to determine the rest of his career. Tribune also brought Foot into contact with influential foreign émigrés, notably Julius Braunthal of the Austrian Socialists, who wrote for Tribune regularly. Foot much admired his later multi-volume history of the Socialist International, and in 1948 wrote a powerful preface to his Tragedy of Austria, a plea for closer cooperation between German and Austrian socialists. Foot was to observe here: ‘No one with any kindred feeling can read the story of Red Vienna without being a better socialist for it.’43 Despite all its writing talent, much of 1937 was occupied for Tribune with sorting out the mess after the dissolution of the Socialist League. There were more promising avenues to pursue as well. One of them was championing the right of constituency parties to be directly represented through election to Labour’s National Executive, which happened at party conference in 1937. But throughout 1938 there were endless strains, to which Cripps was a major contributing factor. They were occasioned, as so often on the left, by difficult relations with other leftish bodies, such as the Left Book Club, whose publisher Victor Gollancz was a distinctly combustible character, and at this time of sentimentally pro-Soviet fellow-travelling outlook. In the background were the show trials and purges in the Soviet Union, of which Barbara Betts wrote quite uncritically under guidance from Intourist, and which D. N. Pritt QC hailed as showing how the rule of law was entrenched under Stalin, but which Michael Foot, ex-Liberal, condemned from the start. He particularly objected to Tribune’s refusal even to mention the show trials of Nikolai Bukharin and other victims.

Tribune reached a crisis point in July 1938. Cripps sought an agreement with Gollancz to merge the journal with the Left Book Club, so that it could pursue an uninhibited Unity Front, pro-Soviet policy. This meant the resignation of Tribune’s editor William Mellor, a tetchy and difficult man for all his personal charm. Cripps offered the post of replacement editor to the unknown twenty-five-year-old assistant editor Michael Foot. It was a deeply attractive offer, and it speaks much for the strength of character of the young man that he promptly refused. In part he resented what he saw as the disloyal, even treacherous way in which Mellor had been presented with a fait accompli. Beyond that, he would be expected as editor to endorse the Unity Front approach, and defend the Soviet Union against its critics.44 Both were unthinkable. In a letter which he has not kept, Foot wrote to Cripps resigning from Tribune. Cripps, en route to Jamaica to try to remedy his gastric problems, replied on 25 July kindly but firmly urging him to change his mind. He could not be expected to pay thousands of pounds towards a paper in whose policies he did not believe. Nor could he be ignored as chairman of the board. ‘I only elaborate these points, Mike dear, to try and show you that I am not such a completely negligible political factor in the Tribune as you seem from your letter to think.’

H. N. Brailsford was a man for whom Foot had a high regard, dating from the time when as a young man just out of school he read the left-wing newspaper New Leader, which Brailsford edited. His classic book Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (1913) celebrated the ‘democratical’ radicalism of the French Revolutionary period which Foot most venerated, while his War of Steel and Gold (published in May 1914) was a famous analysis of the economic roots of international conflict. Brailsford now strongly disagreed with the pro-Soviet line that Cripps wished Tribune to take, and had been appalled by the trial of Bukharin. Under Stalin, he felt, the Soviet Union had become ‘a bloody tyranny ruled by terror and lies’. Yet he too wrote to Foot on 6 August, trying to persuade him to change his mind.45 He wrote sympathetically as someone who had himself three times resigned during his journalistic career. But he argued now that Foot and Mellor were not standing against the proprietors on a matter of policy (a debatable point), and also that Foot should not capitulate in advance against Gollancz, though he added, ‘Like you, I distrust him and am highly critical of the Left Book Club.’ In worldly fashion he noted that ‘to run a good paper matters more than to perform prodigies of conscience’. He offered to speak to Cripps when he returned, and invited Foot to his Buckinghamshire home for a weekend to talk matters through.

But Foot would not be moved by these senior figures. After hanging on for a few weeks until a new editor, the obscure near-Communist H. J. Hartshorn, was appointed, Foot cut his links with Tribune. Brailsford was to conclude that the young man was right. He wrote again to Foot a few days later, largely agreeing with him: ‘I agree in thinking that Gollancz is a sinister influence. But I have a feeling that the Socialist Left is allowing itself to be driven from all its strategical positions by the C. P. With great subtlety it drove the Socialist League to suicide, & now it is capturing the Tribune. Much as I respect Cripps as a man, I fear he’s a disastrous strategist.’46 In this instructive episode, Foot’s judgement and instincts were fundamentally sound. Quite apart from his genuine outrage at the treatment of Mellor, to become editor of Tribune would have compromised him morally at that time, and marginalized him within the Labour movement. Persistent rebel though he was, Foot would never leave the mainstream when a crisis beckoned. Thus it was when he veered away from CND after 1961, when he joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1970, when he stuck to Jim Callaghan’s ailing government through thick and thin after 1976, and when he struck back at Bennites and Militants in 1982. Although he continued to respect Cripps, Foot now saw him as a naïve and highly fallible messiah. At the start of the war Cripps was to be expelled from the Labour Party for pursuing his Unity Campaign again. During the war years he was to come full circle, and now called for an alliance with progressive Tories. Nor did he show up well on India in the end. Foot’s life of Aneurin Bevan (in two volumes, published in 1962 and 1973) is distinctly qualified in its praise: ‘Cripps was a political innocent. He knew little of the Labour movement, less of its history … His Marxist slogans were undigested; he declared the class war without ever having studied the contours of the battlefield.’47 Nye Bevan was a different and altogether more convincing prophet.

It was a troubled summer of 1938 for Foot. He had no job and no immediate likelihood of one, though still brooding about possible books on modern history. In December he did acquire a practical commitment since, undeterred by his Monmouth experience, he had been nominated Labour candidate for the Devonport division in his native Plymouth. Presumably this would be contested in a 1940 general election. But since that seat had been held in 1935 with a majority of over eleven thousand and 68 per cent of the vote by a notable National Liberal Cabinet minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, his prospects there looked extremely remote. The European scene that summer was becoming increasingly alarming, with the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia following Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria. Foot was in Brittany on holiday with Barbara when the Munich crisis took place; he returned to find Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s diplomatic ‘peace in our time’ coup with Hitler trumpeted to the skies by publications ranging from Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman to the Express newspapers of the right-wing press magnate and perennial political controversialist Lord Beaverbrook. Foot was unable to share in this euphoria, and sensed a great surrender. Since the civil war in Spain he was a pacifist no longer. Franco’s assault on the Spanish Popular Front, along with Hitler’s military assistance for him, convinced Foot that the democratic powers had to mobilize force in return. But then came a wholly unanticipated opportunity. Aneurin Bevan had privately mentioned Foot’s resignation from Tribune to his friend Beaverbrook. ‘I’ve got a young bloody knight-errant here,’ Bevan was said to have observed. Foot was invited down to Cherkley, Beaverbrook’s Surrey retreat near Leatherhead, to summarize and interpret the latest news. Beaverbrook was immediately struck by him. After lunch that day Foot was made a feature writer on the Evening Standard, Beaverbrook’s London daily, at a stipend of £450 a year, soon to rise higher.48 He had exchanged one patron for another, the erratic Cripps for the mercurial Beaverbrook. He had a platform and first-hand access to critical political events. After so many miserable episodes while campaigning on the left, he had made a fresh start. It was to make him famous.

Foot’s close, almost filial, relationship with Beaverbrook has always been deeply contested and highly controversial. Probably its most enduring legacy for him was his close attachment not to Beaverbrook but to his left-wing younger friend Aneurin Bevan, whom Foot now got to know well for the first time. But in the months that led to war, and many of the years that followed, it was the unpredictable Canadian press lord, now aged sixty and seemingly close to retirement, who carved out Foot’s destiny. It seemed at the time – and in many ways still does – a most improbable friendship. Clearly, the real basis was simply personal. In a very few months Foot had become, in his own words, ‘a favoured son’, one of the family. Foot’s essay on Beaverbrook in his book Debts of Honour (1980) breathes the deepest affection in every line: ‘I loved him, not merely as a friend, but a second father even though I had … the most excellent of fathers of my own.’ He pours scorn on the view, widely held on the left, that Beaverbrook was ‘a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one’.49 Foot fell for Beaverbrook’s charm, vivacity and mental agility, his rare ability to attract to his circle an extraordinary range of fascinating personalities – Churchill, Brendan Bracken and Aneurin Bevan; H. G. Wells and his Russian mistress Moura Budberg; the Russian ambassador Ivan Maisky; the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy. All in all, the ‘old man’ was simply fun.