Michael Foot: A Life

It should be added that Foot fell not only for Beaverbrook’s own charms but for those of his glamorous young mistress, the former ballet dancer Lily Ernst. Known to them as ‘Esther’, she encouraged Foot’s interest in Jewish matters. But she interested him physically as well. She was ‘a lively Jugoslav-born Jewish girl’,50 and the ever-susceptible romantic Michael Foot, with a penchant for middle Europeans, fell passionately in love with her. It was more than her beauty: she also introduced Foot to one of his cherished poets, Heinrich Heine, a man much influenced by an even greater hero, Byron. Lily Ernst brought him a volume (in English translation) of Heine’s romantic poems, which she and Michael discussed avidly. As was the case with Barbara Betts, she was the partner of another man, and Beaverbrook had actually smuggled her out of Vienna just before the Anschluss. Thus Foot remained caught up, devoted but distant, in another non-sexual relationship. But in 1939–40 Lily Ernst became another major reason for his wanting to keep close to Beaverbrook and his court.

For his part, Beaverbrook evidently delighted in Foot’s personality, his stories, his radical irreverence, and especially his feel for history and literature, with which he used deliberately to beguile the older man. Foot’s admiration could turn into open flattery, historical analogies at the ready. He laid praise on with a trowel when his master became Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, telling Beaverbrook, ‘Gibbon wrote of the Emperor Theodosius that “the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man”. As we read the news of the air battle it seems the same today.’51 Beaverbrook, whose knowledge of the Emperor Theodosius was probably somewhat sketchy, lapped this kind of thing up. He came to have the highest regard for Foot’s writing for the Evening Standard, as assistant editor and then, from April 1942, as editor. He admired ‘the splendid work that you do in the early mornings in the Evening Standard … It is in the early mornings that I admire you most. When a man is admired most in the early morning he is a great fellow.’52 But even more he adored Foot’s warm and witty companionship, which filled a gap in his life. Foot responded with a distinctly sycophantic piece in the Daily Express about the Evening Standard: ‘Cobdenites and anarchists, True blues and pale pinks, radicals and roaring diehards may all make their contribution to this ultra-Conservative journal.’53 The leader column was sternly independent in viewpoint: ‘It doesn’t care a fig for anyone.’

What is one to make of the Foot – Beaverbrook relationship? A man may make friends with anyone he wishes, male or female, and there is no scientific law governing these things. The immediate mutual attraction is understandable, but so too is the sharp political and personal breach after 1945. Perhaps what really needs explanation is why they got together again in 1948 and their continued close friendship thereafter, even as Foot pressed on towards the further reaches of the socialist left. Foot always felt at ease with Beaverbrook, and accepted his many kindnesses without feeling that he was being patronized. He describes with simple, perhaps naïve, gratitude being very soon taken by Beaverbrook on the Blue Train to Cannes and Monte Carlo, the trip being wound up with a stay in the Paris Ritz. It was, Foot explains, all part of learning how to write a good newspaper column. He was to accept Beaverbrook’s frequent comments on the contents of his columns or leading articles – Beaverbrook was notorious as the most interfering of newspaper owners, with his own personal agenda ranging from Empire Free Trade to appeasement of Germany – cheerfully and modestly enough.

Beaverbrook also put a room in his London flat at Foot’s disposal, and Foot sought – and gained – permission to bring a few books, including ‘the heavily-marked works of Jonathan Swift’ along with works by Marat, Bakunin, Cromwell, Stalin ‘and other successful terrorists’. In 1950 Beaverbrook’s kindnesses included a large donation to Tribune when Foot was sued for libel after his attack on Tory press barons, ‘Lower than Kemsley’. It saved the paper from liquidation. It also helped that the Daily Express took out full-page advertisements in Tribune, which cannot have boosted the circulation of Beaverbrook’s newspaper empire. The ‘old man’ also took to Jill, and for some time in the early fifties the Foots lived in a grace-and-favour cottage on the Cherkley estate. Foot always felt confident that his freedom of expression or thought was not compromised in any way by his association with Beaverbrook, certainly not that he was being bought. It should be added that he was only the first of many left-wing journalists to work for Beaverbrook newspapers and to relish the experience. Robert Edwards came from Tribune to become a distinguished editor of the Daily Express. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, who first met Beaverbrook in 1956 after giving a glowing review of one of his books, Men and Power, was another from the left who came to love Beaverbrook; he became the custodian of his collections of private papers, and wrote a highly favourable biography of the old man after his death. Beaverbrook, wrote Taylor of his beloved ‘Max’, was a man ‘who stirred things up’.

But there is still something to be explained. Beaverbrook may well have been a delightful dinner companion and stimulating friend. What he clearly was not was someone at all in tune with Michael Foot’s passionate socialism. Foot has frequently called him ‘a genuine radical’, of which his being a Canadian Presbyterian was a major aspect. He admired a fellow nonconformist outsider like Lloyd George, the centre of a kind of alternative, anti-establishment circle of devotees drawn from all parties and none. Beaverbrook was certainly a mischievous iconoclast. He thought it enormous fun when a dinner-party would end with Michael Foot and Alan Taylor standing to sing ‘The Red Flag’. But he was not in any meaningful political sense a radical. Where Foot was a passionate anti-capitalist of Liberal free-trade background, Beaverbrook was a buccaneering champion of the free market, along with tariffs within a protective imperial system. His Express’s crusader bore the chains of a shackled capitalism throughout the years of the Attlee government after 1945. In international affairs he was foremost amongst the appeasers, a warm supporter of Lloyd George’s lamentable visit to Hitler in 1936, an advocate of Britain leaving the League of Nations, a warm supporter of Munich, an associate of the defeatist Irish-American ambassador to Britain Joe Kennedy, a man who felt that war in September 1939 was a huge error. As Michael Foot became the fierce champion of resistance to fascism in 1938–39, he acknowledged that his employer and patron took a totally different view. Foot rightly claimed that Beaverbrook was an excellent listener to alternative views, and that all viewpoints on the international scene were represented, and powerfully expressed, at his private gatherings at Cherkley.

But listening and tolerating are passive virtues, and not the same as giving positive support. In Beaverbrook’s case they appeared to be an alternative to it, and Foot skirted the point with some delicacy. Readers of Foot’s 1940 book Guilty Men would search in vain for any hint that the wealthy Canadian press baron was ever amongst the appeasers. This does not imply that Foot was a hypocrite, since his advocacy of his own radical views became ever bolder. He did not sacrifice his integrity as a commentator and critic. But it does suggest that the relationship with Beaverbrook was not at all an extension of his own ideas, but something that existed on a totally different plane. For Foot, as to a degree for Bevan, Beaverbrook acted as someone who could transmute revolutionary thoughts and passionate oratory into a private dialogue, detached from key aspects of real life and ultimately harmless. Those who came close to him were always in danger of becoming licensed rebels.

What Foot did gain from his work on the Standard, in addition to a much higher standard of life, was a genuinely stimulating atmosphere in which to work. He progressed rapidly, acting as assistant on the Diary and writing signed historical feature articles on personalities like the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk. He impressed his employer, and in 1940 became assistant editor. His closest friend from day one was the relatively youthful editor of the Standard, Frank Owen, a highly gifted former Liberal MP with alleged Trotskyite tendencies (he was later to write a biography of Lloyd George) and an ardent anti-appeaser.54 He combined enterprising journalism with a distinctly raffish lifestyle, marked by vast consumption of spirits and a bewildering array of attractive girlfriends. He hurled himself into a hectic private life as frenetic as his editing of the Standard. In the end it all proved to be too much, and Owen ended up a pathetic alcoholic. He drew Foot, now rapidly shedding the inhibitions of Pencrebar and West Country Methodism, into this way of life, the more so when they shared a flat in wartime London. Owen contrived a series of sartorial signals on a coat-stand if he was seducing or otherwise entertaining a young woman. He was also a man of much fascinating information, specializing in military matters. He had good contacts with Basil Liddell Hart, Orde Wingate and even Lord Louis Mountbatten. On the eve of war he boldly led a staff deputation to Beaverbrook urging him to change his personal stance on appeasement, or at least to allow his editors to endorse war against Hitler. Beaverbrook, a caustic critic of the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s diplomacy, agreed half-heartedly to do so, although Foot describes him as ‘sulking in his appeasers’ tent’ for some time to come.55 It was not Lloyd George’s war, and it was not yet Beaverbrook’s either.

The outbreak of war in September 1939 was, of course, an immense trauma for Beaverbrook’s journalists as for everyone else. From the start, Michael Foot was a passionate advocate of total resistance to Hitler. On 9 September his impassioned leader in the Standard, headed ‘No!’, urged that any peace proposals should be totally rejected.56 But he could only promote this militant stance through the printed word, since his asthma meant that he was turned down for military service, as was Dingle with his tubercular arm. Unfriendly questions were asked about this by Plymouth Tories in 1945. In the end, John and Christopher were the only Foot boys to see active service. Foot had now joined Owen in writing highly patriotic leading articles for the Standard from a strongly pro-war stance. The paper’s leader as early as 9 September 1939 declared: ‘There will be no quitting here. Britain is pledged to see the finish of Hitlerism.’ Another on 11 November announced: ‘The world knows that we are fighting to prevent this Continent from being transformed into a second Dachau prison camp.’ On 6 July 1940, after Churchill’s elevation to the premiership, another leader addressed its readers in epic terms: ‘You are a member of the nation which stood erect, when all others had fallen or been battered to their knees, against the most black-hearted despotism which ever declared war on the human race.’ A few days earlier, Hitler was warned: ‘He has challenged the toughest people in the world and does not know it. He may even reckon on a breed of Pétainism. He does not know that, if such there are, we shall finish them before he has a chance to finish us.’ However, in the period of ‘phoney war’ that lasted until May 1940, it was difficult to see what the outcome of such stirring rhetoric might be.

Foot’s most characteristic writing came in signed feature articles filling in the historical background to current crises, with themes ranging from Drake’s Drum to the strategic entanglements in the Middle East. Readers of the Standard were treated to learned discourses on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, or even the battles between Carnot’s French Revolutionary army and the Austrians in 1793. He also wrote caustically on the collapse of the Norway campaign in April 1940, comparing it with Gallipoli in the First World War, though taking care not to emphasize the role of Churchill, permanently identified with the Gallipoli disaster, but also widely seen as the only hope of victory now.57

Foot also found time to produce his first solely-authored book, Armistice 1918–39, a volume of 274 pages on post-1918 European history published by Harrap, and appearing in March 1940. It came out of a series of sketches of leading political personalities in the press, and the main strength of the book lies in its vignettes of people as varied as the German Communist Rosa Luxemburg, Hitler, Mussolini, Mustafa Kemal, Aristide Briand, Stanley Baldwin, Anthony Eden and Jan Masaryk. The approach is historical, with brief leftish commentary on contemporary issues. The style is brisk and sardonic. The preface gives the reader due warning: ‘No attempt is made at impartiality. Unbiased historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ There is comment on the ‘Young England’ MPs like Bob Boothby, Duff Cooper, Oliver Stanley and Victor Cazalet who flocked to back Eden after his resignation as Foreign Secretary in 1938. Baldwin, ‘standing in lonely eminence like a hillock in the Fen country’, is condemned on Churchillian grounds for promoting party over country.58 Churchill himself is criticized over the Russian Revolution and the General Strike, but is relatively lightly handled. Lloyd George gets off more or less scot free. There is a sketchy conclusion. In general the book is not memorable, though fun to read. Its most striking feature is that, despite his enthusiasm for Rosa Luxemburg, the dogmatic Marxism Foot displayed in the notes to Cripps’s book in 1936 has by now totally disappeared. Stalin’s purges do not escape mention. However ephemeral, the book did confirm that the Standard’s leader-writer had the capacity to write sustained work on his own.

In May 1940 there was a national crisis. In the Commons there came the famous Norway debate of 7–8 May, after which Chamberlain’s discredited regime gave way to Churchill’s all-party coalition. Beaverbrook, as mentioned, became Minister of Aircraft Production a few days later, despite his own decidedly equivocal attitude to the fall of Chamberlain. Foot was present at the Norway debate; indeed he and Frank Owen were, remarkably, put in touch by Beaverbrook with the veteran Lloyd George at this time, to encourage him to help in overthrowing Chamberlain and then to offer his services for the new Churchill administration.59 But Foot felt the need for a far more direct role than simply being a comfortable journalistic commentator on a war for which others were sacrificing their lives. The architects of appeasement, from Chamberlain and Halifax downwards, were still around, and in key positions in the Cabinet. They must be indicted and removed from power. Since 10 May Foot had been working closely with Frank Owen, a sharp critic of recent military disasters, in penning a series of inspirational leading articles in the Standard to strike a note of defiance. But something much more was needed to shock the national conscience.

There was also another possible colleague, someone that Foot knew less well. This was Peter Howard, previously author of the ‘Cross-bencher’ column in the Sunday Express (with both Isaac and Dingle Foot amongst his previous targets, incidentally).60 Howard, a handsome former English rugby captain, specialized in the caustic personal portrait. Foot and Owen were quite unaware that he was about to become a leading evangelist for Dr Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament. This movement was deeply suspect to all democrats, since Buchman’s pronouncements on current events showed an alarming sympathy for Hitler and indulged in a crude anti-Communism. The author Rose Macaulay observed that ‘the Gestapo was riddled with Buchmanites’. But Howard’s religious inclinations, to which he largely devoted the remaining twenty-five years of his life, were not yet known. The three men met in the Standard offices on the night of 31 May. Foot had heard first-hand evidence of mismanagement by the high command from survivors of the mass evacuation of British servicemen from Dunkirk. Something decisive was urgently needed to galvanize public opinion into realizing how incompetent and morally indefensible the conduct of affairs had been for years past, how essential it was to give mass support to the new Churchill government, above all to spell out the atrocious record of the politicians responsible for past errors, and send them packing. Following some convivial sessions in the Café Royal, the three Express group journalists thus hit on the idea of writing an instant book.61 The precise contents and shape would be left to serendipity and spontaneous combustion. Michael Foot was the main inspiration.

It was he who won the agreement of his old bête noire Victor Gollancz to take it on for immediate publication, he who enlisted Ralph Pinker as literary agent (a disastrous choice, as events proved). Most important, it was Foot who provided a title, in a meeting with his friends in the Two Brewers in the Gray’s Inn Road. Still deep in his reading on the French Revolution, he recalled a popular demonstration at the Convention Assembly in 1793. Those present demanded, they told the convention, ‘a dozen guilty men’. That, Foot believed, was what the British people demanded now, and Guilty Men is the title the book was given.

Since leaving Oxford, Foot’s career had been as haphazard as that of many intelligent young men unclear about their future. The relationship with Cripps, the abortive crusading for the Socialist League and writing for Tribune had been bruising affairs. He had a record of association with some flamboyant failures. His writings were not yet significant. His flight from Liberalism had as yet little positive to show. The most important by-product was a series of strong personal relationships, important as he grew to maturity, with Cripps, Barbara Betts, Aneurin Bevan, Frank Owen, and of course Beaverbrook. At each stage of his life, starting with his father and Lloyd George, Foot seemed to find comfort in worshipping a messiah, a hero-figure, as a supreme point of reference, just as he did in his reading of literature. His psychology appeared to require one. He had unexpectedly lurched into a significant post at the Standard and was for the first time well paid. He had enjoyed an extrovert lifestyle and had lively friends of both sexes which allowed an intense, almost donnish, personality to blossom. But there had been no clear direction or design hitherto to harness his undoubted talents, no big idea to impress a nation enduring a crisis of survival. Now, with Owen and Howard to help, Foot sensed the prospects of a personal statement of a new kind. It would be deeply controversial to denounce government ministers at a time of total war. It might be disastrously counter-productive. But in 1711 such a venture had been a triumph for his and Isaac’s literary icon Jonathan Swift. True, Swift was trying to stop a war and drive a Churchill (Marlborough) out of power, whereas for his admirer in 1940 the purpose was the exact opposite. Still, for him too it could be his finest hour.

3 PURSUING GUILTY MEN (1940–1945)

The three young men wrote their book in four days, from 1 to 4 June 1940.1 The first two days were spent in Howard’s country home in Suffolk. The last two were spent in the Standard offices in Fleet Street – or rather on the Standard offices, since much of the writing was done on the roof whenever Foot and Owen were not engaged in producing their newspaper. The book was almost literally written in white heat, since the background was air raid preparations around St Paul’s anticipating attacks from the Luftwaffe. Guilty Men was not a long work. It eventually ran to 125 pages, divided up into twenty-four short chapters. These were split up on a rough and ready basis between the three authors, eight chapters each. Foot himself wrote the first chapter, ‘The Beaches of Dunkirk’, based largely on accounts given at the time by survivors. When an author had finished a chapter he read it aloud to the other two, and incorporated their comments and corrections on the spot. On 5 June Foot handed the manuscript to Gollancz, who matched the high tempo of the authors by reading it and accepting it for publication the same day. Proofs were rushed through, and a month later on 5 July Guilty Men was on sale. Foot was uncharacteristically nervous about it, and wondered whether it would achieve the desired effect. But it was from the very outset a sensational success. It was the most influential wartime tract Britain had known for over two hundred years, and the best-selling ever.

The tone of the book is caustic and satirical. It makes no attempt to be even-handed. The purpose was to pillory and to condemn the National Government. Left-wing sympathy for ideas of appeasement was simply ignored. Guilty Men assailed leading political figures, many of them still in the Cabinet, including the previous Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, for a catastrophic failure to defend the country or prepare it for war. It did so with a relish that went far beyond that of media interrogators like Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys in a later age. There had been nothing like its uninhibited venom since the Regency period. Guilty Men was Gillray and Rowlandson in breathless prose. It is a remarkable tribute to the survival of traditional liberties in wartime Britain that it appeared at all.

The book consists of a series of brief vignettes of key episodes or personalities, the latter invariably foolish or dishonest. Of Foot’s eight chapters the first was the most powerful, and it set the style for what was to follow. He condemned Dunkirk as ‘a shambles’, and drew powerfully on oral testimony from survivors. It was ‘flesh against steel’; ‘they never had a fair chance’. ‘It is the story of an Army doomed before they took the field.’ The soldiers were heroes all – and so too were the sailors and civilian seamen who braved the perils of German bombing to bring them safely home. The son of Plymouth was the last to neglect the naval glories of the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’. The second chapter, apparently written by Frank Owen, went back to the origins of appeasement as the authors saw them – the miserable conspiracy that saw the National Government formed in 1931. Ramsay MacDonald is reported as telling Baldwin on Crewe station as early as the 1929 election, ‘Well, whatever happens, we shall keep the Welshman out.’2 Lloyd George is indeed a hero in the wings throughout, and Churchill enjoys similar status during this ‘regime of little men’. In asides that the book made famous, MacDonald emerges to express his joy at the delight of aristocratic wives like Lady Londonderry at his success; Baldwin is lazy and inept as he pronounces that the bombers would always get through.

Each subsequent chapter has a named cast list, each member of which is a contributor to tragedy and dishonour. Chamberlain is obviously the chief villain, and the account of his surrender at Munich, probably written by Foot, is drenched with sarcasm at the expense of the ‘umbrella man’, as is the treatment of the ‘Golden Age’ of the subsequent six months before Hitler occupied Prague in March 1939 and the state of Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. The later chapters consist of a series of satirical studies of government ministers, and the book winds up dramatically with Hitler’s blitzkrieg in France, Dunkirk and the downfall of Chamberlain. The final three paragraphs are printed in capital letters, as suggested to Gollancz by Rose Macaulay. They end with a plea that ‘the men who are now repairing the breaches in our walls should not carry along with them those who let the walls fall into ruin … Let the guilty men retire.’

Despite the joint authorship and the breathless haste with which it was composed, the book does hang together remarkably well as a chronicle of passion and patriotism. Foot contributed some of the key chapters. Frank Owen wrote much of the military and naval detail, including the final chapter, where his particular expertise lay. Peter Howard, the sharpshooter of the ‘Crossbencher’ column, wrote many of the individual character studies on ministers like Leslie Burgin, Sir Horace Wilson, the Tory Chief Whip David Margesson, Lord Stamp, W. S. Morrison, Reginald Dorman-Smith, Lord Stanhope at the Admiralty and above all Samuel Hoare, ‘the new titan’, appointed to the Air Ministry for the third catastrophic time. Howard’s most famous target is the pre-war Defence Minister Sir Thomas Inskip, speared for all time as ‘Caligula’s horse’, depicted as a complacent, stupid, ‘bum-faced evangelical’. One of Howard’s known chapters is that which includes Bevin’s demolition of the pacifist Lansbury at the 1935 Labour Party conference. Foot, an admirer of Lansbury’s socialist crusading at Poplar and elsewhere, nevertheless felt that ‘in that Howard was justified’. Foot himself supplied one of the briefer character sketches, of Ernest Brown, the minister dealing with unemployment, which he attributed in large measure to wet weather: ‘He was still lamenting the weather when he was removed from his office – to another post.’3 The fact that Brown was one of the Simonite National Liberals who were anathema to Isaac Foot gave Michael’s ironic dismissal a special relish. Another incidental target was Walter Runciman, whose visit to Prague in August 1938 as Chamberlain’s emissary was an especially shoddy prelude to surrender: he too was a National Liberal who had helped to undermine Isaac Foot in Bodmin. The book sped along, but its overall theme had a kind of Platonic unity which justified the use of a single pseudonym for its authors. This was ‘Cato’, the populist Censor of ancient Rome who to Michael Foot was an appropriate model as ‘a good republican’. Along with ‘Cassius’, his pen name when writing The Trial of Mussolini, and ‘John Marullus’, his later nom de plume in Tribune, Cato was a memorial to Foot’s classical interests. Of course, writing a book in Beaverbrook’s offices in work time made anonymity essential.