Kenneth O. Morgan
MICHAEL FOOT
A life
512pp. HarperCollins. £25.
978 0 00 717826 1
Michael Foot has been a very lucky man, though rarely in politics. Most of the idealistic causes for which he campaigned for nearly seventy years in public life have failed, been ignored, or been overturned in collision with more powerful realities. Even his beloved India, like his admired Israel or his shattered Yugoslavia, has fallen from grace. Once run by fellow patrician socialists, the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty not quite as attractive as the Foots, it is now increasingly capitalist and a nuclear-armed power.
Yet Foot has been wonderfully lucky in his own life. To a degree that has become exceedingly rare he has managed to combine a deep love of literature (twenty books and countless articles to his name) with his passion for politics at a very high level. Most bookish politicians fall by the wayside, as both Churchill and Disraeli almost did. Imbued with the sceptical, libertine spirit of Montaigne, Milton, Swift, Byron, Hazlitt and Wells, Foot fell in the end, dispatched in 1983 by Margaret Thatcher, the kind of unread politician he most deplored. But he was at the centre of political events, in “the eye of the storm” – a phrase he liked to quote from Conrad – during one of the most turbulent peacetime decades of the twentieth century, 1973–83. He did not retreat to the library. His third and authorized biographer, Kenneth O. Morgan, is among those who believes that, as Labour leader from 1980 to 1983, Foot kept his party more or less united and afloat at a time when the alternative leadership offered from the Labour right by Denis Healey might have sunk the ship. What is more, the great parliamentary orator also protected Parliament. Both claims are fiercely contested, not least by those who point out that, courtesy of the SDP, Labour did split and that Parliament was undermined by Foot’s use (now routine) of the procedural guillotine on legislation and by much else. Even Lord Morgan, a Labour historian turned ex-Labour peer, admits that Foot was never really leadership material, being too vague, too nice and too emollient. But his claim is a serious one. After all, the extra-parliamentary Bennite tide was stemmed under Foot and reversed by his protégé, Neil Kinnock. As a direct consequence, New Labour governs today and gives the nonagenarian loyalist in Hampstead more to applaud than denounce, at least in public.
In any case, Foot cannot complain too much about Blairism. One of the comic details highlighted in Kenneth O. Morgan’s Michael Foot: A life is that young Blair deftly claimed to have found political inspiration from reading Foot’s collection of essays Debts of Honour (1980) with its eclectic non-Labour perspectives. Could Foot’s enthusiasm for the press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook (“Beelzebub” he called him) have led the new Prime Minister to embrace Rupert Murdoch? What is undisputed is that Foot’s endorsement helped this well-scrubbed young lawyer to the pivotal victory of his career: the last available Labour nomination in 1983, at Sedgefield.
But the biographer’s attachment to his subject, evident throughout this stimulating and enjoyable book, illustrates another important aspect of Foot’s luck. As a pro-European multilateralist and self-styled “liberal devolutionist” who has previously written a biography of Callaghan, Morgan was far from being a Foot-ite, let alone a Bevanite. But, as he came to know Foot better, he clearly fell under his spell. Typical Foot work. He has been admired, and much loved by those who have known him well, latterly cherished and revered as a symbol of how life should be, even if it is not. The supporters club has included many women who, like Barbara Castle and Foot’s devoted wife, Jill Craigie, did not necessarily like each other. Even the Queen Mother, who would have recoiled from small talk with the fiercely feminist-socialist Craigie, seems to have taken to the scruffy, republican Lord President of her daughter’s Council. She called him Michael and actually approved of the notorious duffle coat worn at the Cenotaph: “Oh hullo, Michael, that’s a smart, sensible coat for a day like this”. The endorsement did not save Foot from the contempt of the press, the wrath of Thatcher (his passionate West Country patriot’s promotion of the Falklands War actually helped her to victory) or the scepticism of the electorate. Labour went down to a near-record defeat in 1983 with Foot lashed to the mast, gallant but electorally ineffectual. Private Eye’s cover had him waving his stick, shouting “Hang on, I haven’t finished yet”. Nor had he. Morgan’s description of the half-blind Foot and ailing Craigie, both over eighty, making a film in 1993, defending their cherished Dubrovnik and Bosnia from Serbian attack, cannot fail to move, overgenerous though their analysis was to Franco Tudjman, the President of Croatia. An attractive fault though it can be, indulgent generosity to friends and heroes is a recurring weakness in Foot’s career, especially when set alongside Manichaean hostility towards those of whom he disapproved. One can see that Hugh Gaitskell might be less fun at dinner than Beaverbrook or Randolph Churchill. But did he deserve so much scorn?
What a twentieth-century pilgrimage Foot’s life is. Would his fourth son’s odyssey have surprised old Isaac Foot, in his book-crammed Cornish lair, at the family home in Pencrebar outside Plymouth? Probably not, though the longevity of the sickly boy who had eczema and asthma might have done. Michael is shown in Morgan’s volume as the favourite of Isaac and Eva’s seven talented, competitive children, three of whom succumbed to drink. Himself a Liberal MP, Isaac combined Asquithian Liberalism with a passion for Oliver Cromwell (the Foots are big on heroes), yet managed to serve as Minister for Mines in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government. Isaac Foot is always there to encourage them, not least to fight dirty if political events warrant it. “Anyone can be an MP or Governor of Cyprus”, he tells Hugh Foot when The Pen and the Sword, Michael’s much-praised biography of Jonathan Swift, is published in 1957. Since Hugh was grappling with the EOKA Emergency as Governor in Nicosia at the time, this sounds a touch thoughtless.
At this stage of his career, Michael, who was defeated in Devonport in 1955, was still the dissenter, the troublemaker, the brilliant pamphleteer (co-author of Guilty Men by “Cato” which sold 200,000 copies in 1940 and made him famous), rather than the politician of power, yet a man to whom socialism was what Morgan calls a doctrine of social and aesthetic liberation. All his life he had been associated with rebellion. He had no more than a brief flirtation with Marxism (the older, less intransigent Marx, Morgan says) and was almost as hostile to the Soviet Union as to America, though a partisan of the (disastrous) “Second Front now campaign” in 1942. A supporter of his beloved Nye Bevan in the 1940s and much-split 50s, Foot in 1957 was poised to plunge into the insular romanticism of CND, which further divided Labour. In the row over Gaitskell’s NHS prescription charges and Korean War rearmament, Aneurin Bevan proved more than half right, the former (raising just £23m) too trivial and the latter (costing £3.6bn) excessive. Churchill later trimmed it. But the resignation strategy was ruinous and put Labour out of power for those “thirteen wasted years”. Attlee incidentally, canonized now by Labour Blair-baiters, told virtually no one about the decision to build the Bomb (no Trident votes here) and informed a Cabinet meeting attended by just seven members that he had decided to hold another election in October 1951, one which was predictably lost.
Yet what gives Morgan’s biography much of its appeal is the countercurrent beneath the surface. Foot the parliamentarian believed that only Labour could bring about socialism, though he was usually vague about the details and never wrote a work of theory. As MP for Nye’s old seat of Ebbw Vale, he rejoiced in the ex-Bevanite, Harold Wilson’s victories in 1964–6. But Foot refused office (there was talk of the Home Office) and opposed the Government on critical issues like incomes policy, spending cuts, Rhodesia (never a pacifist, he was a Troops In man), Vietnam, trade union reform and, in quixotic cahoots with his friend Enoch Powell, on Lords reform. He grew “soft on a diet of soft options”, as Barbara Castle scolded him.
But the countercurrent was becoming stronger, drawing Foot towards the vortex of power and the responsibility he had so long evaded. After Labour’s defeat in 1970, he joined the shadow Cabinet and, working in once improbable partnership with Jim Callaghan, became the mainstay of the 1974–9 Government and its doomed “social contract” with the unions. Morgan insists that Foot’s pro-union labour laws “restored the balance” which existed before Geoffrey Howe’s 1971 reforms (Castle’s with knobs on). But that is to ignore, as Foot also ignored, both the globally competitive forces that were hammering British industry and the unaccountable shop-floor militancy which now hammered it from below. Once Foot’s chief ally, Jack Jones, retired it fell apart. All but ACAS and the Health and Safety Executive was swept away under Thatcher, as it was bound to be. Foot’s leadership during 1980–83 was a predictable coda.
As Lord Morgan records all this, his head struggles against his newly conquered heart. He is kind, but rarely blind, as Foot’s own writing was towards heroes like Bevan. Morgan sees his subject for what he is, a radical upper-class Englishman, an internationalist and socialist not over-keen on abroad or economics; a bit like Tony Benn but tilting more to Aristotle than to Plato. Two stories illustrate the humorous aspect of this gentle Jacobinism, which involved precarious finances and generous dollops of patronage from the likes of Beaverbrook: the cottage and the book reviewer’s contract. When Jill and Michael Foot bought a new house in St John’s Wood for £6,000 (a lot in 1954), Jill raised £2,000 by selling the Renoir (only a minor one, we are assured) given her by an admirer, Malcolm (son of Ramsay) MacDonald. In 1963, she crashed the car into a lorry-load of Lucozade. The couple were both seriously injured, but remained sufficiently conscious of a left-wing MP’s image to insist on an NHS ward. Foot was lucky to pull through, but his asthma mysteriously disappeared, and he gave up his seventy Woodbines a day. He was left with the limp and cane, but discovered Montaigne in hospital. Friends say the whole experience mellowed him. Their NHS treatment duly praised to the hilt, the couple repaired to Morocco for some recuperation. Who did they find at the Mamounia Hotel, Churchill’s favourite haunt in Marrakesh, but Winston’s son Randolph, the twice-defeated Tory candidate in Devonport? A boozy good time was had by all. What Foot luck, eh? To have a minor Renoir on the wall to be flogged in an emergency. To emerge from a nasty car crash in better shape than one went in. It is all a wonderful life, though one to be deployed as a role model only by the romantic, the well-connected and the very robust.
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Michael White is an assistant editor (politics) of the Guardian, whose political editor he was from 1990 to 2006.
