Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan

       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.

      The book is an obvious patchwork, but a pungent and powerful one. Foot himself later felt that Guilty Men had been overrated, and that it had less merit than his next book, The Trial of Mussolini (1943) – which, of course, was his work alone. There is a moving introduction, a brisk, highly personalized scene-setting, then a series of mostly effective personality studies, and an upbeat finale. Government ministers are skewered in turn; a digression is the treatment of the Civil Service head Sir Horace Wilson, chief appeaser and responsible for the fact that ‘the dead hand of bureaucracy grips us by the throat’. There is a catchphrase or anecdote on almost every page. Many of them have had eternal life in popular memory ever since. It was Guilty Men that first drilled permanently into the public consciousness Chamberlain’s umbrella, Baldwin’s ‘appalling frankness’, ‘peace in our time’, faraway countries of which we know nothing, Hitler ‘missing the bus’. They are as much part of the essential cultural equipment of British people now as are nursery rhymes or pop songs. Appeasement is guaranteed always to be a dirty word.

      The broader public interpretation of the thirties, of course, is owed