Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
his literary enthusiasms further, and to buy S. S. Howe’s famous library of volumes of Hazlitt. The master essayist’s thoughts gripped him with ever greater intensity (and as a result often featured in the columns of the Evening Standard). Foot was later to tell Edmund Blunden how being a ‘worshipper’ of Hazlitt led to a strong interest in Leigh Hunt and his Examiner, subjects of two of Blunden’s own books which Foot enormously enjoyed: ‘My criticism of your book on Leigh Hunt was that Hazlitt did not come out as well as his blindest admirers insist he must. But that is a mere trifle compared with so much on the other side.’17
In many respects there was a remarkable ferment of intellectual life during the war. It was one of the great formative periods in modern British history, when creative writers, commentators, planners, economists and artists came together with new blueprints for reconstruction and new dreams of renewal. Michael Foot, man of words and putative man of action, was a pivotal figure in it.
But by late 1943 it was clear that his somewhat unnatural base in the Tory Evening Standard, and his filial relationship with Beaverbrook, were undergoing a change. After all, Foot was Labour candidate for Plymouth, Devonport, and a post-war election was perhaps on the horizon. In addition, he was increasingly restless for a wider crusading role, far beyond the editorial desk. His book published by Gollancz in late 1943, The Trial of Mussolini, written once again in breach of his editorial contract with the Standard, was a sign of this and caused Beaverbrook some anxiety. He remained keen to retain Foot’s services, and offered him a new role instead, as feature writer and book reviewer. Foot’s generous, even affectionate, response on 1 November 1943 suggested that a parting of the ways might not be too far off. He suggested two possible courses of action to Beaverbrook. The first was continuing to act as editor of the Standard for just one more year, since he intended to fight Devonport for Labour at the next general election: ‘I certainly intend to become a politician and to devote what energies I possess to the annihilation of the Conservative influence in politics.’ The second was that he continue to write for Beaverbrook newspapers on such terms as their owner proposed, so long as ‘I am not required to do anything in defiance of my views and that I have freedom to engage in such nefarious activities as I choose in writing books or on the platform’.18 They chose the first course, amicably enough, but things were getting progressively more difficult, especially after D-Day the following June, which made the ending of the war a far more proximate possibility.
So Foot wrote a letter of transparent honesty and integrity to Beaverbrook a few days later:
The main idea I have is that your ideas and mine are bound to become more and more irreconcilable … There does not seem to be much sense in my continuing to write leaders for a newspaper group whose opinions I do not share and some of whose opinions I strongly dissent from … The leaders which I now write are hardly worth writing since they are non-commital and from my point of view I am associated with a newspaper group against whose policies (but not against the proprietor) I am resolved to wage perpetual war. Somehow things were different before. The compromise worked and certainly greatly to my advantage. But I do not see how it could work very much longer.
Foot felt, ‘as an ambitious and intransigent socialist’, that he could find another newspaper in which to express himself He did not see how Beaverbrook could reasonably run a column by him: ‘At the present I am engaged in writing stuff in which I have no particular interest, and I would like to do something different.’ He therefore asked Beaverbrook to release him from his obligations to newspaper and owner.19 Beaverbrook did release him, in tones of sadness and regret. It was a deeply civilized break-up on both sides. But it was a peculiarly sharp one. In a few months Foot was denouncing his old patron’s right-wing views with fire and fury in newspaper columns and speeches. Much more completely than before, he was his own man.
He now threw himself into an even more frenetic range of activities than before. Chief amongst them, given his now perceived talent as part-author of Guilty Men, was inevitably the writing of books. He produced two short but effective tracts in the later wartime period, both highly partisan in a way that the earlier book never was. Each was written at Pencrebar. The Trial of Mussolini, as noted, appeared without Beaverbrook’s knowledge and caused him concern. It was written, Foot told him, to protest against the hypocrisy of those who denounced Mussolini at his fall but had upheld his views for twenty years previously. The idea came to him at the time of the removal of Mussolini and the appointment of Marshal Badoglio as potential peace-making head of the Italian government in July 1943. Foot visualized the forthcoming post-war trial of the dictator and, using the same theatrical method as in Guilty Men, cast the various pre-war British ministers who had appeased him as witnesses at the tribunal. He had been given much information on circumstances in Italy by the son of Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister during the 1919 Paris peace conference.20 A more profound underlying influence was Ignazio Silone. But the book would really be about British foreign policy, not Italy. He offered the idea once again to Victor Gollancz, who seized it avidly for another of his ‘yellow perils’, as the volumes of the yellow-jacketed Left Book Club were known. He received the manuscript on 20 August, and it was published in October, with a confident print run of 100,000 copies. Foot wrote the book in three weeks. His nom de plume, again, was drawn from classical antiquity – not ‘Cato’ this time but ‘Cassius’, the assassin of an earlier not-so-sawdust Caesar.
The Trial of Mussolini is a short polemic, only eighty-two pages and perhaps forty thousand words long, but it is most cleverly written, with much subtle argument. Its style of dramatic personal confrontation between judge and witnesses meant that it lent itself to being turned into dramatic form by political and dramatic societies. George Orwell praised it as such in his review in Tribune. Foot himself considered it a better and more complete book than Guilty Men.21 The conceit of a public trial with eminent witnesses is skilfully sustained throughout. Although the action concerns the trial of Mussolini, the dictator in many ways comes out strongly, giving a vigorous defence of his policies and making short work of any British claims to moral superiority in the area of ‘wars of aggression’. Really it is the witnesses who are in the dock. Successively, Austen Chamberlain describes an amiable meeting with Mussolini in 1924, when Chamberlain was Foreign Secretary. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, relates how in 1928 he stated that ‘Mussolini will probably dominate the history of the twentieth century as Napoleon dominated that of the early nineteenth century.’ Neville Chamberlain confirms the long-held support of British Tories for the Italian dictator. Lord Simon testifies to British double-dealing over Abyssinia. Sir Samuel Hoare is condemned by counsel as ‘disingenuous’ over his notorious pact with Pierre Laval, the future Prime Minister of the Vichy government, about the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Halifax and Leo Amery offer similar testimony. Special attention is paid to Hore-Belisha, Foot’s target in Devonport, who had visited Rome in 1938 and received a bronze medallion from Mussolini. Even Churchill receives a momentary glance of disapproval. The judge concludes in emotional tones to draw a distinction between the English people and ‘the England of the Chamberlains, the Simons, the Hoares’ and the rest of the Tory Party which consorted with Fascism and connived at imperialist war.22
The Guilty Men are thus given another pasting, though perhaps in an over-complex way. The Trial of Mussolini sold slightly less well than ‘Cato’s’ work of 1940, but sales still rose to 150,000. It aroused some criticism as being anti-patriotic. Gollancz sturdily defended the author: ‘Michael Foot … would be interested to find himself described as seditious. So would his father, old Isaac … So would the electors of Devonport, who, if they have the wit to understand the true meaning of British honour and British interests, will in a few weeks’ time [sic] be returning Michael to Parliament.’ The reviews, however, were very favourable, especially one from the Conservative Catholic Christopher Hollis. Another, more predictable admirer was Isaac Foot: ‘He is a fine boy and … he has a fire in his belly.’