Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
href="#litres_trial_promo">52 After the Devonport result was declared there was mass public rejoicing around the Guildhall in Plymouth. Then Michael and his new love Jill more privately celebrated victory and the new dawn, political and personal, that it would surely bring.
His election to Parliament marked the climax of an extraordinary war for Michael Foot. It had made him a prominent editor, an instantly known countrywide campaigner and a nationally celebrated author. Guilty Men had made him a celebrity of a kind while still in his late twenties. It attached the sheen of patriotism to his socialism. Some critics later surmised that he remained stuck in that war, eternally berating Chamberlain and his acolytes, celebrating El Alamein, Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy, still holding fast to the values and ideas of that increasingly distant conflict. Memories of the Second World War, nourished more avidly in Britain than in any other combatant country, right down to the sixtieth anniversary of VE-Day in 2005, remained an essential framework for the sense of historic identity. They encouraged a vision of a dauntless island race standing alone while other, feebler Continental nations plunged into collaboration or collapse. The memory worked against the sense that Britain was part of Europe. It fostered a long-term anti-Germanism. But it was legitimate, too, to declare that the war had brought not only a great triumph for courage and perseverance, but also a great opportunity to avoid the betrayals of post-1918 which older men like Attlee, Bevin, Morrison and Cripps recalled all too well. After all, it was their victory, just as much as Churchill’s. One government minister, the seventy-six-year-old Lord Addison, had actually been part of that earlier post-war government as Minister of Health, and was well aware of the broken pledges then which had led to his own eventual resignation from the Liberals to join the Labour Party.
For Michael Foot, for all his bewildering changes of outlook and occupation since his Oxford days, it was a thrilling moment, another 1789. As his old friend A. J. P. Taylor was memorably to write in the final sentence of English History 1914–1945, ‘England had risen, just the same.’53 In the columns of the press the new Michael Foot MP recalled the French socialist thinker Saint-Simon asking his servant to tell him every morning: ‘Get up, M. le Comte, because you have great things to do.’ It was a story he had picked up from one of his cherished books, Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators. Foot did not believe in servants, but the mood and the message were no less resonant, just the same.
4 LOYAL OPPOSITIONIST (1945–1951)
Like the legendary shot fired at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, that heralded the American War of Independence, ‘the Election rings around the World!’, Foot excitedly told the readers of the Daily Herald.1 Labour’s socialist programme, as announced in the King’s Speech, was ‘the Boldest Adventure, the Greatest Crusade’. Labour had become the nation. Historical analogies with past revolutionaries from Cromwell to Garibaldi poured from his pen. In Westminster the new soi-disant revolutionaries, the 393 (shortly 394) Labour MPs, were sworn in immediately. Will Griffiths led a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ in the Commons in which Foot joined enthusiastically. From the very start, dramatic events unfolded: the next four weeks saw the Potsdam conference, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, VJ-Day marking the end of the war in Japan on 15 August, the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease by the Americans on 21 August, the new committee on the use of atomic energy, all of them to colour Foot’s views fundamentally for the remainder of his career. He felt thoroughly at home in his new surroundings. He enjoyed the buzz in the lobbies as a great progressive programme was launched – a National Health Service, nationalization of the mines, independence for India, all part of what the new Chancellor Hugh Dalton called ‘the flowing tide’ of socialism. Foot also liked the parliamentary atmosphere, the chatter and conspiracy in smoking room and tea room, the ready access to Fleet Street friends. He enjoyed too some of the extra-mural activities, especially the group of MPs who played chess. Leslie Hale was his favoured opponent. Foot was recognized as being amongst the best parliamentary players, though it was agreed that the strongest was Julius Silverman. Others of note were Douglas Jay, Reginald Paget, Maurice Edelman and Maurice Orbach, with Jim Callaghan another, less talented, enthusiast. The world’s dominant players were Russian, and Foot met several grandmasters when an international tournament was held in London in 1946.
Best of all, Foot made attractive new friends amongst the Labour backbenchers. All of them, predictably, were on the left, paid-up members of the awkward squad. Four were particularly important for him. Richard Crossman was a didactic former Oxford philosophy don who had written on Plato and Socrates. Foot first met him when Crossman arranged a social event at the Savoy Grill after Parliament assembled. It was Palestine that first drew them together, but they remained intellectual comrades from then on, even posthumously, when Foot was involved in the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Another long-term ally was Ian Mikardo, a bright but prickly left-winger who, unusually for Labour, was a business consultant. He was of rabbinical Jewish background and had strong views on Palestine. It was he who had moved the famous Reading resolution committing the party firmly to wholesale nationalization at party conference in December 1944, when Foot first met him. Mikardo later described his friendship with Foot as ‘one of the most precious things in my life’. Tom Driberg was an old colleague on Beaverbrook newspapers, writer of the ‘William Hickey’ column. Foot remained tolerant of his ex-Communism and particularly conspicuous homosexual exploits, which almost led to his prosecution, and reacted loyally when journalists asserted that Driberg had been a double agent, both for the KGB and MI5. There is no doubt that many of his contemporaries placed less trust in Driberg’s character and reliability than Foot did.2
Perhaps Foot’s most congenial friend was J. P. W. Mallalieu, commonly known as ‘Curly’, a man of many talents. He had been a fine sportsman at Cheltenham College and Oxford, and won a rugby blue as a stand-off half He had an exciting war in the navy, and published a best-selling book about it, Very Ordinary Seaman. He wrote a financial column in the New Statesman, ‘Other People’s Money’, and a weekly parliamentary sketch in Tribune. He became a great admirer of Nye Bevan, while his friendship with Foot was such that for a few months in 1953 Michael and Jill lived with him and his family. However, Mallalieu never supported CND, and actually became a navy minister under Harold Wilson in 1964, which put him beyond the pale for many on the left. Foot’s memories of him, however, were always affectionate. As a sign of it he gave his daughter Ann (later Baroness) Mallalieu a present of a book on fox-hunting, a strong enthusiasm of hers even though Foot detested the pastime.3
These men found other left-wing comrades early on in the new Parliament. Others with whom Foot had close relations were Harold Davies, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler, Will Griffiths, Hugh Delargy and the playwright Benn Levy (along with his beautiful American actress wife, Constance Cummings). Along with them was a friend of far longer standing, Barbara Castle, in the House as MP for Blackburn and the only one of them who had a government job, as PPS for Cripps at the Board of Trade. In his memoirs Mikardo lists some others in their circle: the Australian lawyer and keen European federalist R. W. G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, George Wigg, Donald Bruce and Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, who had been returned as a Common Wealth candidate at the election but then joined Labour. Occasionally they were joined by mavericks like Woodrow Wyatt, or even figures on the party right like the independent-minded barrister R. T. Paget, who simply enjoyed their company on social grounds. In addition, there were one or two incorrigible rebels who flitted in and out but really pursued their own path, like Sydney Silverman, a disputatious Jewish lawyer, and S. O. Davies, ex-miner and Marxist Welsh nationalist who sat for Keir Hardie’s old seat of Merthyr Tydfil and like him supported Welsh home rule. In 1946 came another maverick, Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s Welsh son-in-law who sat for South Ayrshire. He too was almost impossible to tie down.
This distinctly miscellaneous group of around twenty or so formed an identifiable collection of dissenters. Michael Foot was one of its most eminent members, and the most highly