Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
the conventional wisdom years later. Even at the time, they crystallized some of the discontent amongst the left-wing middle-class intelligentsia of which Tosco Fyvel wrote in Tribune.33 At the very least, Foot was surely right in urging a debate on fundamental geopolitical principles. On Europe, his enthusiasm for closer union was part of a wider critique of British foreign policy, and his vision of a united Europe was distinctly vague. Even so, the European opportunity was an immense gap in Britain’s world view after 1945. Some of the Labour left picked it up more rapidly than many on the right, such as Gaitskell with his uncritical Atlanticism.
The most tentative area of Foot’s analysis of international relations, then and always, was his view of the United States. Unlike his father Isaac, who had been on an extensive morale-boosting lecture tour in 1943, Michael was no ‘special relationship’ man. He had relatively few close American contacts (though he had almost married one of them), and many of them were critics, like the venerable journalist Walter Lippman, the trade unionist Walter Reuther, or the left-wing humorous columnist Dorothy Parker. He was excited by New York City, but rarely visited America, and had limited appreciation of its history or geopolitics. He seldom reviewed books on American history after the time of Tom Paine. His view of America hovered somewhere midway between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, as he veered between ideological suspicion of American capitalism and endorsement of the visionary Marshall Plan and the military necessity for NATO. Nye Bevan was much the same. But at least in 1945–51 Foot could explore a range of options for relations with the US, compared with the confrontational atmosphere of the fifties between East and West, over China and the bomb above all.
On domestic issues, Foot’s Commons speeches followed a fairly unremarkable course in their calls for more socialism. He did not seem to specialize in any particular topic. However, there was one domestic theme on which he took the lead – the influence and political imbalance of the press. Here he was following the lead of his own union, the National Union of Journalists. He launched fierce attacks on the monopolistic right-wing proprietors who controlled at least 80 per cent of British newspapers. Lords Kemsley and Rothermere were his main targets, but Beaverbrook also, his once revered patron, did not escape his barbs. In July 1946 he joined over a hundred Labour MPs, several of them journalists, in asking for an inquiry into the ‘monopolistic tendencies’ in the British press. On 29 October he seconded a motion in the House by Haydn Davies calling for a Royal Commission on the concentration of ownership of newspapers. Almost ritualistically, he threw in personal abuse of key proprietors: he could not understand why the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had apologized to them for using the term ‘gutter press’.34 As it happened, Foot was pushing an open door, since ministers as powerful as Dalton and Morrison lent their support, and a Royal Commission duly went about its work in 1947–49 under the erudite chairmanship of an Oxford classics don, Sir David Ross.
When Foot gave evidence before it on 12 November 1947 he attacked newspaper chains which were taking over local journals (including in Plymouth) and the interference of proprietors with editorial freedom.35 His examples were drawn from his own experience under Beaverbrook. His most startling allegations concerned the ‘blacklists’ which Beaverbrook maintained, including the refusal to review plays by Noël Coward, concerts conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham or the film Proud Valley, which featured the left-wing black American baritone Paul Robeson. Kemsley, he said, also ran a blacklist – for a time none other than Beaverbrook himself was on it! In a second appearance before the inquiry on 18 December, he urged something like American anti-trust legislation to prevent multiple ownership, though this was opposed later by another witness, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst (the father of Foot’s former love Connie).36 Foot gave a confident performance on both occasions, and dealt firmly with a somewhat patronizing enquiry from Lady Violet Bonham Carter. But, predictably, the Royal Commission’s findings were mundane. They saw no danger in the concentration of press ownership, and proposed merely the weak option of a Press Council, run by the newspapers themselves, to consider complaints.37 Tribune denounced the report as ‘tepid and unimaginative’, and the Press Council proved a frail reed over the decades. Aneurin Bevan, who had drifted away from his pre-war connection with Beaverbrook, was to denounce Britain’s capitalist press as ‘the most prostituted in the world’.
Foot’s grievances against the Tory-run daily press continued to fester, not least with Express Newspapers, which pilloried the Labour government mercilessly. But if the Royal Commission had no major impact, his relations with Beaverbrook were certainly affected. The old press proprietor was evidently upset by Foot’s attacks after their close relationship, even though his own evidence to the Royal Commission made almost no direct reference to it. Friends proposed a reconciliation, and Beaverbrook himself wrote to Foot expressing his sadness at their estrangement: ‘The separation that has lasted too long has distressed me. The reunion will give me joy.’ Foot accepted an invitation to a dinner in honour of the old man’s seventieth birthday at the Savoy in early 1949. Invited to speak impromptu, he delighted Beaverbrook with a quotation about a venerable sage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he then revealed referred to Beelzebub. This comparison seems to have been in Foot’s mind for some time: in Tribune on 26 November 1948, ‘Beelzebub Wants the Job’ had compared Churchill to his infernal majesty.38 At the Savoy, though, the magic of friendship was restored, the presence of Jill, whom the old man much liked, being a major contributory factor. Express Newspapers did not change its anti-socialist politics, and neither did Beaverbrook. But his affectionate relationship with Foot was henceforth unshakeable. In all the political crises of the fifties, Foot remained in the closest touch with his former employer, an almost filial and purely personal connection at a time when he was in the bitterest conflict with right-wing comrades in the Labour Party. Each materially helped the other. Beaverbrook helped Tribune with money, and would provide Michael and Jill with a temporary home. Foot was the vital link in introducing Beaverbrook to one of his closest friends, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor.39 And he virtually never attacked the Beaverbrook press again.
With his parliamentary career stuck on the backbenches, and many of his left-wing crusades running into the sand, Michael Foot’s dominant interest in these post-war years lay in journalism. The distinguished labour correspondent Geoffrey Goodman, who first met him around 1950, felt that Foot was generally seen then as a pamphleteer and journalist rather than as an MP.40 His natural milieu was having a drink and a gossip in a pub opposite the law courts with the Socialist Journalists group, including Ted and Barbara Castle, Ritchie Calder and Margaret Stewart of the News Chronicle. Younger journalists like Goodman, Mervyn Jones, Ian Aitken and Dick Clements were soon to join them. Foot still wrote for the Herald twice a week. One speciality here, as always, was fierce personal satire. In 1948, on lines similar to Guilty Men, he wrote a series of character sketches of ‘People in Politics’. These turned out to be all Tories, and were nearly all unflattering – Lord Salisbury, Lord Woolton, Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, Oliver Stanley, Sir Waldron Smithers, Alan Lennox-Boyd, Oliver Lyttelton, Ralph Assheton, Harold Macmillan, Richard Law, W. S. Morrison, Lord Hinchingbrooke, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Walter Elliot successively received unsparing attention. Woolton was ridiculed for the huge profits made by the Lewis’s department store over which he presided. Of Eden, it was said that his ‘polite’ resignation from the Chamberlain government in 1938 ‘left not a ripple on the political waters’. Macmillan retained an Edwardian flourish, ‘but the ardours of Young England have gone’. Lennox-Boyd was an imperialist supporter of Franco’s fascist regime who was ‘as unchanging as Stonehenge’. Most exotic of all was the far-right member for Orpington, Sir Waldron Smithers, ‘our best preserved specimen of Neolithic man … No one would really be surprised if he turned up one day in goatskin and sandals.’ The only one of Foot’s victims to be accorded significant praise was Robert Boothby, who sailed piratically ‘under the skull and crossbones’. Foot wondered why he remained a