Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
Invariably Foot’s columns for Percy Cudlipp in the Herald were Labour orthodox in tone, and seldom rocked the boat. When in 1949 his column turned to a kind of ‘Any Questions’ format, his responses were mild enough. Some were of later interest. Thus on 21 January 1949 he committed himself to the view that ‘The Labour Party does not believe in unilateral disarmament. It wants the other countries to agree to disarm but until that agreement is reached … it believes in maintaining adequate defence forces.’42 Of course he was talking here of conventional forces, not the prospect of nuclear weapons. Still, later on a very different note was struck.
But it was in the columns of Tribune that Foot’s talents expressed themselves most fully. He had been linked with the paper anew, through Bevan, when he left the Standard and joined the Tribune editorial board in 1945. He also became a director. The following year he shared the editorial role with Jon Kimche, but Kimche, after several rows with the board, was eventually dismissed following an unauthorized visit to Palestine. Foot then worked with Evelyn Anderson, a German Social Democrat, as co-editor. She was a woman of ability, but seemed obsessed with Russian perfidy in eastern Europe. With her limited understanding of the British Labour movement, she departed in 1948. Foot then became the senior editor himself, in partnership with Jennie Lee.43 Tribune now became a more important component of the British weekly political press, and Foot’s editorial role added to the mystique that had surrounded him since Guilty Men. Tribune had always been a struggling publication. It had no money, and sales, at perhaps ten thousand copies (so far as the facts could be uncovered), were disappointing under both Kimche and Anderson. What it did have was Michael, charismatic and irreplaceable. From his paper-strewn office at 222 The Strand, he did everything on the newspaper. Keir Hardie had been similarly omnicompetent when he founded and edited the old ILP newspaper, the Labour Leader, in 1894. He not only wrote major articles on long, stuffy train journeys, but also the women’s column under the name of ‘Lily Bell’ and even children’s stories – ‘Donald the Pit Pony’, for instance.44 Foot, also an MP, was more active still. His business manager, Peggy Duff, called him, affectionately enough, ‘the great panjandrum, the Beaverbrook of Tribune’.45 With his Express Newspapers background, he took a close interest in the technicalities of typesetting. He was also much involved in the strategy of marketing and distribution, an important matter, because large bookshop chains like W. H. Smith refused to sell so left-wing a publication. Robert Edwards gives a memorable portrait of Foot at that time, suffering from insomnia and asthma, scratching his blistered wrists, yawning and smoking almost simultaneously. Enveloped in the debris and the stench of up to seventy daily Woodbines, he seemed almost tormented, older than his thirty-odd years.46 Yet he was also inspirational to all who worked with him.
Most crucial of all, he was indefatigable in raising money, including from his own somewhat limited resources. He could not now turn to senior colleagues like Cripps, Bevan or George Strauss, because they were all Cabinet ministers. He got help from sympathetic capitalists, from Jack Hilton, from the Sieffs of Marks & Spencer (for his staunch support for Israel), from the accountant and Labour MP John Diamond, and increasingly from Howard Samuel, property developer and head of the publishing firm MacGibbon & Kee.
He spread his net more widely still. In the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case resulting from a fierce attack on the press baron Lord Kemsley in 1950, not only Tribune but its directors personally, including Foot and Jennie Lee, were threatened with bankruptcy. This followed the issue of Tribune published on 2 March 1950, which fiercely attacked the Evening Standard’s editor Herbert Gunn for scandalously suggesting a link between Klaus Emil Fuchs, the atomic bomb spy, and the Minister of Food John Strachey, a former Communist. Foot headed the article ‘Lower than Kemsley’, an echo of Bevan’s ‘lower than vermin’ attack on the Tories in 1948 and directed against the owner of the Daily Mail, a particular bête noire of Foot’s. Tribune, among other insults, spoke of journalists ‘watching without shame or protest the prostitution of their trade’. But he would find essential help of £3,000 in fighting the case from Lord Beaverbrook (the owner of the Standard, of course), due in large measure to the personal influence of Jill with his old boss. Even so, it was a financial mercy that in 1952 Foot and Tribune eventually won the day in the House of Lords.47
Foot took his responsibility for what was a small, struggling newspaper very seriously. He venerated the craft of political journalism: Dean Swift, the nemesis of the Duke of Marlborough in 1711, was a model from the past here. In the more recent tradition of Labour journalism he had two particular inspirations. One was Robert Blatchford of the Clarion (and the Clarion vans which sold it), always a hero despite his fiercely pro-war nationalism both during the Boer War and in August 1914. Foot not only revered him as an editor and writer, but also honoured him in his lesser-known role as a literary critic. The other was George Lansbury’s brilliant Daily Herald in its first incarnation before 1914, which featured some of the most celebrated of writers, including Shaw, Wells and Hilaire Belloc, along with the matchless cartoons of the Australian Will Dyson. Foot had a special admiration for Lansbury’s achievements at the Herald, where he acted at one time both as chairman of the board of directors and as editor, given that he had no training as a journalist at all. At the present time, Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman was a yardstick – but also a competitor. Like Blatchford at the Clarion, Foot wanted Tribune to be well-written, punchy in style, and to a degree fun to read. He hoped to emulate the back half of the New Statesman, directed by its brilliant literary editor V. S. Pritchett. So he had on his staff some highly literate and intellectual colleagues. A star associate was George Orwell, who served as literary editor for a while and wrote a famously anarchic column, ‘As I Please’, for some time after the war, along with many other miscellaneous columns and reviews. There were also Tosco Fyvel, Orwell’s successor as literary editor, and the drama critic Kenneth Bruce Bain, who wrote under the name of Richard Findlater. Soon talented young political journalists were to come in, Robert Edwards and later an industrial relations specialist, Ian Aitken. Another young recruit, who joined the newspaper as a secretary after the 1950 election, was a Cambridge graduate, Elizabeth Thomas. At first she found it difficult to establish a settled relationship with Foot, who seemed shy and nervy, while his incessant smoking was off-putting. But she persevered, worked closely with him on all issues, rose to become literary editor of Tribune some years later, and began a close friendship that lasted well over half a century.48 This unusual, gifted man, often distant in manner, with an awkward tendency to call women, even Jill, ‘my dear child’, had also a charm and a cultural dynamism which Elizabeth found magnetic. Women frequently did.
In 1948 and 1949 Tribune under Foot’s editorship kept up its robust commentary on domestic issues. But in general, with an election approaching, it was supportive of the government in its editorial comment. This aroused some anger among MPs of the further left. Tom Braddock accused the journal of currying favour with those in high places (unspecified), while Konni Zilliacus attacked it, only to be denounced for his ‘host of delusions’ in return.49 Tribune’s columns featured several articles by Roy Jenkins, a young MP elected in a by-election for Southwark in 1948, praising the government’s economic performance, especially the buoyancy of exports to dollar areas (a yearly rate of £234 million for 1948 was quoted, as against £164 million in 1947). When Cripps was forced to devalue the pound in September 1949, Foot in Tribune staunchly defended the decision as a progressive alternative to Tory policies of wage-cutting, although he acknowledged that its success depended on ‘the understanding and self-discipline’ of the workers. Evidently there were divided counsels on the paper’s editorial board here, since Ian Mikardo expressed doubts on devaluing the pound unless it was accompanied by other policies, notably severe cuts in military expenditure.