Michael Foot—the intellectual in politics

Contemporary Review, Spring, 2008 by George Wedd

Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan. HarperCollins. [pounds sterling]25.00. xix + 568 pages. ISBN 978-0-00-717826-1.

One wonders what the future of the heavyweight biography will be, especially one dealing with someone who, although Party Leader for three years, never quite reached the summit. Is Michael Foot worth five hundred carefully-researched and well-written pages? As elections loom, campaign biographies of a couple of hundred pages seem quite as much as the unfolding tapestry of events calls for. Perhaps such biographies belong to a literary form whose day is passing, and will go the way of the 'imaginary conversations' that were so popular a couple of generations ago. In the meantime, this is a pretty fair specimen of the genre. Kenneth Morgan is a competent, professional historian and writer as well as having been a university vice-chancellor and a Labour member of the House of Lords. He makes no secret of his loyalties and observes (quoting from Mr Foot himself) that 'no pretence is made at impartiality'. Anyone who wants a comprehensive history which is fairer to all sides must look elsewhere.

Lord Morgan is good on Mr Foot's early years; in fact, he might have written a more interesting book if he had taken the whole family as a group subject, and given space to Dingle, who also became a Minister, and Hugh, who became a life peer and colonial administrator. Lord Morgan might also have told us where the family's money came from: there is mention only of the solicitors' business, but Plymouth was a small and not very prosperous city with a limited hinterland. Given the Foot family's opinions (radical Dissenting) one doesn't suppose they could have got any of the Admiralty or Church business. There were appearances and big houses to keep up, and five boys to put through school (one supposes the paterfamilias, Isaac, saved on the girls--who don't get much of a look-in). The boys were all sworn to temperance until manhood, and one isn't surprised. They were a driven and a driving family: nowadays, to bring up five sons without a single police court appearance or comparable mishap among the lot of them would be remarkable, but not so a century ago.

Michael Foot was of course a crusading journalist and an emotional socialist, and Lord Morgan is very balanced concerning both his strengths and his weaknesses. Mr Foot was charming and 'clubbable', and the proof of that is his long and warm association with--of all people--Lord Beaverbrook. He was also bookish and erudite, and wrote beautifully. After Churchill he was the only political man of whom that could be said. His tastes were a little off-beam--Swift, Hazlitt and H.G. Wells, for example--but none the worse for that, and any book by Michael Foot is worth pulling off the shelves. He first came to national attention, anonymously, as one-third of 'Cato', the name under which Guilty Men was published in 1940. It made a terrific impact, even far away from London. As this reviewer recalls, it was hopelessly unfair; all the 'guilty' were men on the Right who had been soft on Hitler; but memory may be weak here. What one does recall is that in 1942, Baldwin was advised not to come to London because this book had excited so much feeling against him that his safety could not be guaranteed.

It says a lot for Michael Foot's character that as a known unilateralist and very shaky on the Services generally, he was elected MP for a Plymouth seat three times over, before moving to Ebbw Vale as successor to Nye Bevan. He was, of course, a Minister in the Wilson-Callaghan Government, where he was an idiosyncratic administrator, to say the least. Having seen trades union leaders without a civil service note-taker, he would give a garbled and unreliable account of what had taken place, while the unionists seized their advantage. Lord Morgan is far too summary in his description of the 'winter of discontent' in 1978-79 and the Government's attempts to do deals with the unions to protect essential services as the country slid very near to disaster. He is, however, very fair in his assessment of Mr Foot's stint as party leader. His role was to let a period of transition begin, after 'the longest suicide note in history' in 1983, and he simply convinced a lot of people that Plato's idea of a philosopher-king left something to be desired.