Leaders: Michael Foot 1980-83

Michael Foot (1913- )

In his essay 'Mind and Motive', William Hazlitt wrote: 'Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar; and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been "hurt by the archers", nor has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them.' There is surely no better description of the virtues of Michael Foot, Hazlitt's most famous modern disciple. To stand by the guiding star of your youth in an age of political opportunism and cynicism is not an easy task yet Foot continues to do so with style, intelligence and wit. How many other 85 year olds would produce a book as timely as Dr Strangelove, I Presume, his critique of nuclear proliferation in south east Asia. But then Michael Foot is no ordinary politician. Since his political debut as Labour candidate for Monmouth in the 1935 election he has dazzled us with the greatest range of skills and talents of any 20th century politician. No one can match his brilliance as an essayist, political journalist, biographer, orator and parliamentarian. Although genius is an adjective whose value has cheapened in modern times, due to the cult of media personality, it can most definitely be applied to Michael Foot.

Michael Foot's significance to the history of the Labour Party is three-fold: firstly he played a leading part in the battle for the soul of the party that was fought between the supporters of Aneurin Bevan and Hugh Gaitskell during the fifties; secondly he acted as the left's conscience inside and outside parliament under the 1964-1970 Labour Government; and finally he led the party during a period when it was utterly unleadable. Throughout his leadership he was vilified in the most grotesque manner by the media and the Conservative Party yet he still managed to maintain his decency, integrity and optimism. To its shame the Labour Party has never properly acknowledged the sacrifice that Michael Foot made between 1980 and 1983; there is no doubt that history will treat him more kindly.

Michael Foot was born on 23 July 1913 at 1 Lipson Terrace in Plymouth. His parents were both Liberal dissenters and from a young age he was encouraged to take an interest in political matters. Although afflicted with eczema and asthma he excelled in history and English Literature at Leighton Park School, Reading. He also succeeded at sports, showing promise in rugby, cricket and soccer. In the summer of 1931 he successfully sat for a history exhibition to Oxford University and that autumn he took up his place at Wadham College where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. During his time at Oxford he remained a Liberal and was President of the Liberal Club - but he was showing signs that he was ready to switch allegiance to the Labour Party.

After university Foot took a job in Liverpool working for Blue Funnel Line, a shipping company. He stayed in Liverpool for nine months but spent more time at work trying to write a biography of Charles James Fox than advancing his career. His spell in Liverpool was more significant for the fact that it was there that he switched from the Liberal Party to the Labour Party - pinpointing his conversion to reading the work of Hazlitt.

When Stanley Baldwin decided to call a general election in November 1935, Foot stood as candidate for Monmouth at the tender age of 22 in the full knowledge that he had no hope of winning the seat. His election speeches, however, had a rhetorical flourish which essayed the language of new Labour by fifty years: 'I want to see a government in this country which will serve the interests of the deserving many, and not those of the wealthy few.'

Following the election he embarked on his career as a journalist. A brief spell under Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman paved the way for a staff job on Tribune (then called The Tribune) when it was launched in January 1937.But a year later he resigned in protest at the sacking of the magazine's editor, William Mellor. However, it was in his next job that he made his journalistic reputation. On Aneurin Bevan's recommendation Lord Beaverbrook took Foot on as an Evening Standard feature writer. Though Beaverbrook was seen as a dangerous and reactionary figure by the left, Foot warmed to his personality and came to regard him as a second father. From writing features Foot moved on to leader writer and eventually became editor in 1942. It was during his five years at the Standard that he wrote (and co-wrote) four highly popular polemics: Armistice 1918-1939, Guilty Men, The Trial of Mussolini and Brendan and Beverley. All four contained hallmarks of Foot's later speaking and writing style: deadly invective, satirical wit and a wide reading of English literature.

In the 1945 general election Foot was elected member for Plymouth, Devonport. Whilst his great friend Aneurin Bevan began to build the National Health Service, Foot played a leading part in the Keep Left Group of Labour MPs and continued his journalistic career - mainly in the pages of Tribune. Bevan's resignation (with John Freeman and Harold Wilson) over charges for dental treatment and spectacles in the April 1951 Budget triggered the next most significant phase in Foot's Labour Party career. In Tribune, Foot denounced the measures in forthright terms: 'There is no case whatever for this proposal on the grounds of merit... a fundamental blow at the essential principle of the Health Service... Mr Gaitskell has delivered a frontal attack on the Health Service.' This style of attack continued throughout the fifties as the Bevanites and Gaitskellites fought over the direction of the Labour Party. It was fundamentally a clash of political styles rather than policy programmes: in one corner the emotional intensity and verbal imagination of Bevan and in the other corner the empiricism and cool rationality of Gaitskell.

Foot lost his seat in the general election of May 1955 and turned to writing, producing his most significant work to date, The Pen and the Sword, an account of Jonathan Swift's battle against the Duke of Marlborough during 1710-11. At the same time he was caught up in a battle of his own: the battle against the British H-bomb, which was tested on Christmas Island during the summer of 1957. That autumn the Labour Party gathered for its annual conference in Brighton deeply divided over the bomb issue. Despite their closeness Foot was in no way prepared for Bevan's devastating denunciation of the left's unilateralist stance. The 'naked into the conference chamber' speech caused a deep rupture between the two men that was only partially healed in the months before Bevan's death.

At the 1959 general election Foot was again defeated at Devonport and considered retiring from frontline politics to concentrate on journalism and writing. However, Aneurin Bevan's death in July 1960 gave him the opportunity to return to the Commons and he duly did so as member for Bevan's constituency, Ebbw Vale, which he would represent for the remainder of his parliamentary career.

During the sixties Foot emerged from Bevan's shadow to become leader of the left, fighting a number of issues that made him unpopular with the Labour leadership and precluded his participation in Harold Wilson's 1964-1970 government. He was the left's most effective critic on nuclear disarmament, prices and incomes policy, the Vietnam War, immigration policy and the trade union reforms contained in the 1969 White Paper In Place of Strife. He found time too for the first volume of his biography of Aneurin Bevan, published in 1962 (the second volume being published in 1973). William Rees-Mogg described the first volume as 'One of the great political biographies of this century.'

In 1968 he formed an unlikely alliance with Enoch Powell to scupper Richard Crossman's Bill to reform the House of Lords. Foot wanted outright abolition of the Lords whilst Powell wanted to preserve the status quo and together they used their considerable parliamentary wiles to block the legislation. Many Parliamentary observers believe that Foot was at the peak of his oratorical powers during the debates on the Bill. He was certainly at his most scathing of the Conservatives: 'Look at them, these unlikely novices for a new Trappist Order, these bashful tiptoeing ghosts, these pale effigies of what were once sentient palpable human specimens, these unlarynxed wraiths, these ectoplasmic apparitions, these sphinx-like sentinels at our debates - why are they here ?'

It was to everyone's great surprise when Foot, having turned down the offer of office during 1964-70, secured election to the Shadow Cabinet in July 1970, accepting a position on Labour's frontbench as spokesman on Fuel and Power. Surely Foot could not control his radical instincts within the confines of collective shadow cabinet responsibility ? Yet he did, becoming Shadow Leader of the House of Commons in January 1972 and securing reelection to the Shadow Cabinet every year until Labour's return to government in 1974, when like Aneurin Bevan, he proved to be an excellent administrator as Employment Secretary. At the Department of Employment he successfully framed the legislation that established ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) and produced the Social Contract which played a major part in helping to control inflation until the breakdown of the Government's relationship with the unions in the autumn of 1978. He played a leading role in the 'Vote No' campaign during the 1975 EEC Referendum, again in partnership with Enoch Powell, and Labour ministers including Peter Shore, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn.

Following Wilson's resignation in March 1976, Foot stood against Benn, Tony Crosland, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Jim Callaghan for the Labour leadership. He lost in the third round to Callaghan by 39 votes and in April 1976 became Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons. In October 1976, he defeated Shirley Williams in straight fight by 166 votes to 128 to become Labour's Deputy Leader, a post that had eluded him on three previous occasions. In July 1970 and November 1971 he had been beaten by Roy Jenkins, first by 133 votes to 67 (with Fred Peart limping in third with 48) and second by 140 to 126, after Tony Benn's'46 votes had transferred to Foot o the second ballot. In April 1972 he had been beaten by Ted Short, by 145 votes to 116, Tony Crosland's 61 votes splitting fairly evenly on second ballot. With Labour having lost its parliamentary majority by the spring of 1977, Foot had to use his considerable parliamentary skills to prevent government defeats whilst attempting to push through major bills such as the ones to establish devolution in Scotland and Wales. Eventually a pact was formed with the Liberals which kept Labour in power until the spring of 1979 when it faced a vote of no confidence in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Scottish and Welsh devolution referendums. During that debate Foot produced one of his most memorable turns and was at his most mocking for both Margaret Thatcher and David Steel whose Liberal Party were voting with the Conservatives against the Government. Of Steel he famously said 'He has gone from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever!'

Foot persuaded Jim Callaghan to remain leader of the Labour Party after the general election defeat of May 1979. But Callaghan was tired of the faction fighting which by then had gripped the party and resigned as leader shortly after the 1980 Blackpool conference. Initially Foot was reluctant to stand for the leadership and was intending to support Peter Shore. However, a number of Labour MPs and trade unionists (led by Clive Jenkins, the ASTMS leader) persuaded Foot to change his mind on the basis that only he could unite the party. He eventually defeated Denis Healey - in the last Labour leadership contest to be decided solely by the parliamentary party - by 139 votes to 129 in the second round of the ballot.

The period of his Labour leadership was not the happiest time for Foot. He had to contend with a sizable chunk of his party splitting off to form the Social Democratic Party in 1981; Tony Benn's challenge to Denis Healey for the Deputy Leadership of the party; the infiltration of the party's grassroots by the Trotskyist Militant Tendency; and constant attacks in the media on his age, appearance and speaking style.

Britain's victory in the Falklands War entrenched Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and the 1983 general election was always going to be a difficult one for Labour to win, irrespective of the policies on which the party would be fighting on. The strength of the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the tabloid media's vitriol against the Labour Party were also decisive factors in the 1983 election. That the party collapsed to its worst performance since 1935 shocked everyone and Foot took full responsibility for the defeat with customary honesty and grace: 'I understand the scale of the defeat which we suffered at the general election... I am deeply ashamed that we should have allowed the fortunes of our country and the fortunes of the people who look to us for protection most... to sink to such a low ebb.' Following his resignation as party leader Foot continued as member for Ebbw Vale (later renamed Blaenau Gwent) until the 1992 general election. In retirement he has concentrated on writing and astonishingly for a man in his eighties he has written major biographies of Byron and H.G. Wells. Michael Foot continues to live happily in the dream of his own existence. He married filmmaker Jill Craigie in 1949 who died in XXX. His publications include: Armistice 1918-1939 (1940); Guilty Men (1940); The Trial of Mussolini (1943); Brendan and Beverley (1943); The Pen and the Sword (1957); Guilty Men 1957 (1957); Aneurin Bevan (Volume One: 1962, Volume Two: 1973); Harold Wilson (1964); Debts of Honour (1980); Another Heart and Other Pulses (1984); Loyalists and Loners (1986); The Politics of Paradise (1988); HG: The History of Mr Wells (1995); Dr Strangelove I Presume (1999). A biography, Michael Foot, by Mervyn Jones was published in 1994.