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speeches and articles show the centrality of international issues in underlining his liberalism, but it went to the core of his being. In later years, Barbara Castle would note that referring to his ‘Why I am a Liberal’ article could annoy Michael Foot and move him on to other subjects.³⁸

      However, it can scarcely be doubted that essential aspects of his early student beliefs stayed with him thereafter, even after his transformation to left-wing socialism. He always remained a strong champion of human rights, active in the National Council for Civil Liberties or in campaigns against censorship; even more strongly was he the Whiggish champion of parliamentary liberties. His jousting with Tony Benn in the early 1980s testified to his unshakeable commitment to the parliamentary route to socialism. Shirley Williams, a Cabinet colleague in the later 1970s, always saw Foot as a man who was never a statist nor a natural centralizer, a natural champion of devolution and popular participation, in some sense always a Liberal.³⁹ It was a view shared, more improbably, by Barbara Castle, who confided in her diaries her irritation with the basic rationalist Liberalism of ‘the collective Foot type’.⁴⁰ To her he was a kind of conformist amongst the nonconformists.

      The centrality of international issues in underpinning Michael’s Liberalism emerged even more strongly in his activities in the Oxford Union. From his first performances in debates in the autumn of 1931 he showed himself to have star quality, and to be a quite outstanding debater even in a House of remarkably talented young men. His speeches were lively and well spiced with humour. In a debate in May 1933 on a motion ‘That this House would prefer Fascism to Socialism’, the President, the future Labour minister Anthony Greenwood, recorded that Foot ‘made a delightful speech which had nothing at all to do with the motion’. He cheerfully moved a frivolous end-of-term motion in December 1932 that ‘This House would hang up its Christmas stocking’. The following summer he ridiculed a government of which its Prime Minister ‘would never rest until German measles was called the pox Britannica’.⁴¹

      But his ultimate purposes were always deadly serious, and he could stir heart, mind and soul as very few speakers could. Foot indeed, Liberal as he was, is a central exhibit in the left-wing pacifism widely prevalent in the Oxford of the time. Frank Hardie, a famous President of the Union, wrote later of the sea-change in the attitudes of speakers in debates after the crisis of 1931. A serious tone replaced the flippancy of the recent past. The significance of the famous motion of 9 February 1933 ‘That this House would not fight for King and Country’ (in which Foot, perhaps surprisingly, did not speak, though he certainly voted for it) may have been exaggerated by Churchill and others as a symbol of the feebleness of the public mood at the time, but it certainly reflected important currents amongst the undergraduate population. Foot himself wrote in the Cherwell in October 1933 of how ‘Oxford politics in the past few years have taken a decidedly radical turn’.⁴² The new mood of undergraduates was shown by an anti-war demonstration alongside the Martyrs’ Memorial on Armistice Day in November 1932, which caused much controversy. There were important new left-wing clubs formed, notably the far-left October Club and the Anti-War Committee, whose members came into conflict with the university proctors for its verbal attacks on the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps.⁴³ Attempts at censorship like Randolph Churchill’s ill-judged motion at the Union later on, which tried to expunge the ‘King and Country’ vote from the record, provoked violent reaction. Many of the movers and shakers amongst undergraduates were associated with radical, anti-war positions.

      Several of them became close friends of Michael Foot. Among them were men of high talent (women were marginalized in a highly chauvinist university at that time). Frank Hardie, President of the Union in Hilary term 1933 during the King and Country debate, was a charismatic President of the University Labour Club. Anthony Greenwood, President of the Union in Trinity term 1933 and a handsome man popular with women undergraduates, saw the pro-Communist October Club founded in his rooms in Balliol – and later suppressed by the proctors. Paul Reilly of Hertford College, the son of a famous architect, was another young man of the far left, and a long-term friend of Michael Foot. He was later to be an important figure in industrial design and director of the Design Council. Foot’s most important close friendship was with John Cripps of Balliol College. He was a patrician socialist with whom Foot shared a house in his final year at Oxford and with whom he was to visit America on a debating tour in 1934, and who was to become a major figure in countryside matters. Unlike his friends Reilly and Foot, he gained a first in the Schools. It was through John’s father, Sir Stafford Cripps, an outspoken MP and voice of far-left views after the collapse of the Labour government (in which he had served as Solicitor-General) in 1931, that Michael Foot was to secure his first important entrée into the Labour Party.

      For Michael the Union, as the focus of Oxford social and political life, was the institution to conquer, and he made astonishingly swift progress. Dingle and John had both been Presidents in the twenties, and as it happened both spoke in Union debates in the Trinity term of 1932. A speech of John’s was described as ‘stupendous’ in the Oxford Magazine.⁴⁴ As for Michael, his brand of revivalist Liberal oratory swept opponents aside. Elected early on to the Library Committee, he was elected Treasurer for Hilary term 1932, then became Librarian, and in June 1933 defeated David Graham, ex-Librarian, in winning the presidency by a large majority. Anthony Greenwood graciously wrote a balanced and delicate appraisal of his election: ‘He would do well to pay a little more attention to the serious parts of his speeches. At present he seldom really deals with the subject. But it was a great oratorical effort and fully justified the result of the polling. I hope that Mr Foot will have a very happy term in the chair which has become almost a monopoly of his family.’ Foot’s election brought much joy. Greenwood wrote privately to congratulate him: ‘I thought your speech last Thursday was first rate, as it was in the Eights Week debate.’⁴⁵ His mother Eva wrote with almost a sense of inevitability: ‘Do you think Graham really thought of getting it?’ Isaac combined paternal warmth with practicality:

      The Foot colours have been kept flying high. I send you a cheque for ten pounds and made a further pull in the overdraft. If invested in the Abbey Road it will be worth about eighty pounds at the age of ninety. No swollen head, my lad.⁴⁶

      In the event, Michael’s term as President passed by satisfactorily, though inevitably silently on his part. He returned to debating the following term in loud support of a motion that ‘the presence of four hundred and seventy Conservatives in the House is a national disaster’. Towards Tories, Foot observed, he had ‘an inflexible loathing’.

      His experiences in the Oxford Union profoundly shaped Foot’s political image. The Union nurtured his particular style of oratory, heavily sarcastic towards opponents, the swift marshalling of key points of an argument, the deliberate focus on the opposition’s strongest point before destroying it, the inexorable advance towards an unanswerable conclusion. Reinforced by ample quotations from historical and literary eminences, Foot’s speeches were hard to rebut. From this time on he was to become celebrated as an incomparable revivalist stump speaker. Equally, the sometimes more measured approach necessary in House of Commons debates, or in television interviews, was much harder to capture. But his unique debating style, with a distinctive rhythm and cadences, and unorthodox changes of emphasis that made him hard to interrupt, was central to his political fame.

      The dominant theme of his speeches at the time was always resistance to war. Foot is a good example of the rebellion of the young in the later twenties and earlier thirties, responding eagerly to anti-war works like All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That, using images that exposed ‘merchants of death’, denouncing the ‘system of Versailles’ and calling for a new international order with open covenants openly arrived at. One book on the wartime experience that made a particularly deep impression on him was the poet Edmund

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