LITMIR.BIZ

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      Palestine was the other country to attract his attention as a newborn socialist. Ever since his visit to see Hugh there in 1934, he had been deeply absorbed by the country. He had by now met Jewish friends like Sydney Silverman in the Labour movement, while the Labour Party considered itself to have important bonds with Jewish Labour figures in Palestine like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. Indeed, there was a small Jewish movement in Britain, Poale Zion, that was affiliated to the Labour Party. Michael’s visit to see Hugh ‘Mac’ in 1934 inspired his intuitive concern, but also a sense of the complexities of the region. An instinctive attachment to Zionism was challenged by a sense of the Arab desperation which broke into open rebellion in the later 1930s. Hugh Foot himself took the strongly pro-Arab line dominant in the Foreign and Colonial Service. In the 1960s, at the UN and in Harold Wilson’s government, he was passionately pro-Palestinian. In 1967 he largely drafted UN Resolution 242, which for the first time attempted to check perceived Israeli aggressive incursions and settlements over the West Bank of the Jordan. Most of the other Foots tended to gravitate to this line also. When Hugh died in 1990, remarkably enough, Palestinian Arab flags were draped over his coffin, at the request of his son Paul.¹⁷ But in this, as in other ways, Michael was a dissenter within his dissenting family.

      By the time war was under way, his support for the Jews was a pivot of his political outlook. It became even more pronounced after the war when he, Richard Crossman, Ian Mikardo and others on the left became passionate critics of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s strongly pro-Arab policy. There were important personal factors in shaping Michael’s views: friends in the party like Teddy Kollek, later Mayor of Jerusalem and both friend and foe of Arthur Koestler; and certainly his fondness for Lily Ernst, the Jewish Yugoslav girlfriend/mistress of Lord Beaverbrook. In the war years he met Arthur Koestler, the most ardent of Zionists, who went as far as endorsing the attacks of the terrorist Stern gang on British troops. Foot’s newspaper Tribune was to employ influential Jewish, and strongly pro-Israel, contributors like Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson and its literary editor, Tosco Fyvel. But obviously the dominant element was the torment of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime, even if the dimensions of the Holocaust were not yet widely known. It made Michael Foot a strong champion of a partitioned Palestine with recognition of a Jewish state of Israel. Only much later, in the 1970s, following, among other things, fierce debate on the Palestine issue amongst the Tribune group of MPs, did he come to modify an old entrenched position, and to join others on the left to call for an Israeli withdrawal from settlements on the West Bank. The Jews, he felt, ‘had wrecked their own case’.¹⁸ In any case, a sternly nationalist Likud-led administration seemed far removed from the old comradeship in the era of Ben-Gurion and the socialism of the kibbutz.

      Otherwise the new-born socialist followed the standard position of the Liberal-Labour left, endorsing European regimes such as the Popular Front governments of France and Spain in 1936, condemning terrorist dictatorship in Germany and Italy (especially the latter, in the case of one who had many Italian friends and who revered the works of the socialist novelist Ignazio Silone). Towards the League of Nations Foot’s view was a characteristic confusion of pacifism with pacificism, collective security being bracketed with the ending of all wars. After all, the Soviet Union itself was now a member of Cripps’s ‘burglars’ union’ (as he had once called the League of Nations). Only some on the Labour left began to recognize the emptiness of their diagnosis, individual MPs like Hugh Dalton and especially the TUC, concerned for the fate of trade union comrades under Hitler and Mussolini.

      One country, however, was never close to Michael Foot’s world view – the Soviet Union. His growing interest in the Marxist interpretation of history never translated into sympathy for Russia under Stalin. He did not share the simple-minded certainties of contemporary young Cambridge intellectuals like Blunt, Burgess and Maclean. It is utterly ironic that in the 1990s disaffected and unreliable informants of MI 5 such as Oleg Gordievsky began to spread rumours that Foot (or ‘Agent Boot’) had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’. right-wingers in the security service who had let genuine spies such as Kim Philby slip through the net actually gave them some credence. On the contrary, Foot rejected with scorn the totally uncritical enthusiasm for Russia shown by the Webbs or Bernard Shaw. He praised H. G. Wells for having a famous dialogue with Stalin in 1934 but in no way being taken in by him. It was a cause of a breach with Cripps that his old icon proved so undiscriminating in his allies in the Unity Front, seeking common cause with the Communists in the later thirties. Foot was quick to respond to news of Stalin’s purges in 1937–38; least of all those on the democratic socialist left could he be accused of fellow-travelling. The simple-minded journalistic claims at the time of l’affaire Blunt that all intelligent young people inevitably migrated towards Communism as the strongest resistance to fascism in the thirties have little substance. A broad-church Labour Party was the invariable destination of almost all of them, even in the pro-Russia climate of the later stages of the war. Like most of his fellow Bevanites and Tribunites, Michael Foot was a redoubtable voice of anti-Communism. Nor did he ever accord to the Russian Revolution of 1917 the special place in his historical affections that was claimed by the events in France in 1789.

      By the late summer of 1935, for all the seductive appeal of Liverpool socialism, Michael Foot was restless. He was thoroughly bored in his job with the Blue Funnel Line. His thoughts turned again to writing a biography of Charles James Fox, and publishers were approached about this for a ‘Brief Lives’ series. Another historical subject that appealed to him was English radicals during the time of the French Revolution, a special place being accorded to Tom Paine. He did discuss the possibility of a book on this theme with Harold Laski, whom he heard lecture at the LSE and who was an inspirational force for so many young socialists in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth. But nothing came of it, and it was politics which seemed to beckon more powerfully. The Labour Party had been making some headway since the dark days of 1931, winning famous by-elections such as that in East Fulham in 1933. Foot himself was active in a by-election in the Wavertree division of Liverpool in February 1935. Here J. J. Cleary won the seat for Labour for the first time, after the Conservative vote had been badly split by an independent candidature from Randolph Churchill, standing on behalf of his father’s distinctly illiberal views on India. Pacifist-inclined though he was, Foot recognized the departure of George Lansbury as Labour leader after the 1935 party conference as inevitable. Who precisely he would have favoured as Lansbury’s successor is unclear. He had no trust in Herbert Morrison, and regarded Attlee as taciturn and colourless. On balance, perhaps, he tended to favour that patriotic (if drunken) Freemason Arthur Greenwood, father of his student friend Tony.

      Suddenly in October, right on cue after successful Royal Jubilee celebrations which the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, orchestrated with characteristic deftness, a general election was called. Michael Foot suddenly decided that he wished to be part of it. He travelled down to Labour’s headquarters in Transport House to see the party’s General Secretary, Jim Middleton (whose wife Lucy was to be a fellow Plymouth MP in 1945), and asked if there were any vacancies for Labour candidates. Given a list of long-shot constituencies with no record of Labour strength at all, Michael Foot, for no clear reason, selected Monmouth in south Wales. It had never been a seat that Labour expected to capture, although in a by-election in 1934 their candidate had won 35 per cent of the vote. That evening he took a train down to Monmouthshire, and was seen by the local agent Tom Powell and a handful of local officials. On the last day of October he was formally adopted as Labour candidate at a meeting chaired by Ivor Harries, President of the Monmouth division Labour Party. Polling day was barely a fortnight away. It was a disgracefully short period of campaigning and a forlorn hope for Labour, in a constituency the new candidate had never previously visited or even seen. Still, Michael Foot, at the age of twenty-two, was into serious politics for the first time.¹⁹

      Monmouth was the most Tory seat in Wales. Indeed, English in speech, squirearchical in tradition, it was hardly a Welsh seat at all. It lay in what the literary theorist Raymond Williams, a native, was to call ‘border country’. It was mostly an anglicized enclave along the Welsh marches, far more similar to rural Herefordshire or Worcestershire than to the radical or socialist traditions of Wales. Its outlook bore little

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