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href="#litres_trial_promo">³⁰ Certainly it had no mass appeal, and membership was at best a couple of thousand. Its programme consisted of the immediate abolition of capitalism at home, with mass nationalization and the extinction of the rich. It opposed rearmament, called for a general strike against war, and declared socialism to be the remedy for imperialistic rivalries between the great powers. Even at the time, it seemed a programme of remarkable emptiness. The dream of a general strike by workers of all countries had been shown to be a total chimera in August 1914. Nevertheless it was, characteristically, to this fringe movement of intellectuals rather than to the mainstream party that the young Foot now devoted his energies, basing himself on the militant London Area Committee of the League. In 1936 much of his time was taken up with propaganda work, making tub-thumping speeches on socialism in our time on street corners in places like Mornington Crescent and Camden Town in north London, and sometimes on Hampstead Heath. His close friend Barbara Castle has left a striking picture of him at this period – witty, learned and articulate, his spectacles giving him a diffident and myopic air which young women might find attractive, a general air of casualness, perhaps outright scruffiness in his dress, whirling his arms around theatrically in high passion.³¹ More courageously, he often attended Mosleyite fascist meetings, engaging in loud heckling with an almost foolhardy recklessness, but getting away unscathed – unlike Frank Pakenham, the future Lord Longford, who was severely beaten up and hospitalized after a blackshirt meeting in Oxford town hall.

      The Socialist League had some hopes of progress in 1936. Like the Bennites decades later, its adherents felt that Labour’s ability to win no more than 154 seats at the previous year’s general election showed the need for a far more radical, even revolutionary, approach. It based itself on a variety of fragments – former members of the ILP, which had disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932, intellectuals like William Mellor, linked with G. D. H. Cole in his SSIP (Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda), some like D. N. Pritt who were effectively Communists under another name. It was a melange of the English (or Anglo-Scottish) far left. The election of Popular Front governments in France and Spain, with Communist backing, in the summer of 1936, gave the movement some encouragement. But it remained a fringe movement always: Ben Pimlott has cited evidence to show that eight ‘mass demonstrations’ attracted only twelve thousand supporters in total, and that the League’s almost one hundred local committees were extremely small, save perhaps for Foot’s London Area Committee.³² A fatal weakness was the total absence of any trade union base: it was seen as a fringe body of middle-class suburban intellectuals. In 1937 it embarked on a new initiative, the Unity Campaign, which aimed to forge an alliance with the Communists: Stafford Cripps and Harry Pollitt spoke from the same platform. Pollitt indeed, uniquely amongst British Communists, was to become someone Foot particularly admired from that time onwards. A new newspaper was created on 1 January 1937, under the powerful editorship of William Mellor – this was Tribune, of which very much more anon, to which Foot was a founding contributor.

      But the League’s campaign soon plunged into fatal difficulties. Internally there was endless ideological and tactical bickering between myriad socialist splinter groups. More seriously, externally the Labour Party’s NEC inevitably reacted strongly to any kind of formal link with the Communists, whose approaches it had always firmly rebuffed. Leading figures like Morrison and Bevin spoke out aggressively against the League. On 24 March Labour’s NEC declared that all members of the League would be expelled. Less than two months later, on 17 May, the League held a conference at Leicester in which anguished debate occurred: H. N. Brailsford, a veteran socialist intellectual and one of Foot’s heroes, wrote that he wished to resign from the League. The decision was taken to disband the Socialist League, and it never re-emerged. Stafford Cripps pursued his crusade for a Unity Front of all on the left on his own, drawing on his own immense funds acquired as a celebrated lawyer, and became a fringe figure, destined in 1939 to be expelled from the Labour Party himself.

      Foot’s involvement in the Socialist League was therefore quixotic and fruitless. But it left an important personal legacy in the important friends the lonely young bachelor now acquired. It was in the League that he became close to Krishna Menon, unwell for much of the time but soon to become a local councillor in St Pancras. Another colleague was the Daily Mirror journalist and future MP Garry Allighan, later defended by Foot in 1947 when he was harshly expelled by the House of Commons for breach of parliamentary privilege. But much his most important new friend, who filled personal as well as political needs, was the fiery and distinctly attractive red-haired Bradford girl Barbara Betts, with whom he campaigned for the League throughout London. She had been engaged in left-wing politics since graduating from St Hilda’s in Oxford, and was now deeply involved in a passionate affair with William Mellor, a leading League intellectual and also a married man.³³ But she and Michael Foot took to each other at once. She found his air of intellectual diffidence combined with political passion deeply attractive. Foot was manifestly in love with her, while understanding and respecting her relationship with Mellor. They spent much time in each other’s company, and when Barbara in the course of 1936 rented a new flat in Coram Street, Bloomsbury, Michael was a frequent visitor for whom she cooked many meals. Sometimes they found the money to have dinner together at Chez Victor in Soho. They also paid joint visits to see Cripps in Filkins.

      At this time the relationship seems to have been a fairly equal one, with perhaps Foot the more important intellectual force, but Barbara far from docile. Foot, not normally an enthusiast for political philosophy, had recently discovered Marx’s socialist writings. He spent many evenings in Barbara’s attic flat, sometimes on the roof outside, reading passages from Das Kapital to her and discussing their importance, thereby deflecting her from perhaps the more congenial task of reading Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. More alarmingly, he gave her driving lessons in his new car. Eventually, as he gaily commented at Barbara’s memorial service in 2002, his car became a write-off, while Barbara went on to become Minister of Transport. Despite hints from Foot to the contrary in later life and her own lifelong flirtatious style, Barbara insisted that there was never any sexual dimension to their friendship at all.³⁴ When they went on holiday together to Brittany in 1938, at the time of the Munich conference, despite the encouragement of a cheerful landlady they slept in separate rooms, though with a connecting door: the only excitement came when Michael had a severe bronchial attack in the middle of the night and took refuge in his inhaler. For all that, Barbara Castle (as she became when she married the journalist Ted Castle in 1944) and Michael Foot were basic points of socialist reference for each other, yardsticks for each other’s socialist purity. They became less close when Foot came under the spell of Beaverbrook, but the relationship remained strong. Colleagues felt they shared a kind of instinctive closeness that was sublime but asexual. It survived various conflicts – the row over In Place of Strife in 1969, Barbara’s sacking from his government by Jim Callaghan in 1976, even a sharp book review of the Castle Diaries by Michael Foot. Throughout their long lives, she was one of the few who always called him ‘Mike’.

      Perhaps, despite the wishes of his mother (who had never met her), Michael could never have married Barbara anyway. He soon became far more confident with young women, and Barbara speculated that he did not find her beautiful enough. He might also have found her relentless ideological nagging tiresome. On their Brittany holiday she ‘lectured Michael relentlessly about world politics’. Michael himself commented that a week with Barbara gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Peace in our Time’.³⁵ Two other personal points may be made. They were both deeply involved with the career of Nye Bevan, a red-blooded Celt who made frequent passes at Barbara which she did not obviously discourage. Also Barbara, who tended not to get on with other attractive young women, never had a friendly relationship with Michael’s later wife, Jill. Indeed, like Jennie Lee, whom Bevan had married in 1934, she positively rejected the central tenet of Jill Craigie’s value system, her unyielding feminism.

      Overshadowing Foot’s world in 1936–37 was the erratic but charismatic presence of Stafford Cripps, his point of entry into socialist politics. It was Cripps who directed

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