LITMIR.BIZ

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Foot. It was a deeply attractive offer, and it speaks much for the strength of character of the young man that he promptly refused. In part he resented what he saw as the disloyal, even treacherous way in which Mellor had been presented with a fait accompli. Beyond that, he would be expected as editor to endorse the Unity Front approach, and defend the Soviet Union against its critics.⁴⁴ Both were unthinkable. In a letter which he has not kept, Foot wrote to Cripps resigning from Tribune. Cripps, en route to Jamaica to try to remedy his gastric problems, replied on 25 July kindly but firmly urging him to change his mind. He could not be expected to pay thousands of pounds towards a paper in whose policies he did not believe. Nor could he be ignored as chairman of the board. ‘I only elaborate these points, Mike dear, to try and show you that I am not such a completely negligible political factor in the Tribune as you seem from your letter to think.’

      H. N. Brailsford was a man for whom Foot had a high regard, dating from the time when as a young man just out of school he read the left-wing newspaper New Leader, which Brailsford edited. His classic book Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle (1913) celebrated the ‘democratical’ radicalism of the French Revolutionary period which Foot most venerated, while his War of Steel and Gold (published in May 1914) was a famous analysis of the economic roots of international conflict. Brailsford now strongly disagreed with the pro-Soviet line that Cripps wished Tribune to take, and had been appalled by the trial of Bukharin. Under Stalin, he felt, the Soviet Union had become ‘a bloody tyranny ruled by terror and lies’. Yet he too wrote to Foot on 6 August, trying to persuade him to change his mind.⁴⁵ He wrote sympathetically as someone who had himself three times resigned during his journalistic career. But he argued now that Foot and Mellor were not standing against the proprietors on a matter of policy (a debatable point), and also that Foot should not capitulate in advance against Gollancz, though he added, ‘Like you, I distrust him and am highly critical of the Left Book Club.’ In worldly fashion he noted that ‘to run a good paper matters more than to perform prodigies of conscience’. He offered to speak to Cripps when he returned, and invited Foot to his Buckinghamshire home for a weekend to talk matters through.

      But Foot would not be moved by these senior figures. After hanging on for a few weeks until a new editor, the obscure near-Communist H. J. Hartshorn, was appointed, Foot cut his links with Tribune. Brailsford was to conclude that the young man was right. He wrote again to Foot a few days later, largely agreeing with him: ‘I agree in thinking that Gollancz is a sinister influence. But I have a feeling that the Socialist Left is allowing itself to be driven from all its strategical positions by the C. P. With great subtlety it drove the Socialist League to suicide, & now it is capturing the Tribune. Much as I respect Cripps as a man, I fear he’s a disastrous strategist.’⁴⁶ In this instructive episode, Foot’s judgement and instincts were fundamentally sound. Quite apart from his genuine outrage at the treatment of Mellor, to become editor of Tribune would have compromised him morally at that time, and marginalized him within the Labour movement. Persistent rebel though he was, Foot would never leave the mainstream when a crisis beckoned. Thus it was when he veered away from CND after 1961, when he joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1970, when he stuck to Jim Callaghan’s ailing government through thick and thin after 1976, and when he struck back at Bennites and Militants in 1982. Although he continued to respect Cripps, Foot now saw him as a naïve and highly fallible messiah. At the start of the war Cripps was to be expelled from the Labour Party for pursuing his Unity Campaign again. During the war years he was to come full circle, and now called for an alliance with progressive Tories. Nor did he show up well on India in the end. Foot’s life of Aneurin Bevan (in two volumes, published in 1962 and 1973) is distinctly qualified in its praise: ‘Cripps was a political innocent. He knew little of the Labour movement, less of its history … His Marxist slogans were undigested; he declared the class war without ever having studied the contours of the battlefield.’⁴⁷ Nye Bevan was a different and altogether more convincing prophet.

      It was a troubled summer of 1938 for Foot. He had no job and no immediate likelihood of one, though still brooding about possible books on modern history. In December he did acquire a practical commitment since, undeterred by his Monmouth experience, he had been nominated Labour candidate for the Devonport division in his native Plymouth. Presumably this would be contested in a 1940 general election. But since that seat had been held in 1935 with a majority of over eleven thousand and 68 per cent of the vote by a notable National Liberal Cabinet minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha, his prospects there looked extremely remote. The European scene that summer was becoming increasingly alarming, with the Sudetenland crisis in Czechoslovakia following Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria. Foot was in Brittany on holiday with Barbara when the Munich crisis took place; he returned to find Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s diplomatic ‘peace in our time’ coup with Hitler trumpeted to the skies by publications ranging from Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman to the Express newspapers of the right-wing press magnate and perennial political controversialist Lord Beaverbrook. Foot was unable to share in this euphoria, and sensed a great surrender. Since the civil war in Spain he was a pacifist no longer. Franco’s assault on the Spanish Popular Front, along with Hitler’s military assistance for him, convinced Foot that the democratic powers had to mobilize force in return. But then came a wholly unanticipated opportunity. Aneurin Bevan had privately mentioned Foot’s resignation from Tribune to his friend Beaverbrook. ‘I’ve got a young bloody knight-errant here,’ Bevan was said to have observed. Foot was invited down to Cherkley, Beaverbrook’s Surrey retreat near Leatherhead, to summarize and interpret the latest news. Beaverbrook was immediately struck by him. After lunch that day Foot was made a feature writer on the Evening Standard, Beaverbrook’s London daily, at a stipend of £450 a year, soon to rise higher.⁴⁸ He had exchanged one patron for another, the erratic Cripps for the mercurial Beaverbrook. He had a platform and first-hand access to critical political events. After so many miserable episodes while campaigning on the left, he had made a fresh start. It was to make him famous.

      Foot’s close, almost filial, relationship with Beaverbrook has always been deeply contested and highly controversial. Probably its most enduring legacy for him was his close attachment not to Beaverbrook but to his left-wing younger friend Aneurin Bevan, whom Foot now got to know well for the first time. But in the months that led to war, and many of the years that followed, it was the unpredictable Canadian press lord, now aged sixty and seemingly close to retirement, who carved out Foot’s destiny. It seemed at the time – and in many ways still does – a most improbable friendship. Clearly, the real basis was simply personal. In a very few months Foot had become, in his own words, ‘a favoured son’, one of the family. Foot’s essay on Beaverbrook in his book Debts of Honour (1980) breathes the deepest affection in every line: ‘I loved him, not merely as a friend, but a second father even though I had … the most excellent of fathers of my own.’ He pours scorn on the view, widely held on the left, that Beaverbrook was ‘a kind of Dracula, Svengali, Iago and Mephistopheles rolled into one’.⁴⁹ Foot fell for Beaverbrook’s charm, vivacity and mental agility, his rare ability to attract to his circle an extraordinary range of fascinating personalities – Churchill, Brendan Bracken and Aneurin Bevan; H. G. Wells and his Russian mistress Moura Budberg; the Russian ambassador Ivan Maisky; the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy. All in all, the ‘old man’ was simply fun.

      It should be added that Foot fell not only for Beaverbrook’s own charms but for those of his glamorous young mistress, the former ballet dancer Lily Ernst. Known to them as ‘Esther’, she encouraged Foot’s interest in Jewish matters. But she interested him physically as well. She was ‘a lively Jugoslav-born Jewish girl’,⁵⁰ and the ever-susceptible romantic Michael Foot, with a penchant for middle Europeans, fell passionately in love with her. It was more than her beauty: she also introduced Foot to one of his cherished poets, Heinrich Heine, a man much influenced by an even greater hero, Byron. Lily Ernst brought him a volume (in English translation) of Heine’s romantic

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