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partner of another man, and Beaverbrook had actually smuggled her out of Vienna just before the Anschluss. Thus Foot remained caught up, devoted but distant, in another non-sexual relationship. But in 1939–40 Lily Ernst became another major reason for his wanting to keep close to Beaverbrook and his court.

      For his part, Beaverbrook evidently delighted in Foot’s personality, his stories, his radical irreverence, and especially his feel for history and literature, with which he used deliberately to beguile the older man. Foot’s admiration could turn into open flattery, historical analogies at the ready. He laid praise on with a trowel when his master became Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, telling Beaverbrook, ‘Gibbon wrote of the Emperor Theodosius that “the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man”. As we read the news of the air battle it seems the same today.’⁵¹ Beaverbrook, whose knowledge of the Emperor Theodosius was probably somewhat sketchy, lapped this kind of thing up. He came to have the highest regard for Foot’s writing for the Evening Standard, as assistant editor and then, from April 1942, as editor. He admired ‘the splendid work that you do in the early mornings in the Evening Standard … It is in the early mornings that I admire you most. When a man is admired most in the early morning he is a great fellow.’⁵² But even more he adored Foot’s warm and witty companionship, which filled a gap in his life. Foot responded with a distinctly sycophantic piece in the Daily Express about the Evening Standard: ‘Cobdenites and anarchists, True blues and pale pinks, radicals and roaring diehards may all make their contribution to this ultra-Conservative journal.’⁵³ The leader column was sternly independent in viewpoint: ‘It doesn’t care a fig for anyone.’

      What is one to make of the Foot – Beaverbrook relationship? A man may make friends with anyone he wishes, male or female, and there is no scientific law governing these things. The immediate mutual attraction is understandable, but so too is the sharp political and personal breach after 1945. Perhaps what really needs explanation is why they got together again in 1948 and their continued close friendship thereafter, even as Foot pressed on towards the further reaches of the socialist left. Foot always felt at ease with Beaverbrook, and accepted his many kindnesses without feeling that he was being patronized. He describes with simple, perhaps naïve, gratitude being very soon taken by Beaverbrook on the Blue Train to Cannes and Monte Carlo, the trip being wound up with a stay in the Paris Ritz. It was, Foot explains, all part of learning how to write a good newspaper column. He was to accept Beaverbrook’s frequent comments on the contents of his columns or leading articles – Beaverbrook was notorious as the most interfering of newspaper owners, with his own personal agenda ranging from Empire Free Trade to appeasement of Germany – cheerfully and modestly enough.

      Beaverbrook also put a room in his London flat at Foot’s disposal, and Foot sought – and gained – permission to bring a few books, including ‘the heavily-marked works of Jonathan Swift’ along with works by Marat, Bakunin, Cromwell, Stalin ‘and other successful terrorists’. In 1950 Beaverbrook’s kindnesses included a large donation to Tribune when Foot was sued for libel after his attack on Tory press barons, ‘Lower than Kemsley’. It saved the paper from liquidation. It also helped that the Daily Express took out full-page advertisements in Tribune, which cannot have boosted the circulation of Beaverbrook’s newspaper empire. The ‘old man’ also took to Jill, and for some time in the early fifties the Foots lived in a grace-and-favour cottage on the Cherkley estate. Foot always felt confident that his freedom of expression or thought was not compromised in any way by his association with Beaverbrook, certainly not that he was being bought. It should be added that he was only the first of many left-wing journalists to work for Beaverbrook newspapers and to relish the experience. Robert Edwards came from Tribune to become a distinguished editor of the Daily Express. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, who first met Beaverbrook in 1956 after giving a glowing review of one of his books, Men and Power, was another from the left who came to love Beaverbrook; he became the custodian of his collections of private papers, and wrote a highly favourable biography of the old man after his death. Beaverbrook, wrote Taylor of his beloved ‘Max’, was a man ‘who stirred things up’.

      But there is still something to be explained. Beaverbrook may well have been a delightful dinner companion and stimulating friend. What he clearly was not was someone at all in tune with Michael Foot’s passionate socialism. Foot has frequently called him ‘a genuine radical’, of which his being a Canadian Presbyterian was a major aspect. He admired a fellow nonconformist outsider like Lloyd George, the centre of a kind of alternative, anti-establishment circle of devotees drawn from all parties and none. Beaverbrook was certainly a mischievous iconoclast. He thought it enormous fun when a dinner-party would end with Michael Foot and Alan Taylor standing to sing ‘The Red Flag’. But he was not in any meaningful political sense a radical. Where Foot was a passionate anti-capitalist of Liberal free-trade background, Beaverbrook was a buccaneering champion of the free market, along with tariffs within a protective imperial system. His Express’s crusader bore the chains of a shackled capitalism throughout the years of the Attlee government after 1945. In international affairs he was foremost amongst the appeasers, a warm supporter of Lloyd George’s lamentable visit to Hitler in 1936, an advocate of Britain leaving the League of Nations, a warm supporter of Munich, an associate of the defeatist Irish-American ambassador to Britain Joe Kennedy, a man who felt that war in September 1939 was a huge error. As Michael Foot became the fierce champion of resistance to fascism in 1938–39, he acknowledged that his employer and patron took a totally different view. Foot rightly claimed that Beaverbrook was an excellent listener to alternative views, and that all viewpoints on the international scene were represented, and powerfully expressed, at his private gatherings at Cherkley.

      But listening and tolerating are passive virtues, and not the same as giving positive support. In Beaverbrook’s case they appeared to be an alternative to it, and Foot skirted the point with some delicacy. Readers of Foot’s 1940 book Guilty Men would search in vain for any hint that the wealthy Canadian press baron was ever amongst the appeasers. This does not imply that Foot was a hypocrite, since his advocacy of his own radical views became ever bolder. He did not sacrifice his integrity as a commentator and critic. But it does suggest that the relationship with Beaverbrook was not at all an extension of his own ideas, but something that existed on a totally different plane. For Foot, as to a degree for Bevan, Beaverbrook acted as someone who could transmute revolutionary thoughts and passionate oratory into a private dialogue, detached from key aspects of real life and ultimately harmless. Those who came close to him were always in danger of becoming licensed rebels.

      What Foot did gain from his work on the Standard, in addition to a much higher standard of life, was a genuinely stimulating atmosphere in which to work. He progressed rapidly, acting as assistant on the Diary and writing signed historical feature articles on personalities like the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk. He impressed his employer, and in 1940 became assistant editor. His closest friend from day one was the relatively youthful editor of the Standard, Frank Owen, a highly gifted former Liberal MP with alleged Trotskyite tendencies (he was later to write a biography of Lloyd George) and an ardent anti-appeaser.⁵⁴ He combined enterprising journalism with a distinctly raffish lifestyle, marked by vast consumption of spirits and a bewildering array of attractive girlfriends. He hurled himself into a hectic private life as frenetic as his editing of the Standard. In the end it all proved to be too much, and Owen ended up a pathetic alcoholic. He drew Foot, now rapidly shedding the inhibitions of Pencrebar and West Country Methodism, into this way of life, the more so when they shared a flat in wartime London. Owen contrived a series of sartorial signals on a coat-stand if he was seducing or otherwise entertaining a young woman. He was also a man of much fascinating information, specializing in military matters. He had good contacts with Basil Liddell Hart, Orde Wingate and even Lord Louis Mountbatten. On the eve of war he boldly led a staff deputation to Beaverbrook urging him to change his personal stance on appeasement, or at least to allow his editors to endorse war against Hitler. Beaverbrook, a caustic critic of the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s diplomacy, agreed half-heartedly to do so, although Foot describes

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