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far from being attacked in the book as the appeaser he was, he had received honourable mention at the end, along with Churchill, Bevin and Morrison, as one of the four strong men in the new government who could rescue the nation.

      Foot had no crises of conscience about writing leading articles or otherwise producing copy for a newspaper owned by a right-wing capitalist he was to denounce in 1944 as an ‘ante-deluvian monster’. In fact Beaverbrook himself agreed entirely with Standard campaigns such as that to promote a second front in western Europe, and became strongly supportive of the Soviet Union long before it was invaded by Hitler. His own wartime career also fitted in comfortably with his newspaper’s challenging line. His appointments, first as Minister of Aircraft Production and then Minister of Supply, fulfilling a role somewhat similar to the one Lloyd George had played so brilliantly at Munitions in 1915–16, were exactly in line with the strong executive leadership for which the Standard called.

      Relations between editor and proprietor, then, continued to flourish. Foot’s letters, which had begun with ‘Dear Lord Beaverbrook’, now started with ‘Dear Max’. Beaverbrook himself seemed generally pleased with the way his young protégé was handling matters. Later on, addressing the Royal Commission on the Press, he did appear to make some slightly dismissive remarks about Foot: ‘He is a very clever fellow, a most excellent boy. And then suddenly he was projected into the editorship of the paper before he was ready for it … Michael Foot believed that I made him a journalist.’⁶ But Beaverbrook offered these views in March 1948, when he and Foot were estranged politically. There is no evidence that he felt any major concern in the two wartime years when Foot sat behind the editor’s desk. There were those who surmised that Foot was getting too comfortable in his editorial role. Beaverbrook’s right-hand man E. J. Robertson, the long-term general manager of Express Newspapers, wrote in August 1942 that ‘On a number of occasions I have noted that Frank [Owen] is jealous of Michael Foot.’ Owen feared losing his editorship for good as a result of being called up by the RAF, but put up a façade to cover his anxieties. Whether these fears were justified is impossible to say although the prospect of Owen’s possibly standing as an independent candidate in the Maldon by-election two months earlier had ruffled some of Beaverbrook’s feathers. In the event Maldon was captured by another Beaverbrook journalist standing as an independent, Tom Driberg, who appeared in the pages of the Express as ‘William Hickey’. Foot and Owen actually remained very good friends. Owen went on to serve as Press Editor in South East Asia Command later in the war, and apparently turned somewhat against Beaverbrook in 1945, as did Foot. His later decline into penury and alcoholism elicited a good deal of sympathy from Foot, who took up his case to receive benefits with the social services while serving as a Cabinet minister in 1977–78. Owen’s death in 1979 was marked by a particularly warm tribute from his old comrade, appropriately in the columns of the Evening Standard they had both once edited. In addition, Foot wrote a vivid celebration of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.⁷

      Beaverbrook, as was his wont, continued to take a keen interest in the contents of his newspapers, and Foot received occasional queries, which had to be handled carefully. In September 1942 he vigorously rebutted complaints from George Malcolm Thomson, Beaverbrook’s ghost writer on foreign affairs and general sidekick, about the Standard’s campaign for a second front in 1943. Thomson’s remarks on Germany’s 1914 Schlieffen Plan to invade France through Belgium betrayed ‘a gross historical ignorance and give me much pain’. Thomson would have to ‘find other grounds for his sinister campaign against the second front’.⁸ In November 1942 Foot dealt no less vigorously with Beaverbrook’s own murmurings that Standard leaders were damaging relations with Franco’s Spain. Foot responded that almost any honest report on Spain, detailing the well-known German influence there, would be used as a pretext for saying the British press was stirring up trouble, and trying to censor it.⁹ This Beaverbrook steadfastly refused to do. Foot also defended comments about the Finns. While expressing sympathy with them for being invaded by the Soviet Union, he insisted that the Standard had always resisted ‘giving them assistance which would land us in difficulties with the Russians’.

      More serious were Beaverbrook’s reservations about three articles in May 1942 signed by ‘Thomas Rainboro’, the name of the famous Leveller of 1647. These appeared not in the Standard but in a very different paper, Tribune, with which Foot retained an unofficial personal connection. They consisted of stinging attacks on Churchill, called ‘the modern War Lord’, for major strategic errors including the failure to protect Greece and resistance to a second front. Remarkably, these were written from an RAF camp in Andover by Frank Owen, recently called up, and drew on his military expertise acquired from Liddell Hart, Wingate and others. Beaverbrook, as Mervyn Jones has shown, evidently knew the secret of their authorship, and indeed agreed with their main thrust, but then became alarmed at possible consequences; he demanded that any future articles be suppressed, and Foot drove to Andover to ensure that they were.¹⁰ His only direct connection with the articles had been to write an erudite explanation in Tribune as to who the original Rainboro was. As regards the Standard, one area where Foot was willing to concede error was when Beaverbrook turned to matters of literary style amongst his columnists, and to phrases that ‘will not do’. He instanced ‘generations yet unborn’ and ‘bore his burdens bravely’ as infelicities; we might simply see them as journalistic clichés.¹¹

      But on wider matters, until well into 1943 Foot’s Beaverbrook connection remained brisk and effective. His employer warmly approved of his consistent support for the Soviet Union before and after Hitler’s invasion: on 22 June 1941 Foot, who was staying at a house party at Cherkley at the time, went downstairs in the morning and played ‘The Internationale’ on the gramophone at high volume. He warmly applauded his old patron Sir Stafford Cripps for his work in fostering Anglo – Soviet friendship in his time as ambassador in Moscow up to the start of 1942. Beaverbrook gave moral support to this. Indeed, his tolerance for his young editor was remarkable. He learnt without apparent dismay of Foot’s presence at meetings shared with Communists like Harry Pollitt on behalf of the ‘Russia Today’ movement in 1941, urging a firm Anglo – Soviet alliance in full Popular Front mode. Russia’s involvement in the war greatly excited Foot. He and Frank Owen had frequent sessions in Owen’s Lincoln’s Inn flat in 1941 with Harry Pollitt, the British Communist Party leader, for whom Foot had especial admiration. Jon Kimche was another important link with Communist activists like Wilfred McCartney. Bevan and Jennie Lee, however, also in contact with the Communists in ‘Russia Today’, were far less ‘forgiving’ than Foot was inclined to be.¹² By contrast, the entry of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor did not excite anything like the same obsessive enthusiasm from Foot and his friends. Roosevelt the war leader seemed less captivating than Roosevelt the New Dealer, while in any case America was never a country that captured Foot’s sustained attention.

      Under Foot the Standard became a more radical newspaper. It also became a more high-quality one. He drew to its columns a wide range of eminent contributors. A highly influential one was H. G. Wells, whom Foot saw as a prophetic figure and who had enormously influenced his conversion to socialism in his Liverpool days. Foot became personally friendly with Wells, and equally so with his Russian partner Moura Budberg, ‘the magnificent Moura’, whose colourful life had included being the long-term mistress of both the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart and the great Russian writer Maxim Gorki. A learned Polish follower of Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, wrote for the Standard on contemporary themes. So did Jon Kimche of the ILP, an ardent Zionist and another émigré, later to edit Tribune. He owned a socialist bookshop near Ludgate Circus and shared to the full Foot’s literary enthusiasm for Hazlitt and others, but he also supplied essential military expertise for Foot’s paper, which had been somewhat lost when Frank Owen left the editorship. Kimche’s role illustrates the close links between Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard and Tribune

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