LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

less of an impact. At least the book made him more money than its predecessor, with no absconding agent this time. It also confirmed his unique skill as a patriotic pamphleteer.

      There had been announced another project of Foot’s, to appear in the ‘Searchlight Books’ series published by Secker & Warburg under the editorship of George Orwell and Tosco Fyvel, both active in the world of Tribune/New Statesman left journalism. Ten books appeared in the series in 1941–42, covering various projections for post-war reconstruction, by such notable authors as Sebastian Haffner, T. C. Worsley, Ritchie Calder and Joyce Cary. The series was launched in 1941 by Orwell’s own famous study of the British national character The Lion and the Unicorn, which, rather modestly, sold over ten thousand copies. Michael Foot was announced as the author of a forthcoming work entitled Above All Things – Liberty. But the publishers’ printers at Portsmouth, along with their stock and paper, were destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1942, so nothing came of it.

      In November 1944 Foot published another squib with Gollancz, this time of overtly party political slant, with an election now on the horizon. This was Brendan and Beverley, a book of just seventy-eight pages. Foot’s name appeared as the author, and he was now formally identified as the writer and co-writer of the two earlier works. This one was a parody of an imagined conversation between two Conservatives, Brendan Bracken, who was close to Churchill and was now Minister of Information, and Sir Beverley Baxter, a right-wing Canadian MP, a strongly imperialist Chamberlainite throughout, and Member for Wood Green and Southgate. In the same month Foot wrote savagely to The Times denouncing Baxter as a pro-Chamberlain appeaser, and dismissing a book of his as ‘a satire on political sycophancy’.²⁴ Brendan and Beverley takes the form of a dialogue between the two Conservatives named in Disraeli’s Coningsby, ‘Taper’ (Bracken) and ‘Tadpole’ (Baxter). They give their different versions of Conservative philosophy, but neither is convincing. Baxter was a particular běte noire of Foot’s, and he is the more obvious target, but ‘Taper’ also gives a poor performance. He defends the Churchill coalition, of which Foot was now a strong critic, ‘since it can do down ideas of reform’. There is a patriotic peroration on Churchillian lines, but it is given to an unnamed Labour politician.²⁵

      This book did not sell well: its message was too oblique for the general public, and it anticipated an election which was not yet called. What it did do was confirm the sharp breach with Beaverbrook, who was close to both Taper and Tadpole. Brendan Bracken was a frequent house-guest at Cherkley, and was actively involved with Beaverbrook in preparing the Conservatives’ propaganda campaign in the coming election. Baxter had actually been editor of the Daily Express up to 1933, and was later to serve as theatre critic of the Evening Standard. Attacking them both, as a way of pronouncing anathema on all Tories and their works, was Foot’s clearest possible declaration of divorce.

      Foot was now very much a doer as much as a commentator. From 1943 to 1945 he engaged in a bewildering miscellany of protest movements, all characteristic of the rich crucible of the war years. He remained active in the India League and friendly with Krishna Menon. He was now campaigning actively for the Zionist cause, and was prominent on the Anglo-Palestine Committee, chaired by Israel Sieff, managing director of Marks & Spencer, and also including Frank Owen, Kingsley Martin, David Astor and Lord Pakenham. Foot himself addressed it on the plight of Hungarian Jewry in 1944.²⁶ There was the League for the Rights of Man, with which Gollancz was identified and which became more vigorous after the United Nations came into being after the war. He was also a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, founded in 1934, which had kept watch on the preservation of civil liberties during wartime. There were various bodies to affirm solidarity with the Soviet Union. Foot also kept very close to the intense milieu of political and literary protest, the natural habitat of writers like Orwell, Koestler and Fyvel, the world of the Penguin Special, the Left Book Club, Searchlight Books, Cyril Connolly’s literary periodical Horizon, and such transatlantic equivalents as Partisan Review and Dissent in New York. All this protest literature was fundamental to the wartime cultural hegemony of the British dissenting left. Michael Foot, barely into his thirties, was an increasingly influential part of it.

      Finally, in this potpourri of leftish idealism, Foot was a member of the so-called ‘1941 Committee’ formed by J. B. Priestley and well described by the historian Paul Addison as ‘a perfect photosnap of the new progressive Establishment rising from the waves’.²⁷ It included not only Priestley himself and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes (both of whom Foot now got to know for the first time) but also Richard Acland, Thomas Balogh, Ritchie Calder, Kingsley Martin, Tom Wintringham and the Rev. Mervyn Stockwood, all of whom were later colleagues of Foot in CND, which it partly anticipated. However, the 1941 Committee was more broadly based, since it also included mainstream Labour figures like Douglas Jay and Christopher Mayhew, and even a one-nation Conservative, Peter Thorneycroft, leader of the Tory Reform Group. It faded away when several of its key figures (though not Foot) joined Acland’s new Common Wealth Party the following year.

      Despite all this manifold activity, which began long before his resignation as editor of the Standard in August 1944, the bedrock of Foot’s world was now the Labour Party, albeit via left-wing movements, non-Communist though pro-Russian, kicking hard against the restraints of being yoked in Churchill’s coalition. Foot was never an admirer of Attlee’s leadership, and the wartime years underlined the fact. One protest in which he was involved was the Bristol Central by-election of February 1943, one of many awkward by-elections for the government at this time. Here there was an Independent Labour candidate in the person of Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s wife, who had recently left the ILP but who declined Acland’s invitation to join the Common Wealth Party and ran on an Independent Labour platform to campaign for socialist policies and a break with the coalition. The ILP ran a candidate against her out of revenge. The entire affair was distinctly embarrassing for the Labour Party. However, Foot (despite being editor of the Standard) went to Bristol to campaign hard on behalf of Jennie Lee and against the idea of an electoral truce. Unfortunately Bristol Central, which included the city’s central business area, was the least promising of the five Bristol seats, and there was a very low poll since so many voters were away during wartime. Jennie Lee lost by 1,500 votes to the widow of the former Conservative Member, Lady Apsley, and there was actually a swing to the government, in contrast to almost all other contests at the time.²⁸ This was a solitary venture by Foot, who of course was free to electioneer without inhibition after he left employment with Beaverbrook.

      Bristol Central tended to confirm that Foot, having broken with Cripps, was finding another inspirational guru in Jennie Lee’s husband. Going out of his way to campaign for her showed how he was swinging from Beaverbrook to Bevan. He had known Nye for some years, dating from a meeting during the Monmouth election in 1935, and had got much closer to him during his time on Tribune. Bevan, as we have seen, was one of Beaverbrook’s many left-wing associates, and it was he who recommended Foot for a job with Express Newspapers in 1938. He was at this time editor of Tribune himself, though his talents did not really lie in the field of journalism. But in the wartime period, with Bevan emerging as a towering critic of Churchill and the coalition on many issues, Foot became his most intimate ally. In 1944 they collaborated in campaigns on the future of Poland, and especially in attacking Churchill for British military intervention in the civil war in Greece. Foot would be more than his comrade. He would be his Boswell, his Engels, his John the Baptist, and of course his parliamentary heir.

      Long after his death in 1960 Bevan remained the most important person in Foot’s life, not excluding Jill. He was central to Foot’s every crisis of conscience, the permanent sounding board for his socialist values. Their difference of view over nuclear weapons was more searing for Foot’s psychology than any divorce could have been. Foot’s passionate admiration for this brilliant, articulate tribune, who came not from the literate suburban bourgeoisie but from Tredegar in the working-class cauldron of the Welsh mining valleys, was unshakeable. Bevan stood with Foot on every possible issue.

Скачать книгу