LITMIR.BIZ

       1 NONCONFORMIST PATRICIAN (1913–1934)

      On a fine sunny evening on 14 July 2003, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, hosted a reception in Downing Street. But this was a New Labour event with a difference. It was attended not only by the predictable great and good of the British Labour movement and the associated media, but also by a rich variety of rebels and dissenters, veterans of CND, Tribune and Troops Out, a representative sample of those people that the historian A. J. P. Taylor had christened, in a famous book in 1957, Britain’s ‘troublemakers’. They were there to honour a frail old man of almost ninety, compelled to be seated but full of life and nodding his head in synchronized animation. This was Michael Foot, an almost legendary icon on the Old Left, one-time leader of the Labour Party, long-term oppositionist parliamentarian, editor and essayist, pamphleteer and man of letters, a scourge of Guilty Men in high places ever since he first made his name in that famous wartime tract published just after Dunkirk, sixty-three years earlier. This reception was merely the most spectacular of many events designed to make July 2003 a month of celebration of Michael’s latest landmark. That same week there was to be a massed gathering of his friends at his favourite Gay Hussar restaurant in Greek Street, Soho, at which the eminent journalist Geoffrey Goodman presided and Michael was awarded a shirt of his beloved Plymouth Argyle football team bearing the number 90 on its back. He had, he was told, been formally registered as part of the Argyle squad with the Football League, perhaps to reinforce his team’s left-wing attack. The following week there was another reception in the very epicentre of the establishment, this time the Foreign Office in Carlton Gardens, genially presided over by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Member for Blackburn and successor and protégé of Michael’s old comrade and love, Barbara Castle. He described how Michael had made in the House of Commons in 1981 the finest speech that he, Straw, had ever heard.

      But the evening in the Downing Street garden on 14 July, Bastille Day appropriately, was the highlight. It was set, as Foot would have particularly appreciated, in a place steeped in history, where the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee had convened his excited ministers in 1945 and Lloyd George’s ‘garden suburb’ of private advisers had once conducted intrigues and manoeuvres from temporary huts set amongst the flowerbeds. People wondered what Tony Blair himself might say about so traditional and committed an Old Labour stalwart. In fact his speech was charming, generous and relaxed. He recalled Michael’s dedication to human rights (though not to socialism), and paid especial tribute to his strong backing of the young Blair’s effort to become candidate for the Sedgefield constituency in 1983 – a reflection no doubt of Foot’s positive response to Blair’s early campaign in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982, and also perhaps of his determination to ward off the selection of a hard-left Bennite, Les Huckfield. Michael, in response, spoke at much greater length and with less precision, although, to the joy of some present, he did manage an amiable throwaway reference to George Galloway, a far-left socialist shortly to be expelled from the Labour Party for his support for Saddam Hussein. The whole occasion was entirely relaxed and enjoyable, Old and New Labour as one, poachers and gamekeepers drinking in common celebratory cause. Vocal protests from demonstrators outside in Whitehall directed against Downing Street’s later visitor that evening, Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (with which many in the garden sympathized), were satisfactorily inaudible. As they left, people commented on how relaxed Tony Blair looked even at a time of pressure during an inquiry by the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee into the origins of the invasion of Iraq four months earlier. This was made especially difficult by the embarrassed evidence from the government scientist, arms expert and apparent whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly. Honouring Michael Foot, himself a vocal critic of the Iraq war, meant for the moment the burying of hatchets all round.

      Four days later, the birthday bonhomie disappeared. The body of the tormented David Kelly was discovered in woodland at Southmoor, near his home in southern Oxfordshire. Suicide was suspected. Angry friends accused Tony Blair of indirect complicity. Foot’s birthday party was to prove almost the last happy evening that the Prime Minister would know for many months to come. The shadow of Kelly and the other consequences of the Iraq venture would haunt him right down to the general election of May 2005, which saw Labour’s majority fall by almost a hundred. But whatever these events meant for Tony Blair, they were perhaps not a bad symbol for the career of Michael Foot – loyal acclaim from the party, genial genuflection from the establishment, but an underlying background of conflict, tension and tragedy throughout the near century of which he was chronicler and survivor.

      This unique combination of elitism and dissent went right back to Michael Foot’s ancestral roots. His family and forebears shaped his outlook and style more than they do for many public figures. More important, he himself believed that their influence was decisive, and often paid testimony to their historic importance, by word and by pen. It was a background of West Country dissent that dated from the historic conflict between Crown and Parliament under Charles I. Cromwell was very much the people’s Oliver for the tenant farmers and craftsmen of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. But it was also a tradition of patriotic dissent, of dissent militant. Francis Drake was an earlier hero for the community from which the Foots had sprung, his freebooting illegalities discounted amidst the beguiling beat of Drake’s Drum. In August 1940 Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was to give a famous broadcast, ‘Drake’s Drum Beats Again’, comparing the little boats at Dunkirk with Drake’s men o’war. Similarly it was Cromwell the warrior whom Michael and all the Foots celebrated – the victor of the battles of Marston Moor, Naseby and Dunbar, the man who supported the execution of his king and conducted a forceful, navy-based foreign and commercial policy – quite as much as the champion of civil and religious liberties. It is not at all surprising that Michael, ‘inveterate peacemonger’, unilateralist and moral disarmer, should also brandish the terrible swift sword of retribution in the Falklands and in Croatia and Bosnia later on. Like the legend of John Brown’s body, his prophetic truth would go marching on.

      The Foot dynasty of Devon were robust specimens of West Country self-sufficient artisans. In the main they were village carpenters and wheelwrights, working on the Devon side of the river Tamar which separates that county from Cornwall. On balance, the Foot dynasty were Devonian English, indeed very English, not Brythonic or Cornish Celts. The earliest traced of them is John Foot, who is known to have married Grace Glanvill in the Devon village of Whitchurch, near Tavistock, on 21 October 1703. Then came successively Thomas Foot (born 1716), another Thomas Foot (1744–1823), John Foot (1775–1841) and James Foot (1803–58), all resident

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