With the death of Michael Foot, we also mourn the loss of a different type of Labour Party

The Paul Richards Column

History will judge Michael Foot kindly, recalling his immense literary canon, the excoriation of the appeasers in the Conservative Party in 1940, his skill at speech-making, and his overwhelming niceness and decency. Barbara Castle, with whom Foot had a romantic but unconsummated relationship, called him “rational, radical and eminently reasonable” which stands as good an epitaph as any on this sad day.

As with all public figures who make a mark young, and live a long life, much of his career belongs to a different age. There is, I believe, only one remaining man alive elected as a Labour MP in the 1945 landslide.

Foot was born before the First World War. He was editor of the London Evening Standard during the Blitz, aged just 24, and a contemporary of George Orwell at Tribune. He stood for Labour, aged 19, for Monmouth in 1935. His election address read:

“WAR and POVERTY are the twin dangers which threaten our chances for a decent happy life in the world. I want to see a Government in this country which will serve the interests of the deserving many, and not those of the wealthy few.”

It served as a personal credo for the next 70 years.

Foot’s reputation is far more complex than the caricature crafted by those vicious sub-fascist cartoonists in the Mail and Telegraph in the 70s and 80s. His biographers Mervyn Jones (who also died recently) and Kenneth O. Morgan have done a great job in their two books on his life to show the reality. He was not a Communist, despite the Tories’ campaign to portray him as such. Nor was he a pacifist. He supported Thatcher over the Falklands War, just as he supported Churchill over the invasion of Poland. Like Orwell, and hundreds of other young men in 1940, Foot was preparing to join an underground resistance army in the event of German invasion. Legend has it that one of Foot’s first targets for assassination would have been Lord Halifax, the arch Tory appeaser. We will never know whether ultimately he would have been willing to pull the trigger.

His period of office as Leader of the Labour Party is generally regarded as disastrous. But even this sorriest episode of his long life deserves a revisionist rewrite. The party was in such a dire state, it is entirely reasonable to suggest that any other leader would have made things much much worse. Foot’s biographer Mervyn Jones reminds us that:

“When the Labour Party loses power, the sequel is a rigorous, and in some quarters venomous, examination of the defects of the fallen government. There are accusations of missed opportunities, broken promises, decisions and policies that outraged the tenets of socialism, and in particular indifference to, or defiance of the opinions of the party rank and file and the resolutions of party conferences.”

This was the atmosphere in which Foot tried to lead the Labour Party; who could have made a success of it? Jones’s words should also remind us of the dangers of self-indulgence and self-immolation that we might face later this year.

Much of the reaction to Foot’s death has been self-serving. Seamus Milne uses it as the platform for a plea for more left-wingery and return to the 1983 manifesto. Roy Hattersley uses it as the excuse to write about himself, again. The leader writers on the Times talk about the ‘fabled absurdity‘ of the ’83 manifesto. The Tories do what they always do with radical left-wingers: seek to destroy them in life, and say generous and kind things about them in death – imagine what they’ll say about Tony Benn.

For many, if not most, Labour members, there is a feeling of sadness and loss, because Michael Foot represented the old Labour Party of GCs, the Reading system, resolutions to party conference, the Durham Miners’ Gala, In Place of Fear, the Tribune rally, the Internationale and heroic election defeats. He belonged to an age when we denounced, rather than feted the ‘Tory Press’, when American Presidents were hate figures not heroes, when Labour politics was largely about protest and complaint, and when wearing badges was enough. Our rational heads know we were right to do away with all that, and become the slick, vote-gathering governing machine created by Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the others. But our romantic hearts yearn for the comforting simplicity of Foot’s ‘no compromise with the electorate’ approach. We’ve sold our souls to win in Stevenage, and there are plenty in the Labour Party who do not consider it a fair swap.

Perhaps that is what we mourn today.

Related posts:

1. As it comes in: Michael Foot tributes and reaction
2. More tributes to Michael Foot – 8 in the morning, March 4th
3. Tributes to Michael Foot
4. Labour can exploit the Tories’ loss of economic vision – but only with more meaningful dialogue
5. This is the type of unhelpful factionalism I was talking about moving on from