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Michael Foot
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Michael Foot |
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| Political Biography: Michael Foot |
(b. Plymouth, 23 July 1913) British; Lord President of the Council 1976 – 9, deputy leader of the Labour Party 1976 – 80, leader 1980 – 3 The son of a Liberal MP, Foot was educated at Leighton Park School, Reading, and Wadham College, Oxford, and worked as a journalist before his election as MP for Plymouth, Devonport, in 1945. Defeated in the 1955 general election, he returned to the Commons at a by-election in Ebbw Vale (later Blaenau Gwent) in 1960.
Twenty-nine years elapsed between Foot's first election and his initial experience of ministerial office. On the back benches in the 1940s and 1950s (and, while he was out of parliament, in Tribune of which he was then editor) he was a persistent left-wing critic of the Labour leadership. He was deprived of the whip 1961 – 3. His criticism was much more restrained when Harold Wilson became party leader, but he nevertheless declined office in the 1964 – 70 Labour government and attacked its policies on such issues as expenditure cuts, industrial relations, and Vietnam.
In opposition (1970 – 4) Foot unsuccessfully contested the deputy leadership in 1970, 1971, and 1972 but was regularly elected to the shadow Cabinet. When Labour regained office in 1974 he joined the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment, taking responsibility for legislation strengthening trade union rights, particularly over the closed shop. He was also one of the ministers who took advantage of the Cabinet's "agreement to disagree" with the official government line during the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the European Community.
When James Callaghan assumed the premiership, Foot (who had been runner-up in the leadership election and was then elected deputy leader) became Lord President of the Council and leader of the House of Commons. He took over the legislation on devolution for Scotland and Wales, but his main responsibility was as the government's principal business manager in an increasingly precarious parliamentary situation. Long known as a most effective debater, he now also proved extremely adept at negotiation with the minor parties.
Foot was reluctant to contest the succession when Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980. His election (at the age of 67) was the last to be conducted by the PLP alone. The party was deeply divided: the left was intent upon constitutional reform to prevent a repetition of the Wilson and Callaghan governments' alleged betrayals of party policy. Despite Foot's reputation as a unifier, the task was beyond him. (His Another Heart and Other Pulses (1983) traces his approach to these problems.) Twenty eight MPs defected on the launch of the Social Democratic Party in 1981. The activities of the left attracted much adverse publicity. A combination of these factors, plus the Falklands factor, a disastrous manifesto (dubbed "the longest suicide note in history"), and Foot's own low popular appeal, made Labour's share of the vote in the 1983 general election its lowest since 1918. Foot resigned the leadership, though he remained in parliament until 1992.
Foot had a career outside politics as a journalist, reviewer, and author. Among his many books is a two-volumed biography of his hero Bevan.
| Biography: Michael Foot |
Michael Foot (born 1913) was a left-wing journalist, a British Labour Party member of Parliament, and leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983.
Michael Foot was born on July 23, 1913, in Plymouth, England. His father, Isaac Foot (1880-1960), was a major figure in the radical wing of the Liberal Party and represented Bodmin (Cornwall) in Parliament from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1929 to 1935. A passionate bibliophile, he built up a collection of more than 60,000 books - an enthusiasm which his son inherited.
Foot was a physically active child despite recurring bouts of eczema and asthma. He attended Leighton Park, a public school founded by Quakers and marked by an internationalist and pacifist ethos. In 1931 he entered Oxford and soon gravitated toward the debating society or Union, as it was called, becoming its president in 1933. He voted with the majority in the famous 1933 resolution that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."
Liberal Turns Labour
Foot's first venture into national journalism was a 1934 article for the News Chronicle of London entitled "Why I Am a Liberal." He argued that Liberalism was a bulwark against war and fascism and called for a Rooseveltian New Deal for Britain. But he was not destined to remain a Liberal much longer. In 1934 he took a job in Liverpool, where he was appalled by the poverty and unemployment he saw around him. As a result he joined the Labour Party and met, for the first time, Aneurin Bevan, whose close friend, coworker, and biographer he was later to become.
Foot fought his first parliamentary race in 1935, losing to a popular Conservative candidate at Monmouth. In 1937 he was adopted as the prospective Labour candidate for Plymouth Devenport. More immediately promising was the experience he was gaining in journalism. After short stints with the New Statesman and Tribune, Bevan was instrumental in finding him a job on the newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook. He worked for Beaverbrook from 1938 to 1944, rising to the acting editorship of the London Evening Standard in 1942. Under his guidance the paper moved sharply to the left.
The appearance of the book Guilty Men in 1940 made him notorious. Co-written by him under the pseudonym "Cato," Guilty Men was a slashing attack on the foreign and defense policies of the Conservative governments of the 1930s. A massive best-seller (by 1944 there were 43 printings), it became the leading anti-Tory critique of appeasement and stands as one of the great political tracts of 20th-century Britain and as a contributing factor to the Labour Party's victory in 1945.
Victory Over Tories
Foot won Plymouth Devenport in 1945, transforming a previous Tory majority of 11,000 into a Labour majority of 2,000. A back beach "loyal critic" of the government, he was the co-author of the 1947 pamphlet "Keep Left," which warned of the need for more rigorous socialist policies. In 1948 he became editor of Tribune and steered the editorial line toward support of Britain's entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and support for the United States in the Korean War.
During the 1950s Foot was a leading spokesperson for the left wing of the Labour Party. He attacked the 1951 Labour government's budget, which raised defense spending and imposed fees on drug prescriptions and eyeglasses. He opposed German rearmament, the British invasion of Suez in 1956, and the Labour leadership's defense policy, which conditionally tolerated British first use of nuclear weapons. These controversial stands helped cause his defeat in the elections of 1955 and 1959.
Foot was flabbergasted when in 1957 his political hero Aneurin Bevan abruptly announced that Britain must maintain its nuclear deterrent so as not to "appear naked in the conference chamber" in negotiations with the Soviet Union. However, friendly relations between the two men were re-established by 1959. On Bevan's death in 1960 Foot was selected as his successor for the South Wales coalmining constituency of Ebbw Vale. He won election by over 16,000 votes and still held the seat in 1985.
Foot welcomed the emergence of Harold Wilson as leader of the Labour Party in 1963 and gave critical support to the 1964-1970 Labour government from the back benches. As he saw it, the greatest need was to keep the Tories out, even though he viewed the government's record as a "bloody catastrophe." In 1969 he ran unsuccessfully against James Callaghan for the post of Labour Party treasurer.
Becomes Employment Secretary
In 1970 Foot substantially modified his political stance. Previously a back bench critic of the Labour leadership, he now sought and won election to the shadow cabinet. In 1972 Wilson promoted him to shadow leader of the House of Commons, and after Labour's victory in the 1974 general election he accepted the cabinet post of employment secretary.
Foot was a powerful figure in the 1974-1979 Labour government. As employment secretary he was responsible for the repeal of the Conservative Industrial Relations Act of 1972. As leader of the House of Commons from 1976 to 1979 he used his encyclopedic knowledge of parliamentary procedure to guide legislation through a House of Commons in which the government did not command a majority. His goal throughout was to keep Labour in office for as long as possible, and he accordingly advised Callaghan, to whom he had become increasingly close, not to hold a general election in the fall of 1978.
But not even Foot's parliamentary skills could save the government from losing a vote of confidence in March 1979, and in the ensuing election Labour suffered a stunning defeat. Following Callaghan's resignation as party leader, Foot won a bitterly-fought contest against Denis Healy in November 1980. Foot's election, along with sweeping constitutional changes in the party's method of electing the leader and reselecting members of Parliament, led the far right of the party to split from Labour to form the Social Democratic Party (S.D.P.) early in 1981.
Defeat for Labour
Foot led a deeply divided and demoralized party into the general election of 1983. The result was an utter debacle for Labour, which only narrowly edged out the S.D.P. for second place with 27.6 percent of the votes. It was Labour's worst showing since the 1920s. On June 13, 1983, Foot resigned as party leader.
Ten years later, looking back over Foot's career on the occasion of his 80th birthday in July 1993, journalist Ian Aitken, writing in New Statesman & Society, lamented what he called a betrayal of Foot. "His leadership had been held - often by people who ought to know better - to be the cause of the disasters that engulfed the Labour Party in the early years of Thatcherism, culminating in the election loss of 1983. Yet this is nonsense, and cruel nonsense at that. What doomed Foot's leadership … was, quite simply, betrayal - and betrayal by the very people he could have expected to support him as the most left-wing, democratically minded leader they have ever had, or were ever likely to have."
Soviet Ties Alleged
Foot was attacked in an early 1995 Sunday Times article that claimed he had taken money from the Soviet secret police in the 1960s to subsidize a weekly newspaper he helped to found in 1937. The story also appeared in The News of the World. Both papers were owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The stories caused a turmoil on London's Fleet Street, and Foot sued Murdoch and the papers for libel. The News printed an apology, but the Times edited Foot's response to the story. Not surprisingly, Foot had strong feelings about Murdoch, which he revealed during an interview with Bill Jones, writing for New Statesman. "It is impossible to overrate the injurious effect he's (Murdoch) had, and it's sad the other papers are inclined to follow his lead rather than restore any decent standards in British journalism, though I exclude some from this - the Guardian and Observer and some sincere journalists on other papers."
In the same interview, Foot blamed England's Tory government for corruption he sees as pervasive in English government. "Most people outside the House (of Commons) now see it as a corrupt place and they're right - it is corrupt from top to bottom. I exonerate Labour from these charges. Yet the way money is distributed in the Commons, and the (House of) Lords too, let's not forget, is an absolute outrage."
As reported by the journalism of the day, Foot was viewed as largely ineffectual in his later years. Reviewer Steven Fielding, writing in the January 1996 issue of History Today on a biography of Foot by Mervyn Jones, noted the "very low-ebb" of Foot's reputation. "Few, even in the party he led during the early 1980s, would now publicly endorse any of his core beliefs. Foot is as Old Labor as you could possibly get."
Further Reading
Simon Hoggart and David Leigh, Michael Foot: A Portrait (London, 1981), is accurate and on the whole sympathetic. A bruising account of his role in Labour's 1983 defeat is offered in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1983 (London, 1984). The best approach, however, is through Foot's own writings. In addition to Guilty Men (London, 1940), the most important are The Pen and the Sword (London, 1957), Aneurin Bevan, 1897-1945 (London, 1962), Aneurin Bevan, 1945-1960 (London, 1973), and Debts of Honour (London, 1981). His side of the election of 1983 is presented in Another Heart and Other Pulses: the Alternative to the Thatcher Society (London, 1984).
Jones, Bill, "Interview: Michael Foot," New Statesman, January 10, 1997, v126, n4316, p. 30.
Aitken, Ian, "The Left's Betrayal of Michael Foot," New Statesman & Society, July 30, 1993, v6, n263, p. 9.
| British History: Michael Foot |
Foot, Michael (b. 1913). Deputy leader (1976-80) and leader (1980-3) of the Labour Party. A distinguished left-wing author and journalist, Foot, as editor and managing director of Tribune, was a leading Bevanite in the 1950s and after 1958 prominent in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. An MP from 1945, he accepted office for the first time as employment secretary 1974-6. Between 1976 and 1979 he was lord president of the council and leader of the House of Commons, before succeeding James Callaghan as party leader. He led a divided party however, and went down to humiliating defeat at the hands of Mrs Thatcher in 1983 on a manifesto described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Michael Foot |
Foot, Michael, 1913-, British politician. He entered Parliament in 1945 and became a spokesperson for the Labour party's radical left wing. Editor of the party organ, the Tribune, he served as secretary of state for employment (1974-75) and as leader of the House of Commons (1976-79). He succeeded James Callaghan as Labour party leader (1980-83) and tried to maintain the party's traditional policies in the face of the opposition of more conservative members, who broke away and formed the Social Democratic party.
| Wikipedia: Michael Foot |
For other persons named Michael Foot, see Michael Foot (disambiguation).
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This article's introduction section may not adequately summarize its contents. To comply with Wikipedia's lead section guidelines, please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (September 2009) |
| The Right Honourable Michael Foot |
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| In office 4 November 1980 – 2 October 1983 |
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| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
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| Prime Minister | Margaret Thatcher |
| Preceded by | James Callaghan |
| Succeeded by | Neil Kinnock |
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| In office 5 April 1976 – 4 November 1980 |
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| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Denis Healey |
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| In office 8 April 1976 – 4 May 1979 |
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| Prime Minister | James Callaghan |
| Preceded by | Edward Short |
| Succeeded by | Christopher Soames (Lord President) Norman St John-Stevas (Leader) |
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| In office 5 March 1974 – 8 April 1976 |
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| Prime Minister | Harold Wilson |
| Preceded by | William Whitelaw |
| Succeeded by | Albert Booth |
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| Born | 23 July 1913 Plymouth, Devon, England |
| Political party | Labour |
| Spouse(s) | Jill Craigie (1949 until her death in 1999) |
Michael Mackintosh Foot (born 23 July 1913) is a British politician and writer. He was leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983.
Contents |
Family
Foot's father, Isaac Foot, was a solicitor and founder of the Plymouth law firm, Foot and Bowden. Isaac Foot was an active member of the Liberal Party and was Liberal Member of Parliament for Bodmin in Cornwall 1922–1924 and 1929–1935 and a Lord Mayor of Plymouth.[1]
Michael Foot's brothers were Sir Dingle Foot MP, the Liberal politician Lord Foot (previously John Foot) and Lord Caradon (previously Hugh Foot), a Governor of Cyprus and a former representative of the United Kingdom at the United Nations from 1964-1970, whose son was the campaigning journalist Paul Foot.
Early life
Michael Foot was born in Plymouth, Devon, and educated at Plymouth College Preparatory School and Leighton Park School in Reading. He then went on to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Wadham College, Oxford. Foot was president of the Oxford Union. He also took part in the ESU USA Tour (the debating tour of the USA run by the English-Speaking Union). On graduating in 1934, he took a job as a shipping clerk in Liverpool. Foot was profoundly influenced by the poverty and unemployment that he witnessed in Liverpool, on a different scale from anything he had seen in Plymouth. A Liberal up to this time, Foot was converted to Socialism by Oxford University Labour Club president David Lewis and others: "... I knew him [at Oxford] when I was a Liberal [and Lewis] played a part in converting me to socialism."[2] Foot joined the Labour Party and first stood for parliament at the age of 22 in the 1935 general election when he contested Monmouth. During this election Foot criticised the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, for seeking rearmament. In his election address Foot contended that "the armaments race in Europe must be stopped now".[3] Foot also supported unilateral disarmament, after multilateral disarmament talks at Geneva had broken down in 1933.[4]
He became a journalist, working briefly on the New Statesman before joining the left-wing weekly Tribune when it was set up in early 1937 to support the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist United Front between Labour and the parties to its left. The campaign's members were Stafford Cripps's (Labour-affiliated) Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CP). Foot resigned in 1938 after the paper's first editor, William Mellor, was fired for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement.
Journalist
On the recommendation of Aneurin Bevan, Foot was soon hired by Lord Beaverbrook to work as a writer on his Evening Standard. (Bevan is supposed to have told Beaverbrook on the phone: "I've got a young bloody knight-errant here. They sacked his boss, so he resigned. Have a look at him.") At the outbreak of the Second World War, Foot volunteered for military service, but was rejected due to his chronic asthma. In 1940, under the pen-name "Cato" he and two other Beaverbrook journalists (Frank Owen, editor of the Standard, and Peter Howard of the Daily Express) published Guilty Men, a Left Book Club book attacking the appeasement policy of the Chamberlain government that became a run-away best-seller. Beaverbrook made Foot editor of the Evening Standard in 1942 at the age of 28. During the war Foot made a speech that was later featured during The World at War TV series of the early 1970s. Foot was speaking in defence of the Daily Mirror, which had criticised the conduct of the war by the Churchill Government. He mocked the notion that the Government would make no more territorial demands of other newspapers if they allowed the Mirror to be censored. Foot left the Standard in 1945 to join the Daily Herald as a columnist. The Daily Herald was jointly owned by the TUC and Odhams Press, and was effectively an official Labour Party paper. He rejoined Tribune as editor from 1948 to 1952, and was again the paper's editor from 1955 to 1960. Throughout his political career he railed against the increasing corporate domination of the press, entertaining a special loathing for Rupert Murdoch.
Member of Parliament
Foot fought the Plymouth Devonport constituency in the 1945 general election. He won the seat for Labour for the first time, holding it until his surprise defeat by Dame Joan Vickers at the 1955 general election. Until 1957, he was the most prominent ally of Aneurin Bevan, who had taken Cripps's place as leader of the Labour left, though Foot and Bevan fell out after Bevan renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1957 Labour Party conference.
Before the cold war began in the late 1940s, Foot favoured a 'third way' foreign policy for Europe (he was joint author with Richard Crossman and Ian Mikardo of the pamphlet Keep Left in 1947), but in the wake of the communist seizure of power in Hungary and Czechoslovakia he and Tribune took a strongly anti-communist position, eventually embracing NATO.
Foot was however a critic of the west's handling of the Korean war, an opponent of West German rearmament in the early 1950s and a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Under his editorship, Tribune opposed both the British government's Suez adventure and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Foot returned to parliament in 1960 at a by-election in Ebbw Vale in Monmouthshire, left vacant by Bevan's death.
He had the Labour whip withdrawn in March 1961 after rebelling against the Labour leadership over air force estimates. He only returned to the Parliamentary Labour Group in 1963 when Harold Wilson replaced Hugh Gaitskell as Labour leader.
Harold Wilson – the subject of an enthusiastic campaign biography by Foot published by Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press in 1964 – offered Foot a place in his first government, but Foot turned it down. Instead he became the leader of Labour's left opposition from the back benches, dazzling the Commons with his command of rhetoric. He opposed the government's moves to restrict immigration, join the Common Market and reform the trade unions, was against the Vietnam war and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, and denounced the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968. He also famously allied with the Tory right-winger Enoch Powell to scupper the government's plan to abolish the voting rights of hereditary peers and create a House of Lords comprising only life peers – a "seraglio of eunuchs" as Foot put it.
In 1967, Foot challenged James Callaghan but failed to win the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party.
In government
After 1970, Labour moved to the left and Wilson came to an accommodation with Foot. In April 1972, he stood for the Deputy Leadership of the party, along with Edward Short and Anthony Crosland. Short defeated Foot in the second ballot after Crosland had been eliminated in the first.
When, in 1974, Labour returned to office under Harold Wilson, Foot became Secretary of State for Employment. In this role, he played the major part in the government's efforts to maintain the trade unions' support. He was also responsible for the Health and Safety at Work Act. Foot was one of the mainstays of the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Economic Community. When Wilson retired in 1976, Foot contested the party leadership and led in the first ballot, but was ultimately defeated by James Callaghan. Later that year, Foot was elected Deputy Leader and served as Leader of the House of Commons, which gave him the unenviable task of trying to maintain the survival of the Callaghan government as its majority evaporated. In 1975, Foot, along with Jennie Lee and others, courted controversy when they supported Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, after she prompted the declaration of a state of emergency.
Labour leadership
Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, Foot was elected Labour leader in 1980, beating the right's candidate Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election (the last leadership contest to involve only Labour MPs). Foot presented himself as a compromise candidate capable, unlike Healey, of uniting the party, which at the time was riven by the grassroots left-wing insurgency centred on Tony Benn. The Bennites demanded revenge for the betrayals, as they saw them, of the Callaghan government, and pushed the case for replacement of MPs who had acquiesced in them by left-wingers who would support the causes of unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the Common Market and widespread nationalisation. (Benn did not stand for the leadership: apart from Foot and Healey, the other candidates – both eliminated in the first round – were John Silkin, like Foot a Tribunite, and Peter Shore, an anti-European right-winger.)
When he became leader, Foot was already 67 and frail – and almost immediately after his election as leader was faced with a massive crisis: the creation in early 1981 of a breakaway party by four senior Labour right-wingers, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers (the so-called "Gang of Four"), the Social Democratic Party. The SDP won the support of large sections of the media, and for more than a year its opinion poll ratings suggested that it could at least overtake Labour and possibly win a general election.
With the Labour left still strong – in 1981 Benn decided to challenge Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, a contest Healey won by the narrowest of margins – Foot struggled to make an impact and was widely criticised for it, though his performances in the Commons, most notably on the Falklands crisis of 1982, won him widespread respect from other parliamentarians. (He was however criticised by some on the left who felt that he should not have supported the Thatcher government's immediate resort to military action.) The right-wing newspapers nevertheless lambasted him consistently for what they saw as his bohemian eccentricity, attacking him for wearing what they described as a "donkey jacket" at the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, for which he was likened to an "out-of-work navvy". Foot didn't make it generally known that HM the Queen Mother had complimented him on it.
Through late 1982 and early 1983, there was constant speculation that Labour MPs would replace Foot with Healey as leader. Such speculation increased after Labour lost the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, in which the gay rights activist Peter Tatchell was its candidate, standing against a Tory, a Liberal and the right wing John O'Grady, who had declared himself the "real" Labour candidate and fought an openly homophobic campaign against Tatchell. Critically, however, Labour held on in a subsequent by-election in Darlington and Foot remained leader for the 1983 general election.
Resignation
The 1983 Labour manifesto, strongly socialist in tone, advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and a return to a more interventionist industrial policy. The manifesto also pledged that a Labour government would abolish the House of Lords, nationalise banks and leave the EEC. Among the Labour MPs newly-elected in 1983 in support of this manifesto were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Foot's Labour Party lost to the Conservatives in a landslide. Foot resigned and was succeeded by Neil Kinnock as leader. Gerald Kaufman, once Harold Wilson's press officer and during the 1980s a key player on the Labour right, described the 1983 Labour manifesto as "the longest suicide note in history". This wasn't just through the orientation of the policies however, it also included the marketing aspect. As a statement on internal democracy, Foot passed the edict that the manifesto would consist of all resolutions arrived at conference, making the manifesto over 700 pages long. The party also failed to master the medium of television, while Foot addressed public meetings around the country, and made some radio broadcasts, in the same manner as Clement Attlee in 1945. Members joked that they hadn't expected Foot to allow the slogan "Think positive, Act positive, Vote Labour" on grammatical grounds.
The irony of the 1983 manifesto has not been lost on recent Labour politicians such as Geoffrey Robinson, who remarked when talking of the 2008 credit crunch and the banking crisis, where part nationalisation of the banks has been proposed, that the 1983 manifesto has come into effect twenty five years later. Hardline left-wing Labour Party commentators believe this has given Foot some vindication.
Backbenches and retirement
Foot took a back seat in Labour politics after 1983 and retired from the House of Commons in 1992 but remained politically active. From 1987 to 1992, he was the oldest sitting British MP (preceding former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath). He defended Salman Rushdie, the novelist who was subject to a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini, and took a strongly pro-interventionist position against Serbia during its conflict with Croatia and Bosnia, supporting NATO forces whilst citing defence of civilian populations in the latter countries. In addition he is among the Patrons of the British-Croatian Society.[5] The Guardian's political editor Michael White criticised Foot's "overgenerous" support for Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman.[6]
In 1995, an article in The Sunday Times, under the headline "KGB: Michael Foot was our agent", alleged that the Soviet intelligence services regarded Foot as an 'agent of influence', named as 'Agent Boot'. Foot denied he had been any such thing, successfully sued The Sunday Times and handed over a large part of his damages to Tribune. The article was based on the paper's serialisation of KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky's memoirs.
Foot has remained a high-profile member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to this day. He is the author of several books, including highly regarded biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H. G. Wells. Indeed, he is a distinguished Vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society. Many of his friends have said publicly that they regret that he ever gave up literature for politics.
Foot is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.
In a poll of Labour party activists he was voted the worst post-war Labour party leader.[7] Though Foot is considered by many a failure as Labour leader, his biographer Mervyn Jones strongly makes the case that no one else could have held Labour together at the time. Foot is remembered with affection in Westminster as a great parliamentarian. He was widely liked, and admired for his integrity and generosity of spirit, by both his colleagues and opponents.
Personal life
Foot was married to the film-maker, author and feminist historian Jill Craigie from 1949 until her death in 1999.
In 2007, it was revealed that he had engaged in an extramarital affair in the early 1970s which had put a considerable strain on his marriage, not least because he spent a substantial amount of money paying the woman's bills. Craigie's suspicion was said to have been raised when Foot, not known for his sartorial elegance, began taking inordinate care over his appearance.[8]
In 2003 Foot turned 90. He has been a passionate supporter of Plymouth Argyle Football Club since childhood and served for several years as a director of the club. For his 90th birthday present the club registered him as a player and gave him shirt number 90. This made him the oldest registered player in the history of football. He has stated that he would not 'conk out' until he had seen his team play in the premiership.
On 23 July 2006, his 93rd birthday, Michael Foot became the longest lived leader of a major British political party, passing Lord Callaghan's record of 92 years, 364 days.
A staunch republican (though well-liked by royalty) and proponent of an elected upper house, Foot had always rejected honours from the Queen and the government, including a knighthood and a peerage, on more than one occasion. This was the opposite view of his brothers, who accepted peerages and a knighthood.
In popular culture
Foot was portrayed by Patrick Godfrey in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis's controversial The Falklands Play.
The Polish military officer and diplomat, Michael W. Zwierzanski, became a politician in Poland during the 1980s. In his second collection of memoirs, published in 1999 under the title of Under Auspices of a Saffron Tree: Life Through a Detached Ambiguity, Zwierzanski wrote how he was in "semi-frequent contact" with Foot's office and that the Labour leader "inspired me greatly, especially with his stance towards nationalistion and social policy...[my] proposal to reclassify travelling peoples as those not protected by domestic law...[in order to] channel extra monies to the native Polish populations in and around Krakow...was directly influenced by the ideals of Mr Foot."
Notes
- ^ Foot, John. "Isaac Foot". in Duncan Brack. Dictionary of Liberal Biography. Malcolm Baines, Katie Hall, Graham Lippiatt, Tony Little, Mark Pack, Geoffrey Sell, Jen Tankard (1st ed. ed.). Artillery Row, London: Politico's Publishing. pp. 109–112. ISBN 1902301099.
- ^ Smith, Cameron (1989). Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press. pp. 161–162. ISBN 0-929091-04-3. Foot in an interview with the author in 1985
- ^ Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 43.
- ^ Ibid, p. 30.
- ^ The British Croatian Society Registered Charity No. 1086139 Info and CV's of the members, retrieved 2009-01-29
- ^ Michael White (2007-04-18). "Michael Foot's lucky life". The Times Literary Supplement. http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2637313,00.html. Retrieved 2009-07-03.
- ^ 09:17am (2008-09-25). "Newsnight: Michael Crick: Place That Labour Face". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/michaelcrick/2008/09/place_that_labour_face.html. Retrieved 2009-06-24.
- ^ Brooks, Richard (2007-02-25). "Michael Foot had a young black mistress". The Sunday Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1434627.ece. Retrieved 2009-08-17.
Bibliography
- "Cato". Guilty Men. Left Book Club. 1940.
- "Brendan and Beverley" (as "Cassius"). Victor Gollancz. 1940.
- Foot, Michael: The Pen and the Sword. MacGibbon and Kee. 1957. ISBN 0-261-61989-6
- Foot, Michael: Aneurin Bevan. MacGibbon and Kee. 1962 (vol 1); 1973 (vol 2) ISBN 0-261-61508-4
- Foot, Michael: Debts of Honour. Harper and Row. 1981. ISBN 0-06-039001-8
- Foot, Michael: Another Heart and Other Pulses. Collins. 1984.
- Foot, Michael: H. G.: The History of Mr Wells. Doubleday. 1985.
- Foot, Michael: Loyalists and Loners. Collins. 1986.
- Foot, Michael: Politics of Paradise. HarperCollins. 1989. ISBN 0-06-039091-3
- Foot, Michael: 'Introduction' in Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Penguin (Penguin Classics), 1967 & 1985.
- Foot, Michael (1997). "Bevan's Message to the World". in Goodman, Geoffrey (ed.). The State of the Nation: The Political Legacy of Aneurin Bevan. London: Gollancz. pp. 179–207. ISBN 0575063084.
- Foot, Michael: 'Introduction' in Russell, Bertrand: Autobiography (Routledge, 1998)
- Foot, Michael: Dr Strangelove, I Presume (Gollancz, 1999)
- Foot, Michael: The Uncollected Michael Foot (ed Brian Brivati, Politicos Publishing, 2003)
- Foot, Michael: 'Foreword' in Rosen, Greg: Old Labour to New (Methuen Publishing, 2005)
- Foot, Michael: Isaac Foot: A West Country Boy - Apostle of England. (Politicos, 2006)
Biographies
- Hoggart, Simon; & Leigh, David. Michael Foot: a Portrait. Hodder. 1981. ISBN 0-340-27040-3
- Jones, Mervyn. Michael Foot. Gollancz. 1993. ISBN 0-575-05933-8
- Morgan, Kenneth O. Michael Foot: A Life. HarperPress (HarperCollins) 2007. ISBN 978 0 00 717826 1
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Michael Foot |
The Labour History Archive and Study Centre hold Michael Foot's archive see: http://www.phm.org.uk/
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Mentioned in
- The Injury: The Office (TV Episode) (2006 Comedy TV Episode)
- American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1991 Spy Film)
- Morocco 1972: The Real Chronicles with Viva (Film)
- theory of spatial competition
- Peter David Shore (British politician)
- James Callaghan
- Denis Winston Healey (British politician)
- Roy Hattersley (British politician)
- Neil Kinnock (British politician)
- Michael Foot (disambiguation)
- The Door in the Wall (Themes) (story)
- Labour Party
- Hugh Gaitskell
- Margaret Hilda Thatcher (British politician)
