‘Michael Foot was a true trumpet of radicalism’

Published: 4 March 2010

IT is deep into the night and I am affectionately remembering Michael Foot.

In front of me is his work on Jonathan Swift, acclaimed as one of our great satirists and foe of hypocrisy, plus a charming painting of two herons sitting in a lake near Michael’s old constituency, Ebbw Vale – a kind thought from an old friend as I lay in my ­hospital bed.

The establishment to which he belonged by dint of his leadership of the Opposition declares the closure on its dead by a Westminster Abbey do, all thoroughly predictable and punctuated boringly by the yawns and foot-shuffling of the over-fed, the overdressed and under-intelligent, champing their bit for lunch.

Pomp and circumstance were not Foot’s strong point. His departure will, of course, unleash a cannibalistic, journalistic feast. I leave his foibles and mistakes in a long life to them.

Of course, the Cenotaph incident (when he was accused of wearing “a donkey jacket” on Remembrance Day) had extraordinary repercussions but nobody bothered to point out that he was very early in the denouncing and warning of the Nazi threat, while others followed appeasement and a few traitors encouraged co-operation.

There was always another side to Michael. He blinked when I reminded him his party piece was Nye Bevan’s, his mentor and founder of the NHS. They duetted awfully in the romantic song It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie with the words: “I love you, yes I do, I love you... Millions of hearts have been broken, just because those words were spoken.”

On the day of the ludicrous accusations in the Sunday Times that he was a “Soviet agent of influence” I asked him from a concealed corner across a restaurant in a Russian accent: “Comrade, do you wish some more roubles?” He flushed with anger and threw a plate at me.

He was always at home in the Greek Street restaurant, the Gay Hussar, then a journalist drop-shop and source of malicious and indiscreet, inaccurate gossip.

A superb journalist, he won the enviable respect of the best of his peers. Geoffrey Goodman, a powerhouse at the Daily Mirror, Ted Castle, then at the Daily Herald, now alas the Sun, and earlier on Frank Owen, the swashbuckling radical in Fleet Street and unredeemed lefty editor of the Daily Mail.

And then there was Bill O’Connor, Cassandra of the Daily Mirror, a feared master of invective. An older generation will recall the live black and white TV debates In The News with Lord Boothby where working class Tory Bill Brown confronted the waspish AJP Taylor and Michael, who was all smiles but suddenly lashing out like the masked hero Zorro.

I have been there when he has held vast crowds spellbound, with his oratory, logic, humour and accuracy.
Enoch Powell, staunch upholder of parliamentary democracy, bowed to Michael for putting the sovereignty of Parliament above all.

At the launch of CND, in a packed Central Hall, a telegram boy suddenly appeared at his side when he was in full flow. When he realised from the telegram’s contents that the fleeing boy was part of a neo-fascist gang, ­several pacifists had to be restrained from handling the boy and administering rough justice. Michael laughed.

At Tribune, he masterminded a high-quality paper where distinguished journalists and others jostled for space. From Orwell to Pinter.

Come 1975, I was in the Greater London Council, he was Secretary of State for Employment and handling the brutal David Steel in the alliance which kept Callaghan’s minority government afloat. His dexterity was breathtaking. I forced through an interview with him and demanded that he allow me to increase firefighters’ pay. Michael was charged with enforcing a wage freeze. My Welsh emotion and his rhetoric made for an ugly moment but he acknowledged I had found a loophole and the flowers in St James’s Square calmed us down.

As leader of the party, he fought the general election of 1983 on a manifesto which Sir ­Gerald Kaufman des­cribed as “the longest suicide note in history”.

Of course, we lost, but I still have a vivid mem­ory of Michael and Jill Craigie standing on a Welsh hillside on the eve of this disastrous poll in driving rain singing The Red Flag... with three Welsh matrons and two dogs, one his beloved Dizzy, as if we were part of the approaching peasants’ revolt.

Lord Beaverbrook, a right-wing Tory and friend of Winston Church­ill, torched the best of the left writers on the Standard. Michael published what others were afraid to do, although he almost lost his job over a provocative series of articles by the incorrigible Arthur Koestler. Like the Duke of Wellington, it was publish and be damned.

His delight was boundless when every newspaper refused to publish Randolph Churchill’s attack on Lord Rothermere, the demon of the Daily Mail. Such was the power of the printed word that when Michael referred in the Commons to the article in which Rothermere was des­cribed as the pornographer royal, the noble lord suffered a fit of apoplexy.

No one can take away his broad humanity, his cultural thirst, dry wit, his love of India and despair at the mess in the Bal­kans. He remained, like Robin Cook, a believer in a moral foreign policy.

His love of football and Plymouth Argyle was genuine and was made tangible when he gave a large part of his libel money from the Sunday Times to the club.

Ancient universities have public orators. Michael was the people’s orator, sounding the brass trumpet of socialism and radicalism, echoing down from days of Cavalier and Puritan. His dna and political genesis were heirlooms he wrapped about with a love of life and a generosity of spirit.

He burned with the style and determination of William Hazlitt, his favourite writer, and that of William Cobbett.

As I looked back, I came across a quote from his beloved Lord Byron, appropriate for today: “Yet freedom, yet thy banner torn, but flying, streaming like a thunderstorm against the wind.”

Or in the words of the German poet Heine, another of his favourites: “Put the sword of truth and the field of justice on thy coffin.” We will.

• Illtyd Harrington is fomer deputy chairman of the GLC