BBC obit here (with weird comment from Gordon Brown — “unifying leader” — what party was he in during the 1980s I wonder?). FWIW my own thoughts about Foot are here.
And of course no obit of Foot would be complete without mention of the cliche of the “the longest suicide note in history”. By the same tortured (sic) reasoning, I suppose that makes the 2001 Labour party manifesto the longest homicide note in history, assuming you are an Iraqi, but that is a matter of less concern to the State media than that Labour in 1983 refused to genuflect at the altar of neo-liberalism.
Isn’t it interesting that the Conservative party have currently been out of power for almost as long as Labour were, and are (apparently still) more unelectable than the Labour Party ever were and yet no one has ever accused them of being ‘too right wing’ (although opinion polls consistently show that they are) or that any of their dreadful manifestoes are ‘the longest suicide note in….’?
no ‘Very Serious Pundit’ in the mainstream media
“Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.” Hannen Swaffer (1879–1962)
“Unifying leader”?
Well, absolutely everybody thought he was going to lose in 1983.
Seriously, given that a year into his leadership the party split in two, that is a borderline mental thing to say.
I guess the thought, which is not unreasonable, is that no-one else could have held it together (which, given the cast of characters at the time, is probably right, no?). Like Major in the 90’s. But, yes, an extremely odd thing to say.
If it was “a voice for unity”, fair enough. Although he was one faction’s candidate, just as Healey was.
But unifying? As in an actual accomplishment?
That’s both odd and utterly wrong.
I liked and admired him, but he did have a fault that’s often praised as a virtue (see for instance RW Johnson in the LRB not long ago) which is that he would often make a stand against something the Labour Party shouldn’t have been doing and then dramatically back down. I know this is sometimes the right thing to do, but there’s that, and there’s being a drama queen, and Foot was too often the latter. (Also see Short, C.)
The history of the Labour Party in the Eighties is too often written from the point of view of the victors. It’s often assumed that the wrong man won the leadership contest. I didn’t think so then and I don’t now.
About two decades ago, by the way, I went to a match at Selhurt Park in which Plymouth drew nil-nil with Crystal Palace. Foot was one step behind me on the terrace. A mate of mine deliberately went to the gents when Foot did, at half-time, so he could say he’d gone for a piss next to Michael Foot. Some people have the strangest ways of paying homage to their heroes.
I’m sure he was a lovely man, with all the right ideas, or at least his heart in the right place, but could anything else be said about the end of his political career other than it was a humiliating failure? I know all political careers end in failure, but this was a particularly evident example.
Was it? His party losty an election, badly. That’s not so unusual. Somebody has to lose, and sometimes they lose badly. But on the other hand, he’s well-regarded as a human being, which the only subsequent Labour leader to win an election will never be able to say. Indeed, he’ll never be able to go out in public without people calling him a war criminal. I know whose legacy I’d rather have.
Failure? Funny how everyone’s thinking about 1983. I’m thinking about 1940. Look at how many imprints there are listed on the inside cover of my copy of _Guilty Men_. You don’t do that by accident.
Interesting that in the BBC appreciation with Andrew Neil it was Michael Gove who mentioned Guilty Men, and seemed most sincerely warm about him. Powell said all political careers end in failure. To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.
Foot was a noted journalist and writer, and politically he got himself elected to Parliament for a long time and got himself into the cabinet. That is usually considered to be a successful career. If Foot had not run for the Labour leadership in 1980, and simply retired at the next election, he would have been regarded as a success. And he would have had just as much success in advancing his political ideals as well. Running for the Labour leadership was his only really bad career move.
Contrast with Roy Jenkins, another author- politician who led the alliance of parties that came in third in that election. Jenkins would also have been regarded as having been more successful in politics if he had not tried to come back in British politics after his tenure as head of the European Commission. I think Jenkins achieved more than Foot, but that is because he achieved more pre-1980, as a Cabinet minister. The Blair government ultimately turned out to be as close to Jenkins’ political vision as it was to Foot’s political vision, e.g. not at all.
Enoch Powell’s observation is true because of the nature of parliamentary systems. Since the top job is Prime Minister, a well known politician who doesn’t become Prime Minister is regarded as a failure, for not reaching the top. But Prime Ministers usually don’t leave office voluntarily, and even when they do there are always at least rumors that they were pushed (this was true even of Churchill). If you want to see political careers that end in success, you have to look at term limited presidential systems. Its not called the greasy pole for nothing.
Bugger. I formed a great many of my political views reading Foot’s biography of Bevan and his journalism. There’s a still a bit of me that hates the Liberal Democrats for the Gang of Four.
I think that the one thing I unquestionable share with Foot is that we have both no doubt cheered for Rory Fallon.
A leader of the Opposition who fails to win a general election might be regarded as a failure, but that failure is always contextual. It’s a very polite, forgivable, British failure to lose an election, and the failures of those who do end up at Number 10 are often much more profound, because they have much greater impact. (Sorry, but I won’t be shedding any tears when Thatcher pops off. Nor Blair, for that matter.)
For further context: we’re as far away today from Foot’s election as Labour leader in 1979 as 1979 was from the creation of the NHS. He was one of the last surviving links to the campaigning left of the 1930s, and generous in later life with his time and memories to those for whom such things were the stuff of ancient history.
but I won’t be shedding any tears when Thatcher pops off…
You think anyone round here will? It’ll be Elvis Costello Time…
Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.
To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.
This is a very good point. If Churchill and Foot had lived their lives backwards, Churchill would be the initially promising idiot who sent thousands to their deaths at Gallipoli, and Foot would be the man who redeemed his youthful electoral failure by his stand against appeasement. (And Enoch Powell would be the man who made some stupid speech about immigration as a young man, but is now mainly remembered for his illustrious military career and his courageous stand against British brutality in Kenya.)
“Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.”
I see the force of that.
On the other hand, run the counterfactual. Say Foot refuses the post. Who would have taken it, and how would they have done?
Labour would have been stuck with a choice between Benn (odious, arrogant, too far
left for 80% of the electorate) and Healey (competent, effective, just maybe electable, but disliked by a clear majority of Labour members, especially the activist ones).
It’s hard to imagine someone doing /much/ worse than Foot. I guess I can imagine an SDP split that sucked away twenty MPs instead of four, say. Or, Tony Benn coming out in full-throated opposition to the Falklands War. IMS he did that as a private Member, and it caused him to lose not one but two elections — he had to wait for a by-election a year or two later to get back in.
Other hand, it’s also hard to see anyone — Healey, some other compromise candidate, whoever — doing very much /better/. Oh, Healey would probably have tried to rein in the Militants and yadda yadda, but I’m not sure he would have been able to succeed in 1980-82; it took Labour not one but two more crushing defeats to grasp this necessity, and Article Four wasn’t abandoned until 1996. And regardless of who’s leading the Opposition, the Falklands conflict is going to make Margaret Thatcher re-election rather difficult to stop — lies about the _Belgrano_, or no.
If any plausible non-Foot leader would have done about as badly (or as well), it’s hard to come down too hard on Foot.
Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m fairly sure that was more the fault of General Galtieri than Michael Foot. That woman looked like a gazetted loser before the Falklands incident. I’m not sure that Foot would have won in 83/4 by as much as Healey might have without it, but he would very likely have won.
I’ll stick my neck out and say that his biography of Nye Bevan was one of the best bios I have ever read, especially Vol 1 for its history of the 1930s in British politics. Not being British (Irish, in fact), it is why I remember him the most.
Granted, Foot was probably too close to his subject. How does his scholarship stand up today? I can’t recall any major revisionism on Bevan, but what do I know.
I also recall reading that his Liberal father called him Michael after Michael Davitt, the Irish Fenian, land agitator, and sometime political partner of Parnell.
“I’m fairly sure that was more the fault of General Galtieri than Michael Foot. That woman looked like a gazetted loser before the Falklands incident.”
Actually, her poll ratings bottomed out in early ’82, and were already rebounding before the invasion. And General Galtieri was not a member of the Gang of Five.
The 1983 election was held nearly a year after the shooting stopped. The Falklands War helped turn a Tory win into a landslide, sure. But if it had never happened, Thatcher still would have won.
(In the early 1980s, many people hated and feared Thatcher, but were just as repelled by Labour. That gets forgotten a lot.)
Nobody’s mentioned Foot’s handling of the First Miners Strike, either. He got the miners to accept pay restraints in return for passing a pile of union-friendly legislation. Most of which Thatcher would repeal a decade later, to be sure. But still: signal achievement, or blip on the screen?
I’m inclined to agree with Doug on the counterfactual. I’d add that coutnerfactuals about other leaders are very hard to assess. There is a reason that Healey never became leader, and it was not his unpopularity with the grassroots, but the distrust that Labour MPs had for him — he was not popular among MPs and – -and you can think this is admirable or not, but it seems to be a fact — he didn’t care. In fact he was as arrogant as Benn at least, and was understood to be so. Me, I admired and still admire them both, actually.
There’s a contrast with the Tories in the 1990s. There were a number of MPs who might have led the Tories reasonably well (which, I think, Major did, in incredibly difficult circumstances). There were not a number of MPs who could have led Labour well in the early 80’s, regardless of the circumstances. (Is this a persistent problem for Labour? Attlee hung on long past his sell-by date, knowing that he was past it, because he wanted to prevent Morrison, whom he believed would be a disaster, from becoming leader, and believed that he was giving Bevan time to mature into the leadership – then they ended up with Gaitskell who was not a stellar leader by any means, not that I’m suggesting Attlee was right about Bevan).
There’s a contrast with the Tories in the 1990s. There were a number of MPs who might have led the Tories reasonably well (which, I think, Major did, in incredibly difficult circumstances).
Do you just mean from 1989 to 1997? Because from here it looks as though the Tories leadership problems from 1997 until the advent of David Cameron were as bad as any that Labour faced in the 1980s.
And I suspect that it’s easier to lead in government than in opposition. (Cue obligatory reference to Kissinger on academic politics
Yes, I did mean 1989-1997. I’m not sure I agree about 1997 to Cameron — Hague was a perfectly fine leader of an unleadable and unelectable party, and I didn’t understand why he had to resign after 2001. Then, certainly, disaster, and I’m not sure it is over even now — Cameron has fused a leadership team that has a human face and is genuinely electable, but he is leading a party that is still, as far as I can see, the party that was unelectable for 9 years (big contrast with Blair, who although he was well to the right of the party he led, was leading a party that had changed dramatically). What happens to that party after May, whether it wins or not, is anyone’s guess (obviously, if it wins, it’ll be a while before the right asserts itself, but only a while – thats the point at which we’ll find out whether Cameron is a good leader).
A theme emerging, maybe: the tactical usefulness of lost elections.
1983: The story goes that Foot was helped to the leadership by key figures on the right, including within the parliamentary party, keen to clear political space for the embryonic SDP. The story further goes that right wing figures who remained in the Labour party, particularly in the union movement, were decisive in getting the longest suicide note adopted as the 1983 manifesto so as to pin the subsequent defeat squarely on the left. From Kinnock to Blair, with Mandelson a constant guiding presence, things moved steadily rightwards from there.
1992: A tactical masterstroke only in retrospect. But Kinnock and John Smith were fully signed up to ERM membership, and would have sought to defend the Deutschmark peg. The outcome would have destroyed the Labour government within months of taking office, and would have irretrievably cemented every prejudice about Labour economic management. As it turned out, though, the Tories took the hit instead. Labour’s reward was a landslide that took three full terms to completely curdle.
2010: Dominic Lawson in the Indie scores this election as maybe a good one to lose. He’s talking to his fellow Tories. But wherever you stand it’s not at all a bad case he makes.
So the entire history of Labour party politics in the 1980s and 1990s is a plot to bring Blair to power? I don’t know which is more appalling and pathetic – that someone might suggest that, or that it might just be true.
Well, if 1983 was a conspiracy, 1992 looks more like a cockup.
(Unless George Soros was in on the plot. But as we all know, he’s a sinister soc1al!st, so in this one instance he’s off the hook.)
Hidari, I suspect that the reason nobody accuses the Tory party of being unelectable because it is ‘too right wing’ is because that is not the reason it is unelectable.
Tory party ideology has become incoherent, faction ridden and visibly opportunist. When they are noticed it is because they are attacking Blair’s government to its left rather than the right. They are currently in the same position as Kinnock in 1992, an unelectable party with a possibility of being elected because the governing party leadership is discredited.
I really don’t know what the outcome of the election will be. I suspect that Cameron will find his ‘support’ evaporates during the campaign as the Tories are unable to say what they stand for in a coherent fashion.
Michael Foot had very much the same problem as leader. I don’t think it was the manifesto that was the problem, rather it was the fear that the manifesto was merely the first installment of a radical agenda led by ideological Bennite Jacobbins.
Me, I tend to blame the people who split the Labour Party for the defeat of 1983. They’d decided that they’d rather oppose Thatcherism than impose social democracy. Lovely for them – less good for many of us.
The history of the Labour Party in the Eighties is too often written from the point of view of the victors. It’s often assumed that the wrong man won the leadership contest. I didn’t think so then and I don’t now.”
Meh. I think with Healey there would have been structural changes on how constituencies were organized to weaken the Trots a few years earlier than the great purges of the mid-late 1980s [which some of us remember with a twinge of fondness].
Or, on the other hand, you could have had a further lurch to the left after an election loss in 1983. But probably the SDP/Liberal alliance wouldn’t have been the same threat to Labour as it was in the 1980s, and the Falklands wouldn’t have been as great a jingoistic boon that it was for Thatcher. Maybe not a Labour win in 1983, but a possible win in 1987 or 1992, and hence more persistence of Old Labour and a stronger role for the unions than in the current party.
“To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.”
“This is a very good point. If Churchill and Foot had lived their lives backwards, Churchill would be the initially promising idiot who sent thousands to their deaths at Gallipoli, and Foot would be the man who redeemed his youthful electoral failure by his stand against appeasement.”
Yeah, but a larval politician who f**ks up in early life usually doesn’t get a second chance. Churchill being the exception, as Churchill’s career before WW2 was a dog’s breakfast of f**k-ups, starting with Gallipolli and including the partion of Ireland and keeping the U.K. on the gold standard, etc.
a larval politician who f**ks up in early life usually doesn’t get a second chance
Perfectly true, of course. But it still seems unfortunate that, like armchairs, political obituaries seem to retain the imprint of only the most recent arse.
Dominic Lawson in the Indie scores this election as maybe a good one to lose. He’s talking to his fellow Tories. But wherever you stand it’s not at all a bad case he makes.
Like Lawson, I remember Robert Harris’s ‘We are a nation of liars’ column very well, from the Sunday Times after the 1992 election. A Murdoch paper, of course, and it was its soaraway sister that stuck Kinnock’s head on a lightbulb . Not going to see that this time round, I’d assume, but you wonder whether that’s in the Tories’ long-term electoral interests.
I gather that the Labour leadership knew perfectly well, from their internal polling, that they were going to lose in 1992 even, incredibly, during the bizarre victory rally.
Since Foot himself was an unswerving supporter of the Falklands War, more fervent than most of his colleagues and many of Thatcher’s colleagues, I see no reason to think that with some other Labour leader the War would have benefited Thatcher less.
Michael Foot, socialist politician, historian, biographer, outstanding orator and a left wing intellectual to his boot straps, passed away last week.
I once heard him speak. It was a cold, wet and wintry February in South Wales. The economy was falling apart as a direct result of a crippling all-out miners’ strike that had begun on New Year’s Day.
So dependent on coal was the nation that by February industry was working a three day week, television broadcasts ceased at 9.30 pm each night and the country was running out of coal.
The little coal that remained was locked up at collieries and rail yards by vigorous secondary picketing. The resulting chaos precipitated a General Election called by Prime Minister Edward Heath which was to be held on 28 February 1974. Heath’s war cry was “Who Runs Britain?†I thought at the time, “not you Mr Heath.â€
I was a 23 year old striker with a young family and truly believed that we were on a righteous crusade to bring down Heath’s Conservative government. As the decades passed I came to doubt the justification of our actions.
A few days before polling day we miners in our thousands came down from the valleys to Cardiff’s Temperance Hall to hear Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson speak at a mass rally. This exercise in engaging the public hardly ever happens now.
We crammed into the Temperance Hall with our overcoats soaked from the driving rain. The mass of hot sweaty bodies that filled the hall soon had our clothes steaming so much that it seemed like a Chinese Laundry!
The stage was packed with Labour Party and National Union of Mineworkers identities, a glittering array that included NUM President Emlyn Williams, General Secretary Dai Francis, Scottish communist miners’ leader Lawrence Daly, future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan MP and the white haired, bespectacled, shambling figure of Michael Foot MP.
The MC informed the gathering that the guest of honour Mr Wilson would be “a bit late on account of his train from London being delayed at Reading.†Meanwhile the men on stage were invited to give their speeches now in anticipation of the leader’s arrival.
The union men went first with stirring speeches of the General Strike of 1926 which they remembered well (it was not yet 50 years past). We cheered the workers and booed the owners at the appropriate moments. Callaghan gave his usual avuncular, fireside chat. He mastered the art of appearing to speak to you as an individual.
Unquestionably the star turn thus far was Michael Foot. He rose, licked his lips and slowly began to move us all back centuries to a time before the Industrial Revolution. He spoke of the torment and torture of working in primitive fields as serfs or slave.
He moved on to the coming of the ironworks where men lost life or limb from scalding in the furnaces or puddling pots. It was as if we were silent bystanders in another age. He invoked the name and sayings of Labour giant, Aneurin Bevan – Nye. We were mesmerised, spellbound. At the end when our spirits were at their zenith we felt as though we were Daniel preparing to enter the lions’ den. We would have followed Foot through the Red Sea! What an orator.
We cheered and stood and clapped for ages.
The MC gave us an update on Mr Wilson’s progress, “The train is now in Swindon, so let’s fill in the time with a few hymns, is it boys?†We sang Calon Lan, Cwm Rhondda and so many of the great Welsh tunes. A large number of the miners were members of Male Voice Choirs and you may imagine how wondrous was that sound.
When we ran out of hymns, the MC told us that Mr Wilson and his train were steaming out of Newport. “Well, boys, there’s only one song left,†he said “The National Anthem.â€
We rose dutifully to our feet and began to sing the loveliest of all national anthems, Mae Hen Wlad Fy’n Hadau – Land of My Fathers. We wept as we sang; every burly, sweaty miner had tears streaming down his cheeks, though none would admit it afterwards.
As our voices swelled we reached that rousing, glorious chorus, “Gwlad, Gwlad, pleidiol wyf I’m gwlad …†At that very instant the doors swung open and the pipe smoking master strode in with his mac swinging and his pipe glowing.
Waving to each of us he made his way through huge applause to the podium where he was embraced by all.
His speech was magnificent and stirring. He had a fine speaking style which he punctuated with an occasional sip of water which was a cue that we should applaud.
What a night. It was as good as a Dylan concert.
Labour won the election with a thin majority. Harold Wilson became Prime Minister for the third time Callaghan became Foreign Secretary and Michael Foot became Secretary of State for Employment.
From 1980 to 1983, Foot led the Labour Party in opposition, a post he did not settle into naturally during a time when the old Labour Party began to self-destruct.
Sadly, many remember him for an ill judged attendance at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day 1981 clad very casually in a donkey jacket cum duffel coat.
He was one of five brothers four of whom, uniquely, became Presidents of the student’s union at either Oxford or Cambridge. He also had two sisters.
He wrote the definitive biography of his great hero and predecessor in the seat of Ebbw Vale, Aneurin Bevan. He was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
He was married to film maker and historian Jill Craigie from 1949 to her death in 1999. They had no children.
His towering intellect was very rare.
Michael Mackintosh Foot, born in Plymouth on 23 July 1913, died at Hampstead, London on 3 March 2010 at the age of 96.
{ 47 comments }
Hidari 03.03.10 at 4:09 pm
And of course no obit of Foot would be complete without mention of the cliche of the “the longest suicide note in history”. By the same tortured (sic) reasoning, I suppose that makes the 2001 Labour party manifesto the longest homicide note in history, assuming you are an Iraqi, but that is a matter of less concern to the State media than that Labour in 1983 refused to genuflect at the altar of neo-liberalism.
Isn’t it interesting that the Conservative party have currently been out of power for almost as long as Labour were, and are (apparently still) more unelectable than the Labour Party ever were and yet no one has ever accused them of being ‘too right wing’ (although opinion polls consistently show that they are) or that any of their dreadful manifestoes are ‘the longest suicide note in….’?
Strange that.
Hidari 03.03.10 at 4:11 pm
‘no one has ever accused them ‘
to clarify: I meant no ‘Very Serious Pundit’ in the mainstream media.
chris y 03.03.10 at 4:15 pm
no ‘Very Serious Pundit’ in the mainstream media
“Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.” Hannen Swaffer (1879–1962)
As I’m sure you’re aware.
Lifestrand 03.03.10 at 4:22 pm
Memorial for Michael Foot. Express your thoughts
http://www.lifestrand.net/affection/show/Michael_Foot
ajay 03.03.10 at 4:25 pm
Really, Hidari? No pundit in the mainstream media has ever accused the Conservative Party since 1997 of being too right-wing to be electable? Not one?
Or is this a “No True Scotsman” dodge – when someone finds one, you’ll just say “oh, he’s not a ‘Very Serious’ pundit”?
ajay 03.03.10 at 4:28 pm
Nick Cohen, for example?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/apr/24/conservatives.immigrationandpublicservices
bert 03.03.10 at 5:57 pm
“Unifying leader”?
Well, absolutely everybody thought he was going to lose in 1983.
Seriously, given that a year into his leadership the party split in two, that is a borderline mental thing to say.
bert 03.03.10 at 5:58 pm
Sorry, psychologically flawed.
Harry 03.03.10 at 6:01 pm
I guess the thought, which is not unreasonable, is that no-one else could have held it together (which, given the cast of characters at the time, is probably right, no?). Like Major in the 90’s. But, yes, an extremely odd thing to say.
bert 03.03.10 at 6:16 pm
If it was “a voice for unity”, fair enough. Although he was one faction’s candidate, just as Healey was.
But unifying? As in an actual accomplishment?
That’s both odd and utterly wrong.
Harry 03.03.10 at 6:58 pm
Not even a voice for unity, really — his engagement in the Tatchell affair was appallingly divisive, eg.
ejh 03.03.10 at 7:00 pm
I liked and admired him, but he did have a fault that’s often praised as a virtue (see for instance RW Johnson in the LRB not long ago) which is that he would often make a stand against something the Labour Party shouldn’t have been doing and then dramatically back down. I know this is sometimes the right thing to do, but there’s that, and there’s being a drama queen, and Foot was too often the latter. (Also see Short, C.)
The history of the Labour Party in the Eighties is too often written from the point of view of the victors. It’s often assumed that the wrong man won the leadership contest. I didn’t think so then and I don’t now.
About two decades ago, by the way, I went to a match at Selhurt Park in which Plymouth drew nil-nil with Crystal Palace. Foot was one step behind me on the terrace. A mate of mine deliberately went to the gents when Foot did, at half-time, so he could say he’d gone for a piss next to Michael Foot. Some people have the strangest ways of paying homage to their heroes.
alex 03.03.10 at 7:17 pm
I’m sure he was a lovely man, with all the right ideas, or at least his heart in the right place, but could anything else be said about the end of his political career other than it was a humiliating failure? I know all political careers end in failure, but this was a particularly evident example.
ejh 03.03.10 at 7:39 pm
Was it? His party losty an election, badly. That’s not so unusual. Somebody has to lose, and sometimes they lose badly. But on the other hand, he’s well-regarded as a human being, which the only subsequent Labour leader to win an election will never be able to say. Indeed, he’ll never be able to go out in public without people calling him a war criminal. I know whose legacy I’d rather have.
alex 03.03.10 at 8:16 pm
Indeed, but just because it’s better to be a failure than a criminal, doesn’t mean it’s good to be a failure.
ejh 03.03.10 at 8:38 pm
Nevertheless, better to be a failure than most kinds of success.
Most of us are failures, in most senses: perhaps for this reason, most of us fail to do any real harm.
bert 03.03.10 at 8:57 pm
Looking forward to “The Ghost Writer”, ejh.
Chris Williams 03.03.10 at 9:50 pm
Failure? Funny how everyone’s thinking about 1983. I’m thinking about 1940. Look at how many imprints there are listed on the inside cover of my copy of _Guilty Men_. You don’t do that by accident.
Harry 03.03.10 at 10:01 pm
Interesting that in the BBC appreciation with Andrew Neil it was Michael Gove who mentioned Guilty Men, and seemed most sincerely warm about him. Powell said all political careers end in failure. To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.
Ed 03.04.10 at 5:47 am
Foot was a noted journalist and writer, and politically he got himself elected to Parliament for a long time and got himself into the cabinet. That is usually considered to be a successful career. If Foot had not run for the Labour leadership in 1980, and simply retired at the next election, he would have been regarded as a success. And he would have had just as much success in advancing his political ideals as well. Running for the Labour leadership was his only really bad career move.
Contrast with Roy Jenkins, another author- politician who led the alliance of parties that came in third in that election. Jenkins would also have been regarded as having been more successful in politics if he had not tried to come back in British politics after his tenure as head of the European Commission. I think Jenkins achieved more than Foot, but that is because he achieved more pre-1980, as a Cabinet minister. The Blair government ultimately turned out to be as close to Jenkins’ political vision as it was to Foot’s political vision, e.g. not at all.
Ed 03.04.10 at 6:00 am
Enoch Powell’s observation is true because of the nature of parliamentary systems. Since the top job is Prime Minister, a well known politician who doesn’t become Prime Minister is regarded as a failure, for not reaching the top. But Prime Ministers usually don’t leave office voluntarily, and even when they do there are always at least rumors that they were pushed (this was true even of Churchill). If you want to see political careers that end in success, you have to look at term limited presidential systems. Its not called the greasy pole for nothing.
Keir 03.04.10 at 6:48 am
Bugger. I formed a great many of my political views reading Foot’s biography of Bevan and his journalism. There’s a still a bit of me that hates the Liberal Democrats for the Gang of Four.
I think that the one thing I unquestionable share with Foot is that we have both no doubt cheered for Rory Fallon.
nick s 03.04.10 at 7:09 am
A leader of the Opposition who fails to win a general election might be regarded as a failure, but that failure is always contextual. It’s a very polite, forgivable, British failure to lose an election, and the failures of those who do end up at Number 10 are often much more profound, because they have much greater impact. (Sorry, but I won’t be shedding any tears when Thatcher pops off. Nor Blair, for that matter.)
For further context: we’re as far away today from Foot’s election as Labour leader in 1979 as 1979 was from the creation of the NHS. He was one of the last surviving links to the campaigning left of the 1930s, and generous in later life with his time and memories to those for whom such things were the stuff of ancient history.
alex 03.04.10 at 8:25 am
but I won’t be shedding any tears when Thatcher pops off…
You think anyone round here will? It’ll be Elvis Costello Time…
Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.
ajay 03.04.10 at 9:25 am
To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.
This is a very good point. If Churchill and Foot had lived their lives backwards, Churchill would be the initially promising idiot who sent thousands to their deaths at Gallipoli, and Foot would be the man who redeemed his youthful electoral failure by his stand against appeasement. (And Enoch Powell would be the man who made some stupid speech about immigration as a young man, but is now mainly remembered for his illustrious military career and his courageous stand against British brutality in Kenya.)
Doug M. 03.04.10 at 10:47 am
“Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.”
I see the force of that.
On the other hand, run the counterfactual. Say Foot refuses the post. Who would have taken it, and how would they have done?
Labour would have been stuck with a choice between Benn (odious, arrogant, too far
left for 80% of the electorate) and Healey (competent, effective, just maybe electable, but disliked by a clear majority of Labour members, especially the activist ones).
It’s hard to imagine someone doing /much/ worse than Foot. I guess I can imagine an SDP split that sucked away twenty MPs instead of four, say. Or, Tony Benn coming out in full-throated opposition to the Falklands War. IMS he did that as a private Member, and it caused him to lose not one but two elections — he had to wait for a by-election a year or two later to get back in.
Other hand, it’s also hard to see anyone — Healey, some other compromise candidate, whoever — doing very much /better/. Oh, Healey would probably have tried to rein in the Militants and yadda yadda, but I’m not sure he would have been able to succeed in 1980-82; it took Labour not one but two more crushing defeats to grasp this necessity, and Article Four wasn’t abandoned until 1996. And regardless of who’s leading the Opposition, the Falklands conflict is going to make Margaret Thatcher re-election rather difficult to stop — lies about the _Belgrano_, or no.
If any plausible non-Foot leader would have done about as badly (or as well), it’s hard to come down too hard on Foot.
Doug M.
chris y 03.04.10 at 11:31 am
Meanwhile, of course, dooming us to another 7 years of that devil’s whelp is one of the things that it seems only fair to hold a small grudge against the Labour leadership of the early 80s for.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m fairly sure that was more the fault of General Galtieri than Michael Foot. That woman looked like a gazetted loser before the Falklands incident. I’m not sure that Foot would have won in 83/4 by as much as Healey might have without it, but he would very likely have won.
toby 03.04.10 at 12:24 pm
No one has mentioned Foot’s writing.
I’ll stick my neck out and say that his biography of Nye Bevan was one of the best bios I have ever read, especially Vol 1 for its history of the 1930s in British politics. Not being British (Irish, in fact), it is why I remember him the most.
Granted, Foot was probably too close to his subject. How does his scholarship stand up today? I can’t recall any major revisionism on Bevan, but what do I know.
I also recall reading that his Liberal father called him Michael after Michael Davitt, the Irish Fenian, land agitator, and sometime political partner of Parnell.
Doug M. 03.04.10 at 1:03 pm
“I’m fairly sure that was more the fault of General Galtieri than Michael Foot. That woman looked like a gazetted loser before the Falklands incident.”
Actually, her poll ratings bottomed out in early ’82, and were already rebounding before the invasion. And General Galtieri was not a member of the Gang of Five.
The 1983 election was held nearly a year after the shooting stopped. The Falklands War helped turn a Tory win into a landslide, sure. But if it had never happened, Thatcher still would have won.
(In the early 1980s, many people hated and feared Thatcher, but were just as repelled by Labour. That gets forgotten a lot.)
Doug M.
Doug M. 03.04.10 at 1:12 pm
Gang of Four, not Five; tch, my bad.
Nobody’s mentioned Foot’s handling of the First Miners Strike, either. He got the miners to accept pay restraints in return for passing a pile of union-friendly legislation. Most of which Thatcher would repeal a decade later, to be sure. But still: signal achievement, or blip on the screen?
Doug M.
Harry 03.04.10 at 1:31 pm
I’m inclined to agree with Doug on the counterfactual. I’d add that coutnerfactuals about other leaders are very hard to assess. There is a reason that Healey never became leader, and it was not his unpopularity with the grassroots, but the distrust that Labour MPs had for him — he was not popular among MPs and – -and you can think this is admirable or not, but it seems to be a fact — he didn’t care. In fact he was as arrogant as Benn at least, and was understood to be so. Me, I admired and still admire them both, actually.
There’s a contrast with the Tories in the 1990s. There were a number of MPs who might have led the Tories reasonably well (which, I think, Major did, in incredibly difficult circumstances). There were not a number of MPs who could have led Labour well in the early 80’s, regardless of the circumstances. (Is this a persistent problem for Labour? Attlee hung on long past his sell-by date, knowing that he was past it, because he wanted to prevent Morrison, whom he believed would be a disaster, from becoming leader, and believed that he was giving Bevan time to mature into the leadership – then they ended up with Gaitskell who was not a stellar leader by any means, not that I’m suggesting Attlee was right about Bevan).
Praisegod Barebones 03.04.10 at 1:51 pm
There’s a contrast with the Tories in the 1990s. There were a number of MPs who might have led the Tories reasonably well (which, I think, Major did, in incredibly difficult circumstances).
Do you just mean from 1989 to 1997? Because from here it looks as though the Tories leadership problems from 1997 until the advent of David Cameron were as bad as any that Labour faced in the 1980s.
And I suspect that it’s easier to lead in government than in opposition. (Cue obligatory reference to Kissinger on academic politics
alex 03.04.10 at 1:52 pm
IOW – Labour party, useless bastards, look what they dumped us with?
Harry 03.04.10 at 2:11 pm
Yes, I did mean 1989-1997. I’m not sure I agree about 1997 to Cameron — Hague was a perfectly fine leader of an unleadable and unelectable party, and I didn’t understand why he had to resign after 2001. Then, certainly, disaster, and I’m not sure it is over even now — Cameron has fused a leadership team that has a human face and is genuinely electable, but he is leading a party that is still, as far as I can see, the party that was unelectable for 9 years (big contrast with Blair, who although he was well to the right of the party he led, was leading a party that had changed dramatically). What happens to that party after May, whether it wins or not, is anyone’s guess (obviously, if it wins, it’ll be a while before the right asserts itself, but only a while – thats the point at which we’ll find out whether Cameron is a good leader).
bert 03.04.10 at 3:45 pm
A theme emerging, maybe: the tactical usefulness of lost elections.
1983: The story goes that Foot was helped to the leadership by key figures on the right, including within the parliamentary party, keen to clear political space for the embryonic SDP. The story further goes that right wing figures who remained in the Labour party, particularly in the union movement, were decisive in getting the longest suicide note adopted as the 1983 manifesto so as to pin the subsequent defeat squarely on the left. From Kinnock to Blair, with Mandelson a constant guiding presence, things moved steadily rightwards from there.
1992: A tactical masterstroke only in retrospect. But Kinnock and John Smith were fully signed up to ERM membership, and would have sought to defend the Deutschmark peg. The outcome would have destroyed the Labour government within months of taking office, and would have irretrievably cemented every prejudice about Labour economic management. As it turned out, though, the Tories took the hit instead. Labour’s reward was a landslide that took three full terms to completely curdle.
2010: Dominic Lawson in the Indie scores this election as maybe a good one to lose. He’s talking to his fellow Tories. But wherever you stand it’s not at all a bad case he makes.
alex 03.04.10 at 3:59 pm
So the entire history of Labour party politics in the 1980s and 1990s is a plot to bring Blair to power? I don’t know which is more appalling and pathetic – that someone might suggest that, or that it might just be true.
bert 03.04.10 at 4:23 pm
Well, if 1983 was a conspiracy, 1992 looks more like a cockup.
(Unless George Soros was in on the plot. But as we all know, he’s a sinister soc1al!st, so in this one instance he’s off the hook.)
Phillip Hallam-Baker 03.04.10 at 4:40 pm
Hidari, I suspect that the reason nobody accuses the Tory party of being unelectable because it is ‘too right wing’ is because that is not the reason it is unelectable.
Tory party ideology has become incoherent, faction ridden and visibly opportunist. When they are noticed it is because they are attacking Blair’s government to its left rather than the right. They are currently in the same position as Kinnock in 1992, an unelectable party with a possibility of being elected because the governing party leadership is discredited.
I really don’t know what the outcome of the election will be. I suspect that Cameron will find his ‘support’ evaporates during the campaign as the Tories are unable to say what they stand for in a coherent fashion.
Michael Foot had very much the same problem as leader. I don’t think it was the manifesto that was the problem, rather it was the fear that the manifesto was merely the first installment of a radical agenda led by ideological Bennite Jacobbins.
Chris Williams 03.04.10 at 4:42 pm
Me, I tend to blame the people who split the Labour Party for the defeat of 1983. They’d decided that they’d rather oppose Thatcherism than impose social democracy. Lovely for them – less good for many of us.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 03.04.10 at 5:14 pm
The history of the Labour Party in the Eighties is too often written from the point of view of the victors. It’s often assumed that the wrong man won the leadership contest. I didn’t think so then and I don’t now.”
Meh. I think with Healey there would have been structural changes on how constituencies were organized to weaken the Trots a few years earlier than the great purges of the mid-late 1980s [which some of us remember with a twinge of fondness].
Or, on the other hand, you could have had a further lurch to the left after an election loss in 1983. But probably the SDP/Liberal alliance wouldn’t have been the same threat to Labour as it was in the 1980s, and the Falklands wouldn’t have been as great a jingoistic boon that it was for Thatcher. Maybe not a Labour win in 1983, but a possible win in 1987 or 1992, and hence more persistence of Old Labour and a stronger role for the unions than in the current party.
“To start with Guilty Men makes the impression of subsequent failure inevitable.”
“This is a very good point. If Churchill and Foot had lived their lives backwards, Churchill would be the initially promising idiot who sent thousands to their deaths at Gallipoli, and Foot would be the man who redeemed his youthful electoral failure by his stand against appeasement.”
Yeah, but a larval politician who f**ks up in early life usually doesn’t get a second chance. Churchill being the exception, as Churchill’s career before WW2 was a dog’s breakfast of f**k-ups, starting with Gallipolli and including the partion of Ireland and keeping the U.K. on the gold standard, etc.
ajay 03.04.10 at 5:34 pm
a larval politician who f**ks up in early life usually doesn’t get a second chance
Perfectly true, of course. But it still seems unfortunate that, like armchairs, political obituaries seem to retain the imprint of only the most recent arse.
nick s 03.04.10 at 8:48 pm
Dominic Lawson in the Indie scores this election as maybe a good one to lose. He’s talking to his fellow Tories. But wherever you stand it’s not at all a bad case he makes.
Like Lawson, I remember Robert Harris’s ‘We are a nation of liars’ column very well, from the Sunday Times after the 1992 election. A Murdoch paper, of course, and it was its soaraway sister that stuck Kinnock’s head on a lightbulb . Not going to see that this time round, I’d assume, but you wonder whether that’s in the Tories’ long-term electoral interests.
Harry 03.05.10 at 1:13 am
I gather that the Labour leadership knew perfectly well, from their internal polling, that they were going to lose in 1992 even, incredibly, during the bizarre victory rally.
harry b 03.05.10 at 1:26 pm
Since Foot himself was an unswerving supporter of the Falklands War, more fervent than most of his colleagues and many of Thatcher’s colleagues, I see no reason to think that with some other Labour leader the War would have benefited Thatcher less.
Barry Freed 03.05.10 at 3:36 pm
harry, that BBC obit page returns a 404 page not found error.
Harry 03.05.10 at 3:46 pm
I’m not going to fix it yet — all the internal bbc links go to the same page, so I’ll wait a bit to see if they fix it.
Chris Skelding 03.07.10 at 9:03 am
Michael Foot, socialist politician, historian, biographer, outstanding orator and a left wing intellectual to his boot straps, passed away last week.
I once heard him speak. It was a cold, wet and wintry February in South Wales. The economy was falling apart as a direct result of a crippling all-out miners’ strike that had begun on New Year’s Day.
So dependent on coal was the nation that by February industry was working a three day week, television broadcasts ceased at 9.30 pm each night and the country was running out of coal.
The little coal that remained was locked up at collieries and rail yards by vigorous secondary picketing. The resulting chaos precipitated a General Election called by Prime Minister Edward Heath which was to be held on 28 February 1974. Heath’s war cry was “Who Runs Britain?†I thought at the time, “not you Mr Heath.â€
I was a 23 year old striker with a young family and truly believed that we were on a righteous crusade to bring down Heath’s Conservative government. As the decades passed I came to doubt the justification of our actions.
A few days before polling day we miners in our thousands came down from the valleys to Cardiff’s Temperance Hall to hear Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson speak at a mass rally. This exercise in engaging the public hardly ever happens now.
We crammed into the Temperance Hall with our overcoats soaked from the driving rain. The mass of hot sweaty bodies that filled the hall soon had our clothes steaming so much that it seemed like a Chinese Laundry!
The stage was packed with Labour Party and National Union of Mineworkers identities, a glittering array that included NUM President Emlyn Williams, General Secretary Dai Francis, Scottish communist miners’ leader Lawrence Daly, future Prime Minister Jim Callaghan MP and the white haired, bespectacled, shambling figure of Michael Foot MP.
The MC informed the gathering that the guest of honour Mr Wilson would be “a bit late on account of his train from London being delayed at Reading.†Meanwhile the men on stage were invited to give their speeches now in anticipation of the leader’s arrival.
The union men went first with stirring speeches of the General Strike of 1926 which they remembered well (it was not yet 50 years past). We cheered the workers and booed the owners at the appropriate moments. Callaghan gave his usual avuncular, fireside chat. He mastered the art of appearing to speak to you as an individual.
Unquestionably the star turn thus far was Michael Foot. He rose, licked his lips and slowly began to move us all back centuries to a time before the Industrial Revolution. He spoke of the torment and torture of working in primitive fields as serfs or slave.
He moved on to the coming of the ironworks where men lost life or limb from scalding in the furnaces or puddling pots. It was as if we were silent bystanders in another age. He invoked the name and sayings of Labour giant, Aneurin Bevan – Nye. We were mesmerised, spellbound. At the end when our spirits were at their zenith we felt as though we were Daniel preparing to enter the lions’ den. We would have followed Foot through the Red Sea! What an orator.
We cheered and stood and clapped for ages.
The MC gave us an update on Mr Wilson’s progress, “The train is now in Swindon, so let’s fill in the time with a few hymns, is it boys?†We sang Calon Lan, Cwm Rhondda and so many of the great Welsh tunes. A large number of the miners were members of Male Voice Choirs and you may imagine how wondrous was that sound.
When we ran out of hymns, the MC told us that Mr Wilson and his train were steaming out of Newport. “Well, boys, there’s only one song left,†he said “The National Anthem.â€
We rose dutifully to our feet and began to sing the loveliest of all national anthems, Mae Hen Wlad Fy’n Hadau – Land of My Fathers. We wept as we sang; every burly, sweaty miner had tears streaming down his cheeks, though none would admit it afterwards.
As our voices swelled we reached that rousing, glorious chorus, “Gwlad, Gwlad, pleidiol wyf I’m gwlad …†At that very instant the doors swung open and the pipe smoking master strode in with his mac swinging and his pipe glowing.
Waving to each of us he made his way through huge applause to the podium where he was embraced by all.
His speech was magnificent and stirring. He had a fine speaking style which he punctuated with an occasional sip of water which was a cue that we should applaud.
What a night. It was as good as a Dylan concert.
Labour won the election with a thin majority. Harold Wilson became Prime Minister for the third time Callaghan became Foreign Secretary and Michael Foot became Secretary of State for Employment.
From 1980 to 1983, Foot led the Labour Party in opposition, a post he did not settle into naturally during a time when the old Labour Party began to self-destruct.
Sadly, many remember him for an ill judged attendance at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day 1981 clad very casually in a donkey jacket cum duffel coat.
He was one of five brothers four of whom, uniquely, became Presidents of the student’s union at either Oxford or Cambridge. He also had two sisters.
He wrote the definitive biography of his great hero and predecessor in the seat of Ebbw Vale, Aneurin Bevan. He was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
He was married to film maker and historian Jill Craigie from 1949 to her death in 1999. They had no children.
His towering intellect was very rare.
Michael Mackintosh Foot, born in Plymouth on 23 July 1913, died at Hampstead, London on 3 March 2010 at the age of 96.
Chris Skelding March 2010
Comments on this entry are closed.