From the archive: Christopher Hitchens on Michael Foot

New Statesman​

23-07-2025

Michael Foot on the march. Photo byIn November 1980, Michael Foot ascended to leader of the opposition, never to become prime minister. Christopher Hitchens, with whom Foot had exchanged furious letters in the NS correspondence pages two years earlier, picked his moment to review Foot's latest book.
In the following passages, who is being assessed by whom?
'It is the superlative ease, the unruffled assurance with which that mind works, which first impresses those who meet him. One can hardly hear the mechanism working at all and yet the results have a perfect precision. Without any sense of strain or pretention, that marvellous instrument absorbs all the arguments presented to it and sifts from them an endless flow of conclusions framed in smooth, yet vibrant English.'
Or, in a comparable vein: 'What [he] so valiantly stood for could have saved his country from the Hungry Thirties and the Second World War… genius.'
The first paragraph is an appreciation of Lord Goodman. The second is a paean to Sir Oswald Mosley. The author in both cases is Michael Foot.
He there exhibits (as he does at much greater length in Debts of Honour) the three distinctive traits of his character as author and as politician. These are a deep reverence for the Establishment, especially for its more gamey ornaments, a fascination with certain reactionary rebels, and a prose style which relies on hyperbole for such effect as it can command.
There is a fourth ingredient, only hinted at in the above. It is a pervasive and amusing variety of chauvinist Anglophilia; very highly developed and of an intensity usually found only among Americans.
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This ought to make for an enjoyable if not a very enlightening read. But it doesn't matter. The treacly exaggerations start to cloy after a while; it's like eating a whole box of chocolate creams. Swift is 'the foremost exponent of lucidity in the English language'. Max Aitken was 'as handsome as Apollo, as swiftly-moving as Mercury'. Isaac Foot 'must have been just about the happiest man who ever lived'. Randolph Churchill 'set the Thames, the Hudson, the Tiber or the Danube on fire with his boiling invective'. There is no subtlety, no light or shade. Everybody has to be larger than life.
Foot was apprenticed to flattery at the court of Beaverbrook, and learned his trade well. The longest essay in this collection of profiles and memoirs concerning the old monster himself. He would not be able to claim that Foot did not take him at his own valuation. Apparently Beaverbrook favoured the 'rumbustious, marauding private enterprise system which had enabled him to become a multi- or as he would call it, a Maxi-millionaire'. And which enabled him to keep Foot (and to a more parsimonious extent, Tribune) in fair old style. Luckily, Beaverbrook was quite nice if you really knew him, as well as being 'a volcano of laughter which went on erupting till the end'.
This rebarbative style is more of a wade when it is used to praise a good man than when it is employed to whitewash a villain. Ignazio Silone was a very great writer and a very fine comrade. But he was not 'the New Machiavelli' and didn't pretend to be. Bertrand Russell was and remains an inspiration in philosophy and politics. But who regards him as a 'Philosopher Englishman'? And how many takers for the following estimate?
'He became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism.'
What the hell, one is moved to inquire, has that got to do with it? It might be truer to say that Russell would resent very much any attempt to annex him and his thought in such a way. A man who gave so much of himself to other countries, and who was so opposed to the crappy orthodoxies of British arrogance, cannot be captured in lines and thoughts like Foot's.
Not that Foot's admiration is feigned. I should say that most of his essay on Thomas Paine was inspired by a piece Russell wrote in 1934 – except that Foot inserts a factual error about Jefferson that Russell did not make.
This tendency to hero-worship results in some very bizarre formulations. Say what you like about Disraeli ('The Good Tory'), it is difficult to recognise anything 'Byronic' in his career or in his novels. Yet that is the precise epithet which Foot selects for him. There is a great deal yet to be learned about Robert Blatchford, but it will not be found out by calling him 'just about the best writer of books about books there ever was'. For one thing, it elides the obvious about Blatchford – his miserable declension from an affected socialism to an unaffected racialism and insularity. Perhaps Foot finds the reminiscence an uncomfortable one.
The obverse of Foot's credulity about people and institutions (who now remembers his slavishly adoring biography of Harold Wilson?) is an attractive streak of sentiment. He manages to enlist a kind of sympathy when he writes about HN Brailsford or about Vicky. Even though the Brailsford essay is clotted with over-writing ('glorious', 'imperishable' etc, etc) one can see that Foot does not need to strain for effect on this occasion. The subject matter tells its own story.
But all the rest is rambling and bluff. Apparently, Sarah Churchill, 'given her magnificent head', could have salvaged England in the reign of Queen Anne. Apparently 'the magnanimous English Left, led as usual by the Irish', came to the rescue of Jonathan Swift. These re-workings have at least the merit of improbability (especially in the latter case, coming as it does from the Orangeman's best friend; the man who dealt them a new hand to buy Callaghan an extra month).
I don't think that Foot can ever have blotted out a line. The collection is much harder to read than it must have been to write. Did he, for instance, really mean to say the following about his poor wife?
'The room of her own, the room where she works, when she is not cooking, gardening, shopping, cleaning, making beds, entertaining and the rest, is a feminist temple, a shrine dedicated to the cause of women's rights.'
If this is one of Foot's arch bits of self-mockery, I think we should be told. When a man can write about Beaverbrook that: 'I loved him, not merely as a friend but as a second father…' One needs a stone of some kind to separate parody from the real thing.
The point about hero-worship is not that you may be worshipping the wrong hero. It is that you surrender your reason and suspend your critical faculties. Foot's book on Aneurin Bevan, though written with much greater care than the present collection, is a disappointment because it makes its subject into a devotional figure, and thus greatly exaggerates his real importance in our time. Issues like Churchill's conduct of the war, Tito's treatment of political opposition, or the Russian invasion of Hungary are shaped in a Procrustean fashion to fit Bevan's own role. The book cannot be read (unlike, say, Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky) as a guide to the period in which the central figure operated.
Still less to any of these portraits fulfil that necessary function. Once you start calling Beaverbrook a 'buccaneer', it is only a short while before you find you have written this:
'The military vision of Churchill and his chief advisers was still fixed on other and lesser objectives and it was Beaverbrook who, within the Cabinet, within the Government machine, seized and sustained the initiative to turn the national energies along the road of commonsense.'
Eh? Does Foot read his articles through when he's finished?
Foot is never happier than when writing about the second world war. It is a favourite theme in his contemporary speeches as well. He seems to remember a period of social harmony, democratic impulse and social innovation. His famous polemic Guilty Men (which he penned under the nom de guerre of Cato) has an account of Dunkirk which could have come from the Boys Own Paper. Such an attitude, which might have made agitational sense in wartime, has more than outlived its usefulness. I remember hearing Foot invoke the spirit of Dunkirk in the Commons on the night Labour lost the vote of confidence in 1979; it was ghastly to hear the titters of the Tories and to see the embarrassment on the Labour benches.
In 1940, also, it might have been permissible for a socialist to write as if Britain did not have an Empire (though Orwell, for one, kept insisting that the subject be remembered). Foot contrives to daub his portrait of Beaverbrook as if the man had never been an imperialist at all. He does have the grace to recall 'Max' at the time of Munich, but only to mention it as an aberration. For the rest, this beautiful friendship, and its seminal role in Our Island Story, is preserved and mummified for ever in scented prose. It seems almost unkind to disturb it now.
Because Foot is a charming old ham in one way, and one should not be surprised at his liking for fellow hams. He has given plenty of harmless pleasure to hopeful audiences in this way. Some might say that his present attachment to the most flagrant conservatism is a result of a 'mellowing' process. Others talk darkly of a 'sell-out'. But, as far as can be discerned, Foot is quite right to claim consistency in his own record.
He has never been otherwise than a poseur; moving smoothly, for instance, from CND into Callaghan's inner cabinet on the Cruise missiles and back into irrelevant pacifist attitudes this week. Like Disraeli, he is a quick-change artist. The objection comes when he dresses up this act as socialism, and thus disfigures a good idea. (Just as he here proposes Disraeli as a radical – because he once gave a civil audience to that old fraud and chauvinist H. M. Hyndman.)
In his brief essay on Vicky, Foot asks the reader, 'And, if he had lived, which of us would have escaped the lash?' Good question. I believe that there does exist a link between Foot's gullibility as a person, his credulity as a profile-writer, and his disqualifications as a politician. The same weakness of character that makes him fawn in print makes him a conformist in politics. The same glutinous style (he even writes of the acid Defoe that 'the truth he had bottled up within himself for so long poured out in golden spate') has its analogue in the gross sentimentality which marks his public speaking.
A good test is this. Listen to a Foot speech, whether made on a party conference platform or in the House of Commons. Mark the dewy response it sometimes gets. Then grab a copy of Hansard or the conference report and read the thing. Full of evasions, crammed with corny special pleading, usually rounded off with an appeal for unity and generally couched, behind its rhetorical mask, in terms of extreme political orthodoxy. A locus classicus here is his defence of Mrs Gandhi's merciless Emergency, where a crude and reactionary political manoeuvre was defended by Foot as an inheritance from the splendid days of Congress, and as a necessary insurance against 'destabilisation'.
Another relationship exists in the matter of detail. Whether he is writing about Tom Paine, or justifying the last Labour government's breaking of the firemen's strike, Foot likes to deal in sweeping generalities. He once echoed Lamb's toast to Hazlitt, 'Confusion to Mathematics', by proposing the toast 'Confusion to Economics'. How predictable, then, that he would become the stoutest defender of the most dismally conventional economic policy when he got anywhere near power. And how regrettable, when discussing Tom Paine, that he should say, with habitual absolutism, that Jefferson 'never wavered' in his high opinion of Paine. It is important, in any evaluation of Paine's American years, to recall the coldness which did interrupt his relationship with Jefferson.
These details matter. In this country it is pretty easy to get a reputation as a radical. The standard of our politicians is such that, when they prove literate at all, they are hailed as Romantics, Renaissance men, Revivalists. The timing of this book could not have been more fortunate; we shall be able to examine both vainglorious claims at once.
The best interim obituary may be that written about Foot's hero Disraeli by Lady Gwendolen Cecil:
'He was always making use of convictions that he did not share, pursuing objects which he could not own, manoeuvring his party into alliances which though unobjectionable from his own standpoint were discreditable and indefensible from theirs. It was an atmosphere of pervading falseness which involved his party as well as himself…'
[See also: From the archive: The apotheosis of Tammany Jim]
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