After a dismal two decades for the left in Britain, Michael Foot at long last has something to celebrate. Brian Brivati finds Hampstead's most famous resident relishing his party's election landslide and confidently predicting a bit of old radicalism from new Labour
What do Hazlitt, Heine, Byron, H.G. Wells, Plymouth Argyle, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Labour party and Dizzy the dog have in common? They have all been the focus of Michael Foot's passionate enthusiasm. Now in his 85th year, the former Labour leader works from a tiny office at "his'' newspaper Tribune: writing the odd review, answering researchers questions and, lately, preparing a single-volume edition of his monument to the hero who outshines all others: Nye Bevan.
Sat in his office, with a picture of Dizzy on the wall, postcards of Lord Byron and a Plymouth Argyle mug on the desk, he recalls election night 1997: "It was like the falling of the ministers in 1945, seven or eight, including Hore-Belisha whom I was fighting in Devonport and put out, and of course this added to the whole sense of change. In 1945 we were listening to the results in the morning because there was a three-week gap between the announcement and the declaration. This time the whole story was known by the afternoon.'' So why was the majority so large this time? Michael Foot's praise for the party's concentration on marginal seats and long- term planning is generous. Perhaps thinking of the 1983 campaign, he concludes, "whatever else you might say about it, the people who managed this election for the Labour party deserve some credit.'' What of the chief architect himself, Peter Mandelson? "Well, Herbert Morrison (home secretary in the wartime coalition and a key figure in 1945) was his grandfather, and Morrison had many faults but he had many virtues. Nye defended him sometimes and called him 'My little cockney sparrow'. But the one thing Nye hated most about politics was to see people who actually loved the machinery, the most wretched parts of politics and Morrison absolutely gloried in that and loved that, but even then, Nye would say, 'fair play for Morrison', and he would expound on his other side - the creation of the London County Council and much else."
Foot refuses to be drawn further on the grandson.
In the aftermath of election night, he went down to Downing Street and delivered a letter of congratulations to the new prime minister, asking the policeman at the door whether he thought Tony Blair himself would receive it. Mr Blair did, and replied with a "nice letter back''. Foot then settled down to relish the unfolding of the government. He thinks the most exciting development so far, aside from the size of the win, is the great increase in the representation of women. He is a fan of Ann Taylor and Margaret Beckett, and particularly hopeful for the new Department of International Development. "Clare Short in that job can change the reputation of this country in many places where we have just been dragged through the mud by what has been done by the previous government. Margaret Beckett is going to be a damn good minister and Ann Taylor at the House of Commons ...'' A real sparkle comes into his eye at the mention of his old job as Leader of the House: "Incidentally, that whole place is going to be better, much better House of Commons, no sleaze which makes quite a difference, overnight that has gone. It's not going to be a dead House of Commons."
He was secretary of state for employment in the previous Labour government, and believes that the present one's initial timidity hides more radical intentions, despite the chancellor's first act. "The business of yielding to the bank on the first day, well if you are going to do it I suppose that's the moment to do it but, well, we'll see ... it has got some big disadvantages, but the advantage is that this is the first time in history there'll be a Labour government coming in that doesn't have a financial crisis.
"Gordon Brown's budget will mark a real change too, he has got great abilities. I'm not quite sure, but the economic blizzard does not look as if it is going to be like 1974 or 1976, you know, we were hit by a tremendous storm, with the whole of the oil crisis, and it set back that government from carrying out what we wanted to do."
This time will be different and not just because the government is more timid. He does not entirely accept the idea that the election marked the victory of neo-liberalism in economic policy and gives two main grounds for hope. From having voted against the EEC in 1974, he now sees Europe, and the Social Chapter, as a potential source of real reform. Added to this is the size of Labour's win. He stresses that many ministers are radical: "They are going to have to deal with the poverty problem in one form or another, and the main cause of poverty is continued mass unemployment. Well, they are going to have to tackle some of that, they won't be able to solve it in a short time".
Given two or three years of healthy crisis-free economic growth, he argues that: "There is no reason at all why they can't then do all these things that a socialist government ought to do. There is going to be tremendous pressures to do those things from the rank and file of the Labour party and from the huge majority. They are not going to be able to hold that back and indeed they do not really want to."
He looks back, a little reluctantly, and remembers what Nye was saying in 1945: "In 1945 he was one of the few to prophesy a large majority. He was going around the country a good deal more than the others, criticising the other leaders for being too timid, though 1945 was a more adventurous a programme than the one we have just been elected on. Nye believed that the British electorate would change sometimes from a cat mood to a dog mood, there were sometimes periods when they were solely concerned with their own affairs and income, and then they would go into a period when they would be more expansive in their ideas.'' Britain is in a dog mood, and if Foot and Nye are right, it is going to last.
The pauses are a little longer than they were, the vocal syntax still unique and he still talks in paragraphs. A characteristic Foot phrase recurring through any conversation, is "in my opinion''. But every time we meet I come away with two or three books or writers to look up. One recommendation is George Lansbury, the stop-gap leader after the debacle of 1931, often forgotten but deserving some of the credit usually given to others for rebuilding the party. The parallels are, of course, striking.
The idea has gradually crept in that if Denis Healey had been leader in the early 1980s, Thatcherism might not have happened. Perhaps. But the split might have been much more profound if the left, rather than the right, had been the ones to leave Labour . Could Healey have kept the party together on the bomb, on trade union reform, on the common market, on Militant and on internal democracy?
History may be kinder to Foot's leadership, giving him, like Lansbury, credit for keeping the shambolic raft afloat amid the recriminations and schisms of the terrible years after the 1979 defeat. Part of the problem is that Healey and others have written compelling memoirs, while Foot saves the brilliance of his pen for the reputations of others.
And, at the moment at least, it is difficult to get him to talk very much about the past, because his thoughts are so focused on the current government and the intoxicating atmosphere of Labour's landslide summer. He watches the Commons, prospects for the new members and his favourite cabinet ministers with pleasure: give them a couple of good years, he says, and you will see the difference. After the long loyal analysis of the Government there is one jibe. It combines the internationalism of H.G. Wells, the philhellenism of Lord Byron and the sparkle of Foot the polemicist at his best: Chris Smith should reconsider one of his early decisions, and send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece.
Brian Brivati is reader inhistory, Kingston University, and is assisting with the editing of the centenary edition of Michael Foot's Nye Bevan, tobe published in October byVictor Gollancz.