Michael Foot rocks in his chair with glee as he points across the room to an
open door: “You see that staircase there? That staircase was paid for by Cecil
King, who was running the Daily Mirror at the time. And the kitchen downstairs
was paid for by Murdoch. I am sorry Jill isn't here to say it for herself,
but she always thought the best thing Murdoch ever did was provide us with
that kitchen.” The late Jill Craigie shared her husband's antipathy for the
world's most powerful media mogul, so the Murdoch kitchen, paid for out of
the settlement of a libel action, was particularly satisfying to the couple, even
if it did not gain access to the Foot household for News International titles.
“No, I don't read the Murdoch press,” says Foot. “I should do, I suppose. We don't have The Sunday Times in the house because it accused me of being a KGB spy. That was a misjudgement on their part. Still, we got about 10 thousand quid for Tribune out of it.” Having helped one of his great journalistic loves – the left-wing political weekly with which he has been associated since its creation – to take a breather from the almost perpetual financial crisis in which it operates, the loose change from the libel pay-out provided the kitchen. It is, I can report, a very fine kitchen. Indeed, the staircase, bought when a miscalculation by what was then IPC resulted in a pay-off for the departing Foot, is also a fine example of what might be called the compensatory school of interior design.
Foot was a political columnist with the Daily Herald and recovering from a car accident when decisions were made concerning who would remain and who would not when the paper metamorphosed into The Sun in 1964. Mirror Group chairman Cecil King and editorial director Hugh Cudlipp trumpeted the new title as “the paper born in the age we live in”. The public did not share their contemporary vision, it transpired, and the broadsheet Sun it was sold to Rupert Murdoch to be tabloid-ised in 1969.
“I had been away after a motor accident and when I got back I walked into the office and they said, ‘Oh, I'm sorry, but we don't think you're employed any more'. So after I'd been away for six months, I got the sack,” recalls Foot. I was fired by John Beavan [a former Herald editor and then Mirror Group political adviser], but I think Hugh Cudlipp had something to do with it. Because I had been away after the accident, they didn't realise I was on the staff of the paper. They thought I was a freelance, but I was a member of the NUJ and there was an agreement and they had to pay me off – a princely sum then, five thousand quid. It did rather prejudice me, if you like, against The Sun. Cudlipp made a big mistake, of course, thinking he could just sell it off to Murdoch and that would be the end of the matter. Murdoch has his own kind of evil genius.”
The fond recollection of how the Foots obtained their kitchen is the only time in two long interviews about print journalism and his part in its history that Foot mentions Murdoch in a tone not wholly disapproving. Recounting the circumstances leading up to the provision of a staircase in what was then his and Jill's new Hampstead home is the only occasion Hugh Cudlipp is even mildly criticised. Michael Foot's journalistic standard is nailed firmly to a mast that, of course, leans considerably to the left (although he was a friend and remains an admirer of Lord Beaverbrook). He considers the loss of the Daily Herald a catastrophe and the scuttling of the News Chronicle by the Cadbury family in 1960 as “a criminal matter”. He has supported Tribune, as writer, editor – twice – or chairman, since it was launched in 1937, when its first editor, William Mellor, under the heading WHAT WE STAND FOR IN THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIALISM, wrote: “We are part of a world system, the working of which is no longer compatible with either democracy or peace. If we want them we must change the world system. We must change it swiftly, for if we wait, the initiative will be in the hands of those to whom neither democracy nor peace is an ideal charged with meaning.”
Michael Foot, journalist and politician, has been trying to change the world system ever since. Unlike the symbol of the Express newspapers, originally introduced by the pugnacious Empire Free Trader Beaverbrook in 1930 and today, still keeping a lonely vigil on the front pages, a knight without a quest, Foot, now 88, has been, and still is, a real crusader. Every bit as committed to journalism as he has been to politics, his deep-rooted love of the trade and respect for many of those who work in it does not inhibit forceful and penetrating opinions on newspapers, past and present, including:
He wrote letters to newspapers and then, being much taken with the goal-scoring phenomenon Dixie Dean, a poem in praise of Everton F.C., as opposed to arch-rivals Liverpool – “The only poem I have ever written, almost” – that he can, and does, recite verbatim:
When at their call my weary feet I turn(The poem was published in a Liverpool paper and Everton's is still the second result he checks after that of his beloved Plymouth Argyle.)
The gates of paradise are open wide.
At Goodison I know a man may learn
Rapture more rich than Anfield can provide.
In Geldard's skill and Coulter's subtle speed
I see displayed in all its matchless bounty
The power by which the heavens themselves decreed
The fall of Sunderland and Derby County.
The hands of Sagar, Dixie's priceless head
Made smooth the path to Wembley
Till that day when Bolton came.
Now all is lost in bottomless dismay
And so I watch with heart and temple cool
God's lesser breed of men at Liverpool.
Foot then embarked on a debating tour in the United States and contributed articles on it to the News Chronicle. He also joined the Labour Party, in Liverpool, and in the general election of 1935 fought and lost Monmouth – “and when I came back [to London] after the election I got off at Paddington Station and went and got a place in Cambridge Terrace for 30 shillings a week. I stayed there for the next three or four years and during that time made my own introduction into journalism. I did freelance things – I wasn't much good at that – and also got a couple of days' work at the New Statesman. Then I met Barbara Castle, who was Barbara Betts in those days. We were both working for a local government weekly paper and the editor of it was William Mellor, who had been editor of the Daily Herald in its great days and whom I'd met a bit through the Socialist League.”
Mellor had been sacked – “As good editors very often are,” observes Foot, wryly – from the Herald editorship in 1930, although he remained with the paper for another six years as assistant managing director. But in 1936 he was working with Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and others of the left to produce a new socialist weekly. Tribune was launched in January 1937, with Mellor as editor and Foot and Barbara Betts as general factotums.
Under Mellor's tutelage, they learned their trade. The great Alan Hutt taught Foot typography. Mellor schooled Foot and Betts in writing an industrial column concentrating on the trades unions. At Mellor's urging, Foot read the Webbs' Industrial Democracy and Karl Marx – “Not the whole of him, but parts of him” – and the young journalist also devoured the works of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell and other prominent writers of the time.
Board member Aneurin Bevan, with whom Foot had become friendly, offered him the editorship. Characteristically, Foot turned down the job not just on political grounds, but because “it would be a dirty trick on Mellor”. Bevan, surprisingly from the distance of more than 60 years, was friendly with Lord Beaverbrook, Canadian proprietor of the mighty Express Group and champion of the Empire. “Politically, there wasn't any kind of friendship or association between them,” says Foot. “But Beaverbrook was very interested in meeting people from other, different sections of the community and one of the people whom he had become friendly with during the 1930s was Aneurin Bevan, who was a friend of his editor [of the Evening Standard], Frank Owen. So when, after William Mellor was sacked, I said I must go off and do something else, Bevan got in touch with Beaverbrook and said, ‘There's a fellow called Michael Foot who's been at Tribune. Maybe you could see him and see if he is any good for you'.”
Foot was summoned to meet Beaverbook one Sunday morning: “He asked me to read the papers for him to see what was happening. He said, ‘I'm going out riding now. When I come back, maybe you'll tell me what's in the newspapers'. I wasn't quite sure what he meant, but I had a good memory in those days and I read the newspapers very carefully, all of them, and even some of the financial sections. When he came back, he said he was going off for a swim, in his swimming bath, and then he said, ‘Have you got your notes with you?' I said, ‘I haven't got any notes'. Beaverbrook said, ‘But I want you to tell me what's in the papers' and I said, ‘Well, I can tell you that anyway'. And I did. I gave him quite a good recital of what was in the papers, including what was in the damned financial columns – not that I understood anything about financial columns, then or since.”
Astonished, Beaverbrook sent Foot to see Frank Owen the following morning – “I started [at the Standard] on the union minimum of £9 a week, which was twice what I had been getting on Tribune. Frank Owen was a wonderful chap. We became bosom friends. This was at the end of 1938 and Beaverbrook was running terrible policies in his bloody newspapers on Germany. Yet on one aspect, Beaverbrook was, strangely, more of a radical that people understood. On this damn thing that was happening in Germany, he was very bad – his bloody newspapers were saying there's going to be no war this year, next year and the rest, but on the issue of Spain he was better. The other Tory papers, the Mail and the rest, were almost pro-fascist. But he wasn't. Chiefly, I think this was due to his reporters there – he wouldn't suppress his reporters. The Express reported it [the Civil War] more fairly than [the other] Tory papers, which were terrible on the subject and pro-Franco.”
Foot's first job at the Evening Standard was writing a daily digest of what was in the morning papers. Feature writing followed and then, from the beginning of the war, leading articles – “It was a very exciting place. The Evening Standard and other newspapers played a very big part, in my opinion, in sustaining the morale of the country and, especially, the morale of London, which had a tougher deal than any other city in the bloody world. It kept going partly because it had papers like the Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard.” Beaverbrook taught him a great deal about journalism, says Foot: “He gave me a list of American columnists to read. Some of them were right wingers, but in some respects American journalism led the world in the 1920s and 30s. He also, right from that moment [when Foot joined the staff], was talking about the book pages. He said, ‘There are people all over the world writing books and we want to know what they are up to. If we can get the stuff early enough, we can put it in our papers and help people understand these authors'. Arnold Bennett was his friend and had written in the book columns of the Evening Standard since the 20s. It was wonderful – Arnold Bennett introducing all the world's authors, especially the Russians, to British readers. Beaverbrook understood how important book columns were. Twenty years later, when I got sacked from the Daily Herald, he gave me a job on the book pages of the Evening Standard. It was a lovely job, being book critic of the Standard. The book columns there always had something special to them, chiefly due to the way Beaverbrook ran them right from the days of Arnold Bennett.
“Whatever else Beaverbrook was – and he made mistakes and mis-judgements – he was a tremendous lover of newspapers and a real journalist. He would have been quite happy to be the editor of a newspaper. He was more interested in news than the money. He would spend about half-an-hour talking about the financial aspects to business managers and then he'd get on with talking to the editors, which was a much more important business.
“I can show you [an example of] why I couldn't help liking Beaverbrook in some respects. A column in my name just before the war was about the railings around Hyde Park. It said, why not pull down the railings because they were unsightly and there didn't seem much purpose to them. Then this chap Wardell, who was the business manager – he had a black patch over one eye and was a near-supporter of [Oswald] Mosley – was very angry and said, ‘Look at the complaints we've got, from the police and others. If you pull down the railings, the whole place will be out of control'. I told him that if he wanted to complain about the article, he had better do so to Beaverbrook, as he had rather approved of it. Quite often, after the paper had been produced, we would go down to Beaverbrook's house at the corner of Grosvenor Place. So I went with this chap Wardell and Frank Owen and others and Wardell said, ‘We have had terrible complaints about this article – the police think it quite irresponsible and would like an apology'. Beaverbrook turned on him and said, ‘I know what you are saying. You are saying that the poor people of London cannot go into their park and do what they want and have their fun. Captain Wardell, you've got all the lovely bedrooms in London to do your f*****g, so what are you complaining about?' I couldn't help liking him for that. And poor old Wardell became quite polite to me afterwards.” (Michael Wardell, ex-Guards and Hussars, was, in fact, a Brigadier, but Foot's memory is so prodigious throughout our talks that I believe Beaverbrook deliberately demoted him.).
In 1940, upon the retreat from Dunkirk, Foot, Owen and Peter Howard, a columnist with the Sunday Express, anonymously wrote Guilty Men, an attack on pre-war supporters of Franco and Hitler and those Government ministers whose advocacy of appeasement the trio believed to have damaged prospects of victory. Speculation about who had written the instantly notorious book was rife. “At first, Beaverbook did not know who had written it,” recalls Foot. “He was very suspicious, but as he was praised in the book [Beaverbrook was by then the successful Minister of Aircraft Production, he was mystified, too. He thought maybe I'd done it, but then there were stories that Randolph Churchill had written it. We spread all these stories – we had a new one every day about who had written it. It was banned by W.H. Smith because they heard it was anti-Government, but some people thought Guilty Men was banned because it was a book about homosexuals – it had a big sale around Tottenham Court Road. The ban was a huge boost for the book. Beaverbook didn't latch on to the idea that it might have been three of us. [Lord] Halifax [foreign secretary at the time of Munich], who was named in the book and was still an appeaser after 1940, was one of Beaverbook's bęte noirs. He was often criticising Beaverbrook and they used to get into arguments. At some stage, in a cabinet meeting, Halifax turned to Beaverbook and said, ‘It must be awful for you, Lord Beaverbrook, because presumably you are now dependent on your cabinet minister's salary?', implying that Beaverbrook hadn't given up his private resources. So Beaverbrook said, ‘I'm not doing so badly – of course, I've got the royalties from Guilty Men'.”
But as the war progressed and the Standard began to anticipate problems that would come with peace, Foot's relationship with Beaverbrook started to fray. “We were moving towards victory and people were talking about what was going to happen afterwards. And the more we started to talk about those things, the more there was a difference between what I was thinking and what Beaverbrook was thinking. We were having more political differences and I had some terrible quarrels with him about some of the things I thought they were doing [wrongly]. So in 1944 I wrote him a letter saying I wanted to support the Labour Party and wanted to see a socialist government and that I had been adopted as Labour candidate down in Plymouth. He said okay, he understood.”
Soon after Labour swept to victory in 1945 – “That owed a lot to some papers, chiefly the Mirror,” Foot recalls – a Royal Commission on the press was being mooted. “Ours was a serious attempt to challenge the power to create monopolies and prevent what has happened since. Beaverbrook didn't like what we were saying, yet what we were proposing would have protected his newspapers and his position – we said you can't object to a chap owning a daily newspaper, a Sunday newspaper and maybe an evening, because the three go together. We thought the newspaper proprietors we had then were pretty bad, but some of those today don't care about newspapers. The amount of power Murdoch, especially, but others too, have been able to accumulate is a great injury to press freedom and every other kind of freedom. He [Murdoch] has gone ahead to spread that power all over the world – I'm sorry to say he believes money conquers everything. So the monopolisation of newspapers has become a tremendous evil. And even some of the newspapers that should last, Beaverbrook's newspapers, are going downhill all the time and maybe will go out of existence altogether.”
It was at that 1947 Royal Commission on the press that Foot declared: “Editors are no more than stooges and sycophants.” Is this still true, I ask? “Well...you can't dismiss all of them like that.” Then who does he consider to be or have been great editors? There is a long pause, “Frank Owen was a tremendous editor – he inspired the whole staff. Charles Wintour, also on the Standard, was taught by Beaverbrook and I think nobody could doubt that he was a great editor. Hugh Cudlipp was a genius, the greatest of all the popular [newspaper] editors, and played a very big part, I believe, in the winning of the election of '45 and the whole atmosphere of the Labour Government of the time [Cudlipp was, in fact, then editor of the Sunday Pictorial, but hugely influential in the group of which he was to become editorial director and, later, chairman]. And Percy Cudlipp, whom I worked for in 1944 when I left the Standard and went to the Daily Herald, was a genius, too. He didn't see in terms of headlines, he didn't plug into the popular mood the way his brother, Hugh, did, but he had all the other qualities of a great journalist. He could do anything on the paper – he was a really super editor with tremendously high standards of what journalism should be. And Harry Evans [The Sunday Times and The Times] and David Astor [The Observer] were both very good editors and friends of mine.”
A glaring omission from Foot's academy of excellence, I observe, is Arthur Christiansen, who edited the Daily Express for Beaverbrook for almost 24 years. “Christiansen wasn't such a great editor, actually,” says Foot. “He was a very skilful technician, but Beaverbrook was the great editor of all his papers – Christiansen got it all from Beaverbrook. The only pages of the paper he was really in charge of were the sports columns, because Beaverbrook wasn't at all interested in sport. When his papers were reporting what was happening in the world in a much more intelligent way than the others, it was chiefly because of Beaverbrook, not because of most of his editors – they didn't appreciate fully what he was doing.”
“As for The Mirror, I became very sorry about the present day paper. I would like to see it back to the greatness of the times of Hugh Cudlipp. I am not saying it was a one-man job, but he and some others – writers like Cassandra [William Connor] and other great journalists – made it what it was and it is more difficult to make a popular newspaper of a high standard than it is the ones that are slightly more sophisticated. The Mirror went into a steep decline, I'm sorry to say, when it was taken over by people who didn't understand its traditions at all. It was mostly, but not entirely, due to the Maxwell takeover. It's very difficult to recover from a situation like that. I don't see the paper every day, but any effort to restore the standards of the [old] Mirror and restore it as a paper that's contributing genuinely to the political life of the country [is good]. Of course I welcome its revised view of tabloid journalism and hope that it lasts. I'm delighted to see it is beginning to recover its old spirit.”
Is it right for journalists, even great ones, to accept honours as well as what are now handsome salaries as reward for their labours, I ask? “Absolutely not,” he says, witheringly. “I think it is a great mistake [for them] to take an honour from the government, whatever government. I thought that about Cassandra, who was a friend of mine and someone of whom I was a tremendous admirer – he was a great, independent journalist, no doubt. But he did accept an honour [William Connor was knighted]. It didn't make his name any better. It didn't make his column any better. It was a great mistake.
“As for them going to the House of Lords, I think the whole place is a farce, anyway, and it has been made an even worse farce by the attempted measures of reform. So I don't think it adds anything to the honour of a chap to go to the House of Lords. Of course, you get free drinks and that sort of thing – I used to say it was the only club in London where they give you the money for your drinks. I think the whole place should be abolished and journalists should not make it more credible by going there. Some of those who did go – Hugh Cudlipp, for example, after he ceased being a powerful figure in Fleet Street – continued to make great journalistic contributions, but in my opinion those contributions could have been made even more strongly if they had stayed out of the House of Lords. I advise all good journalists to avoid it.”
In the roll call of good journalists, who would Foot place at the very top? “James Cameron,” he says, without hesitation. “He was fantastic, the greatest of the lot. The newspapers, especially in this country, shape politics, you know. The really great journalists – and cartoonists like Vicki and, today, Austin, whom I greatly admire – are the ones who do that.”
In his final speech, at his 85th birthday celebration two weeks before he died in June 1964, Lord Beaverbrook gave his definition of a journalist: “First, he must be true to himself. The one who is not true to himself is no journalist. He must show courage, independence and initiative.” Michael Foot, as Beaverbrook recognised at that first meeting an extraordinary lifetime ago, qualifies on all counts.