Michael Foot- A Life by Kenneth O Morgan

M Foot (1913-2009)–

The death of Michael Foot at the age of 96 has marked the passing into history of an era in British political life whose like, as the poet says, we shall never see again. With perhaps the exception of Foot’s friend and rival Denis Healey, now advancing into his nineties, there are few standard bearers left of that generation of political figures born in the closing years of the First World War who experienced the harshness of the “low, dishonest” decade that was the 1930s, survived the titanic struggle of the Second World War and emerged from that epoch-defining period to build the peace and a new world ‘fit for heroes to live in’. It is said that all political careers end in failure but, in Foot’s case, if failure, it was of a glorious and romantic kind. The political cause of democratic socialism never had a more eloquent exponent or more committed advocate. Whether writing leader columns for papers as diverse as Tribune or the London Evening Standard or books on HG Wells or his hero Aneuran Bevan, and in philosophical tracts and polemical pieces, his prose was scintillating and his wit razor-sharp; on public platform in full oratorical flight he could be mesmerising and in person charming and erudite.

All these traits have been brought to magisterial life by Foot’s biographer, the academic, historian and peer Kenneth O Morgan. With great insight and scholarship, one great intellectual and philosopher-historian has celebrated another. Although not from the same tradition of the Labour movement as Foot, Morgan has captured the life, the work and the man both sympathetically and objectively as well as generosity laced with scepticism when necessary.

Born to a prominent Liberal family near Plymouth, Michael Foot inherited the love of literature, music and public debate from his father, as well as a passion for soccer which he manifested in a life-long devotion to Plymouth Argyle. As a journalist in his late twenties, he published the book that made his name exposing the delusions of those who appeased Hitler – Guilty Men. The man who was later to become a founder-member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and self-styled ‘inveterate peace-monger’ was also the protégé of press baron Lord Beaverbrook and a supporter of humanitarian intervention by force in Bosnia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Old age may have slowed him but it never wearied him, although the death of his beloved wife Jill Craigie, a celebrated film-maker, affected him deeply.

The blessing of binaural hearing aids meant he was able to debate, comment and perform in private and public as vigorously as ever. Although an atheist by inclination he was ever the Nonconformist and his was a true Pligrim’s Progress, charted brilliantly by Professor Morgan - son of Wales and possessor of the gift of words himself.