Michael Foot: A Reminiscence

Abstract

My first meetings with Michael Foot were during the inflationary surge of the 1970s when, as a Treasury official, I occasionally sat in on ministerial meetings. The Secretary of State for Employment was at that time, in effect, the ambassador to Whitehall of the trade unions who, in exchange for giving public support to wage restraint, were consulted across a wide range of government policy. During what was to be Michael's last period of power, his officials were encouraged to adopt a comradely informality: not 'Yes, minister' but 'Yes, Michael'. Denis Healey, the Chancellor, remarked that when the crisis struck in 1976, he was conducting two simultaneous negotiations, one with the IMF, the other with Michael Foot. And we know who won. In his discussions with ministerial colleagues, as in his talks to the Byron Society, Michael seldom followed the protocols: there were the digressions (would he ever get back to the main point?), the pauses in the middle of phrases, the silences that nobody dared to fill and, when someone else was speaking, the occasional disconcerting hmph - was it a contemptuous snort or a way of saying 'good point, I agree'? The expression on Michael's face seldom helped you decide, but the attention had been shifted. Michael's first talk to the Byron Society was billed as an anniversary commemoration of Byron's speech in the House of Lords on the frame breakers bill. If the bill had become law, it would have introduced the death penalty for those handweavers who were smashing the hated frames that were destroying their livelihoods. At the time of Michael's talk, there was much fear of new technology, and we hoped not only for his view on Byron's attitudes to early industrialisation in Nottinghamshire but a comment on the contemporary de-industrialisation. Michael, with no script beyond his usual list of key words, began by describing the Wordsworth-filled life of his father. Every few months, Isaac Foot went to London and came back with several suitcases that he had bought there to bring back books for his collection. They grew, Michael said, 'like erisypelas' on all the walls of the family home. I thought he meant like some kind of ivy, and only later did I understand the boldness of the metaphor for a man troubled by an asthmatic skin condition. His own house was packed with books, old and new. It was only the women, Michael then suddenly declared, who really understood Byron: Lady Melbourne, of course, and Teresa and, among the biographers, Elizabeth Longford, Elma Dangerfield (who had arranged the event) and, above all, Doris Langley Moore, whose many qualities as a writer Michael went through in plentiful detail. I never did find out whether he knew that all three of the women he named were sitting in the front rows - I think not. But from my chairman's seat facing the audience I saw Doris, whose normal expression was a scowl at having to be in the same room with 'that woman', break into a long smile, and soon everyone began to laugh affectionately. That evening we never did get round to the frame breakers, but lasting friendships were made. And so it continued. …