If Foot looked like an accident-prone pensioner, he could hardly take offence when critics pointed it out. Yet the personal abuse failed to probe beneath the surface of a deeply thoughtful man.
He was born the year before the First World War broke out, into a highly political and remarkably ambitious family. His father, Isaac Foot, was a Liberal MP and mayor of Plymouth, so steeped in the
struggles of the English civil war and the Whig interpretation of history that he once said he judged a man by which side he would have wanted his ancestor to have fought on at the battle of
Marston Moor. The legacy of Oliver Cromwell, the Putney Debates, the Quakers and John Bright informed the household traditions of Nonconformity and protest. Of the five Foot brothers, two became
MPs (both reaching the Cabinet) and two received peerages (John as a lawyer and Hugh as a diplomat and Britain’s representative at the UN). When, in 1931, Foot went up to Oxford, he did so as
a Liberal and, like his elder brothers, Dingle and John, was elected president of the Oxford Union (his brother Hugh was president of the Cambridge Union). Foot’s turn at running the
prestigious debating society came in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power, and it was the rise of fascism and Foot’s exposure to the miseries of poverty while working in Liverpool that
converted him to socialism. His journalistic career was launched on
Tribune
, a left-wing journal committed to forging a united front between the Labour and Communist parties. While asthma
prevented him from fighting in the Second World War, he used his pen to devastating effect against those who, he believed, had led Britain into it so ill
prepared: under the
pseudonym ‘Cato’ he was a co-author of
Guilty Men
, a best-seller that mercilessly savaged Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative old guard (and conveniently ignored
Labour’s long campaign during the thirties for British disarmament). Foot fell headlong under the troublemaking influence of the greatest press baron of the age, Lord Beaverbrook, and from
1942 served as acting editor of the
Evening Standard
(when he was still only twenty-nine years old) until Beaverbrook finally tired of his efforts to besmirch the Tories with a campaign
alleging that they were admirers of Mussolini.
Elected to Parliament in the 1945 post-war Labour landslide, Foot wasted no time in attaching himself to Nye Bevan – whose two-volume biography Foot later wrote and whose Ebbw Vale
constituency he inherited in 1960. It was passion and principles that guided Foot’s career path, not the attractions of high office. So disregarding was he of the latter’s allure that
his attacks on his own side in the early 1960s caused him to have the whip withdrawn over his defiance of Hugh Gaitskell’s leadership. Unafraid of rocking his mentor’s boat, he also
parted ways with Bevan in 1957 over unilateral nuclear disarmament. Launched in 1957, with Foot on its executive, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) proved one of his most enduring causes
and he was to the fore in the ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches from Trafalgar Square to Aldermaston. He still found the time to combine Parliament with journalism, writing a column for the
Labour-supporting
Daily Herald
from 1944 until 1961 and editing
Tribune
in two stints between 1948 and 1960. In truth, he was a campaigning journalist in politics rather than an
administrator obsessed by processes and detail. His Cabinet experience – first as employment secretary and then as Leader of the House between 1974 and 1979 – did not involve any of the
big-spending departments but succeeded in demonstrating the depth of his admiration for the trade unions. It took his Cabinet colleagues to dissuade him from trying to criminalize lorry drivers who
refused to talk to official pickets. Indeed, quite how deeply he believed in union power became evident when he piloted through closed shop legislation which, for instance, made it difficult for
newspaper editors to publish articles by writers who did not wish to join the National Union of Journalists. Those who lacked his belief in collectivist action found it strange, indeed paradoxical,
that Foot, the former editor and voice of the outsider, whose heroes included essayists like Jonathan Swift and William Hazlitt, should have championed laws that were anti-individualist and
contrary to the most basic notions of freedom of association.
Foot, however, was a deeply paradoxical figure. Despite being a restless intellectual, he showed no sign of questioning uncomplicated views on economic policy that had been framed in the 1930s
and which were not revised over the decades that followed. To him, the dismal science represented a
zero-sum equation between capital and labour. In this respect, he seemed
even less receptive to new ideas than the less intellectual Thatcher, whose thinking had developed from an endorsement of ‘Butskellism’ to proselytizing for monetarism. The man who
spoke with semi-religious reverence of Labour as ‘our great Movement’ and who railed against social injustice and Tory privilege could nevertheless describe his journalistic mentor, the
arch-capitalist Lord Beaverbook, as someone he ‘loved’, not ‘merely as a friend but as a second father’.
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Indeed, many of
Foot’s early philippics against the titans of capitalism were written from a house provided for him on Beaverbrook’s estate at Cherkley in Surrey. His rare combination of deep political
passion and broad-ranging sympathies was apparent even in the naming of his dog Dizzy after Benjamin Disraeli, a Tory he admired albeit primarily for his outsider status, his radicalism and his
novels. Foot’s childhood had been spent in a house that allegedly contained fifty thousand books and it was an environment he replicated at his own home in – appropriately –
Pilgrim’s Lane, Hampstead, where every corner was cluttered with the collection of a dedicated bibliophile. He was equally at ease with normal life and ordinary people. He remained a devoted,
and unaffected, fan of Plymouth Argyle FC.
The hope that Foot would prove a more unifying figure than Denis Healey helped secure him the Labour leadership. The prompt defection of the Gang of Four demonstrated how misguided a calculation
this had been, but throughout the tumults, insults and accusations aimed at him, Foot did his best to conduct himself without rancour. Unlike many on the left who were unable to contain their rage
at the Thatcherite onslaught, he tried to avoid descending into personal attacks on the prime minister. Happily married to the socialist film-maker Jill Craigie, he discovered late in life that
three years into their marriage she had been attacked and raped by the writer Arthur Koestler. Asked how he would have acted if he had learned of the attack at the time, Foot responded: ‘I
don’t know. I think I would have written him a letter – something like “our friendship is at an end”.’
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Such
punch-pulling moderation seemed at odds with a man whose fragile appearance concealed an extraordinary fighting spirit, deployed with brilliant oratorical effect against his political opponents and
reinforced by absolute certainty in the morality of his cause. Truly he was, in the words of his biographer, Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘a kind of Methodist Danton’.
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It was more Saint-Just, the Jacobin ideologue who held his head like a holy sacrament, that Tony Benn was beginning to resemble. Certain of his own incorruptibility, the justice of his cause and
the rightness of harnessing the energy of hard-left activists in the struggle that lay ahead, Benn was not prepared to suppress his talent for factionalism just because Labour now had a leader from
his wing of the party. His relationship with Foot got off to an
edgy start in their first meeting after Benn joined the shadow Cabinet in January 1981. Foot accused Benn of
holding secret convocations with other left-wingers to ‘fix votes in advance’ on the NEC. When Benn gave an evasive answer, Foot lost his temper and shouted: ‘You’re a
bloody liar.’ Benn responded by storming out of the room.
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Their relationship did not improve, with Foot exasperated by Benn’s refusal
to regard himself as bound by shadow Cabinet decisions. Benn was far more interested in reaching common positions with his cohorts from the CLPD and regarded the constitutional revolution within
the Labour Party to be just started rather than at a satisfactory end. He was as much a hate-figure to the right as was Enoch Powell to the left, but while Powell had taken his tormented talents
off to the margins of the Ulster Unionist Party, Benn was far better placed to set the agenda. Extraordinarily for a politician who had never held higher office than secretary of state for
industry, the expression ‘Bennite’ – as in ‘a Bennite solution’ – entered the popular lexicon. Like Foot, he was another ex-Oxford Union president and scion of a
political family. Somewhat embarrassingly, his Liberal-turned-Labour father had, as secretary of state for India in 1930, ordered Gandhi’s arrest for civil disobedience. There was no
confining the son’s lack of deference to the established order. Upon his father’s death in 1960, Benn refused to inherit his title as Viscount Stansgate. In doing so, he created a
constitutional stand-off which was settled only by the innovation of the right to renounce a peerage. The manner in which the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, husband of an American socialist
millionairess, recast himself as Tony Benn, the people’s tribune, evidenced the triumph of his engrained egalitarian instincts over the accident of his birth – as well as demonstrating
his recognition that he could not greatly influence the people’s party from the House of Lords.
Given the personalities involved and the rival outlooks they championed, the promise of one of the great political set-piece dramas of the decade was assured in September 1981 when
Labour’s MPs, activists and trade union leaders gathered in Brighton for the annual party conference, where they would elect the deputy leader. The contest was recognized as significant far
beyond the limited authority enjoyed by the holder of the office, for it seemed to be a dry-run for Foot’s eventual successor. As such, the battle between Tony Benn and Denis Healey was about
the soul and the future of the Labour Party. That is why it was so bitter.
The weeks of campaigning stretched relations between the contenders to breaking point. Benn received a standing ovation from a 2,300-strong audience in Newcastle, where he denounced Foot’s
‘infantile and trivial critique’ of socialist dogmatists.
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Meanwhile, Healey’s public meetings were drowned out by booing and
hissing. A supportive Labour MP, John Golding, who was with him on the platform in Birmingham, observed the antics of the
crowd and concluded that the disruption was
‘totally organized. There was chanting, singing and the clenched first. It’s like the Hitler Youth.’
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Healey inflamed passions by
misidentifying the CLPD’s Jon Lansman as the choreographer of the hecklers. This was not the CLPD’s style. Rather, Benn’s support for causes like the IRA hunger strikers made him
popular with a rabble army, some of it with tenuous links to the Labour movement. Benn did call for respect to be shown to both candidates,
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but,
believing the old mantra that there were no enemies on the left, he was in no hurry to turn away support wherever it was to be found.
The public meetings and traded insults were only the warm-up act to the main event, the casting of votes at Brighton. With the block votes of the trade union leaders accounting for 40 per cent
of the electorate, a handful of union delegations effectively held the balance of power. The race’s also-ran, John Silkin, was eliminated on the first ballot. He had been backed by the
Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). That this union – the country’s biggest – cast its 1.25 million votes for Silkin aptly illustrates the undemocratic nature of
the system. A consultation of regional organizers showed that the majority supported Healey, which the union’s executive committee interpreted as an endorsement of Benn on the basis of the
views of the organizers from the more populous regions. The conference delegation then simply ignored both these interpretations of what their members wanted and plumped for Silkin as a compromise
candidate.
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With Silkin removed from the final ballot, the TGWU delegation was forced to decide, in the fevered atmosphere of the conference hall,
how to cast its 1.25 million votes. Word went out that they had decided the safest thing to do would be to abstain. It was a decision that appeared to enthrone Healey. As the evening drew towards
its theatrical climax, he duly processed into the conference hall exuding a sense of pending triumph. But pride came before a fall. As he settled into his chair, he learned that exactly the sort of
‘smoke-filled room’ stitch-up of which Shirley Williams had warned would happen under the new voting arrangement. Amid intense lobbying and internal wrangling, the TGWU delegation was
persuaded to change its intentions. The union’s 1.25 million votes were now being cast for Benn instead. Suddenly the result was too close to call. Across the conference floor and in the
surrounding bars and function suites, furious horse-trading was taking place, with both sides recognizing that just a few switched votes could seal their candidate’s fate. The future Foreign
Secretary and deputy leader, Margaret Beckett, was observed screaming ‘Traitors!’ at Healey voters.
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One of those at the tussle’s
sharp end was Neil Kinnock, an up-and-coming Welsh MP and shadow education secretary, who had run Foot’s leadership campaign. Having stated that he did not have ‘any significant
disagreements over policy with Tony Benn’,
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Kinnock shocked fellow left-wingers by instead announcing that he
would
abstain (in part because he disliked Benn’s disloyalty towards Foot). Assailed in the conference hall for his apostasy and spat on in the melee beyond, Kinnock endured a torrid week, the low
point of which came when he sought a moment’s relief in the gents’ lavatory of the Grand Hotel. There he found himself standing next to one of Benn’s young acolytes, who promptly
took a flying kick at him. However, the member for Bedwellty was not a man to be flattened lightly. ‘I beat the shit out of him,’ the shadow education secretary boasted, ‘there
was blood and vomit all over the floor.’
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