Читать книгу Michael Foot: A Life - Kenneth O. Morgan - Страница 9

Like the legendary shot fired at the bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, that heralded the American War of Independence, ‘the Election rings around the World!’, Foot excitedly told the readers of the Daily Herald.¹ Labour’s socialist programme, as announced in the King’s Speech, was ‘the Boldest Adventure, the Greatest Crusade’. Labour had become the nation. Historical analogies with past revolutionaries from Cromwell to Garibaldi poured from his pen. In Westminster the new soi-disant revolutionaries, the 393 (shortly 394) Labour MPs, were sworn in immediately. Will Griffiths led a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’ in the Commons in which Foot joined enthusiastically. From the very start, dramatic events unfolded: the next four weeks saw the Potsdam conference, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, VJ-Day marking the end of the war in Japan on 15 August, the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease by the Americans on 21 August, the new committee on the use of atomic energy, all of them to colour Foot’s views fundamentally for the remainder of his career. He felt thoroughly at home in his new surroundings. He enjoyed the buzz in the lobbies as a great progressive programme was launched – a National Health Service, nationalization of the mines, independence for India, all part of what the new Chancellor Hugh Dalton called ‘the flowing tide’ of socialism. Foot also liked the parliamentary atmosphere, the chatter and conspiracy in smoking room and tea room, the ready access to Fleet Street friends. He enjoyed too some of the extra-mural activities, especially the group of MPs who played chess. Leslie Hale was his favoured opponent. Foot was recognized as being amongst the best parliamentary players, though it was agreed that the strongest was Julius Silverman. Others of note were Douglas Jay, Reginald Paget, Maurice Edelman and Maurice Orbach, with Jim Callaghan another, less talented, enthusiast. The world’s dominant players were Russian, and Foot met several grandmasters when an international tournament was held in London in 1946.

Best of all, Foot made attractive new friends amongst the Labour backbenchers. All of them, predictably, were on the left, paid-up members of the awkward squad. Four were particularly important for him. Richard Crossman was a didactic former Oxford philosophy don who had written on Plato and Socrates. Foot first met him when Crossman arranged a social event at the Savoy Grill after Parliament assembled. It was Palestine that first drew them together, but they remained intellectual comrades from then on, even posthumously, when Foot was involved in the publication of Crossman’s diaries. Another long-term ally was Ian Mikardo, a bright but prickly left-winger who, unusually for Labour, was a business consultant. He was of rabbinical Jewish background and had strong views on Palestine. It was he who had moved the famous Reading resolution committing the party firmly to wholesale nationalization at party conference in December 1944, when Foot first met him. Mikardo later described his friendship with Foot as ‘one of the most precious things in my life’. Tom Driberg was an old colleague on Beaverbrook newspapers, writer of the ‘William Hickey’ column. Foot remained tolerant of his ex-Communism and particularly conspicuous homosexual exploits, which almost led to his prosecution, and reacted loyally when journalists asserted that Driberg had been a double agent, both for the KGB and MI5. There is no doubt that many of his contemporaries placed less trust in Driberg’s character and reliability than Foot did.²

Perhaps Foot’s most congenial friend was J. P. W. Mallalieu, commonly known as ‘Curly’, a man of many talents. He had been a fine sportsman at Cheltenham College and Oxford, and won a rugby blue as a stand-off half He had an exciting war in the navy, and published a best-selling book about it, Very Ordinary Seaman. He wrote a financial column in the New Statesman, ‘Other People’s Money’, and a weekly parliamentary sketch in Tribune. He became a great admirer of Nye Bevan, while his friendship with Foot was such that for a few months in 1953 Michael and Jill lived with him and his family. However, Mallalieu never supported CND, and actually became a navy minister under Harold Wilson in 1964, which put him beyond the pale for many on the left. Foot’s memories of him, however, were always affectionate. As a sign of it he gave his daughter Ann (later Baroness) Mallalieu a present of a book on fox-hunting, a strong enthusiasm of hers even though Foot detested the pastime.³

These men found other left-wing comrades early on in the new Parliament. Others with whom Foot had close relations were Harold Davies, Leslie Hale, Stephen Swingler, Will Griffiths, Hugh Delargy and the playwright Benn Levy (along with his beautiful American actress wife, Constance Cummings). Along with them was a friend of far longer standing, Barbara Castle, in the House as MP for Blackburn and the only one of them who had a government job, as PPS for Cripps at the Board of Trade. In his memoirs Mikardo lists some others in their circle: the Australian lawyer and keen European federalist R. W. G. (‘Kim’) Mackay, George Wigg, Donald Bruce and Wing-Commander Ernest Millington, who had been returned as a Common Wealth candidate at the election but then joined Labour. Occasionally they were joined by mavericks like Woodrow Wyatt, or even figures on the party right like the independent-minded barrister R. T. Paget, who simply enjoyed their company on social grounds. In addition, there were one or two incorrigible rebels who flitted in and out but really pursued their own path, like Sydney Silverman, a disputatious Jewish lawyer, and S. O. Davies, ex-miner and Marxist Welsh nationalist who sat for Keir Hardie’s old seat of Merthyr Tydfil and like him supported Welsh home rule. In 1946 came another maverick, Emrys Hughes, Keir Hardie’s Welsh son-in-law who sat for South Ayrshire. He too was almost impossible to tie down.

This distinctly miscellaneous group of around twenty or so formed an identifiable collection of dissenters. Michael Foot was one of its most eminent members, and the most highly esteemed as a communicator. It is difficult to discern any wider influence on the labour movement. Only Crossman attempted to write a statement of political philosophy. Their socialism came across most clearly in their view of foreign policy. Most of them were middle-class journalists: trade unionists (other than members of the NUJ) were very rare. Until the growth of unrest over the anti-Soviet drift of Bevin’s foreign policy the following spring, they were little more than just kindred souls, closet critics in the tea room and the bar. They all favoured strongly socialist policies at home, which meant planning, controls and an uncompromising programme of public ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. But in its first two years, the government itself seemed to pursue this policy with such zest that there was little to complain about. It was really in the more difficult period of Morrisonian ‘consolidation’ in 1948–50, when the nationalizations effectively came to an end, that complaints arose. Nor did Commonwealth or colonial policy generate any great dissent. The left could justify everything, from the transfer of power in India to an unsuccessful attempt to grow groundnuts in Tanganyika. The major areas of criticism almost entirely involved foreign relations, and were largely offshoots of the early stages of the Cold War. To this should be added concern over Palestine, since almost all of them were passionately pro-Jewish and totally opposed to Bevin’s policy.

The members of the group were all instinctively oppositionists. Not one was seriously considered for government office, nor did they expect (or perhaps want) to be. Men like Mikardo or Driberg had backbench mindsets then and always. Until Bevan’s resignation as Minister of Health in April 1951, their influence upon either government or party policy was minimal, and in inverse proportion to their prominence as journalists. To call them ‘Labour’s Conscience’, as one text has done, seems remarkably inflated.⁴ Foot himself, a highly individual journalist with a past record of campaigns for the Socialist League and employment by Lord Beaverbrook, was considered unreliable, a gadfly, a meteor, the ultimate symbol of a party of protest, not a party of power. His activity was largely focused outside Parliament. The prospect of front-bench status seemed at this stage quite bizarre.

These Labour MPs were soft left, but no more than that. With the possible exception of Geoffrey Bing, a barrister later to be Kwame Nkrumah’s Attorney-General in Ghana, they all felt themselves to be located within the capacious reaches of the party’s broad church – only just, in some cases. They were quite distinct from a much smaller, more extreme group – D. N. Pritt, John Platts-Mills, Konni Zilliacus, Leslie Solley and Lester Hutchinson (all later to be expelled from the party), along with William Warbey, Tom Braddock and Ronald Chamberlain. The French political commentator Bertrand de Jouvenel distinguished in 1949 between what he curiously called ‘the pacifist head’ of Cross-man and ‘the Russophil head’ of Zilliacus.⁵ These hard-left dissentients, consistently pro-Soviet and anti-American, were scarcely within the Labour tabernacle at all. They tended to keep their own counsel. Their role in the party was minute, though they could sometimes ally with Foot’s friends, as in the famous ‘stab in the back’ motion on foreign affairs in November 1946 (see page 121). They might be joined also by virtual pacifists like Rhys Davies or Reg Sorensen. But Foot’s friends were more in the mainstream. Foot himself, like Crossman, had always been anti-Stalinist. He never took the sentimental view that ‘left could speak to left’. From 1948 his attitude towards the Soviet Union hardened, as did that of Bevan. Foot and Crossman were foremost among those inspired by the anti-Communist thrust of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, not to mention those famous tracts against totalitarianism, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, written by the eminent recent Tribune columnist George Orwell. However blurred the boundaries might be on the more sectarian left of the parliamentary Labour Party, a fundamental divide between the future Bevanites and Tribunites, and the fellow-travelling fringe, was always apparent. With the two Communist MPs, William Gallacher and Philip Piratin, Foot had almost nothing to do, although he retained his admiration for Harry Pollitt, whom he considered a more considerable politician. He always felt that Pollitt’s return to Parliament for Rhondda West in 1945 (the Labour candidate, Mainwaring, beat him by just 972 votes) would have been politically valuable.

Foot’s contacts and manoeuvres in the new House were always with other backbenchers. His links with government ministers were mostly tenuous. He had scant enthusiasm for either Attlee or the Lord President Herbert Morrison, and clearly underestimated them both. The former he regarded as colourless and uninspired, and a wartime advocate of coalitionism; Morrison he saw as just a machine man, who wanted to curb backbenchers’ independence – unfairly so, since Morrison had shown much interest in ideas and policy-making before the war. For Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, Foot began with a higher regard. Relations were sufficiently good for Bevin to ask him to go on a fact-finding mission to Persia (Iran) in February 1946. The purpose was to assess Russian infiltration in that country, from which Russian and British troops were due to withdraw on 2 March (in fact the British had already left). There was also anxiety that the Russians were taking root in Persian Azerbaijan, through the Tudeh party. Foot’s colleague was a Conservative ex-brigadier, Anthony Head, which led to predictable jokes about ‘Head and Foot’, and they had extensive talks with Tudeh leaders. Foot was convinced after this visit that there was abundant evidence for Soviet Russia’s intended domination of Iran. He also wrote in the Daily Herald in somewhat prophetic terms about the dangers to Anglo-American oil, including the refinery at Abadan, and made many sensible suggestions about changing the relationship between the British heirs of imperialism and the Persian authorities. But Bevin took little interest, and nothing tangible resulted from what was Foot’s one and only official activity on behalf of a British government until 1974.⁶ But by the end of 1946, Bevin’s robust confrontational stance with the Soviet Union, and even more his blatantly anti-Jewish policy in Palestine, had earned him Foot’s anathema.

Nor was Foot in any sense a protégé of Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and patron of youth, as were centre-right figures like Gaitskell and Callaghan, along with Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey (neither yet an MP), to whom was added for a time Barbara Castle. In one rare exchange, Dalton wrote to rebuke Foot over factual inaccuracies in Tribune over the convertibility of sterling, with particular reference to the precise roles as advisers of Otto Niemeyer, Lord Catto and Wilfred Eady. Foot replied courteously, although he pressed the need for the Treasury to employ ‘more socialist economists’ to assist in ‘carrying out a Socialist policy’.⁷ The only one of the government’s big five with whom he had ever been close was, of course, Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade and eventually Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he had shed his links with Tribune and they seldom saw each other now. Cripps replied to a query from Foot about the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948 in purely formal terms.⁸

Foot was close to no other minister, with the obvious and seminal exception of Aneurin Bevan. With Foot working closely with Jennie Lee on the editorial board of Tribune, he served as a permanent socialist sounding-board for Labour’s Minister of Health as he pushed through the National Health Service. Their relationship became closer still after 1949, as Bevan found himself increasingly at odds with the drift of foreign and defence policy. Indeed, Foot, while increasingly critical of Attlee’s government, found his special relationship with Bevan made this one aspect of his parliamentary role rewarding, as he pressed Bevan to challenge government policy. Jennie Lee by contrast found the entire experience between 1945 and 1951 frustrating and depressing.⁹

Foot later felt his speeches in the 1945–51 Parliament fell short of the highest standard. They were too complicated in structure, and perhaps too rhetorical. Sometimes the Oxford Union debates did not seem far away. He sounded more like a journalist in Parliament than a parliamentarian; his father was later to express concern on this point. But he began splendidly. His maiden speech, focusing on foreign policy, on 20 August 1945, was a clear success.¹⁰ He complimented the King’s Speech in characteristic terms: ‘Oliver Cromwell could have hardly done a better job himself in the realm of foreign affairs.’ He proceeded with Guilty Men-type attacks on Churchill and other leading Conservatives for their pre-war sympathies with Mussolini and Franco, along with right-wing monarchs like King George of the Hellenes. He declared that Britain enjoyed both a conception of political liberty denied to the Russians and a conception of economic liberty not shared by the Americans. This ‘unique combination of treasures’ gave it ‘the commanding position of leadership if we choose to exercise it’. He wound up with a passionate affirmation of the socialist patriotism common at the time:

At the end of this great war and after this great election, the British people can play as conspicuous a part before the gaze of all mankind as they played in 1940. Hitler has left behind his terrible legacies – racial hatred, love of violence, hunger, homelessness, famine and death. Surely it is the duty of our great country not to be content with some secondary role, but rather to seek the abatement of those evils by the assertion and example of a much more positive democracy. As we look out across this stricken Continent and as we see a new hope in the struggle to be born across this wilderness of shattered faiths, may it not be our destiny as the freest and most democratic and a socialist power to stand between the living and the dead and stay the flames?

The following speaker, the Conservative Ian Orr-Ewing, congratulated Foot in the customary fashion as ‘the sole survivor of a family which has been for many years represented in this House’. Back home, Father Isaac wrote with paternal pride: ‘Congratulations! I knew you could do it. When people have said you had not the [parliamentary] style I said to myself “Just you wait, my lads!” And now you’ve shown the beggars.’¹¹ Journalists also gave Foot a good press. Even The Times gave him some prominence.¹² The New Statesman commented that the speech and its reception showed that ‘the House still likes a first rate verbal pamphleteer’. Hannen Swaffer observed that Foot spoke ‘with the vehemence of a Hyde Park orator’, presumably meant as a compliment, while his colleague Tom Driberg, himself no great orator, wrote in the Sunday Express that Foot was ‘a little too platform but fiery and fluent’.¹³

He made another major speech that autumn, on one of his special themes, Germany – the destruction of its economy, the diminution of its boundaries, the impoverishment of its people. The leitmotiv was obviously the need not to repeat the errors of 1919. But what stamped him as one of the awkward squad of the parliamentary left was the famous vote against the terms of the American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes with much difficulty.¹⁴ There was criticism in Cabinet both of the reduced amount of the loan, $4 billion, and the commercial rate of interest attached to it. But most criticisms focused on two other aspects. They were both part of what Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky has shown was a calculated American attempt to undermine Britain’s financial predominance, with a dogmatic US insistence on free-market arrangements and scant regard for Britain’s post-war difficulties which Keynes called ‘an economic Dunkirk’. The first of these two provisions was an insistence on an immediate multilateral liberalization of trade; the second was that sterling should become freely convertible into dollars, this to take effect in July 1947. Emanuel Shinwell and Bevan had both fiercely attacked these proposals in Cabinet on 5 December, but had been rebuffed.¹⁵

In the Commons, over seventy Conservatives voted against the terms on 13 December: their most effective voice was Robert Boothby, later Michael Foot’s weekly sparring partner on television’s In the News, who called the loan ‘an economic Munich’. They were joined by twenty-three Labour rebels, nearly all on the soft left – Foot, Hugh Delargy, Barbara Castle, Benn Levy, Raymond Blackburn, W. G. Cove – along with some less likely rebels like Maurice Edelman and James Callaghan. Those on the furthest left like Konni Zilliacus, along with the two Communist MPs, Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, supported the government. Foot did not speak in the debate, but his general view emerged in Tribune.¹⁶ He saw the terms of the loan as reflecting the advice of defeatist economists about a huge balance of payments deficit looming in 1946, and a victory for ‘money power’ which would prevent the payment of sterling debts to India, Egypt, Palestine and other colonized powers. Foot had no expertise in international finance (and he was hostile to the Bretton Woods agreement for international currency stabilization concluded with the US in 1944), but he felt instinctively that the loan was part of a long-term American strategy to destroy British independence in foreign as well as economic policy. He told Dalton of his total opposition to convertibility. Hard-headed economic historians have in the main endorsed the general line of his instinctive criticisms. The catastrophic convertibility of sterling in July – August 1947 lasted barely a month.

The vote against the US loan (which the government won easily) confirmed Foot’s role as a critic. He spoke thereafter on domestic matters many times. On his home base, he dutifully paid due attention to the needs of Devonport and other dockyards, for all his frequent calls for cuts in arms spending. But he made most impact in the House on foreign policy issues. A central one throughout 1946–47 was the condition of Germany, made the more desperate by the forced immigration of hundreds of thousands of German refugees from eastern Europe. Here his closest associate was his old publisher, Victor Gollancz, whose compassion was moved by the starvation amongst the German population. He and Foot spoke at a mass meeting in the Albert Hall on 26 November 1945 to raise awareness of the plight of German children. Other speakers were Labour’s Richard Stokes, Air Vice-Marshal Hugh Champion de Crespigny (who had almost won Newark for Labour in 1945), and Eleanor Rathbone and Sir Arthur Salter, both independents.¹⁷ Foot also came together with Gollancz and Stokes to form the Save Europe Now (SEN) campaign; Bertrand Russell and Canon John Collins were amongst the other committee members, and Peggy Duff was secretary, so there was some overlap with CND later. Others prominent were Lord Lindsay, former Master of Balliol, and the Bishop of Chichester. The campaign went on for two years, attempting to persuade the government to encourage British citizens to either surrender some of their food coupons for the Germans or else send food parcels. SEN saw Foot at his most idealistic and far-sighted.¹⁸

In the House, he described how ‘something like famine’ prevailed in Germany, where food rations had fallen from the starvation level of 1,500 calories per day to as low as seven hundred. His solution for finding the relevant resources was to cease to pay for large occupying forces in Germany, and to make further arms reductions in the Middle and Far East. He pleaded for a discussion of the principles underlying British foreign policy. One ray of light was the compassionate, if short-lived, policy for social reconstruction of Lord Pakenham as Minister for Germany after 1945, which Foot saw as a kind of anticipation of the Marshall Plan. Foot’s view of the German problem was a comprehensive one. He urged the need for a political reconstruction with decentralized institutions, but also warned of the long-term dangers of Germany’s being divided into eastern and western zones. He warned against ‘an anti-German mania’ like the lunatic plan devised during the war by Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office for Germany to be reduced to a purely pastoral economy. On the other hand, like other British socialists he found it hard to make common cause with his comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, since their leader, Kurt Schumacher, demanded early German reunification and spoke in alarmingly nationalist terms, with frequent use of the word Reich. Not until 1949, with the impact of the Marshall Plan on its economy and a stable constitution, did West Germany progress, albeit under the long-term rule of Konrad Adenauer’s right-wing Christian Democrats, and not under the still notionally Marxist SDP.

An even stronger concern in Foot’s Commons speeches was the growing violence and political disintegration in Palestine. By 1946 the region was in near chaos. There was unending tension between Jews and Arabs; a mounting exodus of Jews to Palestine after the Holocaust, with US support, despite determined efforts by Bevin and the British government to prevent it; and open guerrilla warfare by Jewish paramilitary or terrorist groups, the Haganah and Irgun Zvei Leumi, against the British forces stationed in Palestine. They were reinforced by the violent Stern Gang. The destruction of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun on 22 July 1946, with the loss of ninety-one lives, caused an especial shock to a populace not inured to long-term terrorism.

As a pillar of the Palestine Committee, Michael Foot was among those who hoped that a potentially pro-Jewish Labour government would begin a new departure after the long saga of bitterness following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. But he was to be horrified by Bevin’s policy. Britain’s refusal to grant more than a minimum number of immigration visas (a mere 1,500 a month at first), the inhumane efforts to prevent the sailing of the Exodus in 1946 with its refugees from the prison camps, the refusal to contemplate a Jewish state, worst of all what seemed to be the blatant anti-Semitism of the British Foreign Office, caused immense shock. Foot’s zeal for a state of Israel was reinforced by his renewal of contact with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that Foot was now ‘very anti-Bolshie’; Foot helped Koestler by pressing the Home Office to speed up a visa for his aged Hungarian mother. He wrote frequently on Palestine in Tribune, and denounced Bevin for not admitting 100,000 Jewish displaced persons into Palestine immediately. Another strong influence was his new friend Richard Crossman. Previously pro-Arab and, by his own confession, anti-Semitic, Crossman’s membership of an Anglo-American committee of inquiry into Palestine turned him into a fervent Zionist. It urged an immediate agreement to certificates for 100,000 Jewish immigrants: Bevin treated this with contempt, and in effect sought to continue the pre-war policy towards the Jews.

The names of Crossman and Foot were attached to a particularly effective thirty-two-page pamphlet for Gollancz in the autumn of 1946, A Palestine Munich?. In fact much of it, including the entire first section, was written by Arthur Koestler.¹⁹ It detailed the restrictive immigration policy up to 1939 and the rise of Jewish and Arab resistance. The 1939 White Paper, calling for a future Arab Federation in Palestine with highly restricted Jewish immigration, was dismissed as a bribe to the Arabs to prevent their sympathizing with Germany. The pamphlet called for the government to allow full immigration of Jews up to the limit of Palestine’s capacity to absorb them, and not to use force of arms to endorse what Labour ministers themselves had called a Palestine Munich. A promise of early independence to the Palestinian Arabs would mean ‘an Anglo – Jewish war’. The booklet’s political solution, in the absence of one being suggested from the Foreign Office, was a partitioned Palestine free of American military involvement, consisting of a ‘Judean state’ based on large-scale immigration, and an Arab state, with the central mountain region transferred to the Kingdom of Transjordan. At this point Britain would withdraw its forces, and self-interest would compel both the new Jewish and Arab states to collaborate and to come to terms with each other. It was the most cogent statement by pro-Jewish Labour representatives yet written, and it was predictably dismissed out of hand by all Arab representatives. Basically, it reflected Koestler’s totally one-sided Jewish sympathies (he wrote in support of the Stern Gang’s operations), and got nowhere. As it happened, Koestler greatly disliked Israel when he moved there, quarrelled with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and old friends like Teddy Kollek, and rapidly returned to Britain amidst acrimony all round.²⁰

Through Tribune, and to a far lesser extent through his Daily Herald column (which usually was safely loyalist), Foot kept up his campaign on behalf of the Jews in 1947–48. The British government, in which the Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech-Jones was given the poisoned chalice of Palestine, offered no way forward. Creech-Jones’s partition proposals collapsed; Bevin’s proposal for five more years of British trusteeship offered nothing new; the United Nations came out with a scheme for immediate partition which Bevin promptly rejected. In the end the British government, harassed by the huge support costs of maintaining troops in Palestine, decided simply to pull its forces out, and withdrew them by 15 May 1948. Attlee quoted the precedent of the withdrawal from India. But there the British government had produced an agreed scheme for a political settlement that would follow. In Palestine there was none. The Foreign Office imagined that the various Arab armies would simply drive the Jews into the sea. The successful creation of the state of Israel in 1949 astonished everybody. Foot, of course, was delighted that a Jewish state had come into being against the odds. In an adjournment debate on 12 August 1947 he had called for the early withdrawal of British forces. The British people themselves were delighted to see their troops withdrawn from a violent land, but it was impossible to see the Palestine settlement as anything other than a shambles and a catastrophe. Foot might hope that the Jewish people would enter a more settled phase after August 1948. In fact, their tragedy was to haunt him and the world for the remainder of his life.

His main concern in Tribune columns and Commons speeches, though, was the deepening crisis in relations with Russia. Throughout 1946, especially in Germany, the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, the atmosphere seemed ever darker. Of all the commentators on the left, Michael Foot was one of the most outspoken in denouncing Russian policy in eastern Europe after the war. In the press he condemned Russia’s intimidation of the socialists in Poland, its pressure upon Yugoslavia, its totalitarian control of eastern Germany.²¹ Beyond Europe, his visit to Iran had convinced him of Russian dreams of domination in the Middle East as well. On the other hand, he shared the anxiety common on the left at the drift towards a full-scale military alliance with the United States. Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March terrified him. Dissatisfaction with Bevin’s policy built up amongst Labour MPs in 1946, and finally spilled over, with a critical letter sent to Attlee on 29 October by a group of twenty-one Labour backbenchers urging that a democratic socialist Britain ought to pursue a genuine ‘middle way’ between American ‘free enterprise’ and Russian totalitarianism. They were far from being a far-left caucus; they included Crossman, Foot, Levy and Silverman, but also Callaghan and Woodrow Wyatt. A few days later Crossman circulated an amendment to the Address which urged ‘full Socialist planning and control’ of the world’s resources, and ‘a democratic and constructive Socialist alternative to the otherwise inevitable conflict between American capitalism and Soviet Communism’. In the end, forty-three Labour MPs put their names to it; among them, in addition to Crossman, were Levy, Silverman and Michael Foot. The name of Jennie Lee, Bevan’s wife, indicated that at least one Cabinet minister was unhappy too.²²

Crossman moved his amendment on 18 November 1946, though he lessened its impact from the start by saying he would not call a division.²³ In sharp terms, he asked the government to reject proposals for an Anglo – American military alliance, and asked whether precise arrangements in terms of arms sharing and staff discussions were already under way. Since Bevin was away in New York, Attlee himself replied, mildly criticizing Crossman’s speech as totally one-sided. Two Scottish ILP members mischievously moved Crossman’s amendment to a vote, and the government won by 353 to 0, with several Labour abstentions, including Foot. But left-wing anxiety about British foreign policy moved onto a new stage two months later when the ‘Truman doctrine’ for US military aid to potential victims of Soviet aggression resulted in new American military involvement in Greece and Turkey. Talks at the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York had effectively broken down. Talk of a Cold War, an iron curtain and even a possible third world war became commonplace.

Michael Foot had taken little part in the Crossman amendment debate, and indeed had been under fire himself from the left for being too anti-Soviet in Tribune. He remained so in the Daily Herald, and satirized Molotov’s plans for ‘European confusion’.²⁴ But he also now became a leader of the most significant protest against government policy since the general election. Some left-wing MPs now began to meet regularly to prepare plans: led by Crossman, Foot and Mikardo, they also included Stephen Swingler, Harold Davies, Mallalieu, Benn Levy, Kim Mackay and Woodrow Wyatt. They met against a background of a serious fuel crisis in the severe winter of early 1947, and amidst fears that Labour’s socialist advance was slowing down. The economic crisis of the summer of 1947 was another major factor. The outcome was Keep Left, a pamphlet which appeared in May 1947, in time for the party conference at Margate.²⁵ It was the product of a draft ‘red paper’ worked out with Foot and Mikardo at Richard Crossman’s home at Radnage in Buckinghamshire. It included calls for more socialist planning in domestic policies, but what caught the imagination were the criticisms of foreign and defence policy, its call for Britain to stand aloof from confrontations between America and Russia, to withdraw its troops worldwide, and to demobilize rather than embark on conscription. Some of this was the work of Crossman, especially a chapter on ‘The Job Abroad’ and passages on international affairs more generally. But another key author was Michael Foot, whose contribution focused on the domestic economic scene, notably ‘socialist planning’ and tighter controls on capital and labour. With his other outlets in the press, he was typecast as a symbol of Keep Left from then on.

Foot’s viewpoint was an amalgam of socialism, patriotism and anti-militarism. Britain’s international role would be the product of the success of its socialist achievement at home. It would offer moral leadership. Foot’s answer to the problems of the world was a third force in which democratic socialist Britain would join with comrades in western Europe. Bevan had called for one during the war. It would stand apart equally from the military adventures of both the United States and the Soviet Union: ‘The cause of British socialism and the cause of British independence and the cause of world sanity are indissolubly bound together.’²⁶ The extent to which Foot was identified with a version of a federal united Europe at this time is worth underlining. The later defender of British parliamentary sovereignty against the encroachments of Brussels was in 1946–48 advocating ‘a United States of Europe’. It would build a customs union, and plan the coordination of heavy industries. Most of all, it would conduct its own foreign policy and support the Third World with development programmes, bulk commodity purchase and fair trade.

Foot was never a European federalist to the same degree as Kim Mackay, who was influenced by the constitutional arrangements of his native Australia. He cherished Parliament too much. His vision of western Europe was as a socialist-led Europe: the voice he usually quoted as representative of Continental Europe was the veteran French socialist leader Léon Blum. Along with Crossman, Mikardo and others on the left, Foot continued to champion European unity in this form – even though a major difficulty now was that the left in both France and Italy was preponderantly Communist. In May 1948 he was amongst those disciplined by Transport House for attending the founding conference for the Council of Europe at The Hague, where the main event was a visionary speech by Winston Churchill. A ‘Europe Group’ was formed amongst Labour MPs on 2 December 1946, with Kim Mackay as its chairman. Foot was amongst those, including Crossman, Mikardo, George Wigg and Barbara Castle, who joined in a second wave a few weeks later.²⁷ It conducted discussions on policy with the French and other socialist parties, and remained active until late 1949.

And yet, the impact of Keep Left was short-lived. At the Margate conference the government produced its own counter-pamphlet, Cards on the Table (actually written by Denis Healey of Transport House’s international department). Ernest Bevin crushed his miscellaneous critics with an overwhelming conference speech in which he famously condemned the ‘stab in the back’ and the disloyalty of the Crossman amendment. Its author became widely known as ‘double Crossman’ from then on. In Tribune Foot was sceptical about Bevin’s easy rhetorical triumph, and critical of the ‘listlessness, almost indifference’ of the debates on international affairs.²⁸ He listed key unanswered questions, notably ‘What role are we to play as the foremost European power?’

But in fact it was events which finally undermined the socialist federal argument of Keep Left. Soon after party conference, the US Secretary of State George Marshall announced his famous plan for European economic recovery, his proposals initially covering the Soviet Union as well. Soon the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) was working out schemes for the mobilization and distribution of aid in western Europe, to the huge advantage of the ailing British economy. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union became more and indefensible for a democratic socialist like Foot. He became a champion of anti-Communist dissidents in eastern Europe. He particularly admired Milovan Djilas’s work of political theory The New Class (1957), and the Montenegrin intellectual was to be a guest in the Foots’ Hampstead home on several occasions later. In April 1948 Foot argued strongly against the telegram sent to Pietro Nenni, signed initially by thirty-seven Labour MPs (fifteen of whom subsequently disavowed supporting it), backing his left-wing Italian Socialist Party, rather than the right-wing Saragat socialist grouping. Foot, never considered as a possible signatory on any of the lists of possible supporters, wrote in Tribune that the Nenni telegram was ‘an act of sabotage against the declared policy of the party’, and gave the impression that a large section of the Labour Party would welcome a Communist victory at the polls in Italy. Both as a libertarian and an admirer of Silone, Foot could never endorse such a policy. A hysterical letter of protest from the near-Communist Tom Braddock was ignored.²⁹ Other key events in 1948 which reinforced Foot’s anti-Communism were successively the ‘coup’ in February which put Czechoslovakia under Soviet control, the schism with Tito in Yugoslavia (whom Foot solidly defended until his imprisonment of Djilas alienated him from the government of Belgrade) and, most decisively, the Soviet blockade of west Berlin in 1948–49: this last led even Aneurin Bevan to propose that Britain should send in tanks through the Soviet zone to bring in essential supplies. Foot in Tribune and in Parliament symbolized the new mood. He was particularly moved by events in Czechoslovakia; he had Czech socialist friends, and went with Crossman and Wigg on a mission to the country just after the Communist coup. In November 1948 Foot warmly applauded the election of Harry Truman as US President: he had no sympathy for the fellow-travelling left-wing challenge of Henry Wallace.³⁰ The creation of NATO, largely under Bevin’s aegis, in the spring of 1949 was as warmly applauded by Foot in Tribune as by the party mainstream, and he publicly rebuked Mikardo for opposing it.³¹ ‘The Futility of Mr Priestley’ ridiculed a future comrade in CND for regarding the USA and the Soviet Union as equally anti-democratic.

Many of the criticisms of Bevin’s foreign policy from Foot and others were cogent and well-informed. But they are mainly important as anticipations of the later Bevanites. In the 1940s they struck many of the right notes at the wrong time. It was difficult to suggest an alternative foreign policy at a time when Stalin seemed so threatening and so obdurate. The era of post-Stalin ‘peaceful existence’ lay many years off. A socialist-led federal Europe was never more than a pipe-dream; the ‘western union’ which Britain did lead into being in the Brussels Treaty of March 1948 was limited and functional, geared heavily to defence issues, and in no sense a ‘third force’.

These events left Michael Foot with a sense of frustration. Bevin’s foreign policy showed ‘a clean sheet of failure’, yet there seemed no viable alternative. In practice, like his friends and colleagues Koestler and Orwell he trod the path of a regretful but firm anti-Communism. The Keep Left group re-formed (without Foot) in July 1949, and drew on the expertise of Oxford economists such as Thomas Balogh and David Worswick in producing the pamphlet Keeping Left, which twelve Labour MPs signed. But Keep Left had lost impetus, and tended to fragment. It was a highly miscellaneous group at the best of times. The effect of all this on the career of Michael Foot was mixed: because of his greater prominence and articulacy, involvement with the left tended to heighten suspicion of him in the party as irresponsible or disloyal. Some comrades did not like him anyway. Hugh Gaitskell, his later nemesis, writing after the Durham miners’ gala in August 1948, found Foot ‘rather strange. He never seems to talk except when making speeches, and was most silent and reserved all the time.’ Jennie Lee, he added, was ‘a very stupid woman’.³²

And yet there is much to Foot’s credit. On both Germany and Palestine he voiced an unpopular cause with a blend of idealism and hard fact. On the origins of the Cold War, without lapsing into what Marx called ‘infantile leftism’, he raised perfectly proper questions about the robotic confrontation into which Bevin was dragged at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in 1946–47. In questioning Soviet foreign policy, the extent to which it posed a military threat to the West and the viability of Britain’s huge overseas commitments, his judgements became the conventional wisdom years later. Even at the time, they crystallized some of the discontent amongst the left-wing middle-class intelligentsia of which Tosco Fyvel wrote in Tribune.³³ At the very least, Foot was surely right in urging a debate on fundamental geopolitical principles. On Europe, his enthusiasm for closer union was part of a wider critique of British foreign policy, and his vision of a united Europe was distinctly vague. Even so, the European opportunity was an immense gap in Britain’s world view after 1945. Some of the Labour left picked it up more rapidly than many on the right, such as Gaitskell with his uncritical Atlanticism.

The most tentative area of Foot’s analysis of international relations, then and always, was his view of the United States. Unlike his father Isaac, who had been on an extensive morale-boosting lecture tour in 1943, Michael was no ‘special relationship’ man. He had relatively few close American contacts (though he had almost married one of them), and many of them were critics, like the venerable journalist Walter Lippman, the trade unionist Walter Reuther, or the left-wing humorous columnist Dorothy Parker. He was excited by New York City, but rarely visited America, and had limited appreciation of its history or geopolitics. He seldom reviewed books on American history after the time of Tom Paine. His view of America hovered somewhere midway between Henry Wallace and Harry Truman, as he veered between ideological suspicion of American capitalism and endorsement of the visionary Marshall Plan and the military necessity for NATO. Nye Bevan was much the same. But at least in 1945–51 Foot could explore a range of options for relations with the US, compared with the confrontational atmosphere of the fifties between East and West, over China and the bomb above all.

On domestic issues, Foot’s Commons speeches followed a fairly unremarkable course in their calls for more socialism. He did not seem to specialize in any particular topic. However, there was one domestic theme on which he took the lead – the influence and political imbalance of the press. Here he was following the lead of his own union, the National Union of Journalists. He launched fierce attacks on the monopolistic right-wing proprietors who controlled at least 80 per cent of British newspapers. Lords Kemsley and Rothermere were his main targets, but Beaverbrook also, his once revered patron, did not escape his barbs. In July 1946 he joined over a hundred Labour MPs, several of them journalists, in asking for an inquiry into the ‘monopolistic tendencies’ in the British press. On 29 October he seconded a motion in the House by Haydn Davies calling for a Royal Commission on the concentration of ownership of newspapers. Almost ritualistically, he threw in personal abuse of key proprietors: he could not understand why the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had apologized to them for using the term ‘gutter press’.³⁴ As it happened, Foot was pushing an open door, since ministers as powerful as Dalton and Morrison lent their support, and a Royal Commission duly went about its work in 1947–49 under the erudite chairmanship of an Oxford classics don, Sir David Ross.

When Foot gave evidence before it on 12 November 1947 he attacked newspaper chains which were taking over local journals (including in Plymouth) and the interference of proprietors with editorial freedom.³⁵ His examples were drawn from his own experience under Beaverbrook. His most startling allegations concerned the ‘blacklists’ which Beaverbrook maintained, including the refusal to review plays by Noël Coward, concerts conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham or the film Proud Valley, which featured the left-wing black American baritone Paul Robeson. Kemsley, he said, also ran a blacklist – for a time none other than Beaverbrook himself was on it! In a second appearance before the inquiry on 18 December, he urged something like American anti-trust legislation to prevent multiple ownership, though this was opposed later by another witness, the American lawyer Morris L. Ernst (the father of Foot’s former love Connie).³⁶ Foot gave a confident performance on both occasions, and dealt firmly with a somewhat patronizing enquiry from Lady Violet Bonham Carter. But, predictably, the Royal Commission’s findings were mundane. They saw no danger in the concentration of press ownership, and proposed merely the weak option of a Press Council, run by the newspapers themselves, to consider complaints.³⁷ Tribune denounced the report as ‘tepid and unimaginative’, and the Press Council proved a frail reed over the decades. Aneurin Bevan, who had drifted away from his pre-war connection with Beaverbrook, was to denounce Britain’s capitalist press as ‘the most prostituted in the world’.

Foot’s grievances against the Tory-run daily press continued to fester, not least with Express Newspapers, which pilloried the Labour government mercilessly. But if the Royal Commission had no major impact, his relations with Beaverbrook were certainly affected. The old press proprietor was evidently upset by Foot’s attacks after their close relationship, even though his own evidence to the Royal Commission made almost no direct reference to it. Friends proposed a reconciliation, and Beaverbrook himself wrote to Foot expressing his sadness at their estrangement: ‘The separation that has lasted too long has distressed me. The reunion will give me joy.’ Foot accepted an invitation to a dinner in honour of the old man’s seventieth birthday at the Savoy in early 1949. Invited to speak impromptu, he delighted Beaverbrook with a quotation about a venerable sage from Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he then revealed referred to Beelzebub. This comparison seems to have been in Foot’s mind for some time: in Tribune on 26 November 1948, ‘Beelzebub Wants the Job’ had compared Churchill to his infernal majesty.³⁸ At the Savoy, though, the magic of friendship was restored, the presence of Jill, whom the old man much liked, being a major contributory factor. Express Newspapers did not change its anti-socialist politics, and neither did Beaverbrook. But his affectionate relationship with Foot was henceforth unshakeable. In all the political crises of the fifties, Foot remained in the closest touch with his former employer, an almost filial and purely personal connection at a time when he was in the bitterest conflict with right-wing comrades in the Labour Party. Each materially helped the other. Beaverbrook helped Tribune with money, and would provide Michael and Jill with a temporary home. Foot was the vital link in introducing Beaverbrook to one of his closest friends, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor.³⁹ And he virtually never attacked the Beaverbrook press again.

With his parliamentary career stuck on the backbenches, and many of his left-wing crusades running into the sand, Michael Foot’s dominant interest in these post-war years lay in journalism. The distinguished labour correspondent Geoffrey Goodman, who first met him around 1950, felt that Foot was generally seen then as a pamphleteer and journalist rather than as an MP.⁴⁰ His natural milieu was having a drink and a gossip in a pub opposite the law courts with the Socialist Journalists group, including Ted and Barbara Castle, Ritchie Calder and Margaret Stewart of the News Chronicle. Younger journalists like Goodman, Mervyn Jones, Ian Aitken and Dick Clements were soon to join them. Foot still wrote for the Herald twice a week. One speciality here, as always, was fierce personal satire. In 1948, on lines similar to Guilty Men, he wrote a series of character sketches of ‘People in Politics’. These turned out to be all Tories, and were nearly all unflattering – Lord Salisbury, Lord Woolton, Anthony Eden, Rab Butler, Oliver Stanley, Sir Waldron Smithers, Alan Lennox-Boyd, Oliver Lyttelton, Ralph Assheton, Harold Macmillan, Richard Law, W. S. Morrison, Lord Hinchingbrooke, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Walter Elliot successively received unsparing attention. Woolton was ridiculed for the huge profits made by the Lewis’s department store over which he presided. Of Eden, it was said that his ‘polite’ resignation from the Chamberlain government in 1938 ‘left not a ripple on the political waters’. Macmillan retained an Edwardian flourish, ‘but the ardours of Young England have gone’. Lennox-Boyd was an imperialist supporter of Franco’s fascist regime who was ‘as unchanging as Stonehenge’. Most exotic of all was the far-right member for Orpington, Sir Waldron Smithers, ‘our best preserved specimen of Neolithic man … No one would really be surprised if he turned up one day in goatskin and sandals.’ The only one of Foot’s victims to be accorded significant praise was Robert Boothby, who sailed piratically ‘under the skull and crossbones’. Foot wondered why he remained a Tory at all.⁴¹

Invariably Foot’s columns for Percy Cudlipp in the Herald were Labour orthodox in tone, and seldom rocked the boat. When in 1949 his column turned to a kind of ‘Any Questions’ format, his responses were mild enough. Some were of later interest. Thus on 21 January 1949 he committed himself to the view that ‘The Labour Party does not believe in unilateral disarmament. It wants the other countries to agree to disarm but until that agreement is reached … it believes in maintaining adequate defence forces.’⁴² Of course he was talking here of conventional forces, not the prospect of nuclear weapons. Still, later on a very different note was struck.

But it was in the columns of Tribune that Foot’s talents expressed themselves most fully. He had been linked with the paper anew, through Bevan, when he left the Standard and joined the Tribune editorial board in 1945. He also became a director. The following year he shared the editorial role with Jon Kimche, but Kimche, after several rows with the board, was eventually dismissed following an unauthorized visit to Palestine. Foot then worked with Evelyn Anderson, a German Social Democrat, as co-editor. She was a woman of ability, but seemed obsessed with Russian perfidy in eastern Europe. With her limited understanding of the British Labour movement, she departed in 1948. Foot then became the senior editor himself, in partnership with Jennie Lee.⁴³ Tribune now became a more important component of the British weekly political press, and Foot’s editorial role added to the mystique that had surrounded him since Guilty Men. Tribune had always been a struggling publication. It had no money, and sales, at perhaps ten thousand copies (so far as the facts could be uncovered), were disappointing under both Kimche and Anderson. What it did have was Michael, charismatic and irreplaceable. From his paper-strewn office at 222 The Strand, he did everything on the newspaper. Keir Hardie had been similarly omnicompetent when he founded and edited the old ILP newspaper, the Labour Leader, in 1894. He not only wrote major articles on long, stuffy train journeys, but also the women’s column under the name of ‘Lily Bell’ and even children’s stories – ‘Donald the Pit Pony’, for instance.⁴⁴ Foot, also an MP, was more active still. His business manager, Peggy Duff, called him, affectionately enough, ‘the great panjandrum, the Beaverbrook of Tribune’.⁴⁵ With his Express Newspapers background, he took a close interest in the technicalities of typesetting. He was also much involved in the strategy of marketing and distribution, an important matter, because large bookshop chains like W. H. Smith refused to sell so left-wing a publication. Robert Edwards gives a memorable portrait of Foot at that time, suffering from insomnia and asthma, scratching his blistered wrists, yawning and smoking almost simultaneously. Enveloped in the debris and the stench of up to seventy daily Woodbines, he seemed almost tormented, older than his thirty-odd years.⁴⁶ Yet he was also inspirational to all who worked with him.

Most crucial of all, he was indefatigable in raising money, including from his own somewhat limited resources. He could not now turn to senior colleagues like Cripps, Bevan or George Strauss, because they were all Cabinet ministers. He got help from sympathetic capitalists, from Jack Hilton, from the Sieffs of Marks & Spencer (for his staunch support for Israel), from the accountant and Labour MP John Diamond, and increasingly from Howard Samuel, property developer and head of the publishing firm MacGibbon & Kee.

He spread his net more widely still. In the ‘Lower than Kemsley’ libel case resulting from a fierce attack on the press baron Lord Kemsley in 1950, not only Tribune but its directors personally, including Foot and Jennie Lee, were threatened with bankruptcy. This followed the issue of Tribune published on 2 March 1950, which fiercely attacked the Evening Standard’s editor Herbert Gunn for scandalously suggesting a link between Klaus Emil Fuchs, the atomic bomb spy, and the Minister of Food John Strachey, a former Communist. Foot headed the article ‘Lower than Kemsley’, an echo of Bevan’s ‘lower than vermin’ attack on the Tories in 1948 and directed against the owner of the Daily Mail, a particular bête noire of Foot’s. Tribune, among other insults, spoke of journalists ‘watching without shame or protest the prostitution of their trade’. But he would find essential help of £3,000 in fighting the case from Lord Beaverbrook (the owner of the Standard, of course), due in large measure to the personal influence of Jill with his old boss. Even so, it was a financial mercy that in 1952 Foot and Tribune eventually won the day in the House of Lords.⁴⁷

Foot took his responsibility for what was a small, struggling newspaper very seriously. He venerated the craft of political journalism: Dean Swift, the nemesis of the Duke of Marlborough in 1711, was a model from the past here. In the more recent tradition of Labour journalism he had two particular inspirations. One was Robert Blatchford of the Clarion (and the Clarion vans which sold it), always a hero despite his fiercely pro-war nationalism both during the Boer War and in August 1914. Foot not only revered him as an editor and writer, but also honoured him in his lesser-known role as a literary critic. The other was George Lansbury’s brilliant Daily Herald in its first incarnation before 1914, which featured some of the most celebrated of writers, including Shaw, Wells and Hilaire Belloc, along with the matchless cartoons of the Australian Will Dyson. Foot had a special admiration for Lansbury’s achievements at the Herald, where he acted at one time both as chairman of the board of directors and as editor, given that he had no training as a journalist at all. At the present time, Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman was a yardstick – but also a competitor. Like Blatchford at the Clarion, Foot wanted Tribune to be well-written, punchy in style, and to a degree fun to read. He hoped to emulate the back half of the New Statesman, directed by its brilliant literary editor V. S. Pritchett. So he had on his staff some highly literate and intellectual colleagues. A star associate was George Orwell, who served as literary editor for a while and wrote a famously anarchic column, ‘As I Please’, for some time after the war, along with many other miscellaneous columns and reviews. There were also Tosco Fyvel, Orwell’s successor as literary editor, and the drama critic Kenneth Bruce Bain, who wrote under the name of Richard Findlater. Soon talented young political journalists were to come in, Robert Edwards and later an industrial relations specialist, Ian Aitken. Another young recruit, who joined the newspaper as a secretary after the 1950 election, was a Cambridge graduate, Elizabeth Thomas. At first she found it difficult to establish a settled relationship with Foot, who seemed shy and nervy, while his incessant smoking was off-putting. But she persevered, worked closely with him on all issues, rose to become literary editor of Tribune some years later, and began a close friendship that lasted well over half a century.⁴⁸ This unusual, gifted man, often distant in manner, with an awkward tendency to call women, even Jill, ‘my dear child’, had also a charm and a cultural dynamism which Elizabeth found magnetic. Women frequently did.

In 1948 and 1949 Tribune under Foot’s editorship kept up its robust commentary on domestic issues. But in general, with an election approaching, it was supportive of the government in its editorial comment. This aroused some anger among MPs of the further left. Tom Braddock accused the journal of currying favour with those in high places (unspecified), while Konni Zilliacus attacked it, only to be denounced for his ‘host of delusions’ in return.⁴⁹ Tribune’s columns featured several articles by Roy Jenkins, a young MP elected in a by-election for Southwark in 1948, praising the government’s economic performance, especially the buoyancy of exports to dollar areas (a yearly rate of £234 million for 1948 was quoted, as against £164 million in 1947). When Cripps was forced to devalue the pound in September 1949, Foot in Tribune staunchly defended the decision as a progressive alternative to Tory policies of wage-cutting, although he acknowledged that its success depended on ‘the understanding and self-discipline’ of the workers. Evidently there were divided counsels on the paper’s editorial board here, since Ian Mikardo expressed doubts on devaluing the pound unless it was accompanied by other policies, notably severe cuts in military expenditure.⁵⁰ But Tribune felt that things were going so well at home – with the buoyant effect of devaluing the pound, and iron and steel nationalization carrying on the tide of public ownership – that a general election could have been called in 1949. Attlee’s decision to soldier on was, however, accepted amiably enough.