Читать книгу A Private Life of Michael Foot - Prof Carl Rollyson - Страница 9

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September 2000

On my arrival, I found Michael and Julie sitting outdoors in the late afternoon at the Villa Dubrovnik—Michael’s and Jill’s favourite holiday spot in the last years of their life together. Michael wanted to give me the full history of his stays, so we adjourned to his balcony. It provided a wonderful view of Dubrovnik, a place so compact that Rebecca West, looking back on it as she departed, called it a “city on a coin.” Michael said, “Now to come to this place and how we got here. Jill came to see this place better than anybody else and to understand what they were up to here.” In 1980, after Michael was elected leader of the Labour Party, a Yugoslav diplomat asked him why the Communist Party in Belgrade had better relations with the Tories than with the Labour Party. “One reason,” Michael replied, “is the treatment you’ve meted out over the years to our friend Milovan Djilas.” Djilas had stayed with Michael in Hampstead, befriending Jill as well. In fact, after Michael reviewed several of Djilas’s books, Jill proposed that her husband should do a book about him.

The persistent diplomat asked Michael to come to Belgrade on behalf of the Labour Party. Michael agreed, provided it was understood that Djilas would be the first matter he would raise with Tito’s Central Committee. The diplomat did not object, except to say that he did not think Michael would change any minds and that the whole Djilas matter now seemed passé.

Michael arrived in Belgrade just after Tito’s death to address the Central Committee. He spoke to five or six of its members, apparently with no results. He was then invited to visit Dubrovnik. “They took me round the wall,” Michael said. He was never one to describe what he saw: in this case, a marvellous walkway that encircled the old city. By the time I arrived, it had recovered from Serb shelling. There were no ruins, but new tile roofs were evidence of the effort that had been made to repair a world heritage site.

When Michael got home, he said to Jill, “I’ve discovered a new place for a holiday. We’ll go there next year,” and that is what happened. They came to stay at the Villa Dubrovnik. Between 1981 and 1991, they took their holidays in Dubrovnik, a world so self-enclosed that they never managed to visit such famous sites as Sarajevo.

Jill immersed herself in the Dubrovnik arts community and Michael tagged along, developing on the fly a friendship with Stevan Dedijer, the brother of Vlado Dedijer, at one time one of Tito’s staunchest supporters, who braved considerable risk in coming to Djilas’s defence during his trial. Michael extolled the delights of Dubrovnik. He would often call spots he loved to visit, “a good place to read.” I decided to interrupt: “But what did you think of Yugoslavia then and what were your first reactions to the country’s breakup? Yugoslavia as an entity ... ” Michael broke in: “Well we didn’t think it had any sentimental … and we weren’t favouring the breakup, nor were we saying that we thought everything was being run well.” Informing much of Michael’s thinking was Djilas’s call for a more democratic society. Then came the autumn of 1991, the “first time I ever heard the words ‘ethnic cleansing,’” Michael noted. “A Belgrade chap” (Michael seemed to recall he was a journalist) said, “They’re going to claim every territory for the Serbs.” Michael said, “There aren’t many Serbs here, are there?” “Oh, they don’t mean just where they have a majority,” he was told, but any place where there are Serbs. In September 1991, the Serb attack on Croatia began in the North while Michael and Jill were still in Dubrovnik. “We didn’t know about the scale of it. We discovered we had to take a new route home.” Instead of flying home from Dubrovnik, they had to travel to Montenegro, take a plane from there to Belgrade and then change aircraft for the trip to London.

I gazed at the city in the distance and asked, “What were people thinking here? That separation was the right choice?” Yes, Michael and Jill went out and bought Croatian badges. By the end of September, at some public gathering having to do with the House of Lords, Michael spoke to Lord Carrington, suggesting how serious the attacks on Dubrovnik and Vukovar had become. The people in those cities had a right to self-determination. “Of course they have,” replied Carrington. “We’ll have a fresh look at it.” A skeptical Michael told me, “He pretended then to be slightly shocked at what was happening. He bloody well should have been more shocked in my opinion. From that point on, he did not become exactly an apologist for the Serbs, but he and the foreign office were much too accepting of the Serb point of view about the breakup.” The Serbs were bound to prevail, the foreign office thought, because they had such an edge in weaponry. Michael also thought that Fitzroy Maclean, a British agent who had played a significant role in Churchill’s backing of Tito and his partisans during the Second World War, influenced British government policy. Michael knew Maclean well (they were both first elected to Parliament in the 1945 Labour landslide) and Michael surmised that Maclean had advised the government that whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the Serbs, in control of the central government and its army, were bound to crush the Croats. But the British government underestimated Croatian and then the Bosnian, resistance. The Germans and the Americans understood the situation on the ground much better than the Major government, which made such a show of not intervening, Michael added.

Michael and Jill returned to Dubrovnik in December 1994, having followed a roundabout route by bus from Zagreb. Part of the twelve-hour trip took them near the Bosnian war zone, but these intrepid octogenarians were overjoyed to return to their beloved city. Dubrovnik, not yet fully recovered from the shelling, but bathed in sunshine two days before Christmas, seemed to Michael “never so beautiful.” They wanted to make a film about the 1991-92 siege. “During that time we had been in touch with some of the people we had known before the war.” They went to see their friend, the painter Duro Pulitika, whose studio had been used as a lookout post during the siege. A frustrated Michael had not even been able to persuade the British government to send in a food ship. It would be considered an act of war, he was told. “But the Italians are sending in a food ship,” he replied in amazement.

Michael and Jill stayed nearly a month in the Villa Dubrovnik, then occupied by refugees. Jill and Michael interviewed the mayor and defenders of the city. Although Michael narrated the film, Jill’s writing, editing, and direction were what counted, he told me again and again. He had a hard time adjusting to the role of narrator. Jill’s grandson, Jason Lehel, a professional filmmaker who did the camera work, argued that Michael ought to be replaced. Instead, Jill coached Michael day after day, slowing eliminating the stentorian style that had become habitual after so many years on the hustings and in Parliament.

To obtain funding, “We went round to our friends with lots of bloody money,” Michael recalled. One friend, Harold Lever, a multimillionaire, sympathised with Dubrovnik’s plight, finding parallels with what had happened to Spain when the Western democracies failed to support the Republican government’s resistance to Franco’s attack. Yet he did not heed Michael’s plea. Then a fund-raising meal with Sidney Bernstein, founder of Granada Television, and a Labour Party supporter, also proved a disappointment. “I had to pay for the bloody lunch in the end,” Michael said, laughing. Michael resorted to using his own retirement money and Jason cajoled his friends in the film industry to work with no pay, except what they might receive should the film be sold to the BBC or ITV. Finally, a BBC showing of the film, with a panel discussion to balance the film’s pro-Croatian bias, allowed everyone involved to just about recover their expenses.

“I had just finished my book on H. G. Wells,” Michael noted, recollecting their September 1995 holiday in Dubrovnik. “Jill read it here. Couldn’t do much about it then.” I laughed, knowing that Michael was referring to her reservations. “I don’t say she agreed with every word”—a vast understatement! “She thought I was too enthusiastic about Moura Budberg—the magnificent Moura, as I called her.” The mysterious Moura might have been a better appellation because of Budberg’s murky history in the USSR. She has been accused of being a Soviet spy, exciting a good deal of controversy about her. Michael, an ardent champion—indeed an idoliser—of his heroes and heroines, had befriended Moura’s daughter, Tanya. Michael was enchanted with what she told him about Wells and Rebecca West visiting Moura at her country home outside London on weekends during the war. “My mother could hold her own in any company, although with Rebecca she was inclined to be a little quieter,” Tanya told an admiring Michael.

I could imagine the skeptical Jill listening to Michael’s impassioned description of Moura’s “wonderful, serene countenance—one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, in spite of all the turmoil she had. Jill didn’t know Moura, but she said to me, ‘I think you’re a bit thick about Moura.’”

The talk of Moura reminded me of a joke I’d been told about Rebecca attending a funeral for one of H.G.’s mistresses: She turned to another mistress at the ceremony and said, “I guess we can all now move one up.” Michael laughed. “Would you like to meet Tanya?” he asked. Moura and Tanya had nothing to do with my biography of Jill, but it was typical of Michael to corral Jill into the pen of his enthusiasms. He had extended a similar invitation for me to meet Stanley Kubrick’s wife. Kubrick and Jill had had a casual friendship, meeting on a few occasions, and Jill was an extravagant admirer of his films, but Kubrick’s wife had not known Jill—as Michael knew.

I shifted Michael’s attention back to Jill’s Dubrovnik film, wondering aloud whether any other subject could have galvanised her belated return to filmmaking. Michael still seemed to have Jill’s letter to Balcon in mind when he said, “If you look at the whole bloody thing, I was stopping her from what she should have done. She should have been making films all the time.”

Dubrovnik probably was the scene of Michael’s finest marital moment. He put himself entirely in Jill’s hands when it came to the kind of holidays they enjoyed there. He followed her directions for the making of Two Hours From London without so much as a quibble so far as I could tell. Kathy Wilks, an Oxford don who was made an honorary citizen of Dubrovnik for her heroic efforts to save lives during the siege, was aghast at how Jill ordered Michael around during the filming—until Kathy realised that this was how Michael wanted it. At first, Kathy, a deep admirer of Michael and his politics, had trouble getting along with Jill. I can see why: Kathy was like everyone else—especially women—who treated Michael as though he were a sort of saint, the man on the Left with the most integrity, a man who was also so gentle, obliging and incorrigibly cheerful. He was just as cheerful about doing Jill’s bidding, believing that she was a master of the visual media, about which he knew little. As he had done with Aneurin Bevan, Michael adored submitting to those he deemed at the top of their form. In this one realm he wanted Jill to be a genius and perhaps that is why I could catch him in a vulnerable moment: admitting that he had not done enough to foster Jill’s film career.

A lunchtime talk with Stevan Dedijer yielded surprisingly little about Jill. She had sent him a list of questions about the siege of Dubrovnik—none of which he could recall. He promised to send me her list, but I never got it. He was more Michael’s friend than Jill’s. I often had the feeling (as did Jill) that with Michael around she simply did not count for much. As Julie said, “There were problems in the relationship. Michael was very much in demand.” Julie recalled Pamela Berry luncheons in the 1950s. Berry, wife of the owner of the Observer, kept a sort of salon. She didn’t like Jill, but this did not stop Michael going without her. Richard Crossman’s diaries portrayed the “hardboiled, journalistic atmosphere” of Berry’s “male-oriented” parties.

I later discovered a letter from Michael to Jill alluding to the Berry problem. He was writing shortly after their 1963 road accident and release from hospital. He was convalescing at Beaverbrook’s estate in the south of France after Jill had returned to London for an operation on her gravely injured hand: “My dear child, I was relieved to get your telegram, although I am still shaken by our conversation. Whatever has arisen, it’s sad that you should have fresh anxieties when you have enough to put up with. However, nothing can be done about this until we talk and I am confident then that all will be well.” Berry had sent a letter or a book—Michael couldn’t recall—and Jill thought that “there was a closer relationship with the woman than was the case,” he said. “You weren’t having an affair with Pamela Berry?” I pressed. “No, no affair,” Michael insisted.

Julie thought the situation was especially hard for her mother because at that point Jill wasn’t making her own money. In the early 1960s she had quit screenwriting, frustrated because directors made such a botch of her scripts. Then her life was thrown into turmoil when she crashed her car into a lorry. Michael was not expected to live (his chest was crushed and one of his lungs collapsed) and Jill, hurt nearly as badly, almost lost one of her hands. It was saved only at the cost of many painful operations and a physical discomfort she tried to alleviate with special bandages. It took her mother a long time to recover physically and mentally, Julie said.

The early 1960s was not a happy period for Jill, according to Julie:

She sold a Renoir painting to help her mother and buy me a Leica camera [Julie was embarking on a successful, if short, career as a photographer]. Michael gave her housekeeping money, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t in touch with domestic life, to put it generously. I was hostile to him then because I thought he was treating my mother very casually.

This last comment triggered Julie’s memory of a visit to Beaverbrook at his Cap d’Antibes estate. There Lady Beaverbrook, who was very fond of Jill (I found dozens of affectionate letters from her to Jill in Jill’s study) observed that Jill did not have a very nice dress to wear and ordered one made:

This humiliated my mother. She held it against Michael. I don’t know how you can use stuff like that. She felt that he was oblivious when he humiliated her. He didn’t know that £8 a week when my husband was giving me 20 and only earning a pittance wasn’t enough. She never liked to ask for money. She had her pride. When she couldn’t earn it, she’d sell something.

Julie told me that during the first week of Michael’s Dubrovnik stay (I arrived at the beginning of their second week there) several of his London friends had flown over as part of his commemoration of Jill in the City she loved. The wife of Bob Edwards (an intimate of Michael’s who edited Tribune after Michael left the job) told Julie that Michael was one of the most selfish men she had ever met. It seemed a shocking statement to me at the time; Michael was so affable and so obviously engaged with other people. He did not strike me as a monomaniac who would hold forth only about himself. But in effect, in Jill, he found a collaborator—as Carlyle had done with Jane—who might complain from time to time, but who never seriously challenged his own vision of himself or of the world he had a right to rule.

By making no demands (for example, “You must give up your career”), by seeming not to interfere in crucial decisions (should she abort the child she had conceived by him before they were married?) he effectively placed the burden of all decisions on her. She was the one who had to choose—over and over again. Michael could just be himself. This is the free ride men so often enjoy in their marriages.

Much later, when I interviewed Michael’s parliamentary colleague Leo Abse, I discovered that Leo viewed Michael’s solipsism in political terms; that is, because Michael could not see beyond the perimeters of the loving world constructed around him, he became (or perhaps always was) incapable of dealing with a world undreamt of in his philosophy. He was a partisan for his point of view, and it was very difficult for him to argue for any side other than his own. This is a common human failing, I suppose, but we seldom pursue our self-absorption with as much passion as Michael showed.

Jenny Stringer, as usual, was in charge of Michael’s itinerary. She was concerned that he get enough exercise. It was difficult but essential for him to walk. When I first met him in the mid 1990s, he could still walk quite vigorously with a cane but since then, the muscles in his legs had atrophied. He should have had physical therapy regularly, with home visits, but he had stopped even his once a week visits to a Hampstead therapist.

Jenny announced that she would come for Michael at eleven:

[MF] I’m doubtful Jenny.

[JS] Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s ridiculous. You’re not going to hang around here all day.

[MF] Hang around? I’ve got things to do.

[JS] I know. You can still come in [into town] for the walk. Can’t you?

[MF] No. Tell you what I might do ... I don’t want to disrupt your day.

[JS] You’re not disrupting it.

[MF] What I might do with you is walk up those steps [the Villa Dubrovnik had a steep set of steps up to the street] and then walk the opposite way.

[JS] Would you like to do that now?

[MF] No.

[JS] Why not? Then you won’t be doing any exercise all day. At the end of every day you say you need to get more exercise. The last three days have been very bad. You need to reform your ways. Let’s do it.

[MF] If you’ll just help me up the stairs. I’ll walk that way [away from town], come back and have the lightest lunch in Christendom, possibly only bananas.

The conversation reminded me that in spite of how accommodating Michael could be, a resistant element in him defied even the most skilful cajoling. But Jenny and Michael were not through, now almost putting on a show. Jenny ventured:

[JS] Supposing I said Tony Blair had sent a Rolls Royce to be up there at half past eleven?

[MF] You know what a bloody liar you are. Very difficult to know when she’s telling the truth, isn’t it?

[JS] Now you’re going to slump into one position and stay there.

[MF] No, I’m all against that too.

[JS] You heard what he said? He’s all against it.

Michael finally got up from the table, reciting his favourite mantra: “One to be ready. Two to be steady ... ” and with a succession of grunts he stood up.

There was no errand for Michael that Jenny would not undertake, no comfort for him that she would not arrange. Unlike many of the women surrounding Michael however, she was no adoring sycophant. She seemed sturdily independent and rather like Jill, kept him in line. Even so, protecting him was her mission, no matter how critical she might be.

I asked Jenny if she thought Michael appreciated Jill more during the last years of their marriage. Julie had said as much. “Well, he saw more of her,” Jenny replied. Had I heard about any rifts between Jill and Michael? Jenny asked. Was she obliquely referring to ‘Lamia’? I reported that Julie had told me Michael had alluded to rows with Jill. “Hm,” Jenny considered.

After some inconsequential conversation, I decided to come out with it:

[CR] Julie told me a very sensitive story, “I don’t see how you can put this in the biography, but it’s certainly part of the marriage and of who he is.” She told me he had had an affair with a Pakistani woman.

[JS] Yea.

[CR] Paul Foot knew about it. I guess you know.

[JS] I can elaborate on that. I can tell you how Jill felt about it.

[CR] I talked to Michael Bessie about it.

[JS] You’ll have to talk to Michael about it.

[CR] I would like to. I’m not writing a saint’s life ...

[JS] Of course not. No.

[CR] The marriage is strong enough to—if it’s an important story—it makes him more of a human being and the marriage more interesting.

[JS] Absolutely. You’ll have to talk to him rather than to others about it.

[CR] Absolutely.

[JS] See what he feels about it. He’s going to say, “Who told you that?”

[CR] I’m sure he will.

[JS] He adopts positions and it’s very difficult to get him away from them. I’m always challenging him. His memory is quite selective now, too.

[CR] Oh sure.

[JS] This may be one of the ups and downs he needs to talk about. He trusts you. He’s very fond of you.

[CR] I’m very fond of him.

[JS] Maybe in a discreet, subtle way you can get into it. He knows about other biographies and these things have to be revealed. I’m sure he’ll come out with it when you’re on your own sometime. I think it should [the rest of the sentence is unintelligible on tape because Jenny was speaking so softly]

[CR] That’s my gut feeling.

[JS] Talk these things out. Otherwise, after he goes ... someone else will come up with something. Sheila and Una [one of Michael’s secretaries] know, but I don’t know that they will say anything until they know Michael wants to talk about it. Once you’ve got that established, I can talk to you about it. Her [Jill’s] angle on that. It’s very difficult, isn’t it? interviewing very, very close and loyal friends ...

Jenny added: “I’ve been in politics so long ... ”—the rest of the sentence is inaudible—but I can’t help but believe she was alluding to how hard it was to be frank. Certainly her attitude here contradicted the way she later behaved, when politics and protecting Michael Foot the public figure became her sole raison d’être. Perhaps Jenny’s attitude began to change once she realised how much of the ‘Lamia’ affair I already knew from Julie. In retrospect, I can see what was at stake: who had power and authority over this story? It alarmed Jenny, I’m sure, that Julie had made herself such an important source. Julie was the wild card Jenny could not control, except by trying to mitigate what Julie said. I understood as much, but only now do I see how worried Jenny was that the indiscreet Julie would challenge the control Jenny wished to exercise. “What is her theory on why it happened?” Jenny asked me. “He just fell in love? It happens to every bloody MP”—again the rest of her sentence is inaudible. Here I made a strategic error, telling Jenny what Julie said. I told Jenny I had asked Julie how Jill had come to suspect Michael. “Well,” Julie had said, “when a man like Michael begins taking perfumed baths, [I laughed] “and starts paying attention to his personal hygiene in a way he hasn’t before ... ” Jenny was not laughing and I should have understood what a mistake I had made. Julie would not have minded my repeating her words, but Jenny, I think, was appalled that Julie’s account amused me. Jenny said less and less and then switched the subject back to Dubrovnik and how important that story was to the biography. Thinking I had made enormous progress, I had no idea that in another sense, I had dealt myself a significant setback.

In Dubrovnik, Michael established a celebratory mood, cloaking his days with Jill in the city in such lavish ardour that I did not have the heart to discuss anything that might cast a shadow on his memories. I would have to change the terms of our conversation. To scale Michael’s “politics of paradise” (the title he gave to his Byron book) would take some manoeuvring on a different terrain.

“It’s very interesting, Julie, where we’re headed on this,” I said. “Eventually I’m going to have to ask him about this Pakistani woman.” A startled Julie said, “Oh, are you?” I had to, I told her. “How do you know it happened?” she challenged. I laughed: “You told me.” “I know, I know,” she said, “but I don’t want you. . .” I laughed again: “I won’t say that. I talked to Jenny last night about it. But she would say almost nothing. ‘Once you’ve talked to Michael, I’ll talk to you,’” she promised. I wasn’t sure the affair belonged in the book, I said to Julie, but I wanted to write a real biography. “The relationship survived it,” Julie observed, even though at one point a distraught Jill ran away to Venice to sort out what she should do about the affair.

Julie now elaborated on her mother’s discovery of the affair and how Michael took it:

Just after my son was born (1970), I went to see my mother and she was sort of drooping around the kitchen in a very peculiar state. I said, “What’s the matter? There’s something wrong.” She said “I’m not going to talk to you. I’m not going to talk to you.” I said, “Yes you are, there’s something wrong.” So she broke down and told me. Then she kept me informed all the time and things came to a head very quickly and Michael couldn’t make up his mind. My then husband, Mike Randall, went round there and sat Michael down and said, “Shit, or get off the pot.” Mike was then editor of the Daily Mail. Michael had great respect and admiration for him. So Michael had to. One of the strong influences was not just his love for Jill but ... he was not going to move out of that house. No way he could move all those books. Into a flat with a Pakistani? Jill wasn’t about to give up the house, which happened to be in her name, because of the libel case with Kemsley [a newspaper publisher]. Everything was transferred to her name so that they couldn’t be bankrupted. She had him, really. He’ll never admit that. How he’ll react ...

[CR] Well, so far he’s had a free ride with me. I’ve just listened because I think that’s important. I don’t want to cut him short. There’s a truth in all he says, but there’s another side you’re talking about.

[JH] His thinking will be this is a book about Jill, not about his flaws.

[CR] But I will say to him, “This had an impact on Jill. I already know that.” Then either you will be seeing me again, or I’ll be off working on another book.

[JH] Have you met Paul yet?

[CR] No.

[JH] I would not approach Michael until you’ve seen Paul. Paul knows. So Michael won’t know where it’s come from.

Perhaps it was good advice, but I had no rapport with Paul yet and I was keen to test just how strongly Michael trusted me to tell the whole story.

Julie continued:

“Jill was very distracted. There were late night sittings in the House. She was at them. She never used to go. He was a completely free agent. She clung to him ... went right to the other extreme. Then there was the odd business of learning how much money he had spent on her [Michael’s mistress]. They went to the accountant together. He’ll never tell that.”

Julie said my biography would be no good if it became just a book of praise. “It’ll be boring.” I agreed: “No one will read it. This is the Carl Rollyson who usually gets in trouble doing his biographies and suddenly he writes a saint’s life?”1 Which prompted Julie to say:

“My mother had an enormous amount of anger at Michael. I don’t think he was aware of it. She occasionally had rows with him, but her anger was

always turned on me. The tiniest thing would trigger

off a lethal rage at me, which I never understood.”

There were also long periods when mother and daughter did not speak to one another. It took considerable effort on Michael’s part to reconcile Jill and Julie. He was good at that and wanted peace between them, believing that Jill had done the best she could with her daughter.

To Julie, Jill had become Michael’s devotee. “She would give an opinion tentatively as her own and if I wasn’t obviously very impressed, she said, ‘Well Michael doesn’t think ... ’ She was deeply insecure about herself, which was strange seeing as though she was so accomplished in so many ways.”

I joined Julie and Jenny for drinks on the balcony of Jenny’s room. “I don’t know what you think, Jenny, but I think Carl is going to have a very difficult time writing this book,” Julie ventured. Jenny muttered, “God, yes.” “Well, all I can say is that it won’t be the first time,” I replied.

The conversation with Jenny and Julie lasted a good two or three hours, late at night over drinks. Julie repeated a good deal of what she had already told me, dismayed Jenny (frequently dismayed) attempted to contradict or dilute Julie’s acerbic asides. The next day, Jenny spent an hour cautioning me about Julie, who had tended to rely on her mother or on a man to support her. This habit, Jenny implied, coloured much of what Julie had to say about Michael and Jill. But what about Jenny’s bias? She was the caretaker, the damage control operative—more sensible in some respects than Julie but also a politico palliating vexing situations. Julie was direct, Jenny oblique. Julie exaggerated, Jenny temporised. Jenny spoke of “scenarios,” implying that Julie had a tendency to fictionalise. Everything had to go “according to her plot.” Jenny spoke so low I wondered if my recorder could pick up her voice (it did just barely). She spoke, it seemed to me, as though she were trying to fly under the radar.

“What was your father like?” The question came during dinner with filmmaker Fiona Cunningham-Reid, one of Michael’s recent finds whom he had invited to Dubrovnik. Michael responded in typical fashion: “A wonderful chap. He was the happiest chap I ever knew—all his life. Wordsworth’s happy warrior. I don’t say he did not have his trials. He lost more elections than he won.” We learned that Isaac and Jill got on very well, but we did not learn much else. I always found it astonishing how little Michael had to say about his family. Granted, our focus was supposed to be on Jill, it still seemed extraordinary to me how unwilling Michael was to reminisce about his upbringing.

“Your mother?” Fiona asked. “A very strong Methodist, anti-drink,” Michael said. Jenny brought up Lady Astor. “My father fought against her when she was first elected.” That was 1919, when Michael was only six, but he remembered going around Plymouth in a coach, electioneering with his father. “The Labour candidate got about twice the vote my father got. But my father got very friendly with Lady Astor. She was a very great spokesman for Plymouth. She had a lot to be said for her.” Lord Astor, too, earned Michael’s admiration for supporting the ambitious plan to rebuild Plymouth after the war. Michael loved to quote a line from The Way We Live concerning Lord Astor’s effort to interest the House of Lords in the rebuilding plan: “Such was the power of the House of Lords that nothing was done.”

Fiona was full of questions about Parliament because she was researching the life of her grandfather, an MP who had had some dealings with Michael. She asked him if Parliamentary speeches had been recorded. “Only in shorthand,” Michael explained and then the MP was allowed to check over the transcript for errors. “That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher,” Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: “I went up to look at it, and there she was. She said to me something like, ‘They won’t let me say what I want to say.’ I said, ‘They will, sometime.’ She said, ‘Maybe.’” This recollection reminded him of another event in 1978, which marked the fiftieth year since women had been able to vote on the same terms as men. Callaghan was prime minister, with Michael as his second-in-command in charge of the House of Commons. “We decided to have a celebration in Westminster Hall.” Michael called it a “nonparty affair,” with invitations going out to all sorts of people. Jill had a big part in the planning of this event, including suggestions about who should participate. “We sent an invitation to Thatcher,” Michael recalled:

But she wouldn’t come. There was no kind of reason why she shouldn’t have come. She didn’t like to think that she owed anything to the women’s vote. Stupid woman! It didn’t endear her to Jill. But to do Jill credit ... she gives her a fair share because Thatcher came out with you’ve got to resist [the Serbs]. Jill said if she had still been there [in power] perhaps the war could have been stopped. Jill showed her in the film saying that.

Later Thatcher wanted to use Westminster Hall to stage a reception for a sitting U. S. president, Ronald Reagan. Since it would be a state event, she had to obtain the consent of the Labour Party leader, who then happened to be Michael Foot. He refused. Westminster Hall had received such figures as Charles DeGaulle. Thatcher said to Michael, “That’s very small-minded of you. Why are you opposing it?” Michael said, “Don’t you understand? He’s going to stand for election again.” It would be like electioneering for Reagan, Michael argued. “Our people don’t want him re-elected. It’s nothing like a nonparty event.” So Reagan had to deliver his speech in a room off of the House of Lords.

Michael was astonished to see Reagan reading his speech off of the teleprompter. “I’d never seen it before. Everybody does it now. But it’s an outrageous thing. It absolutely destroys the idea that the chap is making a real speech. Of course Reagan’s delivery was amazing. He could give a very good speech.”

After quite a long discussion, Julie stood up (bored, I suspect) and said, “Right, I’m going.” “What?” Michael asked. “I shall have a read, contemplate the weather and either go to the beach or into town.” For two days the weather had been blustery and we were dying for a swim. Into the noisome wind, Michael said, “It’s quietening down, isn’t it?” “No,” Julie said. He had been predicting milder weather almost hourly—that was Michael.

After my week in Dubrovnik, I returned with Michael to Hampstead. Jenny arrived and began to talk about how things had changed since Jill’s death. The house, especially the downstairs kitchen and dining area, were untidy. Michael just dropped books and papers everywhere—a habit Jill refused to indulge. “He can do what he likes now,” Emma, the housekeeper, chipped in.

“There’s no point in talking about anything current,” Jenny said. “He’s out of touch now. He can get away with that in the Aneurin Bevan Society. They like history and that sort of thing. It’s all about ideology anyway.” Jenny was preparing to drive Michael to a talk. Then later in the day there was an event for Tribune. It was remarkable how many events Michael might pack into a day, although he certainly had learned to pace himself with his afternoon naps.

Jill’s death had exhausted him, but he was making a remarkable recovery. The last year or so of Jill’s life had been hard on him. When she was really ill, he would sleep on a sofa next to her. She was so weak it was hard for her to make it to the loo, which was just off the sitting room where she slept. She could no longer go upstairs or down stairs. Michael never talked about how he had waited on Jill during her last illness. What he did, and how he did it, would become a contentious subject later on in my interviews with his friends. Julie seemed a sore point with some. She helped out, but they thought her help was spotty.

Jenny thought Julie might try to seduce me, the biographer-in-waiting. I certainly saw Jenny’s point. But I felt like a double agent, since Julie was a precious source, but whatever her limitations and a surprising number of her stories checked out. I’ve read a novel or two in which the biographer beds a source, but such situations seemed ill advised and Julie never did pursue me.

None of this might be worth reporting, except that Jenny went on to say that Michael was well aware of Julie’s designs on me. Now that interested me because I did not think he had an eye for such shenanigans. “Carl’s arrived,” Jenny recalled telling Michael, when I first appeared at the Villa Dubrovnik. “Julie’s taken him off.” Now Jenny added, “He sort of sniggered under his breath and said something incredibly rude: ‘I expect they’re hard at it in the bedroom now.’” Emma laughed, “He didn’t!” I exclaimed. Then, on second thought, I added: “So maybe when I start to press him on other subjects, he’ll say, ‘Well, I know a thing about you.’” Jenny piled on, suggesting I use this approach with Michael: “I’ve told you about me, now you tell me about you.”

Even though I was staying with Michael whenever I came to London, I found it hard to have him entirely to myself. At home there was always a housekeeper, many calls, and visitors. So I was delighted when Emma said she was going out shopping. “Have you got everything you need?” she asked me. “I do,” I said, “I have my man.” Michael, who often missed parts of conversation, asked, “What’s he got?” I repeated Emma’s question and my answer. “Ah,” Michael said. I don’t think he understood that I was leading up to something.

I started out in as disarming a fashion as possible: “I’m going to tell you what I think of Jill’s book [Daughters of Dissent].” I told him how impressed I was with the writing. Although the book was not complete, Jill had done a good deal of revising as she went along. I then began to discuss autobiographical aspects of the book, passages that dealt with wives of politicians and women with homes and careers. I read Michael a passage where Jill expressed her regret that biographers had so little to say about their subjects’ private lives: “Consequently, we are left with the impression that the Fawcetts were rare specimens who knew nothing of personal tests and fluctuating emotions. Clearly, much more was happening beneath this artificial surface.”“Jill is raising the issue of what biography is,” I said to Michael. “Yes,” he answered. Listening to the tape recording of his response now, I seem to detect the faintest note of resignation in his voice. “You bet she is,” Michael said. I commented on the reticence of Victorian biography, in particular the trouble Froude encountered when he attempted to be candid.2 Michael broke in with “Yah, yah. Yes. He made Jane Welsh, in effect, right, I suppose.”

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