A Pint of Bitter: Michael Foot, 1913-2010; writer, minister, leader

I know I usually write about the political controversies and manoeuverings of the day: matters such as the taxes of Lord Ashcroft and the return of Labour in the polls do matter. But some things matter more, and I want to devote my words on this occasion entirely to the life and ideas of Michael Foot, who died this week aged 96. He was well known here in Britain as a politician from the 1950s to the 1980s, when he led the Labour Party, and as a writer. He’s a particularly English figure, less well known abroad: but no understanding of our politics especially since 1980 is complete without considering his career.

Foot was born in Plymouth in 1913, into a family of Liberal Methodists, and the roundhead tradition of radical Christian dissent was a key influence on Foot – though he became a convinced atheist. His father was also an obsessive book buyer and reader, habits that rubbed thick on to young Michael, who steeped himself in the English romanticism of Byron and Shelley and who in later life wrote serious studies of Swift and H. G. Wells. He was an unusual, exceptionally literate and intellectual politician of a kind rarely seen. At Oxford he was first a left-wing Liberal, but became a socialist in the early 1930s. This was the time of the marked decline of the Liberal Party; socialism in all its forms had recently emerged, in Soviet Communism (which Foot rejected both then and throughout his life) and with the coming of Labour government in Britain in the 1920s. He was far from the first Liberal radical to join Labour, which must have seemed the “happening” party, as we’d now put it, for a young and passionate radical anxious for social justice, for peace and to oppose fascism.

He was a journalist for Tribune (for whom George Orwell also wrote, later) and then editor of the Evening Standard; during the war the short book Guilty Men, which he co-wrote in a few days with two colleagues, caused something of a sensation with its indictment of the pre-war appeasers – Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax and the rest. Then in 1945 he was elected to Parliament for Plymouth Devonport, which he held for ten years. During the 1950s Foot was a prominent “Bevanite”: a supporter of Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan, the charismatic Welsh ex-miner and leader of the left who had established the National Health Service as health minister after the war but who had fallen out with the Labour leadership first over prescription charges, then the H-bomb. Foot was vehemently opposed to Britain’s adoption of nuclear weaponry and felt shocked and bewildered when Bevan famously drew back from outright unilateral disarmament in 1957. But he still revered his mentor; and when Bevan died in 1960, Foot re-entered Parliament at the resulting Ebbw Vale by-election. And used his time in opposition to write the first volume of his biography of the great man, arguably his most important literary work, completed in the early seventies after a period spent as Labour’s most prominent backbench critic under the first government of Harold Wilson.

Foot then surprisingly embarked upon an career as an ultra-loyalist minister in the 1970s under  Wilson and then Jim Callaghan, first as employment minister, then negotiating with the Liberals to keep the Labour government afloat. But it sank in the end; and in the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule, Labour turned sharply left – and began to tear itself apart. Tony Benn was the most prominent and controversial figure on the left, an austere, calculating figure, inspiring to some and sinister to others. The rise of Benn, and the resulting shift in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament and left-wing, anti-European policies enabled Foot to become leader. But he faced  constant internal opposition from Benn who, having welcomed Foot’s leadership, tried to both use and destroy it, and to capture Labour for his own ends. To much of the moderate left, Labour was no longer home, and Foot failed to prevent some MPs leaving to form the Social Democratic Party, now long gone but which can be seen as a forerunner of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” vision. Foot had failed to keep Labour united: and it went down to its worst, most notorious defeat in the general election of 1983.

To his credit, Foot had successfully faced down Tony Benn and he started the campaign to root out  “Militant”, an extraordinary Trotskyist sect that was attempting to take Labour over from within.  I thought then, and still think that Foot was wrong on all the big issues in the 1980s. I now realise though that Labour’s wasted years were less his fault than the fault of others. I can see that Foot and Bevan had a good case in the 1950s against Britain’s testing and making the bomb. But the 1980s would have been the wrong time to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament and remove US bases. The United States and NATO had adopted a tough stance to Moscow’s increasing militarism, and unilateral desertion of that strategy by Britain would at best helped Kremlin hardliners delay their own disarmament. On Europe, to withdraw immediately, less than a decade after our joining, after the voters had decided overwhelmingly to stay in and without consulting them further, would have been a foreign policy disaster. Yet it was Labour’s policy under Michael Foot.

Even so, I think he has important things to teach us. He consistently wanted international control of nuclear weapons, and their ultimate abolition – admirable aims, and in my view it is right for Britain to support Barack Obama now in his efforts to move us just a few short steps along that road. And perhaps now it is finally right for Britain to ask whether it is right to remain a nuclear weapons state. On Europe, all but a few on the Labour side have now abandoned Foot’s thinking, and I would certainly not argue for Euroscepticism. But he reminds us that Euroscepticism is not an intrinsically Conservative attitude and that liberal internationalism does not require support for all the works of Brussels. Michael Foot was a sturdy romantic whose passion and idealism deserve our respect, and whose writing will remain rightly admired. His was a very English strain of radicalism, and I don’t think it’s right to assume his ideas are dead. Foot’s thinking represents a strong underlying current of independence and dissent that you can still find among some Tories as well as in green, libertarian and anti-capitalist circles. I expect it to attach before long to some new great movement – and for Foot to be rediscovered and referenced in a generation to come. if you’d like to know more, listen to this excellent Radio 4 programme about his life.

Barring the death of some other political giant, normal service will be resumed next time.

A Pint of Bitter: MPs in the dock, a journalist questioned – and Gordon’s brown sugar

The huge scandal about MPs’ expenses that began last summer simply rolls on and on, and it’s becoming more confusing, not less, as audit upon audit comes together with reform upon reform. First Sir Thomas Legg audited the past expense claims of MPs, and ordered sums to be repaid – all the party leaders – Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg – being among those who had to repay money to the taxpayer. Then MPs appealed those findings to a judge appointed for the purpose, Sir Paul Kennedy – and some of them succeeded in having their bills reduced. On top of that, it’s no longer clear that another Kennedy, Sir Ian this time, who heads the new Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, will implement in full the recommendations for expense reform made by yet another knight of the realm Sir Chris Kelly, who chairs the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Each new wrinkle in the tapestry seems, to many ordinary voters, a new opportunity for MPs to avoid responsibility for the misdeeds of the past; it is far from clear that most MPs truly yet “get it” or that Parliamentary culture has really changed.

There are, though, three MPs who certainly do “get” how serious this all is – because the Crown Prosecution Service has begun criminal proceedings against them for the offence of false accounting, a serious charge for which they could well, if found guilty, face imprisonment. Elliot Morley is the best known of the three Labour members, having served as a minister. He and David Chaytor MP are accused of claiming non-existent mortgage costs and rent on properties they owned, while Jim Devine MP is accused on claiming for cleaning and stationary on the basis of false invoices. A Tory member of the House of Lords is also being prosecuted. They first appear in court on March 11, and are unlikely to be tried until after the general election but their defence is already controversial – it’s thought they are likely to argue that as MPs their conduct was protected by Parliamentary privilege, and so in effect immune from prosecution. Privilege is an ancient and important constitutional principle protecting MPs from arrest for the things they say in Parliament. Whether privilege really covers expense claims, I doubt; if the courts rule that it does, the scandal will have taken yet another dramatic and controversial turn.

At the same time, a journalist is being questioned by police over his involvement in a man’s death many years ago. Ray Gosling is an outstanding journalist well known for documentaries and local broadcasting in the North and midlands, covering the unusual, the personal and the unglamorous sides of real life in an immediately recognisable style that could be deeply serious, literate but also ironic. I remember some of the work he did for Granada TV in the 70s and 80s – thoughtful broadcasting that drew you in. Here’s a (low quality, I’m afraid) video of him in his pomp, and here’s a more recent follow-up. In his most recent documentary for BBC East Midlands he’s confessed to smothering an unnamed lover who at some time in the past was dying from AIDS, and in incurable pain. The police presumably suspect him of murder. The police and CPS may have a difficult decision to make about whether a murder prosecution would be in the public interest – I can’t, myself, see how it would. Ray Gosling may take comfort in the knowledge that, whatever the professionals think, any trial would be before a jury – a system that is essentially fair and unbiased according to the findings of a major research report by Professor Cheryl Thomas of University College London. I hope Ray Gosling faces no charge. If he does, I hope he’s acquitted. And without for a moment suspecting him of cynical motives, I hope this incident, which has raised his profile massively, ends up with his making truckloads of money out of this. Because another tragedy is that Gosling was poor and on the verge of bankruptcy a few years ago. How can that happen to such a talented broadcaster? All too easily, I’m afraid, in our glamour-obsessed celebrity culture.

A different sort of confessional interview this week was Gordon Brown, who spoke on ITV last Sunday to Piers Morgan (the former Daily Mirror editor, and stalwart of ungoslinglike celeb culture) in an attempt to show his real character to the country. Those who don’t know much about Brown will be interested to see him discuss how he proposed to his wife Sarah on a windswept Scottish beach, and the death of their new-born daughter Jennifer. They may also be surprised by the young student radical Brown and his bevy of female fans – the “Brown Sugars”, who he seems to remember very well from the days of free love. I’d have advised him to open up much more about the distant past – even about sex – but even this quite cautious outing may have done him some good. Certainly Brown is a fascinating figure, however you view his politics – you may still be able to watch the interview for a couple of weeks on ITV Player.

I haven’t mentioned beer yet, I notice. I did, though, visit the Star in St. John’s Wood, a pretty pub with decent beer and a fire, spoiled somewhat by an intrusive telly and music, and by nasty, modern, square-block tables that are frankly out of place; and before that I went to the White Bear in Kennington, just south of the river, which is not great for beer but fantastic if you like to watch sports on big screens, which are many. There is a very good reason to visit the White Bear, though – it has a small theatre at the back and often puts on interesting fringe shows. If that wasn’t enough to make me feel okay about ordering yet another pint, I could remind myself that Gordon Brown admitted to regularly sinking six or so back in his Edinburgh days. Perhaps one day I’ll be as successful and unpopular as him.

A Pint of Bitter: Growth at last for Gordon; England’s captain John Terry with his shorts down

It’s always good to discover a new pub so good it becomes an instant favourite – and I was lucky to have that experience this week at the Old Mitre, tucked away in a little alley off Hatton Garden, just outside the boundary of the City. Superlatives come easily when discussing this pub. It’s traditional to the point of being genuinely old-fashioned, its leather-topped stools and benches and unusual arrangement of old, rustic tables giving it an eccentric, friendly feeling no interior designer could dream of. The beer is good, too –  we had Saltaire Blonde from Yorkshire and the outstandingly complex Gales’s Seafarer’s Ale. This place really is among the top drawer of London pubs.

The other good news this fortnight was that Britain is finally out of recession, after eighteenth months. Only just – growth was 0.1% in the last quarter of 2009 – but technically, the recession is over. If there’s not a “double dip”, that is. It’s been an odd recession, this, in Britain. There have been job losses, but not on the scale many expected. At least not yet. There have not been mass repossessions of homes, either, unlike in the last recession here, in the early 1990s. In fact, many of those who’ve stayed in work have been better off, because low interest rates have cut mortgage costs, in effect putting money in their pockets. In some ways, it’s been a phoney recession in which some of those who weren’t to blame for the credit crunch (those who’d saved since 2000, and more broadly all taxpayers) in effect paid to protect those who do share some responsibility for it (those who’d borrowed substantially over the same period, and highly-paid bank employees) from the consequences of their choices.

But is the recovery phoney? That’s the big question as spring approaches. The next quarter’s figures will come out in April, in the middle of our general election campaign so Gordon Brown badly needs them to show further growth, however sickly. Even more important than the figures, though, is the way people feel between now and May. Brown must hope that a little growth together with continued low interest rates and a canny budget will build confidence and create reasonable conditions for electioneering in May. He retains what control politicians can ever have over economic tides; but he is, more than any Prime Minister for decades, at the mercy of statistics and the animal spirits of voters.

The other important issue of timing is the Iraq inquiry of course – and we now know Brown will give evidence before the election, after all. Tony Blair’s appearance last week was a huge media event, triggering all the old arguments and debates that raged in 2003. The country is deeply divided over Iraq, to say the least: by two to one, or two and a bit to one, people feel Tony Blair’s policy was a disaster. But it matters little now to Blair how much opposition and anger he sets off. For Brown, though, the inquiry is a dangerous trap. It’s very hard to see how he can emerge from the inquiry’s scrutiny with his reputation enhanced – but he must at all costs avoid further damage.

Talking of our great leader’s political future reminds me I was also in the Kings Head this week, just east of Marylebone High Street, not far from Baker Street or Bond Street tube. It’s a shame this place has a TV screen and occasionally piped music – those things slightly spoil what’s otherwise another terrific pub with a very local feel. I especially recommend the bay window in the corner, which is a cosy place to curl up with a pint and a book, or a friend.

Another leader under pressure, and even more talked about down the pub, is the England football captain John Terry, a tough defender with a blunt style and current “Dad of the Year” who has apparently had an affair with the French underwear model girlfriend of an England and former Chelsea team-mate, Wayne Bridge. This is a hot-button affair in more ways than one. Terry initially obtained an order preventing publication on privacy grounds – and even preventing publication of the fact an order had been granted, in what’s known here as a “superinjunction” – but the High Court lifted it last week in another high-profile ruling in what’s become a controversial area of law in Britain. Controversial with the press, at least.

The case again brings to public attention the selfish, sexually sleazy culture of our overpaid footballers – Terry brings in over £150,000 every week – and the young women who are interested in their glamour and money. But more acutely, it has provoked a widespread fit of morality as many people feel, for rather ill-defined reasons, that Terry is no longer fit to captain the national side and ought to be stripped of the job by England’s Italian manager, Fabio Capello. This outbreak of moralism seems though to be less about Terry’s treatment of his wife than his treatment of a team-mate, which may tell us something profound and perhaps troubling about how we understand loyalty.

Whatever it does or does not tell us about that, it reminds us that the England team is a bunch of overindulged underperformers who not only have less skill but are far more easily distracted by girls, cars and clubs than their Italian, Brazilian or German opponents. If I were you I’d have my money on them, not England, for the World Cup in South Africa this summer.

A Pint of Bitter: Choudary banned, Blair and Iraq (again) – and UK joblessness down

Last time, I wrote about Anjem Choudary and his Islamist gang, Islam4UK. Well I doubt I’ll be writing about them again, because since then they’ve managed to get themselves banned. The government has power to “proscribe” organisations under Britain’s terrorist legislation, and Home Secretary Alan Johnson, spurred no doubt by the controversy over Islam4UK’s suggested Wootton Bassett March, has decided now is the time to ban this lot. It won’t last long: Islam4UK was itself at least the third manifestation of this outfit, and no doubt it will pop up again under another name. Choudary will make it as hard as he can for the government to ban him again. If he turns up in Cricklewood I might escape into the Windmill, which markets itself these days as a sort of gastropub.

Otherwise, I doubt I’ll be going back quickly. There’s no real beer, it plays bad music too loudly, it has a pointless telly and a stark, uncomfortable, trying-hard to-be-hip feel that puts me off. A pity; this is potentially a cracking pub, with some lovely interior features. Much as I love old pubs, if I can’t have real beer I’d rather drink in a relaxed, welcoming space like the bar of the Hampstead Theatre, just near Swiss Cottage tube, than in the noise, gloom and awkwardness of the Windmill.

The Iraq war is of course no news to anyone, but the hearings of Sir John Chilcot’s Iraq Inquiry is quite a big story this January. There have been a number of inquiries into aspects of the Iraq war: the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances leading up to the death of Dr. Kelly, for instance, and the Butler inquiry into the government’s use of intelligence. This, though, is the proper inquiry many people have been pressing for for years into the whole thing – the government’s decision to invade together with America, the conduct of the war and the reconstruction of Iraq. Minds here are basically made up: a clear majority of British people think the war was wrong, and perhaps half the country thinks Tony Blair took Britain to war by deliberately misleading the public about Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons programmes. Some even see him as a war criminal. What’s less often reported is that there seems to be perhaps a third of the British public who continue to support Blair over Iraq. That third includes me, I should disclose.

Two weeks ago, Tony Blair’s former press secretary Aliastair Campbell – an enormously influential figure in his administration, and the combative inspiration for Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It and In The Loop – stoutly defended the government’s public presentation of the case for action in 2002-3. This week, Jack Straw who was Foreign Secretary at the time has been defending his own role. The real action comes next week, though, as Tony Blair himself is called to give evidence in public for the first time, as is Lord Goldsmith, who as Attorney General advised that military action was lawful. Many opponents of the war see this as a sort of trial by ordeal for Tony Blair – a chance to grill him and “call him to account” in public – and hope the inquiry’s final report will damn him irretrievably. I doubt that will happen – it’s bound to criticise him to some extent but I think the worst it might do would be to conclude that the war was contrary to international law, as the Dutch inquiry did recently. I’m not sure it will do that. There’s also a  belief among some that the inquiry is an establishment stitch-up, and is bound to end up in a whitewash.

It’s possible that individual performances by the key players could change some minds – I suspect Lord Goldsmith may be able to make a minority reconsider the commonly and often unquestioningly held opinion that the war was clearly unlawful – but I doubt views are now shiftable, really. The real political (as opposed to historical) importance of the inquiry it that it revives the salience of Iraq in the run up to the general election. Will Gordon Brown have to give evidence before then? At the moment he’s not due to, and it’s up to the inquiry itself to decide. But he will hope and pray that he does not. Close scrutiny now of financial decisions he made then about military equipment would intensify the already heavy pressure on him; in any event, he needs to avoid being linked more closely than he already is to the political poison that is Iraq. The timing of his appearance is crucial.

What will please Gordon Brown is that unemployment is down, surprisingly. He needs to be able to argue in May that his policies through the recession have changed jobs and enabled early recovery – and if the figures continue on this trend, he may be able to make that case persuasively. Timing again will be crucial: his last chance, perhaps, is if next year’s budget combined with economic trends contrive to produce some sense of relief and confidence, before the effect of tax rises and spending cuts really bites on the public mind. He has a serious uphill struggle – but don’t count him out completely yet.

Earlier I mentioned the relaxed Hampstead Theatre bar: even better is the bar of the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. There’s no real beer here either – which is truly a great pity. Otherwise, though, this is a surprisingly good place for a drink – roomy, relaxed (a customer started playing the grand piano when I was there last night) with lots of comfy sofas and free wifi, which is especially nice for bloggers and anyone who wants to tweet, say, about their visit to London. All in the middle of London’s leading arts centre. I’ll be there again soon – and back with you in two weeks.

A Pint of Bitter: Gordon Brown survives brief blizzard Coup Attempt, Islam in the UK and Much More!

Happy New Year! Snow is on the ground again in London. It’s not like much of the rest of the country: my parents are actually snowed in, up North. There’s no infrastructural breakdown here, apart from the predictable tube delays. But cold, it certainly is. Ideal weather for settling down with a warming pint of winter beer somewhere like the St. Stephen’s Tavern, right by Westminster tube station, where Francesca and I enjoyed a pint of Pickled Partridge. This pub is much better than you’d think, being in such a tourist-grabbing spot practically underneath Big Ben. It’s plushly Victorian, very welcoming and has good beer – I like it. As do Scots musicians in kilts and the gin-drinking ladies who admire them. It was New Year’s Day. It doesn’t seem a very political pub, though – for that, I recommend the Red Lion, just round the corner opposite Downing Street.

Twenty-ten may only be minutes old, but believe it or not, Gordon Brown’s leadership is in question yet again. There’s been constant muttering: Labour MPs and Labour supporters know their party would be likely to do better with someone else at this year’s general election, and crucially, no one in Britain can imagine him serving as PM until 2014. He survived a serious crisis last June, when one of his Cabinet resigned, calling for a change at the top. Brown was vulnerable then – I thought he’d resign – but the Foreign Secretary David Miliband (much admired by Hillary Clinton) thought better of challenging Brown at that moment – he “bottled out”, as his critics would put it. I and many others thought Brown’s survival then made him safe until the election. But two former ministers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, astonished everyone on Wednesday by calling for a secret ballot of Labour MPs to decide once and for all whether Gordon Brown should lead Labour on polling day.

In truth, this was an attempt to remove him, veiled only flimsily. It didn’t work. The coup was ineptly timed – Labour MPs were e-mailed the idea just as Gordon Brown was giving an unusually strong performance at Prime Minister’s question time in Parliament – and failed to trigger the ministerial resignations it aimed at provoking. It was much too narrowly based, coming from the New Labour right rather than an alliance of the right, centre and left, which could unseat Brown. And it’s come far too late, with only weeks left before Brown must go to the country. If Hoon and Hewitt really wanted, as they said, to settle the leadership question, then they’ve succeeded. Gordon Brown is now surely unremovable internally. The tepid loyalty displayed by some of his Cabinet weakens him politically outside the Labour Party, though: David Miliband could only say

I am working closely with the prime minister on foreign policy issues and support the re-election campaign for a Labour government that he is leading

a tactically bad response that surely damages his future. I think he’s missed his chance to be Prime Minister, and will never have another. Worse for UK PLC, Alistair Darling made the bare statement that

The prime minister and I met this afternoon and we discussed how we take forward economic policies to secure the recovery. I won’t be deflected from that.

What international markets and credit rating firms think of that evidence of unity at the top of H.M. Government, as they scrutinise Britain’s deficit-reduction plans, I don’t know.

There was just time before the New Year Coup for another media storm to be shrewdly created by Britain’s leading Islamist, Anjem Choudary. He announced the intention of his group “Islam4UK“, which wants the UK to convert wholesale to radical Islam and to be subject to sharia law, to hold a procession in the market town of Wootton Bassett. It’s not a stronghold of Islam. It’s the nearest town to the RAF Lyneham, where the bodies of British soliders killed in Afghanistan land on return to the UK, and the public have taken to lining the streets as a mark of respect as their remains are driven through the town. There’s little doubt this obviously provocative march, if it was ever seriously planned, will be prevented. The Home Secretary Alan Johnson has already said he’ll stop it. But Choudary has succeeded in what was no doubt his primary aim, of gaining publicity for his strange outfit. It’s difficult to know how seriously to take him: few Muslims will agree with much he says, and his ideas are so extreme, they are unlikely to have any wide appeal. But the connection of Islamist ideology with violence, and that fact that a few vulnerable people can be susceptible to radicalisation and extremism in the service of mad ideas, means his activities can’t be dismissed as harmless crankery.

Before I go, I should mention the Cittie of Yorke, a fine, quirky old pub on High Holborn, just by the entrance to Gray’s Inn, where I enjoyed a beer a few days ago. The small booths in the main, back bar are packed with young lawyers and Bar students if you don’t take your seat by 5.30. It’s a place with many memories for me, of drunken nights worrying about advocacy tests, and is one of the few grand old London pubs to have improved in recent times – the Sam Smith’s beer (real ale, but not with a great reputation among drinkers) has improved, there’s not a bad wheat beer alternative, and reasonable food is served. This is quite a good stop for visitors to legal London who are interested in seeing young professional London getting plastered in quaint olde surroundings. I don’t expect to see Anjem Choudary in there. I expect he’d close it down; which is one more reason to oppose him.

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