PROFILE Michael Foot Cannot Be Overlooked

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29237, 22 June 1960, Page 22

PROFILE Michael Foot Cannot Be Overlooked

(By SIMON KAVANAUGH]

There is no evading the challenge in the angry, classless voice, or the compelling fervour behind the rimmed glasses. There is no remaining aloof as the pale, lean face on the television screen thrusts forward to snap at some stalwart of the political Establishment: “Absolute rubbish—and you know it!” It is given to few men, in an age that takes its politics in prepackaged half-hour doses by the fireside, to arouse the fire of passion in English breasts. But Michael Foot, keeper of the pure flajie of the intellectual Left wing, rumpled prophet in the wilderness of plenty, can do it. Half the viewing millions switch off their sets in savage fury as the maddening fellow moves in to deliver his relentless verbal coup-de-grace. But the other half have switched on specially to hear him. Maiden Speech

It was the same one autumn evening 15 years ago, when Mr Winston Churchill joined a throng of members hurrying back from the lobbies and the libraries to their seats in the House of Commons.

A new man was about to make his maiden speech. His name was Michael Foot, and they must not miss it.

They were not disappointed. Nor were they on many an occasion afterwards when the member for Devonport, coldly, un-

smiling and with his spare hair slicked untidily back, rose on some minor cause or other.

Redundancy in the dockyard? Price fixing in some obscure industry? His listeners were there only because they awaited their own turn to speak. But soon they found themselves absorbed by this man’s ardent mastery of facts and lucid, compelling argument.

It has been the same as Michael Foot has moved damply on London from Aldermaston with the squelching “Ban The Bomb” marchers, his head thrust stubbornly forward above his turnedup raincoat collar.

And it has been the same through many a brilliant, frostilyreasoned plea for nuclear disarmament in the daily press and in his weekly magazine, “Tribune.”

Foot may be reviled or revered He may not be overlooked.

His faintly fanatical air conceals a sleek and deadly mechanism that makes him the most devastating pamphleteer of his day. Pamphleteers, like prophets, must move with the times. And it was Michael Foot’s blunt outspokenness, first in the 8.8.C.’s “In The News” and later on I.T.V.’s “Free Speech.” that won him his fiercely divided public. And, of course, his enemies. It is not so much his politics, extreme Left though they are, that reduce them to splenetic armchair rage. It is rather his unsqueamish, calculated use of the cudgel where the rapier will not serve.

Foot is poison, or Foot is the last hope for enlightened democracy. It simply depends on whether you belong to the solid ranks of the suburban middleclass—Tory or Ring-wing Socialist. it is no matter —or among the thin ecstacies and minority causes of the Left-wing fringe. Assured of Audience

From the start, young Michael Foot was assured of an audience. It was almost enough to be a member of the incredible family of old Isaac Foot, the carpenter’s son who began life as a 14s a week clerk and became a Liberal Cabinet Minister. But when the new Foot arrived on the public scene he was already substantially more than just another from the stable that had produced two former ministers and a clutch of presidents of the Oxford Union. He was a journalist who had learned his craft so well on the “New Statesman,” and for two years as the first assistant editor of “Tribune,” that he had gone on in 1942 to edit Lord Beaverbrook’s “Evening Standard.” He had preached his reforming zeal from the pages of the “Daily Herald,” and in the famous Gollancz Yellow Books he had revived to its old sharp splendour the fading art of the pamphleteer. He was a fervent, gifted platform speaker. He had spoken up so loud and true from the far Left for liberty, and against injustice and political expediency, that the Labour Party’s publication "Forward” had emerged from the Right in sheer self-defence. The First “Angry”

Michael Foot was an Angry Young Man before Angry Young Men arrived. He was angry about poverty, about idle factories, about Spain, about Hitler’s jack-booted hordes.

When he reached Parliament via Devonport for a stormy 10-year tenure in 1945. he took his anger with him. At 46, he is angry still.

Scenting the rewards of office down the wind, some of his old contemporaries have sidled nearer the fence. But for Michael Foot there is still but one straight road, with no turnings and no middle. He has tramped it in the company of a shrinking band of fellowBevanites. He has followed it undaunted through the raking fire drawn about his ascetic head by his Victory for Socialism activi-

ties and his ceaseless crusade against The Bomb.

He has carried on alone when it meant expulsion from France for his attacks on the President and General de Gaulle; when it meant bold public censure of Hugh Gaitskell, his party leader.

Where can it lead him, this lonely road? To a hopelessly unpractical dreamland in the visionary reaches of the far Left? To disillusion? Or . . . Even the Tories were lost in admiration last week, after the Blue Streak debate, at the sheer staggering size of Michael Foot’s newest achievement. More than any other man, he had compelled the Labour Party by his jarring verbal war to reconsider its policy of an independent deterrent.

Even the Tories have conceded ruefully, since his second and heavier defeat at Devonport last year, that Parliament without Foot is a duller, tamer place. No Martyr

Behind the stern public mask of his integrity, Michael Foot remains a warm, friendly, humorous man lacking the smallest visible trace of a martyr complex. He is married happily to scriptwriter Jill Craigie. He is bookish, and he enjoys chess, soccer on Saturdays, cricket on village pitches, and beer in pubs.

He retired last December from the editorship of “Tribune.” But he has done that before, and returned. And in any case, as managing director, he reserves his right to the pulpit. There are reports astir that Michael Foot wants to get back into the House of Commons; that he is looking about in no particular hurry for another seat. They are welcomed on both sides of the House. For when Foot was on his feet there was never room for dullness, or the dreary sequence of prepared speeches. There was lively, aggressive debate, tilting fearlessly at bureaucratic towers and championing the small man against the giant. Michael Foot believes in debate. He sees it as the catalyst of truth.

And truth is the goal, no matter what stands in the way, for the keeper of the flame. —(Express Feature Service).

A Winter’s Tale “How would I be?” a despairing rhetorical question of the Army, was echoed by a Christchurch man yesterday. A few weeks ago his school-age son caught chickenpox. Just as the boy recovered, his father went to bed with the same complaint. His wife had not had chickenpox, and this week was to be the “deadline” for her to catch it or be clear. Late last week, the doctor was summoned again. The baby daughter had chickenpox, and the mother’s hopes of freedom and of a family recuperation holiday receded. A day later, the doctor was at the home again. The small boy had spots again, this time measles. Neither father nor mother has had measles before. “How would I be?” commented the still-spotted father as he went to buy a clothes drier as a household help.