At Tribune’s 60th birthday party in 1997, I asked Michael Foot and Jill Craigie if they agreed with me that, when the Thatcher Memorial pit came to be dug, it should be supported on either side by symbolic representations of David Owen and Tony Benn. Jill instantly endorsed my fantasy, although Michael was more circumspect: “I couldn’t possibly comment, but you may have a point…”
Imagine my surprise, then, when last Wednesday, about half an hour after Michael’s death had been announced, on The World At One, the two people the BBC deemed most appropriate to give an immediate comment were… David Owen and Tony Benn. Admittedly, their contributions weren’t as nauseating as David Cameron’s later that day, but only marginally less so. For anyone who knew Michael – which I had the immense privilege of doing for the last 18 years or so of his life – choosing the two men who’d effectively destroyed his leadership of the Labour Party to sing his encomia might appear to be the final revenge of the Establishment he despised, but I suspect it was simply down to sloppy journalism (which he also abominated). Anyway, both Benn and Owen (who Michael really, truly loathed) stuck to the approved script, confirming that, with his death we had lost the greatest orator of a now bygone political age. They also agreed (again, sticking to the official line) that he was a fundamentally decent man, perhaps too decent to be an effective leader. We know how both of them repaid his decency, but nonetheless neither was wrong – although neither was entirely right either.
Because merely garlanding him as a great orator doesn’t do Michael justice. Certainly, he was great speaker – the noise of his voice alone, quite apart from what he said, was capable of being both inspiring and deeply comforting – but then again Hitler, to give him his due, was a pretty effective orator, as have been countless demagogues throughout history. But Michael was the very opposite of a demagogue, just as he was the antithesis of the kind of neurotically sanitised and manicured politics embodied by “new” Labour or David Cameron. And that’s because he was on our side.
By that, I don’t mean that he was narrowly on the side of a small arc of the left, or of the Labour Party more generally (although I sometimes despaired at his loyalty – manifested through muteness – towards Labour’s latest mutation, just as his older friends despaired at his loyalty to avatars of Lucifer such as Lord Beaverbrook or Enoch Powell). He was on the side of humanity. Infinitely lovable himself, he recognised that, in general, people as a whole are lovable and deserve much better than they usually get. As I say, he was our side.
So it came as no surprise when he once told me that he considered his greatest achievement in the politics of government to have been the setting up of the Health and Safety Executive. Like his friend and fellow Welsh MP Leo Abse, who added to the real, quantifiable sum of human happiness by masterminding legislation on divorce, adoption and homosexual law reform, he’d achieved something which genuinely improved lives, far more than any amount of great oratory.
But, for my money, his greatest political achievement lay in the rest of his long political life, the years as a serial rebel, because there, too, he was on our side. And that’s because the best part of politics is and always has been not in seeking to usurp power, but in trying to thwart it, by harrying it, obstructing it and, most of all, mocking it. Because Michael was always on the side of the satirists as well – be they Dean Swift and William Hazlitt or his erstwhile colleague, George Orwell, or his great friend, the cartoonist Vicky. Or cartoonists in general, whom he appreciated, admired and supported more completely than any other politician I can think of. As he once said to me, with a mischievous cackle, the thing the Labour leadership hated most about Tribune was the cartoons.
And that mischievousness – his sense of fun – is something else which placed him firmly on our side and which imbued him, even in great age, with a defining youthfulness. He was the youngest old man I’ve ever known, and displayed it over and over again, whether through the twinkle in his one good eye, his barking laugh or his standard form of greeting, which remained that weird, clenched fisted, arm-wrestling Commie handshake.
The last time I saw Jill, a few months before her death in 1999, she told me that, at heart, she and Michael were William Morris socialists. In short, they believed in fun for all. So it’s worth repeating Walter Pater’s line about Morris: “To burn always with that hard, gem-like flame is success in life.” Which will do very nicely. Because, whatever glib and amnesiac political commentators might say, Michael’s life – in and out of politics – was a triumphant success. And although, like me, he had no time for extra-dimensional ideas of life after death, the affection he inspired, for all the reasons I’ve given above, means his life, in our hearts and minds, still has a long way to run. It was a joy to know, not just the politician, but also the man.
