When, four years ago, I reviewed Professor Kenneth Morgan’s impressive biography of Michael Foot (Tribune March 16 2007) I described it as a masterly piece of research which I saluted for the way this eminent historian had handled one of Britain’s outstanding political figures. My revered, and much missed, friend Michael chose Morgan as his biographer largely because his wife Jill thought highly of his biography of Keir Hardie.
Morgan, a renowned Labour historian, wrote his Foot biography with great skill, even if my concluding judgement was that he had not quite succeeded in capturing the real essence of Michael’s magic. Now, in this latest book, the scene shifts uneasily to his second thoughts on Michael Foot – a reassessment which I find not only disappointing but reflective of numerous other misjudgements in the book.
Indeed, this is an odd collection of political reflections across almost two centuries of British history, using the 1832 Reform Act as its starting point, the “first vital step” as he rightly describes it. He takes us through the First World War and into the 1930s in what forms the best part of the book. But then the canvas starts to jolt. The second half of its 314 pages covers much of the post-1945 period with character sketches, and some rather casual observations, some of which have the appearance of being thrown together from a selection of previous essays, biographies and lectures. Of course, much of the research remains prodigious, though the second half of this book never reaches the quality of the first. There, for example, we have his reassessment of David Lloyd George, clearly the author’s hero, which resonates with an insight, depth and sympathy missing from his other character sketches.
This is most evident when Morgan tries to reach behind the carapace of the Labour Party’s outstanding socialist visionary – Aneurin Bevan. The result leaves an impression of superficiality, as well as areas of omission, a failing notable not only in the case of Nye but in the way he ignores the political and economic damage of Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of Britain’s social fabric.
This is followed by a failure to effectively deal with the Tony Blair decade and, especially, that Government’s dismal record in rebuilding after the social havoc caused during Thatcher’s epoch. We get remarkably slender analysis of this in Morgan’s chapters examining “socialism and New Labour” except where he dismisses the Blair period as “the rejection of Clause Four replacing it with a patchwork of verbiage of extreme vacuity.” Correct – but insufficient in a canvas of this importance. And in a brief final chapter there are a mere three and half pages on the Iraq fiasco – as if in afterthought.
But to return to the issue of Michael Foot: the penultimate chapter is the author’s afterthought reflections on his last major biographical subject; and, for me, the most disappointing aspect of the book. Professor Morgan is now far more savage in his verdict on Foot’s leadership than in the biography in which, perhaps restraining his pen, he acclaimed Michael for providing a quality of “leadership [that] was moral, educative [and] in the deepest sense cultural”. He then adds that it was Foot who “in the deepest crisis of 1980-83 [used] his role to keep the party together and affirm its core values.”
This time Morgan puts a very different emphasis on Foot’s leadership, overshadowing his earlier views and concluding that Foot took the party through “a dreadful period as party leader in 1980. It was the party’s darkest hour; the defection of the Social Democrats made it darker even than 1931. Foot himself was not equipped, temperamentally or psychologically, to be a leader…”
It is an observation the more saddening since his subject is no longer with us to respond – as would have been feasible four years ago. Whether Michael would have chosen to do so is beside the point. So this question resounds: has the author changed his mind or did he believe this when he wrote the biography? The book contains no answer, though it becomes clear that Professor Morgan now believes Foot was basically “an outsider” in political life – “a rebel with or without a cause” – and that his impact on British history came “not through his political activities but through his books – two or, perhaps, two and half of them.” That comes close to a sneer; and appears to undermine much of his own biographical work on Michael.
Nor is this the climax of disappointment. Consider his assessment of Aneurin Bevan – a man who, in Morgan’s younger, active days in Welsh Labour politics, he claims to have regarded as an irresistible socialist force. Now his view is transformed into an uneasy hot and cold judgement filled with omissions. He admits that Bevan was a great socialist prophet and visionary – yet contradicts himself by describing Nye as a “centrist” and adding to this ill-defined label an equal absurdity that Bevan shifted to become “almost a proletarian Gaitskellite in excellent disguise.” He finally concludes that “Nye Bevan was not Labour’s lost leader and the mantle of Nye was as elusive and ambiguous a garment as Keir Hardie’s cloth cap. He could never have led the party given his record of dissent and expulsion…”
All this despite having observed in an earlier chapter that the Labour Party lost its way after 1960 (which happens to be the year Bevan died, though Morgan doesn’t say this). He further confuses the issue by proclaiming that “without socialism Labour would have been nothing.” Not a word here about Bevan’s famed speeches at the annual Tribune rallies during Labour Party conference week when, year after year, Nye produced some of his finest socialist oratory. No “centrist” stuff there.
Nor does the author come to terms with the reasoning behind Bevan’s opposition to unilateral nuclear disarmament at the famed 1957 party conference. He ignores Bevan’s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev immediately before that conference in which the Soviet leader pleaded with Nye, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, not to abandon the H Bomb since it would weaken Britain’s crucial influence (as Khrushchev told Bevan) on the Americans. This is what Bevan told me at that Brighton conference and which I reported in my book From Bevan to Blair. It was a plea that had a huge influence on Bevan’s thinking.
Of course Nye resisted any move that would isolate the Labour Party from reality; he consistently sought to avoid splitting the party and even quarrelled with his wife Jennie Lee many times on this very issue. Morgan appears either not to recognise this or dismiss it. However, let me admit my personal interest and concern over Morgan’s judgement on Nye Bevan; I am chair of the Aneurin Bevan Society whose role is to perpetuate his socialist message and philosophy. To his dying moments Nye never abandoned his belief in democratic socialism. A democratic socialist society may still remain far away; it may or may not be attainable. But I can think of no one in Labour’s pantheon who evoked and inspired that vision more eloquently and vibrantly than Aneurin Bevan. If that made him a “centrist”, then my aunt is the Pope.
