Jonathan Freedland
A farewell to Michael Foot: politics,
poetry and Plymouth
Argyleguardian.co.uk, 15 March 2010
Labour turned out in force to eulogise their former leader, Michael Foot, socialist stalwart, at a funeral in north London.
All around was the evidence of his passions: the coffin was covered with red roses, emblem of the party Michael Foot once led, but tucked just underneath, peeping out cheekily, was a well-worn woolly scarf in the green and black of Plymouth Argyle, the football club he always loved.
In attendance were not only friends, family and a line-up of Labour luminaries – Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Harriet Harman, Ed Miliband, Peter Hain and many others – but also a smattering of journalists, those fellow scribblers with whom Foot always enjoyed a good gossip and a drink, right up to the end.
You only had to look around the west chapel of Golders Green crematorium today to be reminded of the many lives of Michael Foot: politician, scholar, football fan, reader, writer, storyteller, husband, stepfather and loyal friend – and to recall how rich each one of those lives had been. There were no fewer than seven eulogies, a recognition perhaps that no single address could capture such a life in full.
The prime minister spoke first of the politician, praising an orator who had the power to compel an audience not only to move their hands in applause, but to move their feet into action. "They heard Michael Foot – and they marched." Foot was a national figure who had "graced the country," but Brown claimed him unashamedly as a treasure of the labour movement: "We mourn today for one of our own."
Next into the strictly humanist pulpit – God did not get a mention – came Mark Seddon, who also spoke as a successor, though in a different role. Seddon, a former editor of Tribune, remembered Foot as another former editor of the weekly. When Seddon got married, Foot lent him his holiday cottage in Tredegar for the honeymoon – phoning "each morning bright and early to see what we were up to".
Foot the inveterate peacemonger was eulogised by Bruce Kent, who once led the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Foot had been drenched in the "abuse and contempt" of the rightwing press, Kent said, but that never corroded him. No one ever heard a note of bitterness from Foot – a point greeted by a murmur of agreement from those in the pews.
Foot did not like pomposity and loved to laugh, so he might have been shuffling in his seat at this point, worried that praise for the man in the coffin was getting out of hand.
Help came from his stepdaughter, Julie Hamilton, who confessed that it was Foot who had taught her her first "bad word". The instant he knocked over one of the tottering piles of books that filled the first flat he shared with his late wife and love of his life, Jill Craigie, the cry would ring out: "Bugger!"
Foot the footie fan was brought alive by fellow Plymouth Argyle devotee Peter Jones, the former vice chairman of the club. Foot first saw the Plymouth side play in 1921 and stayed loyal thereafter, "through thin and thin."
Arriving for a recent away game at Selhurst Park, a steward asked the ninetysomething Foot whether he was carrying an offensive weapon, whereupon he produced a battered copy of Milton's selected poems, explaining that Milton's poetry represented one of the most potent weapons in English history.
As a gift for his 90th birthday, Jones had Foot officially registered as a player for the club, describing him in the programme as "an evergreen leftwinger".
Lying silent in his wooden box, Foot seemed to come alive once more.
A great-nephew, Tom Foot, son of the campaigning journalist Paul, saw Michael Foot up close, living in the famous Hampstead house during these last years. He described how the old man, his body failing, would quote Byron or Shakespeare as he headed upstairs to breakfast and how he would fizz with excitement at the sight of his morning egg, praising it always as the very best egg he had ever had.
It was left to Foot's immediate successor as Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, somehow to cram all those multiple, energetic lives into a whole; to pay tribute to a man who "carried hot ideas in a cool head … who held roundhead convictions with cavalier élan," a republican who got on with the Queen, an internationalist who cherished the English language above all. Kinnock noted that Foot had proved an unexpectedly effective employment minister and later a surprisingly deft political fixer during the long days and longer nights of James Callaghan's minority government. The battles of the 1980s had "tortured" Foot, but "his raw courage saved Labour."
Of course, a truly full farewell would have seen speeches from those who knew the earlier lives of Michael Foot: from Winston Churchill, whom Foot joined as a fellow scourge of the 1930s appeasers; from Clement Attlee, whom Foot served as a new MP in 1945; from Lord Beaverbrook, whose pre-war dining tables packed with bankers and plutocrats the young Foot used to provoke as licensed heretic; from George Orwell, who was a colleague on Tribune.
For the extraordinary fact about Michael Foot is that, active and prominent so young, he was a leading player in the major events of the entire 20th century. If no one is around to recall that first hand, it is only because he outlived them all.
The hour closed with Kinnock lustily leading a rendition of the Red Flag, a reminder that when Foot was leader, Labour did not form a government, it was not even in much shape as a party – but it was still a cause, one that could make the eyes moist and the heart soar. And, for a glorious hour today, remembering the man in whom "the red flame of socialist courage" always burned so bright, it became so once more.
A tribute volume is underway, made up of a selection of Michael Foot stories. The editors request stories be emailed to
brian.brivati@johnsmithtrust.org