Michael Foot: A Life

Michael Foot: A Life

Kenneth O. Morgan

Language: English

Pages: 0

ISBN: B01K14KO50

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Publish Year note: Originally published in 2007
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The authorised – but not uncritical – life of one of the great parliamentarians and orators of our times, the former Labour Party leader, who was also an eminent man of letters.

Michael Foot was a controversial and charismatic figure in British public life, political and literary, for over sixty years.

Emerging from a famous west-country Liberal dynasty, he rose as a crusading left-wing journalist in the late 1930s: 'The Guilty Men' (his book on the pre-war appeasers of Nazi Germany) is one of the great radical tracts of British history. He was the voice of libertarian socialism in parliament, an international socialist and government minister, and was Labour leader for two-and-a-half years between 1980 and 1983.

His political friendships with people like Beaverbrook, Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Barbara Castle were passionate and profound, but he also had a remarkable and quite different career as a man of letters, with Dean Swift, Tom Paine, Hazlitt, Byron, Wordsworth, Heine, Wells and Silone amongst his heroes. Foot's two-volume life of Aneurin Bevan is a triumph of political biography.

Kenneth Morgan's biography does full justice to both the public and the private side of Michael Foot – no more tellingly than his descriptions of Foot's long and happy marriage to the filmmaker, feminist and writer Jill Craigie.

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Candidates what proposals should be made by the current Round Table conference in London considering the future governance of India. As noted, Isaac Foot was himself a Liberal member of that conference, with first-hand knowledge of the views of Gandhi and others on India’s future. The night before he sat the paper Michael had had dinner with his father at the National Liberal Club in London, and Isaac had given him a lengthy briefing on future proposals for an Indian federation, along with.

Overjoyed – ‘We’ve won, we’ve won.’70 Callaghan was swayed by the views of his four senior Cabinet colleagues, even though almost every other minister, from Edmund Dell on the right to Tony Benn on the left, urged an early election. Only Eric Varley and Harold Lever amongst the others agreed with the arguments for delay. In a messy and unsatisfactory way, in which his customary political skills seemed to desert him, Callaghan then irritated the TUC Congress in early September with an unclear,.

The constituency parties Benn had a majority of five to one. It was the closest of close-run things. Yet in retrospect it marked a turning of the tide. The vote was in some ways misleading. It showed up the inadequacy of union ‘consultation’ of members. The result was as close as it was in part because of malpractices by some trade union executives, notably those of the TGWU, who threw all their million-plus votes behind Benn despite having no mandate from their branches to do so. Their vote,.

March 1951 (ibid., CAB 128/19) 83. Tribune, 20 April 1951 84. Morgan, Labour in Power, p.454 85. Minutes of Keep Left group, 17 October 1950 (University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre, Crossman Papers, MSS. 154/3/KL/1/1–14) 86. Ibid., 26 April 1951 (Richardson/Mikardo Papers, People’s History Museum) 87. Peggy Duff, op. cit., p.38 88. Briggs, op. cit., p.601 89. Foot, Aneurin Bevan, Vol. 2, p.342; Ben P1mlott (ed.), The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1918–40, 1945–60 (Jonathan Cape,.

Late 1952 it became news as never before. It had moved away from the arguments of the early Cold War years after 1945, when Jon Kimche and Evelyn Anderson were focusing on eastern Europe. It now ranged over a myriad of issues at home and around the world. Foot’s influence on the newspaper was still central, but he operated now mainly as a manager. He had given up the editor’s chair to a remarkably young successor, the twenty-six-year-old Robert Edwards. At Ian Mikardo’s suggestion Edwards had.

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