Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Among those who dreaded the prospect of a Healey victory were three of the most powerful union leaders in the land: the TGWU’s Moss Evans, ASTMS’s Clive Jenkins and the GMWU’s David Basnett. All three bore the scars of Healey’s intellectual contempt; none had forgiven him for his economic rigour during the late 1970s. The day after Callaghan’s announcement they had a drink to discuss the situation. Shore, they agreed, could not win, so somebody else should stand instead. The somebody they had in mind was Michael Foot.39

  For all the affection he inspired within the Labour family, the 67-year-old Michael Foot was few people’s idea of a natural leader. With his scholarly style and white flowing hair, he looked more like a radical pamphleteer than a modern politician. Born into a family of West Country Nonconformists, he had grown up in a house crammed with 240 Bibles, 130 volumes by or about Montaigne and 300 by or about Milton, 3,000 tracts from the English Civil War and an entire room on the French Revolution. As a boy he had a diet of ‘bacon for breakfast, Liberalism for lunch and Deuteronomy for dinner’. As a young man he had co-written a bestselling, if largely erroneous, attack on the ‘guilty men’ behind appeasement, while as an MP in the 1950s and 1960s he had become the chief guardian of the left-wing conscience. Very late in life, he had come in from the political cold, becoming Employment Secretary and then Leader of the House, largely as a sop to the left. Unlike Benn, he had proved a model of loyalty, working tirelessly to hold the party together. But it was entirely characteristic that when Labour lost the election, he devoted himself to writing a book of biographical essays on subjects such as Cervantes, Burke and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Unlike Benn, he wrote every word himself.40

  Foot never wanted to stand for the leadership. In his own mind he was too old: it was time to let Shore carry the banner for the left. But no sooner had Foot told the press that he would probably sit this one out, than he started getting letters, phone calls and even telegrams begging him to change his mind. In the Commons his young parliamentary neighbour Neil Kinnock, who adored him, rounded up potential supporters and reckoned that he would win at least 112 votes. So would he do it?

  On Saturday 18th, Foot flew to Dublin to give a lecture about his hero Jonathan Swift. While he was away, the union leaders arranged a dinner at his house for Sunday night, when they planned to persuade him to stand. But, as it turned out, there was no need. By the time Foot returned from Dublin, his mind was made up, not least because his wife Jill, a documentary filmmaker, was adamant that he should do it. On Monday morning Foot broke the news to Shore, who was devastated. Then he gave a press conference to explain why he had changed his mind. He had been against it at first, he said unguardedly, but his wife had told him: ‘You are letting down your friends.’ He could not say no to his friends. ‘Besides, if I did my wife might divorce me.’41

  Even after Foot’s volte-face, Healey remained the favourite. In public polls he led Foot by 71 per cent to 16 per cent among all voters and 68 per cent to 25 per cent among Labour supporters. Only among the hard-core activists was Foot in the lead. But for all his brains and experience, Healey suffered from some serious handicaps. As a loner who spent his free time with his family, he had no organized parliamentary faction. The left loathed him, partly because they were still outraged by his spending cuts as Chancellor. And even his friends admitted that, despite his much-advertised love of Milton, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Healey could be a terrible bully. The Labour MP Leo Abse, for example, never forgave him for mocking his teenage son about the books he was reading. The public saw him as a jovial old trouper, red-faced and down-to-earth. But to many of his fellow MPs he seemed arrogant, flippant and just plain rude.42

  The other problem was that Healey was not a good campaigner. He could not be bothered, for example, to write a mini-manifesto in the Guardian, whereas Foot gladly poured out a torrent of anti-Tory gush. Indeed, instead of campaigning vigorously, Healey calculated that it was better to avoid doing anything controversial. Presumably hoping to woo left-wing MPs, he refused to repudiate mandatory reselection and the electoral college, played down his views on nuclear weapons and Europe and effectively said nothing of interest to anybody at all. The Labour right, who were thirsting for leadership, were horrified. The moderate Manifesto Group organized meetings with both Foot and Healey. ‘Foot was friendly and polite,’ one of them recalled. ‘Healey was nonchalant to the point of rudeness.’ When another Labour right-winger bluntly asked why they should vote for him, Healey simply shrugged and said: ‘That’s easy. Because you have nowhere else to go.’43

  He was wrong about that. His campaign managers hoped for 120 votes on the first ballot. But when the result was announced on 4 November, Healey had only 112, with Foot on eighty-three, Silkin on thirty-eight and Shore on thirty-two. That made the second ballot impossible to call, since it depended entirely on where Silkin’s and Shore’s voters went next. ‘Great depression,’ Healey noted afterwards. Six days went by. Then, late on the afternoon of Monday 10 November, came the moment of truth. At five minutes to six, Healey was waiting in a Commons anteroom when a clerk came in and handed him a note. Healey read it, nodded calmly and handed it back. A minute later, grinning broadly, he strode down the corridor to the room where his fellow MPs waited. Michael Foot made his way in too, ‘as white as a sheet’, wrote Benn, while another supporter thought Foot looked ‘as if he had suffered some awful shock’. He had. With 139 votes to Healey’s 129, Foot had won.44

  At first the reaction was complete astonishment. Foot’s young apprentice, Neil Kinnock, hammered on the desk with his fist and let out an ‘Indian war whoop’, but most people just sat there in disbelief. Both Foot and Healey made emollient speeches. Then, for Benn, there was a nasty shock. Healey said it was time for Labour to unite and rebuild its popularity, adding that they had lost a lot of votes in the past thirty years, and ‘not to extreme left-wing parties’. (‘Odious,’ Benn thought.) To that end, he would be delighted to serve as Foot’s deputy. At that, almost everybody cheered; but only almost everybody. ‘I glanced at Tony Benn,’ Healey recalled. ‘His face was ashen. So I knew I had done at least one thing right.’45

  Then came a preview of the issues that would define Foot’s leadership. At a press conference that evening, Foot announced that he would begin his tenure by leading a mass protest about unemployment in Liverpool, and went out of his way to emphasize his commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. After that, he went to a dinner organized by the union leaders at the St Ermin’s Hotel, famously the place where Kim Philby and Guy Burgess had met their Soviet handlers.fn1 ‘We will beat the Tories,’ Foot insisted. ‘We’ll fight them on jobs and on nuclear weapons.’ His big night ended with drinks at his favourite restaurant, the Gay Hussar, where he and his friends sang ‘The Red Flag’ and the Italian socialist anthem ‘Avanti Popolo’. But as two journalists reported, it seemed a ‘slightly oddly muted occasion. People were pleased, but perhaps too tired to be ecstatic.’ Perhaps they knew what was coming.46

  By their standards, the next day’s papers were not especially unkind to Labour’s new leader. Foot was an ‘outstanding Parliamentarian and orator’, said the Express, though it noted that Labour now had a leader ‘whose views scare half the country’. He was a ‘kindly, friendly man’ with a ‘rather engaging’ shabbiness, agreed the Sun, which claimed that if he rebuilt Labour as a ‘respectable and responsible force in politics, then he will find the Sun in his corner’. But The Times was utterly scathing, calling his elevation an ‘unmitigated folly’ that would doom Labour to defeat in the next election. And The Economist thought Foot’s victory must make the Gang of Three’s position untenable. ‘The question is no longer whether they should leave the Labour Party but when. The answer is now.’47

  Given that the second ballot was so close, it is tempting to wonder if things could have been different. There is no doubt that many MPs voted for Foot because they saw him as the ‘candidate of the quiet life’, who might appease the activists and save them
from deselection. But one or two, at least, had more cynical motives. Later, academics identified five future SDP defectors who deliberately voted for Foot because, as one put it, ‘he would make the worst leader for Labour’. Had they acted differently, the result would have been a tie. And with just one more vote, Healey would have won.48

  But if Healey had won, so what? Would Labour have been spared the agonies of the next few years? To begin with, he would undoubtedly have been challenged by Tony Benn under the new rules a few months later. Given how close their contest for the deputy leadership was, it is perfectly plausible that Benn would have won. And even if Healey had prevailed a second time, after what would have been the bloodiest leadership campaign in history, he would still have gone into the next election with a manifesto he opposed and with activists who hated him. There might still have been some sort of split, though perhaps from the left, not the right. At the very least, it is impossible to imagine Labour’s wounds being stitched up overnight. And irrespective of Healey’s qualities, it is hard to see him winning a general election as the captain of such an unhappy and divided ship.49

  In any case, Foot was the man. And since his leadership is usually regarded as an unmitigated disaster, it is worth pointing out that he began with some obvious assets. A passionate orator and brilliant writer, he was fondly regarded in almost every corner of the party, with the possible exception of the Benn household. Certainly no modern party leader was so well read: when Foot wrote for the Observer on ‘My Kind of Party’, he quoted or cited Oliver Goldsmith, R. H. Tawney, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, William Morris, Karl Marx, Alexander Herzen and William Hazlitt, all on the same page. There is something very endearing about the fact that he once sent his Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley, a handwritten letter demanding his resignation because he had been rude about the American writer Dorothy Parker. Hattersley was amused by Foot’s erudition. But he was not prepared for the endless telephone calls from the leader’s office, demanding a reply – and this ‘when I was busy trying to be the Shadow Home Secretary and had other things to do’.50

  The fact is that while Foot was the ideal person to deliver a lecture about Jonathan Swift, he was a risible person to elect as leader of a major party. He was completely out of his depth, and the public knew it. Before the leadership election, the overwhelming majority of ordinary voters had preferred Healey, and they never changed their minds. Kicking off with an already abysmal 38 per cent in November 1980, Foot’s Gallup approval rating plummeted to 30 per cent in December, 26 per cent in January and 22 per cent in February, before a steady plunge to just 9 per cent by the end of his tenure. No other party leader since polling began had inspired such overwhelming disapproval. His friends blamed the press, but since Foot had been a well-known figure on radio and television for decades, the public did not need the Sun to tell them what to think. They knew him. Often they rather liked him. They just did not think he was any good.51

  Foot’s supporters often said that he was betrayed by modern Britain’s obsession with image. But politics has always been about image, as his heroes Gladstone and Disraeli knew very well. In this respect, Michael Foot was ludicrously ill suited to leadership. For one thing, he actually looked older than his 67 years. A near-fatal car crash had left him with a permanent limp, while an attack of shingles had robbed him of the sight in his left eye. Two days after his election he fell downstairs and broke his ankle, which meant he had to have crutches and his right leg in plaster, never a very dynamic look. The cartoonists drew him as a wildly dishevelled old man peering through thick glasses. Private Eye mocked him as the talking scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. In The Times, Bernard Levin called him ‘half blind and at least a quarter crippled’, unable ‘to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down, lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’. It was cruel, but it reflected what millions of people thought.52

  Foot was the personification of Labour as a party of opposition, an elderly, backward-looking leader for an elderly, backward-looking party. His books, his stick, his references to Beaverbook and Bevan, even his daily walks on the heath with his dog, identified him as a high-minded Hampstead intellectual, trapped in the late 1940s. His clothes, wrote the journalist Edward Pearce, ‘looked socialist – corduroys, cardigans, dark shirts and woven ties which made even people who voted reliably Labour sense difference’. Mrs Thatcher might dress conservatively, but she was always impeccably turned out. Foot never looked anything other than a scatty mess. And every time he appeared on television, as Austin Mitchell mordantly remarked, he confirmed Labour’s image as the ‘party of permanent demonstration with unruly, chanting mobs, led by a limping figure with a walking stick’.53

  In Brussels, Roy Jenkins thought Foot’s victory was a ‘sensational result’, opening up a ‘much greater prospect of political alignment’. For the Gang of Three, too, Foot’s elevation made everything simpler. David Owen’s mind was made up: in spirit he had left already. Shirley Williams was also effectively gone. She liked Foot personally, but regarded him as a Little Englander whose policies would be so ‘disastrous for the country’ that she could never support them at a general election. When, at the end of November, the Stevenage constituency party invited her to stand as their candidate again, she turned them down. But unlike the gung-ho Owen, she felt no exhilaration at the thought of breaking with the past. ‘For me,’ she wrote later, ‘leaving the Labour Party was like pulling out my own teeth, one by one.’54

  Bill Rodgers felt the pain of leaving more acutely than anybody. Part of him wanted to stay: unlike Owen, he still stood in the annual Shadow Cabinet election, finishing eighth. Since his teenage years in Liverpool, Labour had been his life. ‘I had happy memories’, Rodgers wrote, ‘of Fabian days, the companionship of hard-fought elections, cheerful July evenings on the Terrace of the House of Commons when [his wife] Silvia came to join me, the exhilaration of battles won and the loyalty and kindness of men and women who owed me nothing. How could I break with this without weeping for ever?’ Laid up after Christmas with a bad back, he consoled himself with Bernard Crick’s new biography of George Orwell. He thought about Orwell, and about his own father, another man of awkward, earnest integrity. And eventually his path became clear. By leaving he would betray his party. By staying he would betray his principles. At last, he recalled, ‘I just lay on my back and suddenly said, “What’s the point – I’m going to do it.” And I rang up Roy and Shirley and said, “Shirley, I’ve made up my mind. I’m coming.”’55

  It was not quite that simple, of course. Right from the start their project contained a subtle but explosive ambiguity. Was it a centre party, akin to the Liberals? Or a new left-wing party, hoping to replace Labour? Jenkins, lurking massively on the fringes, always favoured the former. But that made his potential partners very wary. Williams wanted a new party that was ‘democratic but also socialist’, committed to ‘greater equality’, comprehensive schools and redistributive taxation, and ‘wasn’t certain that Roy shared all those objectives’. Owen was even more suspicious, telling his colleagues that the new party must be ‘different, young and fresh-looking’. Jenkins was none of these things.

  When the two men had lunch at the end of November, Owen insisted that any new party must be on the left and that Williams should lead it. Jenkins agreed, or pretended to. But the issue of the Liberals did not go away. A few days later, Williams arranged for Ivor Crewe and Anthony King to brief them on the challenges facing a new party, and the issue came up straight away. Brandishing a huge flip chart, Crewe and King explained that, with the decline of the two-party system, the prospects for a new party had never been better. But – and it was a crucial but – they simply had to do a deal with the Liberals. In a first-past-the-post system, there were barely enough votes for three parties. There were definitely not enough for four.56

  Even at this early stage, sympathetic observers could see storm clouds ahead. In
a prescient article on 3 December, the Guardian columnist Peter Jenkins, who agreed with almost everything the Gang of Three stood for, warned that the prospects for their ‘desperate venture’ could not be ‘rated good’. Yes, the conditions for an electoral realignment looked better than at any time since the 1920s. But a new party faced gigantic challenges. Almost by definition, they would be advancing policies that were widely thought to have failed in the 1970s. Like the Liberals, they could end up in ‘the deep end of an ideological vacuum’. Jenkins agreed that change was needed. But the potential defectors, he thought, ‘had better reckon with reality’. Any realignment on the centre-left might take the best part of two decades. ‘Meanwhile, promising careers will be wasted in the wilderness, the Conservatives will probably be kept in power (although not necessarily Mrs Thatcher), and many failures may precede eventual success. Those who set out had better be prepared for a long haul into the unknown.’57

  But the Gang of Three were not for turning. On 14 January 1981 they held their first proper meeting with Roy Jenkins, who had left Brussels for good a few days earlier. There were still tensions, but they were now definitively a Gang of Four. The trigger for their departure, they decided, would be Labour’s special conference at Wembley on Saturday 24 January, when the question of the party’s electoral college would be settled once and for all. Assuming the left prevailed, they would publish a detailed statement of principles the next day and launch a Council for Social Democracy, which Labour MPs could join as a prelude to the new party itself. In the week before the conference they began working on a draft, and by Wednesday it was almost ready. Everybody now expected them to go. The Labour Party, Rodgers told the Today programme on Friday morning, was ‘near the end of its useful life as the alternative to Conservatism’. It was time for a ‘shot in the dark’.58