out of a sense that he was making a contribution to society. She was the most subservient feminist ever. Intellectually, she was a feminist, but in her behaviour she was not.” Recalling the marriage’s dynamics in the 1970s and thereafter, Julie noted that if Michael wanted a cup of coffee and Jill was writing her book, he got his cup of coffee. She was always complaining about these interruptions. “Why not go away for six weeks and finish your book?” Julie would ask her. “But who would take care of Michael?” Jill replied. No one—not Julie, not anyone—could take care of Michael as Jill did. To Jill, Michael was “special.” Then Julie added, “Excuse my language, but fuck that! He was just a man. I took issue there, strongly.”
“I think my mother had quite a tough time with Michael. He adored her in a cerebral way, but she had to do all the dog work.” He was attentive. He brought Jill flowers and gifts, often consulting with Julie about what Jill might like best. But to Julie, Michael never put Jill first. “He did on a certain level. He only wanted to hear praise of her after she died. But that tells me that he realised he had not worshipped her as he should have done.”
After listening to Julie over the course of three years, I did begin to wonder why Michael never gave Jill the space or time she gave him. I could never formulate the question in a way that would not seem accusatory, especially to a man who was still grieving. But in retrospect, I wish I had asked: “Michael, did you ever—especially after you retired from public office—just say to Jill, ‘Why don’t you go off and finish your book. I’ll get on?’” Indeed, there were all sorts of friends and family—as I discovered—who were quite willing to coddle him. Other than complaining to others—as Jane Carlyle did about her mate—Jill never made an issue of her husband’s selfishness and perhaps, for all sorts of reasons, she did not really want to finish her book, but the nagging question is why he did not do more to encourage her? He was interested in her work. He read it and made editorial suggestions (which he did not want me to mention in her biography for fear this would somehow diminish her achievement), but as far as making some significant alteration in a life built around him, he seemed incapable of proposing a plan for her book that would free her to confront the formidable task of telling the story of women’s struggle for equality.
Michael was the male partner in a dance, but he did not know how to lead. Or rather, he led by default, since Jill did not challenge his authority. He simply filled a vacuum. As a political man, he would have the same problem: he had a solid group of adherents, but he could not use that base to assert his authority. He was a sort of effigy of a great man and he seems to have known it, since he became leader of the Labour Party only after considerable prodding from Jill and others. It would have looked cowardly not to accept the leadership. But Michael was a sort of hollow man, as he acknowledged with self-deprecating humour during his 1983 campaign against Margaret Thatcher: “I’m here to impersonate the leader of the Labour Party. What have I been doing the rest of the week? You might well ask.”
4
“Did you see Michael yesterday” Mervyn Jones asked me before we sat down to lunch at his flat in Brighton. “People say he is so old and frail. But Jill said to me once, ‘You know, Michael is as tough as old boots.’” Although they had once been close friends, Mervyn had little contact with Michael now, the result of some bad blood over his biography of Michael. I should have taken this development as a warning sign.
I asked Mervyn about Michael’s pronounced limp, occasioned by surgery after a catastrophic car accident in 1963. “I haven’t dared to ask him, but it’s painful, isn’t it, just for him to move?” I had never heard Michael complain, although his explosive grunts made me wonder. But Mervyn did not take the question seriously, simply saying Michael had stiff joints “like old people do” and this was very much the way others close to Michael saw matters. Rather than seeing the strain he was under because of his disability, more than one friend called Michael’s straining “nervous energy.” Michael was like some mechanism constantly agitating and lacking a muffler. He had not merely endured a severe physical injury, he had turned his crippled condition into a kind of performance—like a merry pirate with a peg leg, an Ahab without animus. There was, however, fury in his temperament and even hatred, especially for traitors to the cause like David Owen, who had split off from the Labour Party during Michael’s leadership and whom Michael called a “mountebank.”
Mervyn only noticed Michael’s shortness of breath during walks on Hampstead Heath. Michael had been an all-day walker for much of his life, but at eighty-seven, the rises robbed him of air and he had to stop frequently to tell his anecdotes. Yet he was still taking buses and clattering along with his cane, sometimes hitting posts with it for emphasis. The walking stick had also become a prop, an animated exclamation mark. Sometimes Michael would wave it high and take my breath away, since I was certain that he would take a tumble. He would later wave the stick high while standing atop picturesque Dubrovnik and I worried whether he would topple over in an off-balance movement, plunging into the sea. Michael’s word for his condition was “rickety.”
5
Mervyn listened to me expatiate on my enthusiasm for doing Jill’s biography:
[CR] My experience with them was as equals. When we went out to dinner, or when I was in their home, the back-and-forth between them was marvellous. I had no sense that this was simply Michael Foot’s wife. I liked the whole feeling of that and when I read her obituary, I thought, “if I can work that into a biography ... ”
[MJ] Yea [I can now detect on the tape recording Mervyn’s unexpressed dismay]. Well, there are problems.
I pressed Mervyn to explain.
Well, I think a certain legend is being created about Jill, which came through in my own obituary. I wouldn’t stand by it. It was eulogistic —for Michael’s sake, of course and so were the speeches at the memorial service.
I assured Mervyn that after writing about my previous subjects, I was prepared for problems. “That’s what Gloria said. ‘He knows what problems are,’” Mervyn laughed, and continued: “The legend is that she was a great feminist and I just don’t think that was true. She really didn’t get on with other women. ... The only person who considered Jill Michael’s intellectual equal was Michael. You’re going to have trouble with that.” I heard echoes of Julie’s criticism of her mother in Mervyn’s rather harsh assessment.
Mervyn had had a rough time with Jill over Michael’s biography, which she thought neglected her own role in Michael’s life, mischaracterised her experience as a mother and failed to capture Michael’s domestic side. To Mervyn, Jill seemed rather high handed. “When Jill said we’re having dinner, it was a royal command. If you were doing something else, she would say, ‘Drop it.’” This aspect of Jill did get short shrift in my biography. Michael objected to Mervyn’s remarks, which I included in a draft without using Mervyn’s name and I could see that unless I identified my source, neither Michael nor the reader would take the criticism seriously. Mervyn warned me that Michael would not be able to see—or admit?—that Jill had an overbearing quality.
What enchanted Michael? I asked Mervyn. “Beauty,” he said, but then added:
For a political man to have a wife with a career of her own and was an achiever you could be proud of was, at that time, unusual. Labour leader wives were uneducated. But most people thought of Jill as Michael Foot’s wife. That’s not what you want and that’s not what Michael wants. That’s a big hurdle in the writing of the biography.”
If this was true, I thought, what does that say about Michael?
6
“Gloria mentioned a woman at Tribune who was in love with Michael. She could only remember her first name: Sheila,” I told Mervyn. “That was my impression too,” he answered. “Mind you, she hated Jill, presumably because she was in love with Michael.” I encountered Sheila Noble on several occasions in Michael’s home, where she would come for a day to help him with his correspondence. When I asked her for an interview, she just smiled and shook her head. “Sheila adored Michael. I don’t believe she ever had an affair,” Mervyn said. “The other person to see is Elizabeth Thomas, Michael’s personal secretary—way back, in