no vision, the people perish and here was a man with vision.”
But where was that vision leading? Jill and Michael reminded MacQuitty of a joke. A pretty Liverpool girl wanted to get to the Far East, but she had no money. So she stowed away. A fortnight later she was discovered aboard ship. The Captain said, “You look very spruce, well fed and turned out. How come?” She said, “One of the crew took pity on me.” After more questioning, she revealed that her benefactor was the second officer. “What did you give him in return?” the Captain asked. “Well,” she replied, “You might say he took advantage of me.” Then the Captain said, “I can confirm that. You are on the Liverpool-Birkenhead ferry.”
MacQuitty was full of this kind of badinage, but he was a wary gent who kept referring me to his published memoirs. He seemed uncomfortable with the idea of straying from his text. I would make several return visits, but I was only slightly successful in penetrating his persiflage.
9
MacQuitty’s joke reminded me of Ronnie Neame’s view of Michael. Before my June visit, I had called Neame at his home in Beverly Hills. He was nearly as guarded as MacQuitty and almost as old, telling me he was now put together with string. He remembered that Jill introduced him to Michael in the late 1940s. Ronnie had heard that Michael was a Communist and not a very nice man. On television, Michael came across as soapbox strident, a monomaniac:
People used to come up to Jill and say, “What a shame you are married to that awful man.” In fact, Michael is an absolute sweetheart. The only thing about him is that he is up in the clouds. He would like a world that is just not practical or possible.
Ronnie’s arguments with Michael were always friendly and though he had not seen Michael in many years, he was obviously very fond of him.
10
Ronnie Neame echoed Michael’s editor and publisher, Mike Bessie—another witness I interviewed before setting off for London in June 2000. Mike talked at his apartment off of Washington Square in New York City. Bessie, Michael’s friend since the Second World War, regarded Michael as a brilliant writer, but also an imperceptive personality and a bungling politician. Almost the first thing Mike said was, “I wonder what kind of a source on Jill Michael is? He is so kindly a person.”
But beneath that veneer was a controlling personality, Bessie went on. Michael often attempted to short circuit Jill, calling her “My dear child,” a habit Barbara Castle regarded as a form of “gentle bullying.” Mike Bessie interpreted the phrase as the effort of a man exerting his patience. Often the outspoken Jill did not give ground, but Mike never saw Michael lose his temper, no matter how outrageous her comment.
To Mike there was a mystery about Michael. For forty years he had asked his friend to write a book entitled “Why I am a Socialist” and for four decades Michael Foot had written books that avoided confronting that important issue, Mike thought.
“You know the central criticism of Jill?” Mike asked. She was ambitious for Michael and forced him into a political career, which ended sadly. “If it can be said that there was anybody not qualified to be the leader of the Labour Party at the time Michael became the leader of the Labour Party, it was Michael!” Mike said, his voice rising. “He has none of the aggression — when he speaks he is a demon,” but that is not enough to make a leader, Mike implied.
Then Mike described a different Michael Foot:
To Jill has been attributed what many see as a wrong turn in Michael’s career. If you didn’t know them well, watching them in a room together, you would think that she was very dominant because what you wouldn’t necessarily observe is that he would allow that to seem so. It didn’t deter him from doing what he felt he had to do. He just didn’t fight back in terms of argument or discussion.
Mike wanted to know if I agreed. On two occasions I had watched the dynamic he described while working on my Rebecca West biography. I sensed it again when another biographer sent me a recording of Jill arguing a point while Michael played second chorus, so to speak.
Why did Michael permit such an impression to be created—one that would continue even after Jill died, when he would attract a kind of female confederacy around him? Or did Mike feel otherwise, that Jill could orientate her husband in directions he might not otherwise have taken?
I think the turn in the road was after Nye died. The party came to Michael and said you must take Nye’s constituency. “You are Nye’s heir and you must do that.” I think Michael had made up his mind about writing—God knows I wanted him to write and we had begun talking about the books he would do. But going back into politics that way—I think Jill was one of the elements that persuaded him to do that. But immersed in Labour Party politics through my friendship with Dick Crossman, I certainly understood why Michael did that.
If Jill did have a significant impact on Michael’s political decisions, it was, in part, because he really liked women, Mike emphasised. Michael Foot saw a great future role for women in politics.
When I entered Michael’s life, he was rebuilding his support system, superintended by Jill’s close friend, Jenny Stringer. He had an enlarging circle of new and old companions shepherding him not only around London, but also accompanying him to Dubrovnik, Plymouth, Grassmere (to meetings of the Wordsworth Society) and even to Bermuda. The frail, pale figure I had met on the doorstep was beginning to burgeon, devoting more and more time to his beloved football team and serving on its board, even as he became, in his own words, even more rickety. As Mike Bessie observed:
Michael is greatly changed. Even when he had his eczema [in the 1940s] and a certain shyness, he was not as vulnerable as he now looks—the eye [Michael had been blinded by an attack of shingles] and he just doesn’t have the strength. His continued activity is a triumph of will. Each time I see him I wonder, “Where does he find it?”
Michael’s energy did seem, in part, of a piece with his will to make a world in which he could think well of people. “Jill thought Michael lived in the nimbus of his qualities,” Mike observed:
He didn’t really see how awful some people were. You had to do something pretty bad before Michael would criticise you. He might criticise your ideas, but of your character or behaviour he tended to be sympathetic or understanding. Jill would be much sharper about people. Michael could be a destructive speaker in the House and tear you down. But that was an argument about something, not about a person.
Especially in their last years together, “You had a feeling that Jill pretty much arranged Michael’s life,” Mike thought. Michael grew increasingly dependent on her—“perhaps we all do,” said Mike, including all us husbands in his observation.
This reliance on women showed up early, in Mike’s view. “Whatever affair or relationship he had with Connie [Ernst]” (who became Mike’s first wife after she had ceased her World War II romance with Michael), “there was an element of dependence in it.” When Connie told Michael he should move out of his crowded flat during the war, he seemed powerless to effect a change. How could he manage all his books? he wondered. Rather like Jill taking charge of Michael, Connie engineered his removal to more spacious surroundings, taking care to ship his precious library to his new accommodations.
“Did you seriously consider marrying Connie?” I asked Michael when I got to Pilgrim’s Lane in June. “You bet,” he replied. “Tell me about Connie,” I prodded him. “I was very fond of Connie,” he began:
I had two Jewish friends that I fell for. The other was Lily Ernst, the Jewish exile I first met at Beaverbrook’s and got to know during the war. She was Beaverbrook’s mistress and I would have liked to take her off him. But I didn’t have much success. She was a passionate Jew. Her mother had been taken to the camps from Yugoslavia. Beaverbrook had met her in somewhere like Cairo and said if you’re ever in trouble, let me know. Now Connie I met sometime in 1942 through Mary Welsh.
This roundabout explanation was rather typical. Michael could recall significant events, such as being with Connie in New York City on the night Roosevelt’s death was announced, but he never clarified the nature of his emotional tie to her. I would