Republican Foot, the admirer of the Queen

Michael Foot’s biography has a few surprises, writes Gerald Isaaman

Michael Foot: A Life by Kenneth Morgan, HarperPress, £25. order this book

Vanessa, his terrier dog, regularly sat on the back seat of the chauffeur-driven car when Michael Foot left Whitehall to visit the Queen at Windsor Castle, when he was Lord President of the Privy Council.
“He made an effort to be neatly dressed for their meetings, and treated the Queen with his habitual courtesy towards all women,” says Foot’s biographer Kenneth Morgan. “He liked her, and pronounced her to be, like Jack Jones, ‘highly intelligent’.”
And they shared two interests – a love of political and constitutional history and their dogs, the Queen her corgis and Foot his dogs Vanessa and Roxana, named after Jonathan Swift damsels.
“The personal chemistry between Foot and the Queen was always good,” insists Morgan, who reveals how Foot, the radical and sometimes rude republican wrote a four-page apology to the Queen when he ditched her once for a furious Labour Party national executive meeting dealing with Trotsky infiltrators.
Morgan, otherwise a Labour life peer and noted historian, delights in the surprises his brilliant biography brings to the surface in some 500 compelling pages about the remarkable life of the doyen white-haired urbane guerrilla, now 93.
But Morgan is neither a Ban the Bomb unilateralist like his subject nor against entry into Europe, and certainly not a Bevanite, but an academic and a former vice-chancellor of the University of Wales. But they share Hampstead as a link, Morgan, who came from a poor home, winning a scholarship to University College School, in Frognal, in 1944.
His biography reveals Foot’s own associations with the capitalist newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, who not only made him Editor of the Evening Standard but provided him with a rent free cottage on his country estate.
Shortage of money often dominated Foot’s life, his wife having to sell a minor painting by Renoir, given to her as a gift by an admirer, to help buy No 32a Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, their home for a decade before moving up the hill to Hampstead.
Even then they were unable to renew the Ecclesiastical Commissioners lease on a house in Rosslyn Hill. “They spent a few months in another Hampstead house, 4 Hampstead Hill Gardens,” writes Morgan. “There it was very much a hand-to-mouth existence, including reportedly for a time sleeping in their car.”
The radical air of Hampstead and its Heath where John Keats walked has been the perfect setting for Foot. “Hampstead and its cultural milieu is important to Michael,” Morgan insists. “You couldn’t imagine him living anywhere else.”

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