Laura TannaIN OUR interview of January 23, 2001, the Rt. Hon. Michael Foot, a former leader of Britain's Labour Party, reminisced about his mentor, M.P. Aneurin Bevan, creator of Britain's National Health Service. "He was my number one political influence. He was the Member of Parliament for that part of Wales where later I succeeded him [1960] when he died. Ebbw Vale, pronounced Eh Ba Vale. Jamaicans have the same gift as the Welsh have of making their own language as they go along, and improving the thing too. Wales is different from England. The Welsh are more romantic, but romantic in politics too, romantic in a good sense of the word. They're not going to be so hardbound by supposed facts that stand in the way of doing things. Aneurin Bevan used to say: 'Anybody can say that two and two makes four. It's to turn them into five and six that's really got to be something!' That's just an illustration of how he believed one's always got to be imaginative.
"He also said that poets were more important than politicians. They're talking about more important matters than usually most of the politicians do. And the poets are the people who really see ahead and whom we should be listening to. That doesn't mean to say every poet, of course not. Listen to the best ones. So he was a poet in politics, you see.
"The Celts have got a different kind of approach to many different subjects from the stick-in-the-mud English or Anglo-Saxons. Aneurin Bevan, he wasn't racist at all, but he sometimes referred to the bovine Anglo-Saxons as if the Anglo-Saxons were a staggering lot who didn't really know what was what. When he said it you'd laugh because he was a very witty chap, you see. He was always working out his own witticisms on the platform and trying them out, and sometimes he'd say things that he wasn't supposed to say at all and get into trouble for it. But of course part of the fascination of listening to him was all the greater because you didn't know when he'd do that. He had a wonderful gift for words."
Foot, who became both writer and politician, considers his own number one accomplishment to be his book on Aneurin Bevan, calling it "the most important thing I ever wrote". Although his H.G. The History of Mr. Wells , a biography of H.G. Wells, is a fine work as well. Bevan was Foot's political father figure, but Foot's own father still played a very big part in his life "because of the way he taught me about books. He was turning from one new author to another all the time and had a huge, great library".
Now known as a dedicated bibliophile in his own right, with a great collection of books, Michael Foot became assistant editor of the left wing Labour weekly, Tribune, in 1937, the same year Bevan helped to found the paper. Foot went on to become editor of the Evening Standard under Lord Beaverbrook's patronage in 1942, and then entered Parliament in 1945 when Attlee's government came to power in the Labour victory after the war. Though Foot left the Standard, his association with Tribune continues to this day.
In fact, while in Jamaica, he was reading Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's Development As Freedom in anticipation of writing an article on it for Tribune, showing how the book applies not only to India but also Jamaica. In his enthusiasm, Foot recommends the Jamaican government and everybody else read it "because it's justifying democratic action. He's saying how if you use the democracy you've got properly, it can work much better than any other kind of system. Here in Jamaica, they have a democracy. I know it doesn't always work perfectly, nor does it in India, but in both places if they hadn't had any kind of democracy the whole situation would have been much more hopeless".
Foot's credentials as a writer and bibliophile are sufficiently strong that he was chairman of the Booker Prize Committee the year Salmon Rushdie's book Satanic Verses was in the competition. "I was in favour of it winning but the other judges were in favour of the chap from Australia, Peter Carey. But I was very lucky that I had it that year because as a result, I became friendly with Salmon Rushdie. The fatwa [Islamic death sentence] hadn't been issued just then. It was issued because of Satanic Verses, a great book in my opinion."
(Next: The best and worst of life as a Labour MP)
