Kenneth O. Morgan - Michael Foot

KENNETH O. MORGAN is former vice-chancellor of the University of Wales, honorary fellow of The Queens and Oriel Colleges, Oxford, and Labour peer. He has been for over thirty years one of Britains leading modern historians. His many books include Wales in British Politics, 18681922 (1963), Lloyd George (1974), Keir Hardie (1975), Consensus and Disunity (1979), Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 18801980 (1981), Labour in Power 19451951 (1984), Labour People (1987), The Peoples Peace (1989) and Callaghan: A Life (1997). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, and was married to the historian and criminologist, the late Jane Morgan.

From the Reviews of Michael Foot:

This magnificent biography is everything an authorized biography should be. Its compendious, meticulously researched with the collaboration of its subject, and contains every fact you are ever likely to want to know about him its also clear, lucid and readable

Guardian

Morgans judgements of Foot are elegantly balanced Foot was, and still is, a great man who deservedly inspires affection as well as admiration

ROY HATTERSLEY , Observer

I was engrossed. Kenneth Morgans superb portrait is much more than another Labour biography. It is a portrait in bright oils of a master parliamentary literary-political agitator, in a society congenitally hard to rouse

Prospect

The great achievement of Morgans fine biography is that it reminds us what a wonderfully humane, cultivated man Foot was and indeed still is he deserves to be remembered as one of the most erudite, decent, public-spirited men of his time

Daily Telegraph

A joy to read, erudite, wry, sensitive and enlightening, packed with juicy items from nearly a century of tumultuous personal, party and national events

History Today

When asked what luxury he would take with him to accompany his discs on a desert island one of the senior civil servants replied, Michael Foot. It is the singular merit of this book that the author makes one see why

Spectator

A substantial work of history, not shy to explore Foots human frailties, ranging from his friendships with Lord Beavorbrook and Enoch Powell and a hitherto undisclosed affair, to his inconsistencies over policy. Yet it is also affectionate, conveying the warmth of Foots generosity of spirit and his passions

Scotsman

Refreshingly candid biography

Sunday Telegraph

One of Britains most distinguished modern historians, whose books combine scrupulous scholarship with limpid prose In his equally revisionist biography of Jim Callaghan, he managed, with a remarkable mixture of empathy and skill, to get inside the skin of that surprisingly complex and enigmatic figure. Now he has done the same with Foot another complex and enigmatic figure, but cut from a very different cloth Morgan deals faithfully and fairly with Foots political career

New Statesman

Stimulating and enjoyable Morgan is kind, but rarely blind

TLS

Morgan handles his material judiciously, exploring the twin themes in Foots life the radical politician and literary man in a biography that is both measured and affectionate

BBC History Magazine

A faithful, detailed and colourful account of one of the leading left-wingers of the last century

Yorkshire Post

Wales in British Politics, 18681922
David Lloyd George: Welsh Radical as World Statesman
Freedom or Sacrilege?
The Age of Lloyd George
Lloyd George Family Letters (ed.)
Lloyd George
Keir Hardie: Radical and Socialist
Consensus and Disunity
(with Jane Morgan) Portrait of a Progressive
Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 18801980
Labour in Power 19451951
The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain (ed.)
Labour People
The Peoples Peace: Britain Since 1945
Modern Wales: Politics, Places and People
The Young Oxford History of Britain and Ireland (ed.)
Callaghan: A Life
Crime, Protest and Police in Modern British Society (ed.)
The Twentieth Century

For Joseph

Michael Foot has had a very long and colourful life. He was chronicler and participant in central aspects of British twentieth-century history. His first general election found him crusading for Lloyd Georges Liberal Party in 1929. His twentieth and last saw him campaigning for Labour in his old seat, Ebbw Vale/Blaenau Gwent, seventy-six years later. He spans the worlds of Stafford Cripps and Tony Blair. He was a doughty opponent of appeasement in the later 1930s: his book Guilty Men made him famous at the age of twenty-seven. He was vocal in condemning the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He stands, and feels himself to stand, in the great and honourable tradition of dissenting troublemakers, the heir to Fox and Paine, Hazlitt and Cobbett. He played in his life many parts. As icon of the socialist left, he was custodian and communicator of British socialism. He was the greatest pamphleteer perhaps since John Wilkes, a formidable editor, and author of a glittering biography of his idol, Nye Bevan. He was a scintillating parliamentarian, an inveterate critic and peacemonger as Bevanite, Tribunite and founder member of CND, yet also a belligerent patriot and internationalist from Dunkirk to Dubrovnik. He was a central figure and champion of the unions in the Labour governments of the 1970s, a key player in Old Labours last phase. Less happily, he was for almost three tormented years Labours leader. Perhaps most important of all, he was a deeply cultured and literate man whose learning was absolutely central to his politics. He was heir to the Edwardian men of letters, the Liberals Morley or Birrell, and politically more innovative than either. Over sixty years he was an inspirational and civilizing force, if a deeply controversial one. His passing will symbolize a world we have lost.

When Michael Foot asked me if I would write a new authorized biography, I was, of course, both excited and honoured. At the same time, I had some doubts. After writing a large biography of one veteran Labour leader, Jim Callaghan, I wondered whether it would be wise to write another, especially on someone so removed from Callaghans own wing of the party. Although Callaghan and Foot worked with immense loyalty as colleagues in the Labour government of 197679, they were very different as men and as democratic socialists. Someone who worked for them both told me that they were not best buddies, while Jim Callaghan himself, just before he died in March 2005, showed himself to be a bit wary of my new project. Another point was that, while I had never really been on the right in Labour terms since I first joined the party in 1955, I was not really Old Labour either, despite the stereotypes of amiable journalists who have vainly tried to depict me as its laureate. On the contrary, I have always been a liberal devolutionist rather than a state centralist (being Welsh may have something to do with that), while on several major issues my views were not those of Michael Foot, notably on CND and on Europe. Although an admirer of Bevan (whose features adorn the sticker on my car window), I was not a Bevanite. And finally, at the start of 2003 I was doing something else, namely writing an academic book on the public memory in twentieth-century Britain. I have always been a historian rather than a biographer; only six of my books have been biographies. I was also an active member of the Lords (dissident Labour), an institution of whose abolition Michael Foot has always been an ardent supporter.