Michael Foot on Orwell
Interview by Conrad Landin
Spinebreakers Editor Conrad talks to 1980s Labour leader Michael Foot about his friend and colleague, George Orwell
Having always had a great admiration for George Orwell, I have always imagined the world he inhabited as something completely distinct to the one I live in. Yet although Orwell died in 1950, there remains a human connection between these worlds – Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, became a friend of Orwell’s during the Second World War, when they met through the left-wing newspaper Tribune.
In the garden of his house in Hampstead, which was beautifully designed some years ago by his late wife, the film-maker Jill Craigie, Foot appears keen to share his thoughts and experiences of the writer he much admires. ‘In many ways Orwell was a great chap altogether, and I did know him in very special circumstances,’ he adds. ‘I first met him when he started on Tribune.’ However, this was not the first time he had come across Orwell’s work. ‘We had [The Road to] Wigan Pier before the war, and we’d had some criticisms of that from a Communist point of view in Tribune.’ One reason for his being taken on to write the Tribune Essay and later the As I Please column was Orwell’s strong convictions being shown by the publication of Homage to Catalonia in 1938. ‘This was a real wonderful description of how they were fighting in Spain to change the world, and we [at Tribune] were one hundred percent in favour of it,’ he tells me. ‘Not so many people were pro-Spaniard right from the beginning,’ he adds.
But what made Orwell stand out amongst other writers at the time? ‘[He] was writing things that others were not dealing with properly, or not doing anything like as well. Right from the start he was writing about what was happening in the war.’ Orwell’s column was ‘most up to date on the negotiations taking place between the powers’. Furthermore, Orwell earned the respect of his colleagues, according to Foot, because ‘he was holding his views very strongly, and put them in such brilliant presentations you couldn’t knock him down;’ he put forward his points ‘in a way better than anybody else.’
Orwell is, of course, renowned above all else for anti-totalitarian position, whilst Foot too is remembered for pro-democracy positions; it was this which largely defined his support for the 1982 Falklands War against the military junta of Argentina. So how did the two men’s views of Soviet Russia compare, and how did they differ? On this subject, Foot tells me ‘differences within Tribune didn’t arise at first; most of his earlier articles were written at a time when the whole country was eager to see the Russians winning, and he was supporting that and enthusiastic about that as much as anybody else. [He] was writing in a way which was how we could win the war, and how socialism could win, which was what Tribune was interested in as well.’ He does admit, however, that at times there was some criticism of Soviet actions in his writing, and that others on the paper were ‘a bit nervous about a man who had any criticisms of the Russians at all.’ On the more general subject of totalitarianism, and out of the context of the war, Foot asserts that ‘almost all of us on Tribune were very strongly in favour of everything he’d written on those subjects at the time.’
‘But there were matters in which there were difficulties right from the beginning,’ I am told. ‘That was on the subject of Israel and what would happen in Israel after the war.’ In contrast to the situation today, where the left are usually more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, Foot tells me that in 1940s, Tribune was ‘one-hundred-and-fifty percent pro-Jewish on this issue.’ ‘Orwell, however, was taking a slightly different view, partly to his anti-imperialist attitudes. He wasn’t sure it was the right way for the whole thing to go.’ I am told ‘almost from the first times of meeting him, whenever there was discussion on this mater, it was one of the very few subjects on which he wasn’t one-hundred percent in favour of what was being prepared.’ Did Orwell foresee the great tensions the establishment of the state of Israel would create in the future, and that a peaceful settlement still be far off today?
Foot mentions that another big issue at the time was India, and I am intrigued to know how their opinions compared on this subject. ‘Orwell’s opinions on [India] were shaped by his own book on the region [Burmese Days].’ Orwell, Foot says, made efforts to get ‘a decent policy [on India] from the Labour Party, which we hadn’t had at all then, and getting it committed to the freedom of India after [the war]’. Foot argues that the politicians of the time, including senior Labour figures (he names Clement Attlee, then party leader) ‘didn’t understand that we had to move much faster in India’. He talks of efforts made by Aneurin Bevan to engage with Nehru and Gandhi; ‘we were making arrangements to have different things happen in India altogether, the left of the Labour Party was coming to that view long before.’ Again, Orwell’s view of imperialism defined his position on the subject: ‘he’d seen it in practice when he’d been in that part of the world.’ So whilst he disagreed with most of the Tribune staff on Israel, Foot stresses that with India ‘Orwell was mostly on our side.’
Orwell died comparatively young, but what would he be writing about now, were he still alive? ‘He’d have opposed the Iraq war, like many of us,’ states Foot, with some confidence, in defiance of the claims of others that he would have supported it. However, he implies that it would be difficult to answer the bigger question, as ‘quite a number of sections of his journalism were affected by the things he’d seen,’ citing Spain as an example.
It is evident that Michael Foot has great admiration for his friend and colleague, but is not at all afraid to talk about where their thoughts differed. His thoughts are probably more valuable than ever, with few with such experience of Orwell still alive, and paint a picture of Orwell in action, which is difficult to obtain through his novels and essays.