At Golders Green crematorium yesterday the faithful said goodbye to Michael Foot, a grand occasion for the romantic left, according to those present. But before we leave him, ponder this. How would Michael Foot have fared under the puritanical terms and conditions now being imposed on MPs?
I do not pose the question out of malice, let alone to annoy hair-shirted Robespierres among the readership, but because the reaction against the petty greed displayed by some MPs over their expenses has unleashed "reforms" that will make it unattractive for many people to enter politics.
"Could Michael Foot have survived investigations by the commissioner into his jollies down to the Côte d'Azur to see Lord Beaverbrook? And how long would his entry in the register of members' interests have had to be if he entered every article, review, comment, interview or book, as we are now meant to do with time spent writing and time spent researching?" a Labour MP – and Foot fan – asked me in an email the other day.
Good question. Foot was raised in austere non-conformist conditions in east Cornwall, but like Snow White he drifted after he came to London and fell in with the likes of Nye Bevan, Barbara Betts (Castle) – no puritans that pair – and the mischievous Canadian press lord to whom Bevan introduced his protege as "my young bloody knight-errant here" in 1938.
Beaverbrook (1879-1964) took to Foot, then aged 25 and a relatively recent convert from pacifism, and gave him a job as a feature writer on the London Evening Standard next day (at a handy £450 a year). By 1942 – when Foot had become famous as the author of Guilty Men – he was editor.
He was not an MP then, of course. But Kenneth Morgan, Foot's most recent biographer, struggles with the relationship, a father-and-son bond even though Foot loved his own "excellent father" and Beaverbrook loved his son Max so much he fought hard to prevent him being killed as an RAF pilot in the war that soon engulfed them all.
How could the leftwing socialist love the swashbuckling champion of wealth and capitalism, Morgan asks himself – and does not come up with wholly convincing answers. Glamour, mischief, excitement, a kind of outsider's view that the Canadian retained.
Be that as it may, Beaverbrook put a room in his own London flat at Foot's disposal, and took him on the luxurious Blue Train to Monte Carlo via the Paris Ritz. He gave money to Tribune and placed ads for the Daily Express there to help it survive.
He gave Jill and Michael Foot a grace-and-favour cottage on his Surrey estate at a time when Michael must still have been MP for Devonport (1945-55). And of course Beaverbrook paid him for his journalism, not least as a book reviewer, which he still was when I was a young reporter on the Standard – long after Lord B was dead.
It's all in Ken Morgan's book. "What Foot gained … in addition to a much higher standard of life, was a genuinely stimulating atmosphere in which to work." Indeed.
I hope we can all understand that? I'm sure Lord Rothermere, whose family still own a chunk of the Daily Mail, understands it. His late father, who liked enjoying himself, certainly did. So in their own weird ways do Richard "Asian Babes" Desmond, current owner of the Express, and the Barclay Brothers, the tax exiles who own the MP-baiting Telegraph papers. Murdoch, I suspect, is a puritan.
But does Sir Thomas Legg, the author of the Legg tribunals on MPs' expenses, understand it? Or Sir Christopher Kelly, current chairman of the committee on standards in public life? Or his thin-lipped predecessor, Alistair Graham?
I'm not confident of that point since all have joined the media moguls' populist crusade against elected office. All have, incidentally, led sheltered lives in Whitehall free from disturbing influences such as Beaverbrook, though not necessarily from Monte Carlo. These sort of people get the occasional jolly too ...
Am I suggesting Michael Foot would have bought a £3,000 flatscreen TV from John Lewis on expenses? Or flipped a flat? Of course not. He wasn't much interested in money and – lucky him – usually had enough to see him by. On one occasion, Morgan reveals, Jill sold a little Renoir – given by an earlier admirer – to help purchase a new house.
But my MP friend's question still stands. How would Legg or Kelly have squared up to Foot's untidy lifestyle with its exotic connections? The question could have been asked across the political spectrum – from Churchill, whose finances were always rackety, to Lloyd George and beyond to Oswald Mosley, who was very rich.
Politics are cleaner now and that's good. But my favourite word, "proportion", still has a place in the wider scheme of things if we are not to have a parliament full of "monks or millionaires", as an MP put it the other day. Even they let you down, anyway – both types were caught being greedy on expenses.
It's all the more grotesque because the expenses merchants at Westminster were such small fry, their lack of imagination almost as embarrassing as some of their claims. If you want to get a sense of proportion about fraud read Phillip Inman's reports today – this one's even scarier – about the "window dressing" role played by major accountancy firms (Ernst & Young, in this instance) in London as Lehman Brothers collapsed towards its world-shaking disaster.
Remember Michael Fallon, the Tory MP who is quoted by Inman as the likely chairman of the Commons Treasury select committee who will have to try and get a better grip on these people after the election, is paid £64,000 a year – rather less than a moderately competent accountant in such firms.
Yes, I know it's a decent salary by most standards and that many MPs abused their expenses/allowances to augment it. But we have to deal with the world as it is – warts, accountants and all.
One Labour MP with a marginal seat complained to me the other day that he/she is facing an opponent who has raised £50,000 in the past quarter alone to take it off him/her. We're talking serious money here. "Find out where it came from, then tell the voters," was my advice.
Oh yes, while we're on the subject of money and politics, Denis MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham, also raises an interesting point. When the aforementioned Legg instructed him to repay £6,000 in mortgage and gas bills, it was splashed all over his local paper.
But when Sir Ian Kennedy, new head of Ipsa, reviewed the case, as he did a number of appeals, he found that the MP was right, Legg wrong and that MacShane had underclaimed by £209. The local paper gave it three paragraphs.
Can the elected MacShane sue the unelected, publicly-pensioned Legg for the damage he may well have done him as a man facing the electorate on 6 May? No: Legg's report is protected by parliamentary privilege.
Rough justice out there. What would Michael Foot think?
