but I think Carl is going to have a very difficult time writing this book,” Julie ventured. Jenny muttered, “God, yes.” “Well, all I can say is that it won’t be the first time,” I replied.
The conversation with Jenny and Julie lasted a good two or three hours, late at night over drinks. Julie repeated a good deal of what she had already told me, dismayed Jenny (frequently dismayed) attempted to contradict or dilute Julie’s acerbic asides. The next day, Jenny spent an hour cautioning me about Julie, who had tended to rely on her mother or on a man to support her. This habit, Jenny implied, coloured much of what Julie had to say about Michael and Jill. But what about Jenny’s bias? She was the caretaker, the damage control operative—more sensible in some respects than Julie but also a politico palliating vexing situations. Julie was direct, Jenny oblique. Julie exaggerated, Jenny temporised. Jenny spoke of “scenarios,” implying that Julie had a tendency to fictionalise. Everything had to go “according to her plot.” Jenny spoke so low I wondered if my recorder could pick up her voice (it did just barely). She spoke, it seemed to me, as though she were trying to fly under the radar.
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“What was your father like?” The question came during dinner with filmmaker Fiona Cunningham-Reid, one of Michael’s recent finds whom he had invited to Dubrovnik. Michael responded in typical fashion: “A wonderful chap. He was the happiest chap I ever knew—all his life. Wordsworth’s happy warrior. I don’t say he did not have his trials. He lost more elections than he won.” We learned that Isaac and Jill got on very well, but we did not learn much else. I always found it astonishing how little Michael had to say about his family. Granted, our focus was supposed to be on Jill, it still seemed extraordinary to me how unwilling Michael was to reminisce about his upbringing.
“Your mother?” Fiona asked. “A very strong Methodist, anti-drink,” Michael said. Jenny brought up Lady Astor. “My father fought against her when she was first elected.” That was 1919, when Michael was only six, but he remembered going around Plymouth in a coach, electioneering with his father. “The Labour candidate got about twice the vote my father got. But my father got very friendly with Lady Astor. She was a very great spokesman for Plymouth. She had a lot to be said for her.” Lord Astor, too, earned Michael’s admiration for supporting the ambitious plan to rebuild Plymouth after the war. Michael loved to quote a line from The Way We Live concerning Lord Astor’s effort to interest the House of Lords in the rebuilding plan: “Such was the power of the House of Lords that nothing was done.”
Fiona was full of questions about Parliament because she was researching the life of her grandfather, an MP who had had some dealings with Michael. She asked him if Parliamentary speeches had been recorded. “Only in shorthand,” Michael explained and then the MP was allowed to check over the transcript for errors. “That was how I met Mrs. Thatcher,” Michael said. It must have been 1976, just before she was elected leader of the Conservative Party. Michael had just given a speech: “I went up to look at it, and there she was. She said to me something like, ‘They won’t let me say what I want to say.’ I said, ‘They will, sometime.’ She said, ‘Maybe.’” This recollection reminded him of another event in 1978, which marked the fiftieth year since women had been able to vote on the same terms as men. Callaghan was prime minister, with Michael as his second-in-command in charge of the House of Commons. “We decided to have a celebration in Westminster Hall.” Michael called it a “nonparty affair,” with invitations going out to all sorts of people. Jill had a big part in the planning of this event, including suggestions about who should participate. “We sent an invitation to Thatcher,” Michael recalled:
But she wouldn’t come. There was no kind of reason why she shouldn’t have come. She didn’t like to think that she owed anything to the women’s vote. Stupid woman! It didn’t endear her to Jill. But to do Jill credit ... she gives her a fair share because Thatcher came out with you’ve got to resist [the Serbs]. Jill said if she had still been there [in power] perhaps the war could have been stopped. Jill showed her in the film saying that.
Later Thatcher wanted to use Westminster Hall to stage a reception for a sitting U. S. president, Ronald Reagan. Since it would be a state event, she had to obtain the consent of the Labour Party leader, who then happened to be Michael Foot. He refused. Westminster Hall had received such figures as Charles DeGaulle. Thatcher said to Michael, “That’s very small-minded of you. Why are you opposing it?” Michael said, “Don’t you understand? He’s going to stand for election again.” It would be like electioneering for Reagan, Michael argued. “Our people don’t want him re-elected. It’s nothing like a nonparty event.” So Reagan had to deliver his speech in a room off of the House of Lords.
Michael was astonished to see Reagan reading his speech off of the teleprompter. “I’d never seen it before. Everybody does it now. But it’s an outrageous thing. It absolutely destroys the idea that the chap is making a real speech. Of course Reagan’s delivery was amazing. He could give a very good speech.”
After quite a long discussion, Julie stood up (bored, I suspect) and said, “Right, I’m going.” “What?” Michael asked. “I shall have a read, contemplate the weather and either go to the beach or into town.” For two days the weather had been blustery and we were dying for a swim. Into the noisome wind, Michael said, “It’s quietening down, isn’t it?” “No,” Julie said. He had been predicting milder weather almost hourly—that was Michael.
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After my week in Dubrovnik, I returned with Michael to Hampstead. Jenny arrived and began to talk about how things had changed since Jill’s death. The house, especially the downstairs kitchen and dining area, were untidy. Michael just dropped books and papers everywhere—a habit Jill refused to indulge. “He can do what he likes now,” Emma, the housekeeper, chipped in.
“There’s no point in talking about anything current,” Jenny said. “He’s out of touch now. He can get away with that in the Aneurin Bevan Society. They like history and that sort of thing. It’s all about ideology anyway.” Jenny was preparing to drive Michael to a talk. Then later in the day there was an event for Tribune. It was remarkable how many events Michael might pack into a day, although he certainly had learned to pace himself with his afternoon naps.
Jill’s death had exhausted him, but he was making a remarkable recovery. The last year or so of Jill’s life had been hard on him. When she was really ill, he would sleep on a sofa next to her. She was so weak it was hard for her to make it to the loo, which was just off the sitting room where she slept. She could no longer go upstairs or down stairs. Michael never talked about how he had waited on Jill during her last illness. What he did, and how he did it, would become a contentious subject later on in my interviews with his friends. Julie seemed a sore point with some. She helped out, but they thought her help was spotty.
Jenny thought Julie might try to seduce me, the biographer-in-waiting. I certainly saw Jenny’s point. But I felt like a double agent, since Julie was a precious source, but whatever her limitations and a surprising number of her stories checked out. I’ve read a novel or two in which the biographer beds a source, but such situations seemed ill advised and Julie never did pursue me.
None of this might be worth reporting, except that Jenny went on to say that Michael was well aware of Julie’s designs on me. Now that interested me because I did not think he had an eye for such shenanigans. “Carl’s arrived,” Jenny recalled telling Michael, when I first appeared at the Villa Dubrovnik. “Julie’s taken him off.” Now Jenny added, “He sort of sniggered under his breath and said something incredibly rude: ‘I expect they’re hard at it in the bedroom now.’” Emma laughed, “He didn’t!” I exclaimed. Then, on second thought, I added: “So maybe when I start to press him on other subjects, he’ll say, ‘Well, I know a thing about you.’” Jenny piled on, suggesting I use this approach with Michael: “I’ve told you about me, now you tell me about you.”
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