B
ritish Labour politician and former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, who has died aged 96, grotesquely described by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan as “God’s Englishman”, deserves a place in history, apart from his laudable achievements in bringing the British Labour Party to disaster when leader: he was not only the biggest liar since Goebbels, but a good deal more effective. As a wrecker of British industry he was also second to none. He was the principal author, under the pen-name “Cato” of the World War II book Guilty Men, which created the enduring myth that the British Tories had been solely responsible for Britain blundering into the War disarmed, and the ill-equipped British Army being driven into the sea at Dunkirk. There is no doubt Guilty Men, completed in only about a week, is a brilliant piece of writing: fast-paced, taut and vivid with a sense of impending doom, its recounting of British politics in the 1930s captured perfectly Churchill’s quote: “Death is in charge of the clattering train.”
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The first edition was published shortly after Dunkirk. The first chapter “the doomed army,” a vivid picture of the Dunkirk beaches, describes British soldiers with Brenguns fighting hopelessly against Panzers and Stukas: “flesh against steel …. this is the story of an army doomed before it took the field.” The Home Secretary, by co-incidence also a Labour politician, made apparently unlimited amounts of paper available for its printing in the middle of the war, despite paper being severely rationed, and it went through edition after edition. There is no doubt that it played a major part in the Conservative defeat of 1945 and the subsequent installation of a socialist Labour government with all the disasters that followed. It was a perfect example of the deliberate creation of a political myth. Few if any other books can claim such influence. Cleverly, while damning the old guard of pre-war Tories, it praised Churchill, thus ensuring at least some acceptance in patriotic Conservative circles. Foot himself neither served in the armed forces nor took part in war-work that might have helped
the defence effort. He is said –rather vaguely – to have had asthma but this would not have excluded him from a variety of defencerelated occupations. Like all the best liars, Foot based his work on a half-truth. Apart from the fact that appeasement of a man like Hitler, bent on war more-or-less for its own sake, would never work, it is true that is many ways Britain’s pre-war re-armament was grossly inadequate. As George Orwell put it: “[In] 1940 we nearly perished for lack of a large, efficient army, which we could only have had if we had introduced conscription at least three years earlier.” (Whether Britain could have afforded more re-armament is another matter.) But Orwell prefaced this with another
A vivid picture of the Dunkirk beaches … British soldiers with Bren-guns fighting hopelessly against Panzers and Stukas