Michael Foot by Kenneth O. Morgan

Author:Kenneth O. Morgan [Morgan, Kenneth O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007369812
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2007-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

10

HOUSE AND PARTY LEADER

(1976–1980)

Michael Foot surveyed his changed world from an office of faded Victorian splendour with a bay window looking out on Horse Guards Parade. He moved from St James’s Square to 68 Whitehall, at the heart of government: he had access to number 10 directly through a connecting door later made famous in the television series Yes, Prime Minister.1 His new role as Lord President and Leader of the House was remarkably flexible and unstructured. To a degree, the job would be what he made of it. It was perhaps a role more appropriate for a free spirit like Foot than undertaking a heavy and formal departmental responsibility. He had only a handful of, mainly junior, officials to help him, unlike the large Civil Service machine he had had to assist and advise him at the Department of Employment. Much of his briefing came from the Cabinet Office next door at number 70, which also, of course, gave advice to 10 Downing Street, and thereby enabled the Prime Minister and his party deputy to say identical things. For Foot’s position was to be strengthened later in the year, on 21 October, when he defeated Shirley Williams in a little-noticed contest for the deputy leadership by 166 votes to 128. Callaghan had supported him.

It emerged at once that leading the House of Commons had its decidedly social side, especially as the political parties were so finely balanced and the government’s fate rested on a miscellany of small groupings. The nationalist minorities in Scotland and Wales, and Unionists in Northern Ireland, had to be conciliated with a variety of concessions – a pipeline here, compensation for retired quarrymen there. John Biffen, a Conservative Leader of the House in the 1980s, called it ‘a very drinks kind of job’. So it was, with Foot an active and genial host.2 Compared with an earlier Lord President, his old bugbear Herbert Morrison, Foot was a far more flexible and accessible, if also more disorganized, operator.

He had a large number of major responsibilities in his new role. His Private Secretary’s initial memorandum of 8 April 1976 ran to eight pages and listed twenty-four separate items.3 The Lord President bore overall responsibility for the government’s legislative programme, and had formal relationships with the opposition leaders and with all Members of Parliament. It was a priority of Foot’s to ensure, along with the Chief Whip Michael Cocks, that the government had sufficient votes to survive. He also had to arrange, with Cocks’s Private Secretary Freddie Warren, the business of the House, to make parliamentary statements and answer questions on a wide-ranging and unpredictable number of issues. His very first formal debate on the adjournment ranged, in his Private Secretary Clive Saville’s words, from ‘the iniquity of VAT on yachts to the fate of the New York dressed turkey’. His role also covered domestic Commons matters (such as the huge £500,000 deficit in the catering budget), Members’ pay and pensions, and arrangements for party political broadcasting. All these were unpredictable issues, especially in a hung Parliament.

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