Adam Boulton Diary – the Michael Foot letters

The boast on the short biography I am sometimes asked for is that I have “interviewed every Prime Minister since Sir Alec Douglas-Home”. It’s true, though not, of course necessarily while they were all in office: I was four years old in 1963 when Douglas Home took over.

My encounters with the more senior premiers were on the hoof but more than what the Americans call “brush-bys”. I sent a note into the Lords chamber asking Sir Alec to comment under embargo on the peerage awarded to Harold Macmillan. I’ve never quite understood why his opening words to me on the ennoblement of his predecessor were, “is this some kind of joke?”.

I caught up with Harold Wilson for a comment on an issue of the day after he had been a guest on David Frost’s Sunday morning breakfast show on TV-am. It was one of the ailing Wilson’s last such appearances.

Ted Heath is the only ex-Prime Minister I know of who frequently and generously entertained journalists as guests at his home in Salisbury. He liked to show off his bibelots, most of which had a story behind them, and was open with his strong opinions, piercing table talk with an acid observation.

Jim Callaghan also continued to be politically active after Number Ten. I once interviewed him and Ted in a double header during some royal event at Guildhall.

After checking the records, I can also say that I have interviewed every Leader of the Opposition who never made it to Downing Street over the same period. Not always as often as I would have liked as I’m reminded by a newly unearthed exchange of correspondence between me and the Right Honourable Michael Foot MP, Labour leader 1980-1983.

Foot’s letter exudes high levels of frankness and self-confidence which are sadly lacking from our present generation of political leaders. Footie was an old socialist but very classy with it.

Mark Seddon kindly sent me copies of the letters a few weeks ago. He is currently preparing the Foot papers for their final destination at the Peoples History Museum in Manchester. Seddon is a former editor of Tribune. Foot was the best-known editor of the democratic socialist paper.

I encountered Foot during my early years at TV-am. A political journalist would be unlikely to avoid a party leader during the 1983 general election and its aftermath. But Sky News, which I joined for its launch in 1989, had no decent Michael Footage because he boycotted organisations connected to Rupert Murdoch, Sky’s founder.

It was a very personal feud. Foot didn’t have a thing against media proprietors in general. He had been a star correspondent for Max Beaverbrook’s Express.  

In 1994, The Sunday Times splashed on its front page “KGB: Michael Foot Was Our Agent”. The story was based on allegations by the soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky. Michael Foot sued and won substantially the following year. He later told an interviewer that he had re-carpeted his Hampstead home with the damages and that “the kitchen downstairs was paid for by Murdoch…the best thing he ever did.” Tribune was given £10,000.

In 2012 John Witherow, the editor of The Sunday Times at the time of the libel, admitted to the Leveson Inquiry which the phone hacking scandal that the story was “incorrect…overcooked…and cocked up.”

Those words were still in the future when I contacted Michael Foot in 2003 hoping his ninetieth birthday might be the chance to record an interview. I confess we were also hoping to gather material for his eventual obituary. “Your media reservations about media outlets associated are well known.” I wrote, “as a gesture of goodwill…we would also be happy to make a significant donation to…the Tribune newspaper.”

I also pleaded that Sky News was an impartial broadcaster and that “Even Dennis Skinner talks to us now!”

No dice. A couple of weeks later I got a reply beginning, with uncalled for courtesy, “It is really disgraceful of me not to have replied before now to your most charming letter, especially as it seems to offer some untold gift amounting to millions for Tribune. I will do almost anything for them.”

However: “I think you must also be fully aware of the argument of principle which I had with your proprietor, Mr Murdoch. Even before that libel action, I had many objections to what he was doing to the British press and – despite his obvious intelligence in hiring people such as yourself to work for him – I still think that he does to British journalism, and indeed British live generally outweighs the good.

So I fear that I must refuse your kind offer to do an interview and I will have to explain to Mark Seddon why he is not getting the donation from you but why he might ask for an equal sum from me.”

That was that. We had nothing in the can when Michael Foot died in 2010 at the age of 96.

The row over the KGB “Agent Boot” story continued to rankle both sides after Foot’s death. In spite of John Witherow’s admission to Lord Leveson, The Times, now under his editorship, published another, carefully worded, splash in 2018 “MI6 Believed Michael Foot Was Paid Soviet Agent”. The story was based on a book about Oleg Gordievsky and his original claims. You can’t libel the dead and, anyway, MI6’s suspicions don’t amount to a direct allegation.

I’m sorry I never got to interview Michael Foot at length about his “political life and times” as I had requested. It was still a pleasure to deal with him.  It was also a reminder of how things used to be. When political leaders and journalists knew each other and dealt with each other directly and frankly – without protective barricades put up by spokespeople and special advisors. A time long gone when they felt they needed to justify not giving an interview rather than evading one automatically.

I doubt that there will ever be another literary archive written personally by a British political leader of comparable value. Texts and emails do the job nowadays. I’m lucky to have interviewed all the Prime Ministers and Opposition leaders since Sir Alex Douglas Home, and I will keep trying with the next ones.

In case you were wondering, Mark Seddon tells me “Michael didn’t make a contribution as he promised” to compensate for the loss of interview fee. Politicians eh!