Music Memory And Michael Foot

Things sometimes come together. We have had the finals of the Leeds Piano Competition at Leeds Town Hall, above, and the media being in a flurry over whether or not Michael Mackintosh Foot, once Leader of the Labour Party was a "bookies runner" for the Soviet KGB. Foot, who loved music, left us in 2010 but it was great to see that Fanny Waterman, founder of the Competition in 1963 is still active.

Leeds Town Hall is a place where I have been several hundred times, the great majority for musical occasions but at others for conferences, big meetings for this and that and at a couple Foot was on stage telling us how he saw it and what should be. This grated on the ears a lot more than the most modern bang bong music.

Wikipedia has a long item on Foot so I do not need to go into all his history, background and career. Born in 1913 he was into politics from day one given his family and their connections. Then when a journalist and political scribbling he became a party "intellectual", stop laughing at the back.

His formative years were those of the 1930's. Eighty years on despite all the sources, now visual as well as written, it is difficult to describe and explain the complexity of the various schools of politics and political thought of that era. Personally, I think for those of the mid 21st Century it is impossible.

It is enough to say that all the various groups, interests, agencies and representative bodies overlapped and connected not only in many ways and in relation to many issues. They were in and out of each other's meetings, demo's, libraries, favoured eating and watering holes, Hyde Park corner etc. etc.. In the London of the 50's it was still like this, despite the Cold War.

Which brings us to Stalin, inevitably, and to a contemporary of Foot, Robert Conquest, born in 1917 at Malvern, with Edward Elgar up the street. See the Wikipedia on Conquest, it was not until the 1960's with his works that the realisation of the terror and vileness of the Stalin regime became wider known. It was known to the UK and USA intelligence services but how much was known to all the political activists at the time?

My opinion of the Left wing groups of the mid 20th Century is that they were a mixed bunch with very different ideals. The workers wanted to keep their jobs, retain the existing industrial economy and have decent pay and conditions, hence the power of the trade unions. Then you have the moderate Labour element, many of them lost Liberals. Along with them were posse's of intellectuals who violently disagreed more than they ever agreed.

Foot was one of these, in an airy fairy land of his own, looking at the Soviet Union as the model for the UK to follow and to ally with. They did not need to attract him or to pay him, He would have done most of it for free and often would pay up some from his own pocket. When and if a Soviet agent now and again came up with a gift who could ever refuse a gesture of generosity?

Especially, if they were a couple free tickets for the Wigmore Hall or the Royal Festival Hall for something very special. I recall the rare visits of orchestras or performers from the East at Leeds, drawing audiences from afar. Much earlier, I was at the performance in 1958 when Van Cliburn, US winner of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition was at the Festival Hall.

So was Michael Foot, MI5, MI6 and more or less the entire Soviet embassy senior staff. It was an interesting interval.