Footy and me
I did two things with Paul Foot. Over two days, he, Colin Wallace and I copy-edited the manuscript of what became Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? Foot was impressively objective about his own writing, accepting editing suggestions on their merits. During a lunch break he said to me: ‘What’s a bright guy like you doing in the Labour Party?’ I replied: ‘What’s a bright guy like you doing in the SWP?’ We laughed.
The second time we worked together was during our most minor contributions to the Ken Loach film Hidden Agenda. The script for the film, by Jim Allen, had been informed a little by Lobster 11: the ‘hidden agenda’ in the film’s title was evidence of plotting against Harold Wilson’s government. I was invited to London by Loach and in a room in a hotel in central London found Loach, a couple of the cast, some technicians – and Paul Foot. To our consternation Foot and I learned that Loach wanted us to improvise dialogue as if we were two of the conspirators in the anti-Labour plot; we were going to provide the secretly recorded plotting for the tape recording at the centre of the script.
I had never acted and neither had Foot. We said, ‘Can we write it for you, and you get some actors?’ (There were two sitting in the room, drinking tea.) No: Loach wanted us to improvise it. So in front of some professional actors, mind, we spent an excruciating 15 minutes trying to improvise a dialogue about the 1970s, pretending to be a British Army officers engaged in a cabal. We tried and tried and tried – it was all embarrassing rubbish – and eventually Loach said, ‘Fine’.
If you sit through Hidden Agenda – pretty poor film, in my opinion, despite a great cast – right at the end, the McGuffin, the tape of ‘the plotting’, is put into a cassette player in a car and you hear a few indistinct sentences of dialogue: that’s us.
Foot and I left the hotel and got into his knackered old Mini. For Colin Wallace supporters like us it was quite an occasion: it had been announced that day that David Calcutt QC, after examining the evidence, had found that the 1975 Civil Service Appeal Board hearing of Colin Wallace’s appeal against his dismissal had been rigged by the MOD, just as Wallace had claimed; and this meant that Wallace was eventually going to win his struggle with the British state. (Calcutt’s judgement is reproduced in Lobster 20.) As we crawled through central London’s traffic, Foot was exultant: ‘All my life I have been trying to rattle the British establishment, and I’ve finally done it.’
RR