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Are you ready to answer some questions?” I asked Paul. He was quite willing to oblige. I asked him when he first met Michael. Paul’s earliest memory of Michael places him at the Foot family home in Pencrebar, just about the time of the 1945 general election: [PF] The only thing [of importance] to us was how many members of the family were going to get elected. The information we had was no chance for Michael. He was the black sheep. He had gone away from the family tradition. [CR] No longer a liberal. [PF] Serve him bloody well right. [CR] Teach him a lesson. [PF] Everybody else had a good chance of winning. [CR] Do you think his father felt that way? [PF] No. They didn’t actually say that. It was the banter. His mother was a bit that way. [MF] Ah! Not my mother. [PF] When Michael was in the first results and he’d won, it followed that everyone else would win by enormous majorities. All through the next days there were these terrible results: Dingle had lost in Dundee, and John lost in Bodmin and then the worst was grandfather in Tavistock. He just shut himself up in his room. He wouldn’t talk to anybody for about four days afterwards.
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