But what a life. Michael Foot is a giant of Labour politics, and I am going to spend the next thousands words telling you why. If you consider Foot an Old Labour mastodon, or blame him for wearing that donkey jacket, then look away now.

Foot’s tragedy was being elected leader of the Labour party in 1980. At the age of 67, he had the leadership of the party thrust upon him, at a time when the party was nearly ungovernable. His period of leadership was a disaster, with acquiescence to the hard left culminating in the terrible defeat of 1983. Labour secured 27% of the vote, or 6.8 million votes. The Tories won 45%, and 11.7 million people voted for them. But would another Labour figure have done any better? If Tony Benn or Denis Healey had been leader of the Labour party in 1983, following the Falklands War and four years of fratricide, I doubt they would have secured much more than 27%. To win the 1983 election Labour would have needed a sorcerer, not an alternative leader.

If Foot had not been elected leader, his reputation as a man of letters, biographer, rhetorician, politician and campaigner would be secure. He was editor of the Evening Standard at the age of 28. He was the anonymous co-author of Guilty Men, a pamphlet which firmly blamed Tory ministers (and Ramsay MacDonald) for appeasing Hitler. It was published in July 1940, and swiftly sold 200,000 copies despite WH Smith refusing to stock it. By documenting the Tories’ failures, Guilty Men helped to build the head of steam which saw Labour’s victory in 1945. Foot himself was part of the landslide.

In parliament Foot was a close friend and ally of Aneurin Bevan. Eventually Foot took over Bevan’s seat in Ebbw Vale. I have always considered the Bevanites, like the cavaliers in 1066 And All That, as ‘romantic but wrong’ and the Gaitskellites, like the roundheads, as ‘right but repulsive’. Foot fell out with Bevan when Bevan went to the party conference in Brighton in 1957 and denounced unilateral nuclear disarmament. If you want to read the best eyewitness account of Bevan’s famous speech (‘I would call that an emotional spasm’), then read Foot’s two-volume biography of Bevan, one of the best political biographies ever written.

He refused ministerial office in 1964, but came into government a decade later as an unremarkable employment secretary and then leader of the House. He did not wear the trappings of ministerial office well, nor master the artifices and compromises that high office demands.

Foot wrote brilliantly throughout his life: biographies of Byron, HG Wells, and endless essays and pen-portraits about figures as diverse as Wilde, Robert Owen, Tom Paine and Swift. He was the editor of Tribune twice, for nine years in total, during its glory days. Rarely for a great writer, Foot was an equally effective public speaker. Drawing on his early experience as president of the Oxford Union, Foot would delight audiences, from the Chamber of the House of Commons, to CND rallies.

He was depicted by the vicious tabloids and in nasty cartoons as a communist. But he was fiercely anti-communist. When the Sunday Times suggested he had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’ he sued for damages, won, and donated some of the money to Tribune. The rest went on a new kitchen for his Hampstead home. Unlike his contemporary Jack Jones, the union leader, who a new history of MI5 claims was in the pay of the Kremlin, Foot despised the Soviet Union for its perversion of socialist ideals. He was unambiguous in his denunciation of the Soviet suppressions in both Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

His unilateralism has lasted since the invention of the atomic bomb. Throughout the nuclear age, Foot has argued for Britain to give up its nuclear weapons on the path to worldwide nuclear disarmament. When presented with polling evidence by Bob Worcester during the 1983 election showing that the public thought this was nuts, and would vote Tory in vast numbers as a result, Foot simply carried on making his speeches making the case. He was wrong, but consistent. Unlike Bevan, or Kinnock, or a hundred former CND members currently in the parliamentary Labour party, he never resiled from his conviction, which shows a certain courage, or even, dare I say a ‘moral compass’?

But Foot is no pacifist. He backed the British taskforce in its recapture of the Falkland Islands. He spoke up loud and clear in support of military intervention in Bosnia to prevent the ethnic cleansing and massacres of Muslims. If Blair had been prime minister, he would have intervened in a way which stemmed the violence. The Tories sat on their hands while the death toll mounted. Foot sank his savings into a documentary ‘Two Hours from London’, made by his wife filmmaker Jill Craigie, which denounced European governments’ failure to stop Bosnian Serbian aggression.

Foot represents a radical tradition with its roots in the egalitarianism of the levellers and diggers, the internationalism of Tom Paine, the passionate indignation of the hunger marchers and the invective political journalism of George Orwell. He refuses to accept a knighthood or a peerage. Mark Seddon, former editor of Tribune, has called him ‘the greatest living Englishman’ which might be going a little far, but reflects the deep affection felt by many. He is, to use a word much loved by George Orwell, thoroughly ‘decent’.

And as to that donkey jacket? Well of course it wasn’t a donkey jacket at all, but a blue-green overcoat, bought by his wife, and praised on that fateful Remembrance Sunday by the Queen Mother. It only became a donkey jacket once the hyenas of Fleet Street got hold of it.

Photo: David Nimrod 2007

From the Progress archive. This piece was originally published on 30 October 2009

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