The death of Michael Foot severs another link to a past when it appeared natural to call MPs “honourable members” and politics itself was a noble pursuit where positions were made rather merely taken.
Born into a old liberal family, Foot converted to socialism at Oxford and emerged on the national stage as a ferocious critic of appeasing fascism during the late 1930s as a co-author of Guilty Men. He was later to take an equally strong line with those who excused Communist totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.
A journalist, author and politician, this was a man who was unashamedly an intellectual — a man of letters and ideas — steeped in Hazlitt and Cromwell.
As an MP, first for Plymouth Devonport and later Ebbw Vale, Foot was a left-winger. He formed a tight bond with Aneurin Bevan in challenging the Labour leadership, although they were to fall out over Foot’s support for unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Mr Michael Foot, aged 67, last night became the new leader of the Labour Party
When he eventually became a minister in 1974, Foot was in the vanguard of policy-making pushing through reforms on women’s rights through the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act which did not wait for consensus.
His leadership of Labour between 1980 and 1983 has often been written off as a disaster which saw the party achieve its lowest share of the popular vote in a post-war election.
The 700-page manifesto in the 1983 campaign — promising higher taxes, nuclear disarmament, withdrawal for Europe and the nationalisation of the banks — was famously described by Gerald Kaufman as the “longest suicide note in history”.
An old man when he came to the leadership of the party at the age of 67, his once dazzling powers of oratory were dimming and, in any case, unsuited to the modern era of sober television interviews.
Others, however, have been kinder to his legacy and suggest that at a time of left wing insurrection led by Tony Benn, no one else could have held the party together.
The 1983 defeat was a wake-up call to Labour which led to the long march back to power under Neil Kinnock, a protege of Foot’s, and Tony Blair.
Foot had spotted the potential of Blair in the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, declaring that Labour’s no hope candidate in that contest had a “big future in politics”. Both Blair and Gordon Brown were among the new intake of Labour MPs in 1983.
Perhaps, aware that he would never be able to lead Labour to victory, Foot’s legacy was finding someone who could.
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