Michael Foot;MICHAEL FOOT, who has died aged 96, was leader of the British Labour party during a period in opposition from 1980 to 1983 and a cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He graced the House of Commons as an independent-minded backbencher, and was widely acclaimed as one of the most principled British politicians of his era.
During Wilson's first government (1964-70), Foot had been a fierce backbench critic on issues ranging from wage restraint to Vietnam. However, when Labour lost power to Edward Heath's Conservatives, Foot accepted a place on the opposition front bench and led the fight against British entry into the EEC.
With Labour back in office from February 1974 and submitting renegotiated terms to a European referendum in 1975, he campaigned for a No vote. Uniquely, cabinet ministers were allowed to campaign on opposite sides. Foot was then secretary of state for employment, and won a reputation for administrative ability.
In 1976, Wilson retired suddenly, Callaghan defeated Foot in the leadership contest and Foot became - though not formally - deputy prime minister. His experience from 1976 to 1979 was in general unhappy, as was that of the government. Callaghan retired in 1980 and Foot narrowly defeated Denis Healey for the leadership.
Many thought him ill-advised to seek the leadership, which indeed brought him no laurels. But the ultimate judgment may well be that he performed the vital service of holding his party together when it was polarised between centrist Healey and left-winger Tony Benn.
He had little chance of further successes. Rejecting his pleas, 25 Labour MPs joined the Social Democratic party. Then Benn stood against Healey for the deputy leadership, plunging the party into a damaging struggle. And in 1982, Thatcher's triumph in the Falklands ensured her supremacy.
For Foot, the election campaign of 1983 was a disaster. His public image was terminally damaged. He was lampooned as Worzel Gummidge: the TV scarecrow seemed a visual match for Foot's often unkempt appearance. His 1981 appearance at the Cenotaph wearing what was described (wrongly) as a donkey jacket seriously alienated middle England.
At 28 per cent, Labour's share of the 1983 poll was the lowest since the 1920s. Foot immediately gave up his party leadership, to be succeeded by Neil Kinnock.
Michael Mackintosh Foot - Mackintosh was his Scottish mother's maiden name - was the fifth of seven children of Isaac Foot, a solicitor by profession, collector of valuable books, lord mayor of Plymouth, Liberal MP for two short spells and an ardent Methodist and temperance campaigner. Michael was born at the family home, 1 Lipson Terrace, Plymouth.
He was educated at Leighton Park, in Reading, a fee-paying but heterodox school founded by Quakers, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he took a second-class degree in classics and was elected president of the union.
Settling in London, he was given a try-out at the New Statesman, but Kingsley Martin, the editor, decided that he was less than brilliant. He joined the staff of Tribune, founded in 1937 by Stafford Cripps as a mouthpiece for his left-wing ideas. Association with Cripps's Socialist League brought Foot two friendships: with Aneurin Bevan, MP for Ebbw Vale, regarded by the younger man with fervent admiration; and with another Tribune writer, Barbara Betts, later Barbara Castle after she married.
In 1938 Lord Beaverbrook hired him as a feature writer on the London Evening Standard. Foot's affection for Beaverbrook embarrassed socialists who saw the proprietor of Express newspapers as the embodiment of evil. Beaverbrook paid Foot an inflated salary, sent unexpected cheques, invited him for holidays at his villa on the French Riviera, lent him a cottage on his estate in Surrey, and rescued the Tribune when a libel suit threatened it with extinction.
Foot was on the Beaverbrook payroll when war came. With Winston Churchill replacing Neville Chamberlain, Beaverbrook switched from his support for appeasement to defiance of the Nazi threat, voiced in Standard leaders written by Foot. Those leaders were as erudite as they were eloquent, quoting within two months from Pericles, Cato, the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Edward Gibbon, Louis Saint-Just, Walt Whitman, Giuseppe Mazzini and Joseph Conrad.
It was also time to denounce the politicians who had landed Britain in peril. Foot and two other Beaverbrook journalists, under the pseudonym Cato, wrote a 40,000-word book, Guilty Men, over a weekend in 1940. Its ultimate sale was an astonishing 200,000.
In 1945 he became MP for the Devonport division of Plymouth. The campaign occasioned his first meeting with Jill Craigie, who was making a film about the rebuilding of heavily bombed Plymouth. They were married four years later.
When Foot lost his seat in 1955, he said to Jill: "Now I can write that book." The book in question - Foot's fifth, but his first non-topical work - was The Pen and the Sword, a study of Jonathan Swift.
The interest in Swift brought Foot regularly to Dublin. He had a broader affection for Ireland, which manifested itself quietly in the 1970s and 1980s when the IRA was bombing in Britain. He made it his business to visit regularly. There was nothing overtly political in these gestures; he was simply extending the hand of friendship.
Foot stayed in the Commons until 1992. He had three major works to his credit: The Pen and the Sword; his two-volume biography of Bevan (1962 and 1973); and The Politics of Paradise (1988), a scholarly book on Byron. His book on HG Wells, The History of Mr Wells, appeared in 1995. A book on the nuclear arms race - Dr Strangelove, I Presume - followed in 1999. Last came The Uncollected Michael Foot (2003).
As a young man, Foot was plagued by asthma and eczema. He almost lost his life in a car crash in 1963, which left him with his characteristic, lopsided walk. In 1976, after an attack of shingles, he lost the sight of one eye. Yet he was essentially, as Jill liked to say, "as tough as old boots". She died in 1999.
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Michael Mackintosh Foot: born July 23rd, 1913; died March 3rd, 2010