A giant of politics

HE WAS a politician of another age – an age when oratory, intellect and ideology mattered – who will be best remembered for foundering when confronted with the beginnings of modern political practice in this country.

Michael Foot, whose death was announced yesterday, was a complex man, a polymath as happy discussing or writing literature as editing a newspaper, or deploying his rapier-like wit in debates within his party or across the floor of the House of Commons.

What he was clearly not suited for was the leadership of Labour in the dark days of the early 1980s, when the party he loved moved so far to the left – ironically the wing from which he came – that it came close to self-destruction.

It was he who led Labour into the 1983 election with a pro-nationalisation, unilateralist manifesto that was described, accurately, as the longest suicide note in history. The outcome was inevitable.

His supporters in the Labour party would argue that during his leadership Mr Foot began to realise Labour had to change and that process was taken up by his successor and protg, Neil Kinnock. His detractors would say that as a long-standing man of the left he had been part of the problem.

But leaving those arguments aside, as the cross-party tributes made clear yesterday, Michael Foot will be remembered as a passionate politician of high principle; a man who was one of the great figures of post-war politics; and a reminder of a political age never to return.