RIP Michael Foot

Michael Foot, campaigning journalist and former Labour leader has died. He was 96, and perhaps the last socialist leader the Party ever had, despite his occasional shifts to the right (by my standards, anyway).

Was he a successful leader? No: he never won an election and saw his party riven by left and rightwing splits. He was constantly, appallingly attacked by the usual newspapers who criticised his clothes (pathetic: they falsely claimed he wore a donkey jacket to the Remembrance Day ceremony), claimed he was an agent of the USSR and all the other smears applied to threats to the establishment. Perhaps this was related to the fact that as a serious journalist, he really, really hated Rupert Murdoch.

He was right about everything (Suez, Vietnam, the Prague Spring, Korea, Rushdie, Serbian aggression, republicanism - he refused all honours) except on Europe: I think a USSE is possible, he thought that it was inevitably a capitalist plot.

However, I admired him hugely as a great journalist and author in the 1930s, and as a Cabinet Minister under Wilson and Callaghan. He was a great constituency MP from 1945 until 1992, and was at the heart of the leftwing intelligentsia which used to be such a prominent part of this country's intellectual life. He was also, under the pseudonyms of 'Cato' and 'Cassius', author of two Left Book Club publications, which I collect.

And, of course, he was a co-founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of which I am proud to be a member. He was a thoughtful, intelligent and gentle man who had the misfortune to be active in a period in which these qualities were perceived as weaknesses.

His 1983 Labour Manifesto caused the biggest Labour defeat in its history - and one rightwing Labour MP (and notable expenses hoover) called it the 'longest suicide note in history', yet most of its ideas are now being implemented, it having taken 25 years for New Labour to realise that market forces are inherently evil (still waiting for disarmament, but we're getting there):

The 1983 Labour manifesto, strongly socialist in tone, advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and a return to a more interventionist industrial policy. The manifesto also pledged that a Labour government would abolish the House of Lords, nationalise banks and leave the EEC. Among the Labour MPs newly-elected in 1983 in support of this manifesto were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.