Michael Foot

Michael Foot was born in Plymouth in 1913, a son of the Liberal MP Isaac Foot. He studied at Wadham College, Oxford, where he was president of the union, and joined the Labour Party in the 1930s. He worked on Tribune and the Evening Standard and in 1940 co-wrote Guilty Men, an attack on the politicians behind appeasement. He was MP for Plymouth Devonport from 1945 to 1955, and after the death of his friend Aneurin Bevan he won Ebbw Vale in 1960, representing it and its successor seat until 1992. He was a founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As Employment Secretary from 1974 he restored trade union rights lost under the Industrial Relations Act 1971 and helped create Acas and the Health and Safety Executive. He was Leader of the House under James Callaghan and was elected Labour leader in 1980. Labour won 28 per cent of the vote at the 1983 election and he stood down. He wrote biographies of Bevan, Byron and H. G. Wells.

Admirers remember Foot as a principled democratic socialist, a great parliamentary orator and a writer devoted to liberty, and some credit him with holding Labour together when it was dangerously split between its left and right. Critics see his leadership as a period of division and electoral disaster: the 1983 manifesto was famously called "the longest suicide note in history", and Labour's vote share was its lowest since the 1920s. A 1995 claim by a KGB defector that he had been an agent of influence was unsupported by evidence, and Foot won substantial libel damages from the Sunday Times.