I was genuinely saddened to hear of the death of the former Labour Leader, Michael Foot, yesterday. Without a doubt, his death marks the passing of one of the great parliamentarians of the post-war era.

Born into a Liberal family, Foot became a committed socialist after he witnessed extreme poverty in Liverpool. He subsequently came to London and worked for both Tribune, and for Beaverbrook as a highly successful journalist and writer. Foot gained his first great claim to fame as the author of Guilty Men, the 1940 polemic against the pre-war appeasers.

In Labour’s 1945 landslide victory, Foot unexpectedly won Plymouth Devonport for the party. After losing Devonport in 1955 he succeeded his hero, Aneurin Bevan in Ebbw Vale after his death in 1960.

Michael Foot represented a tradition in the Labour Party that often fell out with the party’s leadership, and he even had the whip taken from him in the early 1960s. He also shunned high office, despite several offers of ministerial posts from Harold Wilson; he finally he relented to be Employment Secretary and then Leader of the House under Callaghan.

Much has been written about Foot’s great oratory (a skill sadly lacking in modern politics) and for me, one of his most memorable Commons speeches had to be the one he gave as Leader of the House of Commons on 28^th March 1979, when he closed the ‘No Confidence’ debate on the night the Callaghan Labour Government fell.

He became my party’s leader in the aftermath of that 1979 election defeat and Callaghan’s resignation the following year, as the candidate most acceptable to both wings of the party. It is easy to be critical of Foot’s leadership not least because he led Labour into near oblivion in the 1983 General Election where we came close to third place behind the SDP-Liberal Alliance!

I actually take the more sympathetic ‘Kinnock view’ that Michael Foot did his best to hold what had become a divided and self-indulgent party together in extremely difficult circumstances. In any case, the Labour Party survived (which was by no means certain back in the early 1980s) and after 18-years in the political wilderness, eventually returned to government.

The 1997 Labour manifesto couldn’t have been more further removed from that of 1983 – or ‘the longest suicide note in history’, as Sir Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed it.

Whatever Michael Foot thought of Tony Blair’s new Labour project, he continued to passionately support the Labour movement and the Labour government, and loyally kept quieter than I imagine he would have done in the 1950s!