Michael Foot 1913-2010

Michael Foot always reminded me of my much less well known grandfather, my mother's father, who was a life-long Labour supporter who lived to be a similar age. It is impossible to read or talk about the Labour Party over the years in Cornwall without bumping into the Feet. There is some retrospective annoyance that, when he was a determined Labour candidate for 'Falmouth and Penryn' - the first Labour held seat in Cornwall which had almost identical boundaries to the new seat of Truro and Falmouth  - A.L.Rowse dismissively claimed that Labour supporters in North Cornwall would be better supporting the Liberals, because the Cornish Foot family's intellectually vigorous Liberal tradition meant it would never go Labour. Rowse was a young, academically elitist Labour candidate convinced politics was about winning the rational argument, who moved Labour into second place here but was never elected, while occasionally confiding to his private diary that the "idiot people" got things wrong.

Last year a friend in Cornwall gave me a collection of some of Michael Foot's journalism. It includes Michael Foot's memoir of an old political sparring partner George Brown, which begins: "When Lord George Brown died at his Cornish home in June 1985 no comets were seen, but .... within a few days came a heavenly leakage or downpour, call it what you will, with the latest information, confirmed in colourful detail, that he had died a Catholic, that the local priest from Falmouth had been ready and prepared to perform the last rites." And later recalls: "The same George Brown who whispered at the top of his voice warnings against 'authoritarian' or 'Presidential' tendencies in the Labour Party, once got me expelled from it at a meeting called at three hours' notice .... George Brown with a thumping majority at his back or a card vote in his pocket, could be a boorish bully, and part of the Brownite or Gaitskellite fury against Wilson, one suspects, was that he outmanoeuvred them at their own game of behind the scenes confabulations and contrivances."

As a politician, Michael Foot was of a very different temper, and I doubt he privately converted to Catholicism because he let people read him like a book. While many more column inches may now be written about his brief Labour premiership, Michael Foot was someone who, with both feet grounded by his family's Cornish roots, could simply quote - in a moving tribute to Jennie Lee - this from Robert Ingersoll: "I believe in the fireside. I believe in the democracy of home. I believe in the republicanism of the family. I believe in liberty, equality, and love." And that is partly why Michael Foot will be remembered by many in Cornwall with great affection.