65 Facts About Michael Foot

1.

Michael Mackintosh Foot was a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to 1983.

2.

Michael Foot co-wrote the 1940 polemic against appeasement of Hitler, Guilty Men, under a pseudonym.

3.

Michael Foot served as a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1955 and again from 1960 until he retired in 1992.

4.

Michael Foot was appointed to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment under Harold Wilson in 1974, and he later served as Leader of the House of Commons under James Callaghan.

5.

Michael Foot was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under Callaghan from 1976 to 1980.

6.

Michael Foot led Labour into the 1983 general election, when the party obtained its lowest share of the vote in 65 years and the fewest parliamentary seats it had had at any time since the end of the First World War, which remained the case until Labour's defeat at the 2019 general election.

7.

Michael Foot resigned the party leadership following the election, and was succeeded as leader by Neil Kinnock.

8.

Books authored by Michael Foot include Guilty Men ; The Pen and the Sword, a biography of Jonathan Swift; and a biography of Aneurin Bevan.

9.

Michael Foot was born in Lipson Terrace, Plymouth, Devon, the fourth son and fifth of seven children of Isaac Michael Foot and of the Scotswoman Eva.

10.

Isaac Michael Foot was a solicitor and founder of the Plymouth law firm Michael Foot and Bowden.

11.

Michael Foot was the uncle of campaigning journalist Paul Foot and of charity worker Oliver Foot.

12.

Michael Foot was educated at Plymouth College Preparatory School, Forres School in Swanage, and Leighton Park School in Reading.

13.

Michael Foot then went on to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Wadham College, Oxford.

14.

Michael Foot was profoundly influenced by the poverty and unemployment that he witnessed in Liverpool, which was on a different scale from anything he had seen in Plymouth.

15.

Michael Foot joined the Labour Party and first stood for parliament, aged 22, at the 1935 general election, where he contested Monmouth.

16.

Michael Foot supported unilateral disarmament, after multilateral disarmament talks at Geneva had broken down in 1933.

17.

Michael Foot became a journalist, working briefly on the New Statesman, before joining the left-wing weekly Tribune when it was set up in early 1937 to support the Unity Campaign, an attempt to secure an anti-fascist united front between Labour and other left-wing parties.

18.

Michael Foot resigned in 1938 after the paper's first editor, William Mellor, was sacked for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement.

19.

Michael Foot was an avid anti-imperialist and was heavily involved in the India League.

20.

Michael Foot was speaking in defence of the Daily Mirror, which had criticised the conduct of the war by the Churchill government.

21.

Michael Foot mocked the notion that the Government would make no more territorial demands of other newspapers if they allowed the Mirror to be censored.

22.

Michael Foot left the Standard in 1945 to join the Daily Herald as a columnist.

23.

Michael Foot rejoined Tribune as editor from 1948 to 1952, and was again the paper's editor from 1955 to 1960.

24.

Michael Foot fought the Plymouth Devonport constituency in the 1945 general election.

25.

Michael Foot won the seat for Labour for the first time, holding it until his surprise defeat by Dame Joan Vickers at the 1955 general election.

26.

Michael Foot successfully urged Bevan to follow through with his threat to resign from the Cabinet in protest of the introduction of prescription charges at the National Health Service, leading to a split in the Labour Party between Bevanites and Gaitskellites.

27.

Michael Foot was a critic of the West's handling of the Korean War, an opponent of West German rearmament in the early 1950s and a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957.

28.

Michael Foot returned to parliament at a by-election in Ebbw Vale, Monmouthshire, in 1960, the seat having been left vacant by Bevan's death.

29.

Michael Foot had the Labour whip withdrawn in March 1961 after rebelling against the Labour leadership over Royal Air Force estimates.

30.

Michael Foot only returned to the Parliamentary Labour Group in 1963, when Harold Wilson became Leader of the Labour Party after the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell.

31.

Michael Foot opposed the government's moves to restrict immigration, join the European Communities and reform the trade unions, was against the Vietnam War and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, and denounced the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

32.

Michael Foot challenged James Callaghan for the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party in 1967, but failed.

33.

Michael Foot served in the Second Shadow Cabinet of Harold Wilson in various roles between 1970 and 1974.

34.

The first ballot saw Michael Foot narrowly come second to Short winning 110 votes to the latter's 111.

35.

The second ballot saw Short increase his total to 145 votes, while Michael Foot's only rose to 116, giving Short victory by 29 votes.

36.

When, in 1974, Labour returned to office under Wilson, Michael Foot became Secretary of State for Employment.

37.

Michael Foot was responsible for the Health and Safety at Work Act, as well as the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act that repealed the Heath ministry's trade union reforms, and the Employment Protection Act, which introduced legal protections against being sacked for becoming pregnant and legislated for maternity pay.

38.

Michael Foot was one of the mainstays of the "no" campaign in the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Communities.

39.

When Wilson retired in 1976, Michael Foot contested the party leadership and led in the first ballot, but was ultimately defeated by James Callaghan.

40.

Later that year Michael Foot was elected Deputy Leader, and during the Callaghan government Michael Foot took a seat in Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, which gave him the unenviable task of trying to maintain the survival of the Callaghan government as its majority evaporated.

41.

Whilst Leader of the Commons, Michael Foot simultaneously held the post of Lord President of the Council.

42.

Michael Foot was elected Labour leader on 10 November 1980, beating Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election.

43.

Michael Foot argues Labour MPs were looking for a figure from the left who could unite the wider party with the leadership, which Healey could not do.

44.

Richards states that despite being on the left of the party Michael Foot was not a "tribal politician" and had proved he could work with those of different ideologies and had been a loyal deputy to Callaghan.

45.

Michael Foot was criticised by some on the left for supporting Thatcher's immediate resort to military action.

46.

Michael Foot did not make it generally known that the Queen Mother had described it as a "sensible coat for a day like this", which could be considered a slight or a compliment depending on whether irony was intended.

47.

Michael Foot later donated the coat to the People's History Museum in Manchester, which holds a collection that spans Foot's entire political career from 1938 to 1990, and his personal papers dating back to 1926.

48.

Critically, Labour held on in a subsequent by-election in Darlington, and Michael Foot remained leader for the 1983 general election.

49.

The party failed to master the medium of television, while Michael Foot addressed public meetings around the country, and made some radio broadcasts, in the same manner as Clement Attlee did in 1945.

50.

Michael Foot took a back seat in Labour politics following 1983 and retired from the House of Commons at the 1992 general election, when Labour lost to the Conservative Party for the fourth election in succession, but remained politically active.

51.

Michael Foot defended Salman Rushdie, after Ayatollah Khomeini advocated killing the novelist in a fatwa, and took a strongly pro-interventionist position against Serbia and Montenegro during the Yugoslav Wars, supporting NATO forces whilst citing defence of civilian populations in Croatia and Bosnia.

52.

Michael Foot remained a high-profile member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

53.

Michael Foot wrote several books, including highly regarded biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H G Wells.

54.

Michael Foot became a supporter of pro-Europeanism in the 1990s.

55.

Michael Foot was an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

56.

Michael Foot is remembered with affection in Westminster as a great parliamentarian.

57.

Michael Foot was widely liked, and admired for his integrity, habitual courtesy, and generosity of spirit, by both his colleagues and opponents.

58.

Moore said there was no evidence to show that Michael Foot gave away state secrets.

59.

Michael Foot served for several years as a director of the club, seeing two promotions under his tenure.

60.

Michael Foot was married to the film-maker, author and feminist historian Jill Craigie from 1949 until her death fifty years later.

61.

In February 2007, it was revealed that Michael Foot had an extramarital affair with a woman around 35 years his junior in the early 1970s.

62.

On 23 July 2006, his 93rd birthday, Michael Foot became the longest-lived leader of a major British political party, passing Lord Callaghan's record of 92 years, 364 days.

63.

Michael Foot used a walking stick for the rest of his life.

64.

In October 1976, Michael Foot became blind in one eye following an attack of shingles.

65.

Michael Foot died at his Hampstead, north London home on the morning of 3 March 2010 at the age of 96.