Dead Michael Foot

[Tuber Mirum 125]

no comment-suffice to say I will make a formal statement tonight (sunday night) regarding Mr Foots condition.

 

Any statement regarding Mr. Foot's condition could only be something along the lines of "Mr. Foot is quite old, but not yet dead"

 

I don't think anyone here is interested in hearing that you had miscalculated and he will certainly be dead within the next week.

 

If you make a statement this evening, Iain, you would be well advised to limit it to some carefully chosen last words on this forum.

[Octopus of Odstock 2,194]

no comment-suffice to say I will make a formal statement tonight (sunday night) regarding Mr Foots condition.

 

We're still waiting with baited breath.......

 

 

By the way, we're also still waiting for your formal statement on Michael Anderson's condition. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

[Windsor 2,233]

Well, being that it is now Monday morning, it would seem that iain cannot even get the timing right on things he actually does have control over!

 

With any luck, this failure to turn up at deathlist will be the start of a new trend...

[MyBrainHurts2 4]

I don't know why we feed into iain's crap sometimes.

[Guest iain]

OK heres my statement. I screwed up.Weve all done that sometimes.A belated happy birthday to Mr Foot.No hard feelings mate.I still think he'll snuff it soon though.

 

As far as my future on this forum is concerned I will be away on holiday for the next week or so and will consider whetehr to start posting again when I get back.I suppose it all depends on whetehr theres any major deaths while Im away b uit I suppose there wont be,so this could be goodbye.My failure to correctly predict Michael Foots demise has destroyed my confidence in death prediction.Can i just take this opportunity to thank those few people who have made me feel welcome here.Without you I would have packed up and left months ago.

 

PS it would seem that Michael Anderson is still alive as well.I hate people called Michael...

[millwall32 114]

OK heres my statement. I screwed up.Weve all done that sometimes.A belated happy birthday to Mr Foot.No hard feelings mate.I still think he'll snuff it soon though.

 

As far as my future on this forum is concerned I will be away on holiday for the next week or so and will consider whetehr to start posting again when I get back.I suppose it all depends on whetehr theres any major deaths while Im away b uit I suppose there wont be,so this could be goodbye.My failure to correctly predict Michael Foots demise has destroyed my confidence in death prediction.Can i just take this opportunity to thank those few people who have made me feel welcome here.Without you I would have packed up and left months ago.

 

PS it would seem that Michael Anderson is still alive as well.I hate people called Michael...

 

Very dignified statement.

 

Re MF, he is the frailest looking person on this year's DL. Not that that makes any great difference....

[millwall32 114]

Just as context, here is Clive James' article on MF in the 1983 election campaign. I think it is quite funny.

 

Campaign Down the Drain: 1983

On Monday morning the Michael Foot bandwagon was loaded up at its starting-point for the week’s festivities. The news conference at Transport House took place in a large room entirely full of jostling media, except for the Labour Party spokesmen up on the dais, who sat in front of a backdrop dipped in the standard blood-stirring shade of radical crimson.

The backdrop also featured some radical grammar, to help remind you that this is the party of change. THINK POSITIVE ACT POSITIVE VOTE POSITIVE. This is more quickly said than THINK POSITIVELY ACT POSITIVELY VOTE POSITIVELY but one doubts if it is more quickly understood. Substituting adjectives for adverbs doesn’t necessarily galvanise the act of comprehension.

As subsequent events were to demonstrate, Mr Foot, while placing great emphasis on the importance of your listening to what he is trying to tell you, has not always the knack of putting it in a way the normally equipped human being can unscramble. But at least his suit conveyed a clear message. The suit, which settled approximately into position with Mr Foot leaning at various angles inside it, was blue. It meant business. It also meant wrinkles, but not even the redoubtable Jill Craigie can keep her husband pressed and brushed when he is on the move. For now, it was enough that he looked less like a minor Georgian poet than usual.

Even bluer than the suit was the tie. Mr Peter Shore’s tie, which was also present, showed you how red a Labour big-wig’s tie can still be. But Mr Foot’s tie was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Just around the corner, the Conservative Party news conferences were being staged in a deep-space blue ambience like a NASA briefing room. Without laying overt claim to the cold-eyed slickness of Tory PR, Mr Foot had borrowed something of that atmosphere and got it into his tie, plus those parts of his suit which were visible above the podium.

But the borrowed clothes reached no higher than the neck. There was nothing crisp or glossy about his opening remarks, which even those reporters with good shorthand were finding it hard to get down. The remarks were often accompanied by the Little Laugh, the laugh which says that the question you are hounding him with has been answered often, and with exemplary clarity, before. Almost invariably it hasn’t, but the laugh is meant to arouse the sympathy of the onlooker. Almost invariably it doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean that Mr Foot has lost faith in the technique. It has served him ill in the past, so he sees no reason to abandon it now.

Mr Foot’s Little Laugh, however, is the merest distraction when compared with his syntax. He doesn’t just say that ‘this election is about jobs’. He has to add that ‘this is the number one issue we raised at the start of the campaign and shall continue to raise until the end’. He says that he has said it before, as indeed he has, at the beginning of the sentence. Then he says he will say it again, as indeed he does, at the end of the sentence. Except there is no end of the sentence. The most you can hope for is that the sentence will get back to roughly where it started, so that the man uttering it will be struck by some recognisable phrase which he will pause to savour. This he does by nodding his head vigorously, in full agreement with himself.

But while the echo of his voice was still travelling in circles among helpless reporters comparing notebooks, Mr Foot’s body was now lunging in a relatively straight line towards the waiting black Rover 3500 radio car which would take him out for the day’s stint of stumping the country. The media had been issued with a cyclostyled itinerary listing the venues in which Mr Foot would arouse enthusiasm with his renowned oratory. But wheels were not supplied.

To follow the unscrupulous Mrs Thatcher it was merely necessary to climb aboard the bus which had so cynically been provided, but to follow Mr Foot required acumen, maps and a current Access card. Luckily the first destination was an easy one. Through fields of rape which looked as if the low hills had been thickly spread with Colman’s English Mustard, it was possible to reach Leicester town hail by 125 mph train just in time to see the candidate ascending the stairs of the double-decker open-topped bus which would take him on a tour of the city through ecstatic crowds.

Largely due to the presence of the dishevelled media, there were more people on the bus than were detectable lining the streets, either at any one point or considered as a total. Lack of publicity was held to be the cause. It was also recalled that Sir Harold had spoken to sparse audiences and won. Meanwhile, the media massed tightly on the top deck of the bus did their generous best to point their cameras at the greatest concentrations of people they could find. Wherever two or three were gathered together, the image was captured. ‘I’ll just get a cutaway of these demented hordes waving,’ said a cameraman, as two women in saris stood looking puzzled in front of the GANGES SPORTING CLUB (Members Only).

Stuck in the stairwell with an earphoned sound-man who had his rifle mike up on a stick like a periscope, I got a close-up view of the heels of Mr Foot’s tractor-tread shoes as he stood at the front parapet of the bus, ducking his head under low bridges and waving to the assembled children of the proprietor of Shabir’s Takeaway. The Central TV crew got off the bus to snatch an action shot of it moving. They got the shot of it moving but then they couldn’t catch up with it. They were last seen sprinting along the traffic island as the bus arrived back at the city centre, like one of Mr Foot’s sentences returning to its point of origin after the maximum possible waste of energy.

A press conference then took place at which Mr Foot, given the opportunity to clobber the Tories’ patronising poster about blacks, said inter a lot of alia, ‘another of their wretched posters. . . thought up by Saatchi and Saatchi who haven’t got the slightest interest in the politics of the matter. What the Labour Party is going to do and is pledged to do and will most certainly do. . .’ Sludge without nuggets. The TV cameras picked it all up but you could tell that the producers would find it impossible to edit. Tough on the Asians, who could have used a few memorable phrases to help keep them warm through the next five cold Tory winters which the polls were insisting stretched ahead.

Overland to Nottingham went the black Rover with the media Grand Prix in pursuit. Nobody wanted to miss the thrills and spills of the afternoon walkabout in the Broad Marsh shopping centre. The excitement was intensified by an element of secrecy, since the public has obviously not been forewarned, lest they congregate in too great numbers and impair the candidate’s progress. ‘Ooze iss?’ said a woman in zip-fronted felt bootees. ‘None of um’s any good,’ opined her morose companion. By now several members of the public had attached themselves to the frantic half-moon of media in whose brightly lit cusp Mr Foot lurched forward like a floppy toy on Benzedrine. He has an impressive turn of speed at those moments when slowness is what’s called for. But when a baby was presented to be held, he stopped and held it. The baby hated him.

Mr Foot, although patently a very nice man, handles objects in the real world as if they ought to be books, and a baby can tell when the pair of encircling hands would rather be holding a copy of Hazlitt’s Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. It was also possible that Mr Foot’s hands would rather have been holding the neck of the local organiser, who in theory was a different man in each place, but in practice seemed to be the same chap moving one day ahead and making sure that no posters were put up, or, at best, that the word was spread by a single clapped-out Ford Escort with a defective bull-horn.

Tuesday started in Birmingham, with a public meeting in St Agnes Hall, Pershore Road, Cotteridge, out past the Stirchley 10-Pin Bowl and Fred’s Frocks, just across from Richelle Frozen Foods (12 FISH FINGERS 55p). The church hall itself had a wooden vaulted ceiling, a stripped pine floor and the proudly displayed, yellow-tasselled banner of the Eighty-seventh Birmingham Company of the Boys’ Brigade. The walls resounded with the unmistakable forlorn echo of generations of pimply boys in forage caps numbering off from left to right.

But by the advertised time the place was full, and not just with media, who were soon uncomfortably aware of being in possession of that increasingly precious thing, a salary. Most of the 150 or so people in the audience were unemployed, including the convenor, a stout man in a brown suit who called out, ‘Reg! Reg! Is there any chance of a joog and a couple of glasses?’ Mothers in anoraks cuddled already fractious toddlers, one of whom, a militant in the making, held the string of a pink balloon. Here were the converted waiting to be preached to.

The preacher arrived to a standing ovation, which was certainly not for his clothes. Grey instead of blue, today’s suit was a reversion to type. If he didn’t precisely look like a minor poet, he did look like a minor essayist. After sitting down and pretending to be riveted by an introductory speech of death-dealing tedium from the local candidate, Mr Foot rose to remind the local candidate that when it came to the handing out of boring speeches the champion was now in town.

‘Friends may I. First of all thank you for your. WELCOME, and I...’ The full stops, as always, were seldom at the end of the sentence, but today were cropping up with remarkable frequency during it. For an audience to whom good words would have been bread, here came a whole cargo of stones. There was passion in his heart, but he couldn’t say what was on his mind. ‘I know that reports appear in the newspapers about the polls but I say that they should. Report faithfully mass meetings like this.’

Reg having neglected to open the windows of the tiny hall, the mass meeting began to heat up under the television lights. Babies with dummies breathed smoke through the nose. ‘Year after year after year the curse of unemployment hitting people harder and harder.’ He believed it, but said it as if he didn’t.

The next event was an intersuburban media motocross to Redditch, for Mr Foot’s scheduled walkabout in the new Kingfisher Centre, a hardened ICBM silo masquerading as a shopping mall. On the upper level of a precinct, or the upper precinct of a level, was the Labour Party district office, where Mr Foot paused for tea and a brief interview with ITN, all other media in attendance. When Mr Foot’s noble forehead is lit up by a sun-gun the veins show through the skin. Venerable and vulnerable, he looks what he is, an intellectual in a false position. But on the matter of nuclear disarmament the false position now began to sound untenable. ‘Stage by stage ... move towards ... along the lines...’

Stage by stage along the lines of the upper lower precinct level, Mr Foot moved towards Sainsbury’s between glass shop-fronts and under tropical foliage growing in suspended concrete pipes. With Jill Craigie and Dizzy the wonder-dog in hot pursuit, he proceeded in a sun-gun halo to run tight circles around a grove of palm trees. Once again the security blackout had been almost totally successful. Apart from the local candidate and some ladies Knitting for Peace, few seemed interested. To those who might be, Mr Foot promised ‘a thumping majority for Dick’. A blind lady asked, ‘Dick who?’

Dizzy, a 2½-year-old Tibetan terrier who looks like an astrakhan tea-cosy soaked with shampoo, and who will instantly attack any other dog threatening to cramp his style on national television, moved on, towing everybody else with him.

Wednesday started at Transport House, with Mr Foot back in the blue suit but wearing a red tie with white polka dots. Overnight a new word had entered the nuclear debate. The new word wasn’t peace, but pace. ‘I think in five years we will be able to. To move towards ... the pace must be judged by the government that is there.’

Then into the Rover and away to Peterborough, for a public meeting in the Wirrina arena, a roller-skating rink with yellow walls and a sign saying Beadle Roller Skates PERFECTION ON EIGHT WHEELS. The joint was the size of an airship hangar and there were scarcely 200 people in it. The Labour Party’s cunning policy to wear out its leader with meaningless, botched engagements had reached fruition.

‘What I believe,’ said Mr Foot to the reverberating void, ‘is going to be decided on July the. On June the 9th.’ The cameras. had already drooped, the sound-men as usual had not bothered to re-load, and no producer would screen such slips anyway. Although Mr Foot finds it hard to believe, television is not out to cross him up. He does that all by himself. He is a man who has been mastered by the English language. It can do anything with him.

At the Thursday morning news conference, in the presence of Norman Mailer, the effluent finally hit the air-conditioner. Speaking about the allegedly crystalline clarity of Labour’s position re Polaris, general secretary Mr Jim Mortimer put Foot in it. The question about whether the party hierarchy still had confidence in Mr Foot’s leadership was answered by Mr Mortimer resoundingly in the affirmative. Unfortunately, he answered the question before any of us had asked it. As it happened, the first reporter to ask the question that had just been answered was myself; but that was only because I was too naive to realise the full import of what Mr Mortimer had said. Everybody else, with the possible exception of Norman Mailer, was thunderstruck. The party wise men looked as if they just received word that a Soviet SS-20 was about to arrive by air at Labour headquarters in Walworth Road, SEI7 1JT.

Mr Foot spent the rest of the day being worn out by eventettes in South London. The grey suit came into contact with the hot pants of Michele, billed as a professional photographer’s model and non-operative chimney sweep. He cuddled a convalescent fox cub, which was more than Dizzy would have done. He told a hospital that he would replenish its funds. It was the right promise, but given out of turn. On Nationwide that evening he was pressed flat on the Polaris issue by Sue Lawley.

The sentence he started on Nationwide was still going when I switched on TV Eye three hours later. Then, for once in a blue moon, he paused for breath. Alastair Burnet asked him whether there was dissension in the leadership, and before he could get started on the next interminable evasion a tiny, glowing chip of candour popped out. ‘We have got trouble...’ He had forgotten to think positive and given a straight answer. It is a weakness to which good men are prone.

 

(Observer, 29 May, 1983)

 

As the book which he later published reveals, Michael Foot took particular exception to the above piece, which he believed typified the way in which the media framed him. But really he received, from the up-market papers anyway, a fair press, and the men responsible for his shambolic campaign a better than fair, because they threw him to the wolves and were called nothing worse than fools for doing so. My one lasting regret about guying an honest and considerate man is that the piece contributed, I hope in only a small way, to the general impression that the Labour Party lost the election because of bad public relations. Actually they lost because of that and their defense policy, a point made more obvious by the general election of 1987, when Neil Kinnock’s presidential-style campaign ran like clockwork but the vote scarcely increased.

[Tuber Mirum 125]

I hate people called Michael...

 

That should go down well with Windsor.

[Windsor 2,233]

I hate people called Michael...

 

That should go down well with Windsor.

 

Hmm, how ironic.

[Phantom 2,533]

As far as my future on this forum is concerned I will be away on holiday for the next week or so and will consider whetehr to start posting again when I get back.

 

In other words, you'll be checking the news each day whilst pretending to be on holiday and then the moment someone famous dies you'll go online and post a link to Wikipedia ?

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

He could - like - really be on holiday.

[Canadian Paul 97]

He could - like - really be on holiday.

 

Possibly... I did catch him perusing the Michael Foot thread no more than a few days ago though...

[DevonDeathTrip 2,358]

Although I am loathe to admit reading websites like this - a podcast of a recent interview with Michael Foot can be found here - link to podcast is on left somewhere.

 

BTW what the hell is a podcast?

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

Short for Ipod cast, an mp3 file delivered in an edited form resembling a broadcast on radio but designed for release on the Internet and listening on computers or MP3 players....like iPods.

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

Iain's 'week or so' started on July 24th, a week or so ago. Anyone spotted him back in action hereabouts?

[Tuber Mirum 125]

He's been looking in occasionally, and posting under the pseudonym "Dick Long"

 

Nomen est Omen? I think not.

 

Stupid is as stupid does, more like.

[MyBrainHurts2 4]

He's been looking in occasionally, and posting under the pseudonym "Dick Long"

 

Nomen est Omen? I think not.

 

Stupid is as stupid does, more like.

 

I knew those posts sounded strangely familiar. I had that feeling in my stomach...you know, like the one you get right before you want to vomit, that's what it was.

 

I recall Iain stating that Michael Foot was going to die sometime last month because there was a heat wave in the London area. I have a lot of elderly family members within 30 miles of Baltimore (around 20 old folks), and the temperature has been hovering around 100 degrees Farenheit for the last few days with the heat index reaching 115F yesterday in some parts. By Iain's reasoning - if it's really hot, and someone's really old, their death is imminent - I should have a lot of funerals to attend.

 

According to the US Census Bureau's 2000 Census, the population for the state of Maryland was 5,296,486, with people over the age of 85 accounting for 66,902 of that crowd (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTab...=DEC_2000_SF1_U. By Iain's reasoning, all of them should be dead when fact is there's been only 1 heat related death in the state and that was a person trying to save money on their gas and electric bill by keeping the air conditioner off.

[Handrejka 1,903]

He's been looking in occasionally, and posting under the pseudonym "Dick Long"

 

Nomen est Omen? I think not.

 

Stupid is as stupid does, more like.

 

I knew those posts sounded strangely familiar. I had that feeling in my stomach...you know, like the one you get right before you want to vomit, that's what it was.

 

I recall Iain stating that Michael Foot was going to die sometime last month because there was a heat wave in the London area. I have a lot of elderly family members within 30 miles of Baltimore (around 20 old folks), and the temperature has been hovering around 100 degrees Farenheit for the last few days with the heat index reaching 115F yesterday in some parts. By Iain's reasoning - if it's really hot, and someone's really old, their death is imminent - I should have a lot of funerals to attend.

 

According to the US Census Bureau's 2000 Census, the population for the state of Maryland was 5,296,486, with people over the age of 85 accounting for 66,902 of that crowd (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTab...=DEC_2000_SF1_U. By Iain's reasoning, all of them should be dead when fact is there's been only 1 heat related death in the state and that was a person trying to save money on their gas and electric bill by keeping the air conditioner off.

 

 

To be fair to Iain though, I've noticed that I get a lot more calls concerning recently deceased elderly account holders in the summer months than any other time. I've had about 10 in three days this week, normally I don't get that many in a three month period so perhaps there is somethin in it.

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

Dick Long reckons Sir Bobby Robson's death is immenent, the future shape of the Michael Foot thread doubtless depends upon events in an Ipswich hospital.

[MyBrainHurts2 4]

To be fair to Iain though, I've noticed that I get a lot more calls concerning recently deceased elderly account holders in the summer months than any other time. I've had about 10 in three days this week, normally I don't get that many in a three month period so perhaps there is somethin in it.

 

10 account holders in 3 days? Wow. - "don't close my account just yet..."

 

Heat can introduce an increased risk for the elderly, I learned that while working with the elderly. My grandfather, 76, last year stubbornly ran errands outdoors in 100 degree heat and didn't think of the need to drink water here and there while doing so. He spent a day in the hospital because of dehydration following that and got a prescription lecture from myself (general smartass on one of the few people he'll listen to) and my aunt (nurse). What bugs me was the assumption of causation that high heat outside absolutely will cause death while not factoring in the potential that Footie may be in a climate controlled residence, being pampered and not affected by the heat outside. Now if there was evidence that Foot was going to be left out in the heat, tied to a flagpole and covered in electric blankets...well then, he might die. I think I'm just irritated with the wishful 'imminent death' announcements and jumped on this particular one.

 

Then again, I may have just felt like being nasty on that particular day last week.

[Phantom 2,533]

 

To be fair to Iain though, I've noticed that I get a lot more calls concerning recently deceased elderly account holders in the summer months than any other time. I've had about 10 in three days this week, normally I don't get that many in a three month period so perhaps there is somethin in it.

 

10 account holders in 3 days? Wow. - "don't close my account just yet..."

 

Heat can introduce an increased risk for the elderly, I learned that while working with the elderly. My grandfather, 76, last year stubbornly ran errands outdoors in 100 degree heat and didn't think of the need to drink water here and there while doing so. He spent a day in the hospital because of dehydration following that and got a prescription lecture from myself (general smartass on one of the few people he'll listen to) and my aunt (nurse). What bugs me was the assumption of causation that high heat outside absolutely will cause death while not factoring in the potential that Footie may be in a climate controlled residence, being pampered and not affected by the heat outside. Now if there was evidence that Foot was going to be left out in the heat, tied to a flagpole and covered in electric blankets...well then, he might die. I think I'm just irritated with the wishful 'imminent death' announcements and jumped on this particular one.

 

Then again, I may have just felt like being nasty on that particular day last week.

 

MB2,

 

I think if you hadn't been feeling that way, I'm sure someone else would have stepped in and done exactly the same.

Perhaps Iain has word-of-the-day toilet paper or something and uses a word that he likes the most

The heatwave over here in the US has taken people from all ages so it's not just the old and frail that are at risk. I mean, look at Brook Astor. 104 years of age and still dodering about and she's over in NYC where the heatwave has shifted to

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

Ms Astor is - I think - still in the cooler surrounds of Martha's Vineyard. She might be losing her mind but she's not that stupid.

[Octopus of Odstock 2,194]

Article from the Spectator re. Michael Foot this week.

 

At first I couldn't print the whole interview, but now I can - here goes:-

 

Gordon will do the job very well

John Reynolds

 

 

Michael Foot and I are sitting in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, north London. Outside in the garden a red ‘Labour’ rose blooms in the afternoon sun; inside, the house is crammed with books: they’re in piles on the kitchen table, on shelves on every wall: William Hazlitt, William Blake, John Keats, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Paine. Upstairs there’s a whole roomful of books on women’s suffrage that belonged to his late wife, Jill Craigie, then another room where an entire corner is devoted to Irish writers: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift.

 

Mr Foot believes that politicians should have a love of great literature (he has written acclaimed biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H.G. Wells among others) and also that the best writers of fiction should concern themselves with politics. ‘I’m in favour of politicians knowing something about literature and vice versa,’ he says. ‘Swift was a wonderful example. Swift, his views and ideas changed my life. I was asked to speak at his 300th commemoration at Trinity College Dublin in 1967,’ he says, ‘and I remember thinking I would be hosting perhaps a small seminar in a library or lecture room. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was to give the talk in the awe-inspiring St Patrick’s Cathedral. I felt very close to heaven!’

 

‘I also met Mary Robinson [the former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] there,’ he continues. ‘She is one of the wonderful women of the world, but I felt she was very badly treated by the US during her work for the UN. Mary showed herself to be independent and was not afraid to ask tough questions when she saw the need, such as during the war in Chechnya. She would have made a wonderful International Secretary of the UN.’

 

So Swift informed Mr Foot’s philosophy, introduced him to great figures of the day, and also played Cupid between him and his wife. In the early days of their relationship, Foot and Craigie spent many happy hours discussing Swift. ‘Jill and I also read the essays of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw,’ says Mr Foot, then pauses perhaps to replay the happy memories in his mind.

 

Joyce is another Irish writer whom Mr Foot admires, for his ideas about both love and politics. ‘We have to take notice of Joyce on politics. He embodied the spirit of Ireland, and was outraged by some of the things the English did there,’ he says.

 

Mr Foot is 93 now and, since his birthday on 23 July, the longest-lived leader of a British political party, beating Lord Callaghan’s record of 92 years, 364 days. And though he’s as politically astute as ever, he sometimes lapses into silence and I find it difficult to get him talking about the current state of the Labour party. On the subject of Tony Blair’s foreign policy, however, he becomes uncharacteristically outspoken. ‘Blair was quite wrong to go into Iraq,’ Mr Foot says, adding vehemently, ‘Our government should be prepared not to accept the American way of doing things, and the ongoing talk of putting pressure on Iran, militarily or with sanctions, is also quite wrong.’

 

It’s not of course that Mr Foot has any objection to spreading democracy. ‘Government by consent is the most sacred cause of all,’ he said in 1970, and he has always argued that all people deserve to live in democracies. But his love of democracy these days often rubs up against his hatred of war and his fear that in an attempt to destroy injustice, the world will destroy itself. ‘The pre-emptive strike is a terrible, terrible idea,’ he says, about the onset of the second Gulf war, ‘and the dangers of this idea spreading are just appalling.’ One of Mr Foot’s persistent worries is that other nuclear nations might take up the idea of pre-emptive strikes, to catastrophic effect. ‘Look at India’ (Mr Foot was a close friend of Indira Gandhi) â” ‘the dangers if they tried a pre-emptive strike are too awful to contemplate.’

 

Perhaps, then, Mr Foot has more in common with David Cameron’s foreign policy than New Labour’s? After all, on his recent visit to Mumbai, the Conservative leader referred to the ‘challenge in international affairs’, the British political obsession with Europe and America, and the importance of ‘our deep relationship with India’.

 

The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. While Mr Foot would agree with Mr Cameron that it’s crucial to take notice of what other countries think â” ‘Of course we should be listening to people in India,’ he says, ‘they’ll give us better ideas about how to deal with the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction’ â” during the course of our interview it becomes clear that he’s a great supporter of Gordon Brown.

 

So even after all this infighting and betrayal, you still see Mr Brown as a figure on whom to focus your hopes, I ask. Mr Foot raises his voice, sounding more urgent than usual as he says: ‘I have known Gordon Brown for a long time and I’m very much in favour of him taking over.

 

‘I think he’ll do the job very well,’ he adds, leaving little doubt that he sees Mr Brown as the inevitable heir â” and the sooner the better. It is perhaps strange that, for someone who favours debate and diplomacy, Mr Foot sees no need for these qualities in a new party leader. Nor does he seem concerned that the Chancellor’s seriousness and his obvious bitterness will put voters off. But then Mr Foot is an intellectual, and the antithesis of the image-conscious politicians of today, as he himself would happily admit. ‘The age of the agitators has gone,’ he wrote in 1965, ‘and that of bureaucrats, political technicians and public relations officers has succeeded.’

 

By now, Mr Foot is tired and keen to finish our interview. ‘I’m going to have to throw you out, I’m afraid,’ he says, firmly but politely. As I gather my notes, he thoughtfully gives me a book of his essays to take with me, before walking me to the front door.

 

John Reynolds is a freelance writer based in Ireland. Michael Foot’s and Alison Highet’s biography of Mr Foot’s father, Isaac, published by Politico’s, goes on sale on 18 September.

 

 

 

 

So, politically astute, and still helping to compile a biography. Whilst Footy is clearly weakening, I don't think he'll die this year, with v. little mention of his "supposed" ill-health. I think he'll outlive Iain yet.

[maryportfuncity 10,646]

All being well he should attend the Labour conference in just over a week, that'll be a good insight into how healthy he is.

[Octopus of Odstock 2,194]

Please note full interview now edited. I don't think MF will be a DL hit in 2006 if the only weakness he has is feeling "tired" after a long interview.