Michael Foot (1913-2010)

Mr Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour party, has gone to his reward.

I never cared toffee for Mr Foots politics. I regarded them as wrong headed, inimical to human freedom, a threat to any hope of national prosperity, and a disaster for his own party. They didn't call his 1983 manifesto the "world's longest suicide note" for nothing. Worse, he was either a Communist fellow traveller or the most unobservant man in history–one who couldn't possibly have remained oblivious as Labour was infiltrated by the KGB and its leaders went to Moscow cap in hand to have their policies vetted by the Kremlin. Not to mention that in matters of party discipline he was as effective as Helen Keller at a skeet shoot. On the other hand, Mr Foot was a man of convictions who could always state them clearly, a master of the English language, and was never willing to sell out his principles in order to merely win an election, which even in his most ignominious defeat gave him the air of a man who would have charged the guns at Balaclava without hesitation.

Compared to his successors, a self-serving rabble who utterly lack principles or even respect for the Britain itself, this eloquent, well-read, tragically deluded, slightly comic man comes off looking like a pillar of respectability.

Sleep well, sir.