Michael Foot - requiem for a posturing old ninny

So, Michael Foot is dead. According to the Telegraph’s regular political bloggers, he was a great Englishman, a patriot, a man of integrity, a superb writer, a champion of the underdog, a tremendous orator…

Oh God, I’m sorry, I just can’t take any more!

I’ve been reading and listening to eulogies all day, and they’re beginning to turn my stomach. Apart from the distress you might cause their family, I’ve never understood why a politician’s demise should automatically trigger a self-denying ordinance on mentioning their myriad faults. The Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan – normally a sensible sort of chap - even called him “God’s Englishman”: for goodness sakes, man, get a grip!

By all accounts, Foot was an amiable cove – very well-read and civilized – but as a politician, he was an incompetent, dangerous nitwit. True, he wanted to keep us out of the EU (tick) and he was spot-on when it came to the menace of totalitarian despots (double tick) but then we wanted to hand as much power as possible over to anti-democratic trade union thugs and to render this country undefendable by ditching all nuclear weapons. Famously, the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman described Foot’s 1983 election manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” – but at the time it struck me as an accurate reflection of the Labour leader’s utter lack of political understanding rather than some sort of temporary mental aberration.

He was a hopelessly muddled thinker. 

As for his powers of oratory, I’ll admit that I didn’t hear him in full flow until the 1970s, by when whatever talent for public speaking he might once have possessed seemed to have vanished, to be replaced by a TENDency to bawl meaningless, badly thought out, stream-of-consciousness bollocks very LOUDLY, while emphasizing all the wrong WORDS and SYLlables. He was, in many ways, part of the “random word-generator” tradition of Labour oratory which included Aneurin Bevin and Neil Kinnock and ended (one can only hope) with the twisted, muddled, Orc-like stream of twaddle that used to issue regularly from that bloated fool, John Prescott.  

The one real service Michael Foot rendered his country was to lead the Labour Party to inevitable defeat in 1983, thereby ensuring a second term of office for Margaret Thatcher – who at that stage, one gathers, was neither particularly well-read, nor much of an intellectual, but was undoubtedly a stupendously effective politician with a coherent vision of this country’s future.

Now, if Michael Foot had remained a journalist and writer - in other words, a classic Hampstead intellectual, boring away on behalf of the working classes while living in enormous comfort - I’d have been happy to let all the sickly adulation go. But he once sought to lead this country to utter, unthinkable disaster – and for that reason Hannan and his fellow commentators should really engage their critical intelligence before turning this muddle-headed, dangerous old scribbler into some sort of national hero.

One commenter on Hannan’s eulogistic blog was appalled that anyone would be vicious enough to bring up the “duffle-coat at the Cenotaph” incident. Good Lord! Why not? No doubt if Foot had got into power, we might have ended up in a country where leaders’ embarrassing gaffes were airbrushed from history (by force, if necessary). But as we got Margaret Thatcher instead, we can, fortunately, mention incidents which might not reflect well on the deceased.

Now, I’m sure most of us, encountering Foot hobbling across Hampstead Heath  with his stick and his dog, would have found him immensely likable and engaging - stimulating, even. But that doesn’t detract from the accuracy of the late, much-lamented Auberon Waugh’s oft-repeated description of him as a “posturing old ninny”. Spot on, I’d say.