Just right for a desert island

It would be difficult to write a boring book about Michael Foot. As well as being eloquent, imaginative and idealistic he possessed the priceless quality, from the point of view of the biographer at any rate, of intemperance. He did nothing by halves. ‘No attempt is made at impartiality,’ he announced defiantly in the preface to his first book. ‘Impartial historians are as insufferable as the people who profess no politics.’ He was as committed in his politics as in his history; his career consisted of a series of crusades, tilting sometimes at windmills, sometimes at real dragons, but always conducted with courage and panache. One of his heroes was Georges Danton and Danton’s apophthegm — L’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace — could have provided the inspiration for Foot’s career.

Kenneth Morgan does make some gestures towards impartiality, but Foot would probably forgive him, for there is no doubt where his sympathies lie. ‘The writer,’ Morgan observes, ‘should make a personal comment, as a novelist should . . . In the deepest sense, a biography should convey understanding.’ He understands Foot, and though when necessary he does not hesitate to condemn his hero’s shaky judgment and sloppy thinking, he never doubts that Foot’s motives were pure and his instincts sound. Nor does he hesitate to make his own standpoint clear. ‘It was under Harold Wilson,’ he writes, ‘that the sun did indeed finally set on the old British Empire, and rightly so.’ Most historians would today probably accept the validity of his last three words — not many would have thought it necessary to include them.

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Foot was remarkably consistent throughout his political life, but consistent by his own idiosyncratic standards. He was a passionate opponent of nuclear weaponry, at times came close to pacifism, yet his ardent patriotism led him to support unequivocally the campaign to liberate the Falklands.