Michael Foot would rather lose with honour than lie to win a battle

John Smith, the former Labour Party leader, used to discuss it a story about Michael Foot from the failing days of the 1970s Labour government.

Smith was apportion for Devolution, struggling in vain to get the Commons to determine to the origination of a Scottish Parliament.

There was one sold proviso in the Bill that in jeopardy to means so most difficulty that Smith simply did not know how to benefaction it. He incited to Michael Foot, afterwards Leader of the House, for advice. Foot told him, with ridicule solemnity: "In governing body you should never slight the probability that you competence have to tumble at the back of on the truth."

Michael Foot was not a clever leader. He left at the back of unimaginable disharmony when he stepped down after the disturbance of the 1983 election.

But this was not unconditionally his fault. He presided over a profoundly widely separated party, ripped detached by clever characters such as Denis Healey, David Owen and Tony Benn, nothing of whom unequivocally recognized Foot as a legitimately inaugurated leader.

They were hard-nosed characters rebuilt to pull others in reserve to get their way. Mr Foot was a peaceful man who, at heart, would rather lose a domestic conflict with honour than lie to win.

During the tributes to him yesterday, countless people referred to the declaration on that Labour fought the 1983 choosing the "longest self-murder note in history" as if it were Michael Foots work. It was not. He was the leader, but incredibly he did not carry out the manifesto. That pursuit was substituted to a cabinet chaired by Tony Benn.

Foots viewable weaknesses as a celebration boss, sadly, vaporous what a means and tasteful human being he was. I was twice guilty, myself, of underestimating him in his old age. I was once at a swarming lunch list where multiform guests, all from the Labour left, were berating Tony Blair for not being in advance enough.

I waited for Michael Foot to intervene, meditative that if he shielded Blair or pounded him, it competence have a story, but his face was so unresponsive that I resolved the bad old associate was mill deaf.

I was disabused when someone down the alternative finish of the table, becoming different the subject, referred to a lady he declared as carrying been Arthur Koestlers lover. Foot rught away called down the list to scold him. The lady in subject was Koestlers former lovers sister.

My second inapplicable designation was some-more recent, when Foot was 88, and overheard me discuss the locale of St Helens, in Lancashire. He asked what was function there, so I began laboriously explaining that the Tory MP for Witney, Shaun Woodward, had defected to Labour, and had been parachuted in to a protected Labour chair in St Helens. I was cut short in midst explanation. Foot knew all that, and knew that Woodward was confronting foe from the far left. He longed for to know if I had polling justification about what was function to the Labour vote.

Never, in new domestic history, has so delectable a man led so large a domestic celebration to so crashing a defeat.