Michael Foot: 1913–2010

Michael Foot, who died on March 3, 2010, at the age of ninety-six, was the soul of the democratic Left in England. His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and lasted well into the second campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. He was in his prime in the decades between the Suez Crisis of 1956, which brought down the Conservative government of Anthony Eden, and the Falklands War of 1982, which sealed the popularity of Margaret Thatcher. The fine obituary by Mervyn Jones in the Guardian was headed, "Principled leader who held Labour together in the early 1980s, and a writer devoted to the cause of freedom." There is not a word of exaggeration there. He was a great spirit and a great voice, in every sense that both of those words will bear.