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To chronicle the life of Michael Foot, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is to embrace the canvas of 20th century British radicalism. The great cavalcade of his life was the essence of that word “radical”: tempestuous, full of a courageous integrity, which sometimes may have seemed a touch eccentric; unyielding in its moral code and, even in old age, astonishingly vigorous in its execution; scion of a remarkable family in which all his brothers and sisters were fed on the unshakable West Country liberalism of Isaac, their puritan father, and the fiery principles of their Scottish-born mother, the redoubtable Eva Mackintosh.  So it was with Michael Mackintosh Foot in his world of politics, literature, journalism, history, Byronic poetry, Cromwellian purpose and exceptional oratory. Throughout a remarkable lifetime, he encompassed all  these and offered the gift of honest enlightenment to enhance the quality of British political and cultural life.

Michael started as the wunderkind of the left – a role formally launched at the 1945 general election as Labour MP for Plymouth Devonport, his home base, where he remained until 1955. He had tried to enter Parliament before, contesting Monmouth at the 1935 election campaign. He was then 22, just down from Oxford where he was an active Liberal. Yet even then he was shifting toward socialism.

The Monmouth campaign produced a meeting that was to transform Michael’s entire life. Stafford Cripps introduced him to Aneurin Bevan, then only 37 and not long the Member for Ebbw Vale.  It was the combination of Cripps and Bevan, founders of Tribune in January 1937, which brought Michael to journalism and Parliament. He had already spent nine months working in a Liverpool shipping office in a job found for him by the Cripps’ family, who were old friends of his parents.

It was the Liverpool experience that finally converted him to socialism, as Foot recalled later: “I first joined the Labour Party in Liverpool, because of what I saw of the poverty, the unemployment and the endless infamies committed on the inhabitants of the back streets of that city.” Joining Tribune in 1937, Foot was soon appointed assistant editor  and also started work on a range of books about his political and literary heroes, including Charles James Fox, Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Tom Paine, Lord Byron and HG Wells.

Bevan introduced his young friend to Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of Express Newspapers which then included the London Evening Standard. The great mogul of Fleet Street became fascinated by the young Foot – and he with Beaverbrook. There developed an extraordinary friendship which lasted until Beaverbrook’s death in 1964.

The Evening Standard was then edited by Frank Owen, who employed Michael as a feature writer, before the two joined forces to write their classic account of pre-war appeasement, Guilty Men, published in 1940. Then, in 1942, and still only 29,  Michael was appointed editor of the Evening Standard by Beaverbrook, where he remained until 1944.

Elected in the 1945 Labour landslide, Michael sat throughout that Parliament on the backbenches. His oratory, inevitably fashioned on Bevan, soon cast its own spell over the House of Commons. His was the radical voice warning Clement Attlee’s Government to beware of the perils of retreating from the purity of the socialist gospel.  Michael’s fire turned on Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, because of his anti-Soviet and pro-American stance. Michael demanded more nationalisation and still greater help for working people. What he refrained from saying in the Commons, he wrote in the columns of Tribune – of which he became editor in 1948. So it went on until Bevan’s 1951 resignation from the Government, after which Nye and Michael were again singing from the same hymn sheet.

Even so, during those nine turbulent years until Bevan’s death in July 1960, Michael was frequently a tortured soul. At the 1955 general election, he lost his Plymouth seat. The political climate in the Labour Party was tense and bitter, with recriminations against the Bevanites who were conducting a nationwide campaign critical of official party policies. Hugh Gaitskell had taken over the leadership, inheriting a party riven with dissent – notably on defence. Foot stood beside Bevan throughout those years, never wavering.

It was also a period when some of Foot’s most illustrious work was published, including an updated Guilty Men in 1957. The Pen and the Sword, a superb account of Jonathan Swift and the power of the press, also published in 1957 is arguably one of his best books. In 1959, he again contested Plymouth Devonport but failed to regain the seat for which he always retained a special affection – coupled with a life-long support for Plymouth Argyle FC.

By far the most devastating blow to Michael came at the 1957 Labour conference when his idol, Nye Bevan, refused to support unilateral nuclear disarmament – the cause to which Foot committed himself from the inception of CND. Bevan’s famous 1957 Labour conference speech in which, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, he refused to enter “the conference chamber naked” (without the bomb) was a savage blow to Foot. It came close to destroying their friendship.

The temperature inside the editorial board at Tribune – where Nye and Jennie Lee sat with Michael – frequently touched boiling point. Michael insisted on the paper’s right to reflect his views, as well as those of Bevan. At one point, the conflict became so feverish that Jennie Lee wanted to close the paper down, but Bevan vetoed that. Even so, whenever the two met, it almost always ended in turbulence.

The 1959 general election brought all this to a head. Bevan was already a sick man, although few realised how ill he was. He was due to speak for Foot in Plymouth, but was compelled to cancel the arrangement on doctor’s orders. Within weeks of the election, Bevan was in hospital, diagnosed with cancer from which he died in July 1960. At the end of that year, Foot was selected as Bevan’s successor. Michael held the Ebbw Vale seat, renamed Blaenau Gwent, until he retired from Parliament in 1992.

It was in those 32 years representing Bevan’s old seat that the image of Foot the rebel was transformed into Foot the statesman. He became a reluctant and a sadly unsuccessful Labour leader. Here was the one-time bête noire of Labour governments finally ending as Leader of the House to James Callaghan. Before that, he had served under Harold Wilson as Employment Secretary.

Earlier, in the decade from 1960 to 1970, the scene was very different. The rebel continued to storm the ramparts of Labour officialdom. Foot emerged very much in the mantle of Bevan as leader of the left. From the backbenches, he was outstandingly the most effective critic of the 1964-1970  Government – especially over its prices and incomes policy and, in foreign policy, against the Vietnam War. Some of Foot’s greatest parliamentary speeches were delivered in that decade when he was at the peak of his oratorical splendour. MPs of all parties crowded into the Chamber to hear him.

Foot rejected several attempts by Harold Wilson to tempt him into office. In 1964, Foot’s political ally and CND marching companion, Frank Cousins – then in the Cabinet as Minister of Technology – wanted Foot as his parliamentary secretary. But Michael would not be seduced, even by his closest political friend. Yet, when Wilson lost the 1970 general election and the Tories returned to office under Edward Heath, there came a significant shift in the Foot story. At the age of 57, he accepted his first official position in Labour’s hierarchy after being elected to the Shadow Cabinet. Wilson appointed him spokesman on fuel and power. The rebel was in the process of change.

Throughout his married life, Michael was enchanted, inspired, and sustained by his glowing partnership with Jill Craigie. They met during the 1945 election campaign in Plymouth, where she was filming a documentary on the rebirth of the city. They married in October 1949. Jill, stunningly attractive, had been twice previously married, with a daughter, Julie Hamilton, from her first marriage. In that difficult decade after Nye’s death through to 1970, Jill’s support sustained him amid some terrible moments.  In October 1963, Michael and Jill were driving back from his Ebbw Vale constituency when their car was involved in a fearful collision with a lorry. Both were severely injured. Michael was thrown across the road and Jill pinned under the truck with her hand crushed – an injury never fully repaired. Michael was out of action for months and Jill gave up her film work career. Miraculously, they survived and Michael struggled slowly back into political life.

He started writing again. The first volume of his magnum opus biography of Aneurin Bevan had already been published in 1962. But it was 1973 before the second volume was published – to be hailed as one of the century’s finest political biographies.

One year later, he made his first entry into Cabinet, as Secretary of State for Employment in Wilson’s government of February 1974. His views had not changed, but life’s experiences had mellowed the rebellious impetus. Wilson persuaded him that he had a constructive role to play inside a Labour Government rather than attacking from outside.

His two years as Employment Minister were immensely constructive. He re-established the links between Downing Street and the trade unions, which led to the Social Contract – a package of pay restraint and extension of trade union rights that was unique. With TUC help, he formed ACAS, the conciliation service; he set up the Health and Safety Executive to increase workers’ protection. Inside the Cabinet, Foot became known as the “Minister for the Trade Unions” – meant as a sneer but not far removed from the truth.

When Wilson resigned the premiership in March 1976, Foot stood for the vacancy against Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Jim Callaghan. He was defeated after a third ballot. Even so, he was only 39 votes behind Callaghan, who became Labour leader and Prime Minister. In April 1976, Callaghan appointed Foot Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons. Effectively, he was Callaghan’s deputy – a role formalised in October that year when Foot was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party in a straight fight with Shirley Williams.

None of these additional roles curbed either his writing or other external interests—notably a long association with India and especially the Nehru family, including Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi whom he again visited in 1977, when she was Prime Minister. On his return from that trip, he was struck down with a virus. His consultant told him to rest or he would lose sight in that left eye—advice he ignored.

That same year, when the International Monetary Fund pressured Chancellor Healey into major reductions in public spending, Foot led a mixed group of the left within Cabinet in revolt against the cuts, while Tony Crosland did the same with his own group of followers. This combination threatened to destroy the Callaghan government – then surviving on a tiny parliamentary majority. But, in the end, both Foot and Crosland chose to support Callaghan and Healey out of loyalty.

Even so, the Callaghan government was tottering. Although Foot played a crucial role in winning Liberal support in trying to prolong the Government, the end was inevitable. It came at the general election of May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was voted in as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

When Callaghan resigned the party leadership after the 1980 Labour conference, Michael was persuaded to stand by a group of union leaders. He was deeply reluctant and had no illusions about the enormous challenge. Thatcher was well ensconced and Foot, then 67, was half blind and physically tired – although intellectually still astonishingly vigorous.  At the outset, Jill was uncertain, but then accepted Michael’s conviction that he must stand to help save the party. In the first round, Denis Healey led with 112 votes against Michael’s 83, trailed by John Silkin (38) and Peter Shore (32). In a second ballot, Foot defeated Healey by 139 votes to 129.

That result simply added to the internal bitterness. Those on the right of the party suggested that some of Michael’s votes came from those who wanted to see Labour disintegrate, believing that, under Foot, the party would break up. The formation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981 under the “Gang of Four” gave weight to that cynical theory.

When Michael led Labour into the June 1983 general election, hardly anyone was surprised when Thatcher, triumphant after the Falklands War, won a huge majority. Labour’s vote collapsed to its lowest since 1935. Foot’s rout was mocked by most of the media who taunted his weakness – taunts which, at the 1983 Labour conference, brought from Michael a passionate denunciation of his old trade, the press. His bitterness and fury then found expression in a brilliant new book, Another Heart and Other Pulses (1984).

He resigned the party leadership in the summer of 1983 to pave the way for one of his disciples, Neil Kinnock, who succeeded him in October that year.  Michael fought the 1987 general election, but resigned the seat before the 1992 election. He returned to his old love, writing. He wrote essays for Tribune, book reviews for his old paper, the Evening Standard, and yet more outstanding books.  The hand was never still, the mind never wholly at rest, even when he could scarcely walk or see out of his remaining, partly functioning eye. Jill died in 1999 just before they were about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Michael spent the rest of his few remaining years seeking to ensure an appropriate biography of his beloved wife. Mervyn Jones wrote a fine one of him, published in 1994.

No finer epitaph for Michael Foot can improve on the words of Byron:

“And I will war, at least in words (and – should

My chance so happen – deeds) with all who war

With thought.”

Exclusive in this Friday’s Tribune: Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown offer their tributes to Michael Foot