In any league of effective Labour leaders, Michael Foot would be very near the bottom. He led the party to a catastrophic defeat to Margaret Thatcher in 1983, with 27.7 per cent of the vote, after fighting the election on a 700-page manifesto described as "the longest suicide note in history". Yet his failure, against a background of press hostility and mockery, highlighted not his own weaknesses, but those of modern British politics. His virtues were old-fashioned - integrity, magnanimity, breadth of vision. He was the finest parliamentarian of his generation, eloquent in speech, scarcely less so in writing. He resolutely declined to "spin" his image or his policies: criticised for attending a Remembrance Day ceremony in what the press called a "donkey jacket", he never told anybody that the Queen Mother had complimented it. And that 1983 manifesto doesn't now look quite as reckless as it seemed then: it promised to nationalise the banks.