Michael Foot - Labour Leadership

Labour Leadership

Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan remained party leader for the next 18 months before he resigned. Foot was elected Labour leader on 4 November 1980, beating Denis Healey in the second round of the leadership election (the last leadership contest to involve only Labour MPs). Foot presented himself as a compromise candidate capable, unlike Healey, of uniting the party, which at the time was riven by the grassroots left-wing insurgency centred around Tony Benn.

The Bennites demanded revenge for the betrayals, as they saw them, of the Callaghan government. They called for replacement of MPs who had acquiesced to Callaghan's policies by left-wingers who would support unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the Common Market, and widespread nationalisation. (Benn did not stand for the leadership: apart from Foot and Healey, the other candidates – both eliminated in the first round – were John Silkin, a Tribunite like Foot, and Peter Shore, an anti-European right-winger.)

When he became leader, Foot was already 67 and frail. The Tory government's controversial monetarist policy against inflation had increased unemployment and sent Britain into recession earlier in 1980. As a result, Labour had moved ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls. After Foot's election as leader, opinion polls showed a double-digit lead for Labour, boosting his hopes of becoming prime minister in the next general election, which had to be held by May 1984.

Almost immediately after his election as leader he was faced with a serious crisis. In early 1981, four senior Labour right-wingers (Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers, the so-called "Gang of Four") left Labour to form the Social Democratic Party. This was largely seen as the consequence of the Labour Party's swing to the left, polarising divisions in an already divided party.

The SDP won the support of large sections of the media. For most of 1981 and early 1982 its opinion poll ratings suggested that it could at least overtake Labour and possibly win a general election. The Tories were then unpopular because of the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, which had seen unemployment reach a postwar high.

The Labour left was still strong – in 1981 Benn decided to challenge Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, a contest Healey won narrowly. Foot struggled to make an impact and was widely criticised for his ineffectiveness, though his performances in the Commons, most notably on the Falklands war of 1982, won him widespread respect from other parliamentarians. He was criticised by some on the left for supporting Thatcher's immediate resort to military action. The right-wing newspapers nevertheless lambasted him consistently for what they saw as his bohemian eccentricity, attacking him for wearing what they described as a "donkey jacket" (actually he wore a type of duffel coat) at the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in November 1981, for which he was likened to an "out-of-work navvy" by a fellow Labour MP. Foot did not make it generally known that HM the Queen Mother had complimented him on it; he later donated the garment to the People's History Museum in Manchester.

The formation of the SDP – who formed an alliance with the Liberal Party in June 1981 – contributed to a fall in Labour support. The double-digit lead which had still been intact in opinion polls at the start of 1981 was swiftly wiped out, and by the end of October the opinion polls were showing the Alliance ahead of Labour. Labour briefly regained their lead of most opinion polls in early 1982, but when the Falklands conflict ended on 14 June 1982 with a British victory over Argentina, opinion polls showed the Tories firmly in the lead. Their position at the top of the polls was strengthened by the return to economic growth later in the year. It was looking certain that the Tories would be re-elected, and the only key issue that the media were still speculating by the end of 1982 was whether it would be Labour or the Alliance who formed the next opposition.

Through late 1982 and early 1983, there was constant speculation that Labour MPs would replace Foot with Healey as leader. Such speculation increased after Labour lost the 1983 Bermondsey by-election, in which Peter Tatchell was its candidate, standing against a Tory, a Liberal (eventual winner Simon Hughes) and the right wing John O'Grady, who had declared himself the "real" Labour candidate and fought an openly homophobic campaign against Tatchell. Critically, Labour held on in a subsequent by-election in Darlington and Foot remained leader for the 1983 general election.