Up the Garden Path 
R.W. Johnson
One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness. As he stood up to get off he half-stumbled and six or seven people rushed to help him. As soon as he’d gone I heard the same words over and over: ‘What a dear old man.’ I’ve never heard such spontaneous warmth evoked by a politician, but my guess is that I was one of the few people on the bus who’d actually voted for him ten years earlier, and I’d done it with some exasperation.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 24 May 2007 ] David Ganz.
R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.
Other articles by this contributor:
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
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