Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson

• BuyMichael Foot: A Life by Kenneth O. Morgan
  Harper, 568 pp, £25.00, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 00 717826 1

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.