Gordon will do the job very well

16 September 2006

Michael Foot led Labour to defeat in 1983, the year Blair and Brown entered Parliament. He tells John Reynolds why Iraq was a catastrophe and why Brown will be a great PM

It’s not of course that Mr Foot has any objection to spreading democracy. ‘Government by consent is the most sacred cause of all,’ he said in 1970, and he has always argued that all people deserve to live in democracies. But his love of democracy these days often rubs up against his hatred of war and his fear that in an attempt to destroy injustice, the world will destroy itself. ‘The pre-emptive strike is a terrible, terrible idea,’ he says, about the onset of the second Gulf war, ‘and the dangers of this idea spreading are just appalling.’ One of Mr Foot’s persistent worries is that other nuclear nations might take up the idea of pre-emptive strikes, to catastrophic effect. ‘Look at India’ (Mr Foot was a close friend of Indira Gandhi) â” ‘the dangers if they tried a pre-emptive strike are too awful to contemplate.’

Perhaps, then, Mr Foot has more in common with David Cameron’s foreign policy than New Labour’s? After all, on his recent visit to Mumbai, the Conservative leader referred to the ‘challenge in international affairs’, the British political obsession with Europe and America, and the importance of ‘our deep relationship with India’.

The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. While Mr Foot would agree with Mr Cameron that it’s crucial to take notice of what other countries think â” ‘Of course we should be listening to people in India,’ he says, ‘they’ll give us better ideas about how to deal with the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction’ â” during the course of our interview it becomes clear that he’s a great supporter of Gordon Brown.

So even after all this infighting and betrayal, you still see Mr Brown as a figure on whom to focus your hopes, I ask. Mr Foot raises his voice, sounding more urgent than usual as he says: ‘I have known Gordon Brown for a long time and I’m very much in favour of him taking over.