Gordon will do the job very well

Michael Foot and I are sitting in the kitchen of his house in Hampstead, north London. Outside in the garden a red ‘Labour’ rose blooms in the afternoon sun; inside, the house is crammed with books: they’re in piles on the kitchen table, on shelves on every wall: William Hazlitt, William Blake, John Keats, Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Paine. Upstairs there’s a whole roomful of books on women’s suffrage that belonged to his late wife, Jill Craigie, then another room where an entire corner is devoted to Irish writers: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift.

Mr Foot believes that politicians should have a love of great literature (he has written acclaimed biographies of Aneurin Bevan and H.G. Wells among others) and also that the best writers of fiction should concern themselves with politics. ‘I’m in favour of politicians knowing something about literature and vice versa,’ he says. ‘Swift was a wonderful example. Swift, his views and ideas changed my life. I was asked to speak at his 300th commemoration at Trinity College Dublin in 1967,’ he says, ‘and I remember thinking I would be hosting perhaps a small seminar in a library or lecture room. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was to give the talk in the awe-inspiring St Patrick’s Cathedral. I felt very close to heaven!’

‘I also met Mary Robinson [the former Irish President and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] there,’ he continues. ‘She is one of the wonderful women of the world, but I felt she was very badly treated by the US during her work for the UN. Mary showed herself to be independent and was not afraid to ask tough questions when she saw the need, such as during the war in Chechnya. She would have made a wonderful International Secretary of the UN.’