There's more to Foot than meets the eye

Nearing 90 now, frighteningly unsteady on his feet and consumed with formidable nervous energy, Michael Foot for the zillionth time explains he won't discuss Tony Blair.

However, he will ride the donkey-jacket route, even though it's sad that the one-time leader of the Labour Party and renowned academic has to travel it again and again.

There is irony, of course, and a lot of myth.

The coat which caused outrage in the Eighties was, in fact a green Jaeger label from Herbie Frogg, in Jermyn Street.

But because Michael Foot wore it at Armistice commemorations at the capital's Cenotaph, controversy raged.

The man who has spent most of his life trying to stop war in campaigns for nuclear disarmament and banning the bomb, was said to be insulting our dead soldiers.

Ironically, he went on to own more donkey-jackets than a donkey-jacket shop as miners and steel and construction workers across the country sent him the hardy cover of their trades in a move for moral support.

We share a bottle of water in a Grasmere hotel, sipping from the same glass.

It's all about equality, he says.

He laments foot-and-mouth and its " devastating effects" on our economy, explaining he has great affection for the Lakes and has paid many visits over the last 25 years.

This is a caring, clever, misunderstood soul.

He never had the front-cover looks, the charisma, the obvious charm to be an enduring, endearing leader.

What Michael Foot had was passion.

Not an ounce of it has left his otherwise failing, decrepit body

History, he accepts, will probably not be kind to him.

"Churchill always said it would be safer to write your own history.

I think he was maybe right."

As a young man, Michael Foot announced to his great Liberal politician father Isaac Foot that he wanted to join the Labour Party, who said go off and read William Hazlitt.

"I was told if I wanted to be a real radical or real revolutionary, I needed Hazlitt."

The critic and essayist and friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge provided all the inspiration Michael Foot needed.

Hazlitt remains a hero, along with Byron, and Aneurin Bevan, naturally.

"I had some wonderful times with Bevan - and a few arguments, mostly about the bomb, how to ban it, obviously.

He taught me a different sort of socialism, the kind we need to get back."

We find ourselves on a favourite bandwagon - the unacceptable rift between rich and poor, and he is scathing it is not improving under New Labour.

The true Foot fervour is reserved for his condemnation of Thatcherism and the "terrible damage it wrought on the country."

His own 1983 election humiliation still hurts and, yes, he felt "partly responsible".

There is no sympathy for William Hague, though.

The situations were "very different".

" Hague was a good deal more responsible than I was for the defeat.

Anyway, I don't worry about the Tory Party."

Some of the Foot "really good times" were spent in journalism.

That career started in 1937, on the Tribune, where he earned a fiver a week and saw many a political battle fought and won.

He worked for the New Statesman and during the war edited the Evening Standard, witnessing first-hand the worth of women writers and workers.

He has always been an ardent campaigner of equal rights.

The course of his life changed forever when he was elected MP for Plymouth Devonport in 1945.

"I am proud of many things my party has done, but being a journalist was better than being an MP.

"Hazlitt, now he was one of the greatest journalists that ever lived."

We are back where we started, with Hazlitt.

In half-an-hour Michael Foot is delivering a lecture on The Genius of Hazlitt for The Wordsworth Trust.

He said he needed a sleep before my interview, but was now ready for his Grasmere gathering.

Clutching his walking stick in one hand and a bundle of books tied up with rubber bands in the other, he flails about in an attempt to move forward.

Slowly, painfully, the reluctant body with a razor brain is ready to reveal the Genius of Foot.