Michael Foot: How New Labour is at risk of getting it wrong

The Monday interview: with the former leader of the Labour Party

Michael Foot is a fine example of that rarest of rare birds – a politician who is held in affection. All the more startling because his name will forever be linked with the 1983 general election, in which he led the Labour Party to its worst defeat in half a century and near destruction.

It was, he says, the "blackest day in my political life". And yet, accompanying Mr Foot to the Durham Miners' Gala, Old Labour's annual festival of banners and brass bands, you might be forgiven for thinking he had led the party to its most famous victory.

Ironically, the man who arguably achieved that feat, or at least secured for the party its largest parliamentary majority, Tony Blair, has never visited the gala as Labour leader. This despite the fact that he is a local MP, representing Sedgefield, a constituency which includes former mining communities. This year, he didn't reply to the invitation.

The omission is felt keenly by the trade unionists and loyal Labour members who organise and attend the rally. Mr Foot thinks it a "damn shame" that Mr Blair doesn't show up, as every Labour leader before him did. Yet Mr Foot, 89 tomorrow, did make the effort.

Able to walk only a short distance with that famous splayed gait, his sight now gone in one eye and clearly frail, Mr Foot still managed to stand on the balcony of the County Hotel for longer than was good for him, waving his stick and singing the "Red Flag".

The event means a lot to Mr Foot personally as well as politically, for he came to the gala first in 1947, and it was here that he met his beloved wife, Jill Craigie, who died in 1999. When he met the crowds it would not be too great an exaggeration to say he was mobbed; for autographs, for pictures, and because "I just want to shake your hand."

A characteristic cry of "Ha!" greets those who approach him and he is, of course, unfailingly obliging, especially to those miners he met during the strike of 1984-85. Mr Foot wants to be with these people who feel that they have been betrayed, or at least taken for granted by New Labour.

He went into an election against the odds fighting for them and, even though he was destroyed, they haven't forgotten what he tried to do for them. They haven't forgotten, either, the vicious treatment meted out to Mr Foot by the Tory newspapers, summed up in the text of a note a press photographer left at a Labour rally in St George's Hall in Liverpool in 1983: "Express only want pix [pictures] if Foot falls over or collapses or is shot, etc. Same for The Sun".

However, many of Mr Foot's opponents have only complimentary things to say about him. Enoch Powell called him his "political pin-up". Margaret Thatcher wrote that "Michael Foot is a highly principled and cultivated man, invariably courteous in our dealings. In debate and on the platform he has a kind of genius."

The easy thing to forget about Mr Foot is that behind the good manners and weak body, a politician still lurks, jealous of his reputation, and one who hasn't forgotten what he believes in. He may be the scion of a famous family of Plymouth non-conformists, but his retort to Baroness Thatcher's niceness is as earthy as to be unrepeatable. He is critical of the "foolish" way Mr Blair has allowed proper cabinet government to atrophy and describes Peter Mandelson's "I am not a quitter" acceptance speech at the 2001 election as "quite odious".

Mr Foot is so well up with what is going on that it is sometimes easy to forget that this is a man who has an incredible hinterland. He is one of the few figures to have risen to the top of journalism and politics and to stand in his own right as a formidable scholar (of William Hazlitt, Jonathan Swift and H G Wells, the last of whom he knew). A protégé of Lord Beaverbrook, he was editor of the Evening Standard and Tribune. He served as an MP for 42 years, as a cabinet minister for five and as deputy leader and leader of his party for seven (1976-80 and 1980-83). Not to mention being the political son of Nye Bevan.

Mr Foot has known every Labour leader since, and including, George Lansbury, whom he met in 1934. He was Clement Attlee's backbencher, Hugh Gaitskell's implacable foe, Harold Wilson's conscience, Jim Callaghan's fixer, mentor to Neil Kinnock and John Smith and the man who talent spotted Tony Blair at a by-election in 1982 (although he now lets slip that he didn't actually vote for him as leader, preferring John Prescott). It is hard to draw him on Mr Blair personally but he talks a lot about Gordon Brown, and was especially pleased that Mr Brown delivered the first Aneurin Bevan lecture, named after Mr Foot's greatest hero.

At any rate, Mr Foot is clear about where he thinks this Government is going wrong. First up is the way Mr Blair runs the Cabinet and the drift to presidential government – "foolish" according to Mr Foot.

He speaks convincingly of the way Wilson and Callaghan ran their cabinets, with ministers encouraged to take papers for discussion and decisions taken at the meetings. Recalling his old friend and ally Barbara Castle, at whose memorial service he recently spoke, Mr Foot says: "Barbara used to do that, and while some people might think she went on a bit she was a fine minister and she argued well." He thinks today's ministers "must have that chance" to fight their corner.

Reflecting on the council workers' pay claim, Mr Foot thinks they "have a good case", especially given that they are (relative to other workers) more poorly paid than in 1978-79 during the Winter of Discontent, when Mr Foot was in government.

He remarks that he still believes in incomes policy, not least as an engine of redistribution, and "if a Labour government doesn't have one then it will find that it has one forced upon it". He would also like to see an incomes ceiling, although he is not saying how much it might be.

Mr Foot is upset about the Government's failure to abolish tuition fees – "dreadful". But having watched Mr Blair on the Channel 4 special programme on education presented by Jon Snow he gives him credit for not running away and for standing up for his policies.

Most of all, however, as someone who made the battle against The Bomb a life's work, he feels that Mr Blair, even as a multilateralist, could and should have done more to fight proliferation of nuclear weapons, citing the Indo-Pakistan conflict as an example of what can go wrong. The authentic echo of the first Aldermaston march can be heard when he says: "Geoff Hoon talks as if he might want to use these nuclear weapons. It is the biggest issue in the world".

One of the few things that Mr Foot has changed his mind on is the euro, which he now seems, on balance, to favour. He was famously anti-Common Market, as it was called then, although he denies he was ever "anti-European" as such. He simply believes that Labour can't line up with those who are against it. As for a referendum, he disarmingly declares: "We should have it when we can win it. If we don't we'll just be handing a gift to the Tories."

Since his wife died, Mr Foot has remained in his Hampstead villa which he bought half a century ago with the help of a redundancy cheque for £6,000 from Lord Beaverbrook. He is surrounded by thousands of books and mementoes. Step-grandchildren occupy the flat at the top of the house.

At breakfast and you'll find him drinking coffee from a Nye Bevan mug; at the close of the day this "lapsed puritan" enjoys a whisky or two, taken from a silver cup presented to him by the train drivers' union Aslef, "so people can't see how much I'm drinking".

He is still broadcasting (most recently "Footnotes" on Radio 4's Westminster Hour), has a volume of essays coming out in October and is a director of Plymouth Argyle football club. He is looking forward to the first match of the new season, away to Mansfield.

Mr Foot likes to quote Hazlitt's essay "Mind and Motive": "Happy are they who live in the dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not entered! They have not been 'hurt by the archers', not has the iron entered their souls. The world has no hand on them."

Not a bad description of Michael Foot, as it happens.