At Plymouth Sutton in the by-election of November 1919 he was beaten by Nancy Astor, who became the first woman MP in Britain to take her seat in Parliament and a lifelong friend of Foot.

[4] In 1931 he became Secretary for Mines in the National Government, but resigned the following year in protest at the protectionist Ottawa Agreements.

[2] Foot also served as deputy-chairman of the Cornwall Quarter Sessions in 1945, and was chairman from 1953 to 1955,[4] a distinction rarely granted to a solicitor.

[2] Foot also built up a library of over 70,000 books at his home near Callington and would wake at five in the morning in order to read them.

Foot married Catherine Elizabeth Taylor, née Dawe (born Liskeard 1894) in St Germans in 1951, who survived him.

[4] Hugh's son, Paul Foot, was a prominent campaigning journalist and political activist, being a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).