After graduation he joined the family law firm before serving in the Wessex Division, reaching the rank of Major, and also on the HQ Staff of the 21st Army Group during World War II.

After the war he rejoined the family law firm and subsequently became the senior partner there following the death of his father in 1960.

He first stood as a Liberal candidate in a 1934 by-election, in the safe Conservative seat of Basingstoke, and ran again there in the 1935 general election.

He remained in the Liberal Party during the long period of its post-war decline and was subsequently made a life peer on 29 November 1967 as Baron Foot, of Buckland Monachorum in the County of Devon.

[1] He served as Chairman of the UK Immigrants Advisory Service from 1970 to 1978 where he did not hesitate to criticise the Wilson Government for the inadequate fulfilment of their pledges to the persecuted Kenyan and Ugandan Asians.