A passionate orator, and associated with the left wing of the Labour Party for most of his career, Foot was an ardent supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and of British withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC).

Foot resigned in 1938 after the paper's first editor, William Mellor, was sacked for refusing to adopt a new CP policy of backing a Popular Front, including non-socialist parties, against fascism and appeasement.

In 1940, under the pen-name "Cato" he and two other Beaverbrook journalists (Frank Owen, editor of the Standard, and Peter Howard of the Daily Express) published Guilty Men, which attacked the appeasement policy and slow pace of British re-armament under the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain; it became a runaway bestseller.

The Daily Herald was jointly owned by the Trades Union Congress and Odhams Press, and was effectively an official Labour Party paper.

He successfully urged Bevan to follow through with his threat to resign from the Cabinet in protest of the introduction of prescription charges at the National Health Service, leading to a split in the Labour Party between Bevanites and Gaitskellites.

Before the Cold War began in the late 1940s, Foot favoured a 'third way' foreign policy for Europe (he was joint author with Richard Crossman and Ian Mikardo of the pamphlet Keep Left in 1947), but in the wake of the communist seizure of power in Hungary and Czechoslovakia he and Tribune took a strongly anti-communist position, eventually embracing NATO.

He opposed the government's moves to restrict immigration, join the European Communities (or "Common Market" as they were referred to) and reform the trade unions, was against the Vietnam War and Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, and denounced the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

However, he was able to steer numerous government proposals through the Commons, often by very narrow majorities, including increases in pension and benefit rates, the creation of the Police Complaints Board, the expansion of comprehensive schools, the establishment of a statutory responsibility to provide housing for the homeless, universal Child Benefit, the nationalisation of shipbuilding, abolishing pay beds in NHS hospitals, and housing security for agricultural workers, before the government fell in a vote of no confidence by a single vote.

In 1975, Foot, along with Jennie Lee and others, courted controversy when they supported Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, after she prompted the declaration of a state of emergency.

[32] Following Labour's 1979 general election defeat by Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan remained as party leader for the next 18 months before he resigned.

Foot presented himself as a compromise candidate, capable – unlike Healey – of uniting the party,[33] which at the time was riven by the grassroots left-wing insurgency centred around Tony Benn.

They called for MPs who had acquiesced in Callaghan's policies to be replaced by left-wingers who would support unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Communities, and widespread nationalisation.

[34] However, Steve Richards notes that while "Healey was widely seen as the obvious successor to Callaghan", and that sections of the media ultimately reacted with "disbelief" at Labour not choosing him, the "choice of Foot was not as perverse as it seemed".

[36][37] Following the 1979 energy crisis, Britain went into recession in 1980, which was blamed on the Conservative government's controversial monetarist policy against inflation, which had the effect of increasing unemployment.

When Foot became leader, the Conservative politician Kenneth Baker commented: "Labour was led by Dixon of Dock Green under Jim Callaghan.

Foot struggled to make an impact, and was widely criticised for his ineffectiveness, though his performances in the Commons – most notably on the Falklands War of 1982 – won him widespread respect from other parliamentarians.

The right-wing newspapers nevertheless lambasted him consistently for what they saw as his bohemian eccentricity, attacking him for wearing what they described as a "donkey jacket" (actually he wore a type of duffel coat)[39] at the wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in November 1981, for which he was likened to an "out-of-work navvy" by a fellow Labour MP.

[41] He later donated the coat to the People's History Museum in Manchester,[42][43] which holds a collection that spans Foot's entire political career from 1938 to 1990, and his personal papers dating back to 1926.

[citation needed] Critically, Labour held on in a subsequent by-election in Darlington, and Foot remained leader for the 1983 general election.

The 1983 Labour manifesto, strongly socialist in tone, advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and a return to a more interventionist industrial policy.

The manifesto also pledged that a Labour government would abolish the House of Lords, nationalise banks and immediately withdraw from the then-European Economic Community.

The party also failed to master the medium of television, while Foot addressed public meetings around the country, and made some radio broadcasts, in the same manner as Clement Attlee did in 1945.

The Daily Mirror was the only major newspaper to back Foot and the Labour Party at the 1983 general election, urging its readers to vote Labour and "Stop the waste of our nation, for your job your children and your future" in response to the mass unemployment that followed Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's monetarist economic policies to reduce inflation.

[47] The Labour Party, led by Foot, lost to the Conservatives in a landslide – a result that had been widely predicted by the opinion polls since the previous summer.

He defended Salman Rushdie, after Ayatollah Khomeini advocated killing the novelist in a fatwā, and took a strongly pro-interventionist position against Serbia and Montenegro during the Yugoslav Wars, supporting NATO forces whilst citing defence of civilian populations in Croatia and Bosnia.

[citation needed] Oleg Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB officer who defected from the Soviet Union to the UK in 1985, made allegations against Foot in his 1995 memoirs.

[58] Following Foot's death, Charles Moore writing in The Daily Telegraph in 2010 gave an account that he said had been provided to him by Gordievsky, containing additional uncorroborated information concerning his allegations.

[65] On 23 July 2006, his 93rd birthday, Michael Foot became the longest-lived leader of a major British political party, passing Lord Callaghan's record of 92 years, 364 days.

A staunch republican (though well liked by the Royal Family on a personal level),[65] Foot rejected honours from the Queen and the government, including a knighthood and a peerage, on more than one occasion.

[76] Foot was portrayed by Patrick Godfrey in the 2002 BBC production of Ian Curteis's long unproduced The Falklands Play and by Michael Pennington in the film The Iron Lady.