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Published: 18 March 2010

FUNERALS should be a reflection of the dear departed’s life, carefully omitting any unsavoury episodes – a drama of death, with tombstones,  black crepe, and solemn mournful music. It can be in, out, followed by dodgy pork pies, stale sandwiches and rationed quantities of wine and beer. 

At Michael Foot’s, the Westminster village decamped to Golders Green Crematorium. Above all, he was held in great affection, and at 96 it was hardly unexpected. Mary Wilson, the widow of Harold, who was Prime Minister during the 1960s and 1970s, called me over. A quiet observer of high-life at the top of the political greasy pole – a place with sycophants, greasy superiors and a place of back-stabbing and merciless ambition. 

We exchanged intimacies under the menacing glare of Cherie Blair, carrying a large part of a harmless African crocodile on her arm. She gazed at the long distance cameras – her much-troubled husband was not there. It was feared that he might have brought a blessing from the Pope, who Blair believes has the answer to the riddle of time. Some of it resembled a Labour Ascot: the giveaway being the expensive nails, designer shoes and aromatic fragrance wafting about us. And accents which could have been acquired at Cheltenham Ladies College. 

The balance was redressed by a stolid group of Camden citizens, ostensibly dressed in warm clothes and woollies, not barging into the chapel like their “betters”. Thankfully the Liberal Democratic granny Lady Shirley Williams was absent, probably locked permanently in a BBC studio or saying the rosary with Sir Gerald Kaufman in a nearby Catholic Church, for Michael’s soul and Gerald’s conversion. 

My curiosity led me towards a number of men in expensive overcoats, each individually tailored and topped by expensive trilby hats. Lord Paul, again with his velvet collar, but now under a cloud surrounded by a group of Indian men. Not bodyguards, I assumed, but diplomats. Lord Melvin Bragg stood out, worthy of a page in the Tailor & Cutter.

It was comforting to see a group of familiar faces to redress the balance. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx’s biographer, of Private Eye and the Gay Hussar. The members of the Parliamentary Lobby I was pleased to see are no longer the drink-crazed hardmen of yesteryear, but all would be at home in an advertisement for the Westminster bank. Dennis Skinner was in his permanent uniform: flannel trousers, dark shirt, red tie and sporting a mass of black hair, admirable on the head of a contemporary of mine. He seemed a lonely isolated figure, no longer the “Beast of Bolsover” but Father of the House. 

Entrance to the chapel was in the hands of ruthless women from Labour’s headquarters. One nervous male clutched a clipboard – a sign of deep uncertainty. A brusque command to show whether you had a green or red ticket made me wonder whether they could have been redcoats in a geriatric holiday camp. 

After all, the Prime Minister was there. Hidden detectives and ostentatious retainers. 

Bruce Kent, from CND, painted a charming picture of Michael at home at teatime. Wondering why Michael insisted on giving him his Life of Jonathan Swift, Kent was genu­inely unaware of Swift’s coruscating satire and black humour – weapons we need today. 

John and Tom Foot, unsullied in the dangerous art of rhetoric, filled their time in a prayer to humanity. 

Lord Neil Kinnock spoke well but sounded like a jangling triangle, clutching the prophet’s mantle. 

It had all begun with a sterling Hebrew chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco, and ended with a rousing tune from Rossini’s Silken Ladder, but in between I was shocked by a thunderous rendering of The Red Flag. 

Was this a call to the impending battle or waiving the banner of last hope? Or a callous gesture to the man who had held them all to­gether? 

I shuddered with disbelief at the full-throated version of this revolutionary hymn. 

They will be well advised not to be afraid of showing passion and practicality. 

Michael had disturbed the conscience of the Labour Party and given a reminder to the cynics of its historic role based on working-class suffering. 

It was, in a perverse way, a noble, resounding call to arms, albeit from the middle-aged.

• An exhibition of photographs celebrating Michael Foot being given honorary freedom of the borough is currently on display in Committee Room 3A at the Town Hall.

‘Sail into rest’ – My 10 days preparing send-off

I MAY have sprouted a few more grey hairs, but we did it, and I think we gave him a good send-off.

The organisation of Michael’s funeral has dominated the past 10 days of my life. The phone rang non-stop for a week with requests to attend the 130-seat chapel.

We have had endless meetings. Labour Party people, security people, press people, funeral directors; speakers, timing, music, flowers, coffins, tone – public or private?

I did not sleep at all on Sunday night and set off for a run around the Heath at 6am – the sun was just rising over Highgate Hill.

My eight-year-old nephew, Joe Foot, asked whether God had arranged the fine weather?

“Michael didn’t believe in God,” said his dad, Matt.

“It must have been Father Christmas then,” said Joe. A welcome moment of light relief in a morning loaded with trepidation.

There were around 150 mourners in the Golder’s Green crematorium forecourt when I arrived – mostly familiar faces from the Labour Party and around Hampstead, where Michael lived. Gordon and Sarah Brown, former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, Secretary of State for Wales Peter Hain, Harold Wilson’s widow Mary, Downing Street aide Sue Nye, Fiona Millar and Alastair Campbell, trade union leader Jack Jones’s son Mick, Lord Melvyn Bragg, journalists Ian Aitken, Bill Keegan, Geoffrey Goodman, Jon Snow, cartoonist Martin Rowson and Salman Rushdie’s former wife and Michael’s near neighbour Elizabeth West. And 43 Feet.

The hearse arrived, coffin topped in red roses and Michael’s green and black Plymouth Argyle scarf. 

Mr Brown was expected to simply read a poem – but he surprised us all with a speech of around three minutes. “A life lived in the service of the greatest of progressive causes,” he said. 

Brown, watched by security men high-up in the gallery above, remembered how Michael gave him a first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels when his son John was born. He read a passage from Pilgrim’s Progress and also Swift’s epitaph that Michael liked to visit in a churchyard on the outskirts of Dublin:

Jonathan Swift has sailed 
      into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Former Tribune editor Mark Seddon quoted Lord Byron; CND president Bruce Kent joked about Michael’s lengthy literary lectures; Michael’s stepdaughter Julie Hamilton read Cicero.

I read Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, which Michael read at my father Paul’s memorial. “There’s not a breathing of the common wind that will forget thee,” it goes.

Lord Kinnock started the singing of The Red Flag.

Around 60 people came to the reception at Keats House. The family played Grandmother’s Footsteps on the grass. 

Many thanks to Keats House manager Mick Scott for making everything go so smoothly – and to the New Journal’s Clare Latimer, of Clare’s Kitchen in Primrose Hill, for the food and wine.

A public memorial event is being organised and is expected to be held in May.
TOM FOOT

Wordsworth sonnet for Michael Foot

by RICHARD OSLEY

THE green and black scarf tied to the coffin was a symbol of his devotion to Plymouth Argyle football club, the throw of red roses was an emblem of Michael Foot’s loyalty to the Labour Party.

In a funeral without a hymn or a prayer, the former Labour leader was given a final farewell at Golders Green Crematorium on Monday afternoon by more than 40 relatives, the Prime Minister and a host of familiar party faces.

Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah were joined by Lord Neil Kinnock, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Ed Miliband, Frank Dobson, Dennis Skinner, Harriet Harman, Mary Wilson, Harold Wilson’s widow, and the Islington Tribune’s literary editor Illtyd Harrington, the former deputy leader of the GLC. Former Tribune editor Mark Seddon and Bruce Kent, from CND, were also there. Broacasters Lord Melvyn Bragg and Jon Snow listened from the pews.

Around 150 mourners listened to stories of Foot, the journalist turned politician who led the Labour Party between  1980 and 1983. 

More than 50 more listened to the service from speakers and a television screens outside the chapel.

The Islington Tribune’s assistant editor Tom Foot, who lived with Mr Foot, his great uncle, in Hampstead, told the chapel: “It will be a terrible thing waking up in a world where there is no Michael Foot. I can still hear that voice, rising and falling with its unmistakable lilt.”

Lord Kinnock said: “Michael’s religion was humanity, his country was the world. He is dead now but the memory of him endures to illuminate all our lives. His great soul goes striding on.” 

The finale was a singing  of The Red Flag. The wake was held at Keats House in Hampstead.