After the 1935 general election, however, Mellor acquired a second disciple and Barbara a close and enduring friend. Michael Foot had deserted his family's Liberal tradition - his father and one of his brothers were Liberal MPs - for Labour. After contesting Monmouth in the general election at the precocious age of twenty-two, he had come to London to work as a journalist. Cripps, whom Foot had met at Oxford where he had been a friend of his oldest son John, sent him to see Mellor, with a view to getting work on the Tou,n and County Councillor. Barbara's friendship with Foot was uncomplicated and stimulating; their backgrounds were similar, and so were their outlooks - radical, passionate, romantic. Three years younger, Foot had gone up to Oxford in the same year that Barbara came down. He was quick and funny and clever, and a much needed companion, someone to ease the enforced loneliness of the mistress of the married man. Sixty years later he denied there was any more to it. He claimed that he knew about the affair and, if nothing else, loyalty to Mellor would have made it unthinkable for him to take his relationship with Barbara any further. Barbara always claimed she was not beautiful enough for Michael Foot, that he was too ugly for her (he was still suffering from chronic and disfiguring eczema). They read together, sometimes for fun, often in pursuit of political knowledge - Marx, Beatrice Webb, Dickens - a reading course prescribed by Mellor.

Today 400,000 German Jews are persecuted while a disciplined people shout their approval. Sixteen years ago one German Jew was murdered. He heard the roar of a pounding engine behind him. A high-powered six-seater tourer shot alongside. It was almost a crash. Suddenly a muffled figure ripped out a revolver, rested it on his armpit and fired.

The England of the Conservative party condoned fascism, consorted with fascism, connived at imperialist war, abandoned any hope of building a sane and secure international society. It was the England of the left, the England of Labour, it was the resurrection of this other England which saved the world, and the hopes of the European revolution will depend on which England rules as the fighting subsides.

Churchill, on his entry into the Commons, was greeted with loud Labour and Liberal cheers, but with almost total silence on his own side. So deeply ingrained was the subservience to Chamberlain among the men who still retained a parliamentary majority. This fact was quickly blotted from the public memory.

Your views and mine are bound to become more and more irreconcilable. As far is this socialist business is concerned, my views are unshakable. For me it is the Klondyke or bust, and at the moment I am doubtful whether I am going the right way to Klondyke. There does not seem much sense in my continuing to write leaders for a newspaper group whose opinions I do not share and some of whose opinions I strongly dissent from. I know you never ask me to write views which I disagree. But as this works out is is good business neither for you nor for me.

Temperamentally, Foot was far better suited to criticism than construction. In his mental universe idealistic Socialists strove heroically against the dastardly machinations of capital and privilege. While he could admire an unprincipled adventurer like Disraeli, or a self-destructive logician like Enoch Powell, he felt only withering contempt for Tories anxious to protect interests for which they had neither toiled nor spun.

For most of his life he appeared to regard with even more loathing the Labour Judases who compromised the one true faith. As a backbench zealot of the Left, Foot had regularly flouted the Whips, sallying forth like the Levellers or Ranters of old in defence of Socialist virtue.

His literary heroes – Swift, Hazlitt and Byron – were all rebels, and Foot was proud to stand beside them against the dragons of reaction. He was a fine speaker, at his best when addressing a vast meeting with the moral fervour of an Old Testament prophet, but also an accomplished performer in the House of Commons, where even opponents delighted in the wit and venom that poured from him.

Yet the ideologue who appeared in public debate to be drained of all sympathy for his enemies presented a different face in private. Foot was wholly without vanity or side, and part of him eagerly withdrew from the arena to indulge his literary tastes.

Away from the hustings he became an immensely likeable man of charm and sensibility, exuding in every contact the courtesy and kindliness conferred upon him by his middle-class Methodist background.

Michael Foot, the most improbable literary romantic to lead a major British party since Benjamin Disraeli, has died at the age of 96 after a turbulent political career that left him a much-loved but also deeply controversial figure.

A brilliant orator, steeped in Swift, Byron, Shelley and the great political struggles of the 17th century, Foot was first an incorrigible rebel who helped foster the left-right Bevanite split that damaged Labour throughout the 50s. A champion of British unilateral nuclear disarmament, one of the left's great postwar causes, he gradually moved towards office in the economic crisis of 1974...

Even before Michael Foot's death, the current tensions with the government of Argentina over South Atlantic property rights presented a gift for fans of the what-if school of modern history.

What if the frictions of 1982 had been resolved, as the present ones will be, by diplomacy? Without that war, which, as a venerable foe of fascist dictatorship Mr Foot felt obliged to support, would Margaret Thatcher have been sunk by the employment exclusion zone she'd imposed on three million people?

Would the longest suicide note in history have been transformed into a billet doux to which the electorate responded by peppering the ballot papers with Labour kisses? And would he have survived in office, this wry and captivating firebrand, for long?

A little while earlier, Chris Mullin had written A Very British Coup. Would the British establishment, and more pertinently Ronald Reagan's White House, have tolerated a unilateralist running America's leading anti-Soviet ally and most priceless strategic dominion? If Prime Minister Foot had ordered the Yanks to pack up their air bases and clear out at a high point of Cold War paranoia, might we have seen a constitutional crisis like the one in Mr Mullin's novel?

Assuming it survived, would a Foot administration have bowed to realpolitik and steered the country in the same reformist direction, albeit along less choppy sea lanes, as Mrs Thatcher, or stuck to its socialist guns? Or might Mr Foot's laissez-faire approach to leadership (and he was resplendently hopeless in the role) have led colleagues to move against him immediately, just as Herbert Morrison schemed to oust Clement Attlee in the hours after his landslide defeat of Churchill in 1945?

Enormous fun as it is to imagine the development of dramatically different time lines, the oddity is that no one could have been less interested in the what-if game than Michael Foot. Perhaps it isn't odd at all. Perhaps he just wasn't that bothered. No one who ever led a technically electable British political party seemed so uninterested in the acquisition of power, so free from anguish at failing to acquire it, or so without rancour at the betrayals of the successor who did.

I met Mr Foot only twice, once at a Tribune dinner not long before 9/11, and again at a neighbour's house after the invasion of Iraq, and his loyalty to people as well as principle was chastening. The first time, in Soho, I returned from the gents with some facetious reference to the Tom Driberg Memorial Suite (the Gay Hussar loo in which that singular Labour MP liked to indulge his altruistic passion for fellating newly introduced gentlemen). "Whaaaarrrgghhhhh!" harrumphed Mr Foot, slapping an outraged thigh. "Don't upset him," his wife Jill Craigie admonished. "Michael's terribly loyal to Tom's memory."

He was equally loyal to Mr Tony Blair, whom several of us tried to entice Mr Foot into slagging off. He wasn't having any. Early days was the Foot line on the young superstar for whom he campaigned in 1983; and anyway, Labour is a great movement, not one man. But this was a coup d'etat, I wittered, executed against that movement by four of five men. No, no, he's a fundamentally good chap, rebuked Mr Foot, and the party will civilise him (I paraphrase slightly) in the end.