You could easily fall into the trap of sentimentalising about Michael Foot, the former UK Labour leader who died yesterday at the age of 96. It would be as easy to dismiss him too.

Many of those who remember him at all, will remembering him at a bitter-cold Remembrance Day ceremony, paused before the Cenotaph, in a light brown duffel coat. Labelled a “donkey jacket” by the Murdoch press, it was symbolic of everything that Labour was getting wrong in the 1980s, projecting an image not merely of a lack of fuss, but of torpor, not of equality, but of a lack of aspiration.

While Margaret Thatcher managed to project an air of smouldering vitality from within staid Home Counties wear — “the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe'” as Mitterrand once remarked — Foot’s demeanour came from a different era, in which a leader projected solidarity and sameness. He first entered the Commons in 1945, leaving in 1955, returning in 1960 and staying until 1993.

He succeeded Aneurin Bevan, prime mover of the National Health Service, and was also his biographer, turning out a two volume study among a range of other works. He was a fire-breathing journalist from the 30s into the 50s, co-author of the book Guilty Men, a denunciation of the years of Tory appeasement in the lead-up to the Second World War. Written furiously over three days in 1940, the work sold a quarter of a million copies in the next three months. He was a co-founder of the left weekly Tribune (still going), of the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament (still going), and a core of the old Labour Party centre-left (not doing so well).

That will all return to the fore, but as ancient history, the record of an era now decisively passed. It’s the donkey jacket that still lingers at the edge of our historical consciousness, and not merely because it was a bad fashion choice. At the beginning of the Thatcher era, as Labour passed, exhausted and eviscerated by the divisions of the left, into opposition, Foot took on the leadership of what was a single party in name only.

From the vantage point of history, it has the air of self-sacrifice. But this was before Thatcher became Thatcherism. With two million unemployed from the application of a strict monetarism that many in her party didn’t like, Labour was not without a chance in the early 80s. Until of course, the Falklands came along, a potential military hat-trick, served up to a battered nation who couldn’t even win a second World Cup. Though Foot supported the war, his image as a self-described lifelong “peacemonger”, made him look like he was opposing it, without getting any of the benefit from that.

It was a hiding to nothing, as was the 1983 election, which Labour went into with a manifesto that Gerald Kaufman described as “the longest suicide note in history”. It was not that it was a leftist programme per se that doomed it — it was that it was a leftist programme unchanged in form by the obvious stagnation and failure of the 1970s, a remnant faith in monolithic nationalisation rather than more innovative modes of social ownership, a residual support for union dominance, rather than a broader idea of leftist participation and citizenship.

The Labour leaders of Foot’s generation were so accustomed to being the force of progressive change in the face of entrenched Toryism, that they didn’t see that it was the Tories who had become identified with the mobility and fluidity of the new world. Though Thatcherism would devastate the country permanently and send poverty soaring from 10% to 23%, Labour’s anti-achievement was to make the things that enabled freedom- such as a health system with universal access — to look like constraint, while the Tories made unfreedom, the loss of work conditions and a safety net for most, look like a liberation.

Could someone else have got the Labour Party through its sclerosis quicker, out to the other side? It would have taken a far more towering figure, a spinebuster, a philosopher-thug, to open up the party like a wound, tear its heart, then close it up again, in a different form. Foot could not even prevent the split, when the centrist faction left to form the SDP party, that would ultimately combine with the Liberals.

But time will say nothing but I told you so, and Foot’s achievement of that period may simply be that he prevented further splits, which might have finished the party altogether. Whether what would have emerged after that could have been any further to the right than Blair-labour, is unknowable. But since it’s all unknowable, Foot deserves credit for what didn’t happen.

For the rest, he was possessed of the same holdover eccentricities and exceptions as most British Labour, as much Burke as barricades. He wanted to abolish the House of Lords — but if it remained he wanted to keep hereditary peers. He was an anti-militarist who helped keep the UK out of Vietnam, yet he threw himself into the Balkans war with an anti-Serbian approach that verged on racism, and was an expression of the projected fantasies that helped tear the Balkans apart in the first place.

He believed in an enforced equality, yet much of his strength and energy came from being part of a great Liberal family, in the classic British manner. The NHS is still there. The BBC is still there. CND and the social movements are still there. They all look a lot better than the legacy of those who came after him. He was made of Methodism and Marx (more the former than the latter), of the hopes, failures, fantasies and triumphs of the left The 20th century runs through like the rings and ridges felt in old oak, the one tree, hewn from different sides.