Michael Foot was the brilliant left-wing crusader, unequalled in his day as a parliamentarian, who in 1983 led his beloved Labour party to its worst electoral humiliation.
This cruel epitaph is sadly how Mr Foot will be remembered above all else. For he was a politician who was far more at home on the backbenches, freely dispensing discursive and sophisticated argument and debate, than as a frontbench man hemmed around by official policy lines which he was compelled to adhere to.
Wherever else his talents lay - and they were plentiful - leadership was certainly never his strong suit. By the time he was elected leader, he was already perceived by many as a shambling, white-haired, ill-groomed figure, limping along with a walking stick and a dog at his heels.
His very appearance, as an old man, epitomising, it seemed, the lumbering nature of the old Labour Party, spelled doom at the 1983 general election. Many Labour supporters felt, but were too gracious to say so, that if the rumbustious Denis Healey had secured the leadership, then Margaret Thatcher might well have been beaten in 1983.
Labour's and Michael Foot's standing was diminished even further in 1981 when Fellow Labour MP Walter Johnson denounced the leader as looking like "an out-of-work Irish navvy". This was because Mr Foot played his major role as Leader of the Opposition at the Cenotaph ceremony wearing what his critics denounced as an old donkey jacket.
It was that which earned him the derogatory nickname, Wurzel Gummidge and which, more than any political issue, was probably responsible for Labour's election calamity in 1983.
But Mr Foot always denied that that coat was a donkey jacket, merely a short overcoat. It was actually admired by the Queen Mother when she met the then Labour leader after the Cenotaph ceremony.
Mr Foot's achievements - and where he excelled and enjoyed himself - were on the backbenches, delivering fascinating speeches full of wit and logic, playing to the left-wing gallery, and unrestricted by policy lines. He invariably played to a full House.
As a Cabinet minister, although effective and generous, Mr Foot often looked ill at ease. He seemed to detest having a brief to read from at the Despatch Box, hankering after the freedom, it appeared, of the backbenches.
Mr Foot was also a journalist of great ability, having edited the London Evening Standard, a trenchant biographer and an author of huge merit.
Despite the crushing defeat he suffered at the hands of Margaret Thatcher, he will be remembered at Westminster with great affection as one of the kindest, most genuine and popular politicians.
Mr Foot, although a gentle and courteous individual, always attracted controversy, whether as left-wing Tribune columnist in the 1930s, part-author of the most famous attack on Britain's wartime rulers, Guilty Men, in the 1940s, or a ban-the-bomb Aldermaston peace marcher in the 1950s.
But controversy of a less welcome kind dogged his three unhappy years as Labour leader.
In addition to the Cenotaph incident - the furore about which enraged his actress wife Jill Craigie - there was talk, mostly behind his back, of forcing him to resign.
His contemporaries could see that with a leader who, frankly, looked doddery, they were handing Margaret Thatcher election victory on a plate. Even during the disastrous campaign itself, senior Labour figures were publicly proclaiming full confidence in their leader - an unprecedented move which told the world they were dissatisfied with his performance.
But this indomitable figure stayed put, and with a manifesto later described as "the longest suicide note in history" fought the election only a month before his 70th birthday with its terrible consequences.
And within 72 hours of that three-figure disaster, Neil Kinnock's name was being bandied about as the party's ideal new leader. Mr Foot was distinctly and noticeably irritated that the movement was already casting around for a new leader before he had even suggested he might stand down.
Whatever his personal view was, the party could not afford to keep this man in charge, even though he was then - and remained until his death - one of the best-loved figures in the Labour movement.
And unlike most of his Labour contemporaries, Mr Foot, in keeping with his principles, refused the opportunity for a life peerage and a seat in the House of Lords.
Michael Foot was born on July 23, 1913 in Plymouth - into the most famous of West Country Liberal families.
His father, Isaac, a Methodist and leading Plymouth solicitor, was a Liberal MP who served in Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. Michael was the youngest, and most famous, of a quartet of sons who all became national figures.
Lord Caradon was former permanent British representative at the UN, the late Sir Dingle Foot was a Liberal MP and later a Labour minister, and Lord Foot, a former Liberal candidate, sat as a Liberal peer.
But it was Michael Foot who first broke the Liberal tradition, something his parents found particularly galling. However, his mother's peace offering was much appreciated - she sent him a homemade Cornish pasty to celebrate his election as an MP in 1945.
Oddly, his early prowess at school was not in politics, but on the soccer field as a centre forward. Later, he took great pleasure listing himself in Who's Who as a devoted Plymouth Argyle supporter, something he remained until his death.
He went from Leighton Park School, Reading, to Wadham College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner reading philosophy, politics and economics, and in 1933 became the youngest president of the Union.
On leaving university, his political and journalistic careers went hand in hand. He joined the Labour Party in Liverpool in 1934, convinced that socialism, and not his father's liberalism, was the only answer to the widespread poverty and unemployment of the period.
Foot fought the no-hope seat of Monmouth in 1935 and two years later became assistant editor of the respected left-wing journal Tribune, which he was later to edit from 1948-52 and 1955-60.
An unlikely friendship developed between the young left-winger and the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who became Mr Foot's "second father". This paved the way to what could have been a glittering future in journalism. Even so, in 1942 he became editor of the Evening Standard before his 30th birthday - an achievement beyond the dreams of even the most ambitious journalist of that age.
His reign at the Standard lasted two years, and he left to begin a 20-year stint as political columnist on the Labour-sympathetic newspaper, the Daily Herald.
It was in 1945 in Plymouth, the city of his birth, that he achieved Parliamentary success - as MP for Devonport division. He fought at Westminster for cash to rebuild the blitzed centre of the city, where his father was lord mayor at the time.
During the campaign he first met Jill Craigie, then making a film in Plymouth. He later married her.
Much to her annoyance, in the heat of his victory over former War Secretary Leslie Hoare-Belisha, he neglected to invite her to the celebrations.
In Parliament, he quickly became a fiery spokesman of the Bevanite left, advocating nationalisation, disengagement from the Cold War and alliance with the US, non-participation in Europe - and, above all, nuclear disarmament.
Words of wisdom
Michael Foot's celebrated quotations over the years
• "Is the Labour Party to remain a democratic party in which the right of free criticism and free debate is not merely tolerated but encouraged? Or are the rank and file of the party to be bludgeoned or cowed into an uncritical subservience towards the leadership?" - Tribune, 1954.
• "Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology" - In the Daily Herald, 1956.
• "A Britain which denounced the insanity of the nuclear strategy would be in a position to direct its influence at the UN and in the world at large, in a manner at present denied us" - Newspaper article, 1960.
• "A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg" - Speech in the House of Commons, 1964.
• "He was without any rival whatever, the first comic genius who ever installed himself in Downing Street" - Description of Disraeli in his book Debts Of Honour.
• "Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power" - In his book Debts Of Honour.
• "The national strike of the miners in 1972 performed, I believe, a great service, not only to the miners, but the people in Britain today who wanted coal" - House of Commons, 1974.
• "People must learn more and more that the strength of this country is the democratic power of the trade union movement" - Article in the Morning Star, 1974.
• I have been on the Left of the party since I joined it in about 1934 and I have not seen much reason for altering" - Panorama TV interview, 1976.
• "If the freedom of the people in this country had been left to the good sense and fair-mindedness of the judges, we would have had few freedoms in this country at all" - Article in Daily Telegraph, 1977.
• "There is nothing wrong with being a Marxist. Their point of view is essential to a democratic debate" - Daily Telegraph, 1977.
• "What is needed is a strong shift leftwards. This party in Parliament ought to start the process, and if it won't, the party conference will do it for them" - Article in Tribune, 1979.
• "In my opinion, Marxism is a great creed of human liberation. It is the creed which says that when all other empires fade and vanish, our business is to enlarge the empire of the human mind" - At a Morning Star rally in 1980.
• "Most liberties have been won by people who broke the law" - Interview in 1980.
• "She has no imagination and that means no compassion" - On Margaret Thatcher, 1981.
• "A semi-house-trained polecat" - His description of Norman Tebbit, 1983.
• "We had not the armour, the strength, the quickness in manoeuvre, yes, the leadership" - Explaining Labour's 1983 election defeat when he was leader in his book Another Heart And Other Pulses, 1984.
• "I think the House of Lords ought to be abolished and I don't think the best way for me to abolish it is to go there myself" - On his departure from the House of Commons, 1992.