Gordon Brown caught recycling at Michael Foot's funeral

We've all done it. Recycled a good line or phrase, be it on a birthday card going round the office or even a love letter. But at a chapel in Golders Green cemetery last week Gordon Brown took recycling to a new level—at Michael Foot's funeral.

“It is a terrible thing waking up in a world with no Michael Foot,” said Tom Foot at the funeral of his great uncle on Monday. Inside the west chapel of Golders Green crematorium sat family and friends, colleagues and comrades who felt the same way; outside, dozens stood silently in the spring sunshine, watching proceedings on two television screens. A number of politicians, past and present, were there including Gordon Brown, Neil Kinnock, Alastair Campbell, Harriet Harman, Ed Miliband, Peter Hain and Dennis Skinner. Others were notable by their absence. Tony Blair was in America but Cherie had come in his place.

Gordon Brown led the tributes. “It was said of Cicero,” he began, “that when people heard him, they turned to one another and said 'great speech' but when Demosthenes spoke, people turned to one another and said, 'let's march.' People heard Michael Foot—and they marched.” It was a rousing start to a eulogy to a remarkable man, but listening to it I could not help feeling that I had heard these words from Brown before. After some internet research I quickly discovered that the prime minister used exactly the same quote less than a year before in reference to Barack Obama. Writing in Time magazine on 30th April, Brown had finished an article using the exactly the same quote, changing the end to read: “Around the world people are marching with Barack Obama.”



It's not the first time Brown has been caught of reusing material. In 2008 his conference speech was attacked for including borrowed phrases from Obama as well as Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Whilst recycling your own lines is not as bad a stealing from others, and the words were stirring ones, I couldn’t help but feel that Michael Foot was a unique individual and deserved a unique tribute.

Other tributes were more heartfelt. Julie Hamilton talked of him "a wise and wonderful grandfather to my four children," and Peter Jones recalled his love for Plymouth Argyle FC. Others talked of his love of literature and all talked about his passion for politics. "Michael loved the House of Commons not as a place of trappings and tradition, but as the supreme instrument for bringing the powerful to account and for gaining redress for the powerless," said Neil Kinnock.

In the week after his death, MPs of all parties invariably referred to Foot as "a man of principle," and his loss highlights what a rarity principle has become in modern British politics. With the expenses scandal rumbling on, and the House of Commons filled to its ancient rafters with lily-livered career politicians desperate to stay "on message" whilst arranging lucrative directorships for their life after politics, we should mourn both the loss of the man and what he represented: one of the last in the breed of conviction politicians.