On 8 November 1981, the leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, attended the annual National Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph on Whitehall. His choice of outerwear – a greenish-brown tweed overcoat – was denigrated by the press as a “donkey jacket”.

Foot’s fashion critics said his choice of coat – which was later proven to be a perfectly fine winter garment – revealed a lack of respect for the solemn remembrance service. A donkey jacket is a garment typically associated with manual labourers.

The scene became one of the defining images of Foot’s ill-fated leadership of the Labour Party.

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Foot was elected leader of the opposition in 1980 at the age of 67. A member of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan’s cabinets, he was known for his skilled performances in the House of Commons.

Foot had first won election to parliament as part of Labour’s post-war landslide in 1945. The former Evening Standard editor emerged as a leading figure on the ‘Bevanite’ wing of the Labour Party.

Foot’s image was shaped by his bookish and sometimes dishevelled appearance. Conservative MP Kenneth Baker welcomed Foot’s succession in 1980 with the remark: “Labour was led by Dixon of Dock Green under Jim Callaghan. Now it is led by Worzel Gummidge.”

Borrowing from Baker, Spitting Image (first broadcast in 1984) caricatured Foot as a scarecrow.

The white-haired Labour leader, a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), was also depicted as insufficiently patriotic by critical commentators; his infamous remembrance service appearance infused this narrative.

Foot, who co-authored the influential 1940 anti-appeasement pamphlet Guilty Men, was by no means a pacifist. But the media found this framing irresistible.

The Times‘ diarist, Michael Horsnell, described Foot as “dressed as if he had just returned from walking his dog on Hampstead Heath, in green donkey jacket, sneakers and Paisley tie”.

Labour MP Walter Johnson was reported as calling on his party to reprimand Foot for looking like “an out-of-work navvy” and showing “gross discourtesy to the servicemen he was supposed to be honouring”.

Johnson added: “If this is a measure of his leadership, it is time we had a change.”

The Guardian was only slightly more sympathetic, noting: “Mr Foot was, without doubt, ill-advised to turn up at the Cenotaph looking as if he had just completed his Sunday constitutional on Hampstead Heath.”

Notwithstanding the cold November weather, Foot is said to have received letters from members of the public complaining about his appearance.

The Labour leader’s biographer, Lord Morgan, concluded that the “Cenotaph donkey jacket proved to be a more troublesome garment than the mantle of Nye [Bevan] ever was.”

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The reality of Foot’s fashion choices was not nearly as important as the political narrative they helped crystallise. The Labour leader’s ‘donkey jacket’ was, in fact, a luxury Jaeger overcoat purchased from Harrods by his wife, Jill Craigie.

The Queen Mother even complimented Foot on his attire. “Why, Mr Foot, what an awfully nice coat”, she is reported to have said.

Foot later reflected on the derision his overcoat sparked, admitting: “I never dreamt this was going to cause such trouble”.

He said: “After [the ceremony] was over, I went back to the Foreign Office where they had drinks and there was the Queen Mother. She said to me, ‘That’s a lovely warm coat you’ve got on.’

“And I said, ‘Yes, you need a warm coat like that on a day like this’. So I never dreamt that this was going to cause such trouble.”

Foot added: “I was caricatured and of course caricatures can be extremely wounding, but there have been quite a lot of people in our politics, before me and much more eminent than myself, who have been caricatured.”

Neil Kinnock, Labour leader from 1983 to 1992, remarked that it would “have been better for Michael Foot if Denis Healey had become leader of the party – I mean in personal terms, in terms of the pressures upon Michael and the wretched treatment that he got from most quarters.”

In February 2000, Foot wrote: “One of the other problems that we had to contend with was our treatment by the press. I don’t think that they were any worse towards me than any other Labour leader – but they did try every kind of method of ridicule or poison.”

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In June 1983, Thatcher’s Conservative Party won a landslide general election victory, securing a parliamentary majority of 144 seats – the largest since Labour’s victory in 1945.

In July 2003, on his 90th birthday, Foot donated the infamous coat to the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

Foot would not be the last opposition leader to face derision for his sartorial choices.

In August 1997, just weeks after becoming the youngest Conservative leader in nearly two centuries, William Hague was photographed on a log flume wearing a personalised, navy-blue baseball cap, emblazoned with the word “HAGUE” in bold white text. Hague’s choice of headgear, seemingly designed to counter perceptions of the Conservatives as stuffy and out of touch, was utterly ridiculed.

On 24 February 2016, during a session of prime minister’s questions, David Cameron delivered what appeared to be a scripted remark about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attire and patriotism, telling him to “do up his tie and sing the national anthem”.

In November 2018, the Daily Mail denigrated Corbyn for his allegedly “scruffy” appearance during the traditional wreath-laying ceremony.

Foot famously referred to the Mail as “the Forgers’ Gazette”.