Michael Foot for his rumpled appearance. A centrist faction of the party broke away in 1981 to form the SDP. Foot led Labour into the 1983 general election, when the party obtained its lowest share of the vote since the 1918 general election and the fewest parliamentary seats it had had at any time since before 1945. He resigned after the election, and was succeeded as leader by Neil Kinnock. Among the books he authored are "Guilty Men" (1940); "The Pen and the Sword" (1957), a biography of Jonathan Swift; and a biography of Aneurin Bevan. Foot was born in Lipson Terrace,
History of the Labour Party (UK) in 1983 to find a lower satisfaction rating at this stage". Foot, in fact, had actually enjoyed a lead in the opinion polls over the Tories wide enough to win an election with a majority of up to 130 seats immediately after becoming leader in 1980, although that lead was wiped out in 1981 following the advent of the Social Democratic Party. In September 2010 the party reported a surge of 32,000 new members since the general election; at the end of 2011 this figure had reached 65,000 new members. The Parliamentary Labour Party voted to abolish Shadow Cabinet elections