Foot stayed at the "Daily Mirror" for fourteen years, managing to survive at the paper during the years Robert Maxwell was in control from 1984. Foot wrote in 2000: "Maxwell demeaned everyone who worked for him, myself included, but I was able by sheltering behind the editor to protect myself from his more monstrous excesses”. He finally fell out with the new "Mirror" editor, David Banks in March 1993, nearly seventeen months after Maxwell's death. Banks, he claimed, had accused him of being "mad", and a contemporaneous boardroom coup had introduced, according to Foot, a "systematic campaign of union-busting" at the company. He left the "Mirror" in 1993 when the paper refused to print articles critical of its new management and placed him on sick leave. "This is Stalinist psychiatry," he said at the time. "If you don't agree with us you must be mad." Banks also revealed Foot's salary as being £55,000 at the time of the row over the unpublished column, although Foot himself said that it was actually a few thousand less.