THIS week, the late Michael Foot has been described as “a gifted polymath”, “a tribune of the people”, “a romantic democrat” and “a marvellous man – brave, honest, determined, loyal and immensely erudite”. A columnist on the Daily Mail said he was “a dangerous, deluded hypocrite”, but as Mr Foot called the Mail “The Forgers Gazette”, he was probably expecting worse.

For many people, though, the name Michael Foot conjures up two words: “donkey jacket”. This is because of the coat he reputedly wore while wreath-laying in 1981 at the London Cenotaph.

The first recorded use of the “donkey jacket”

is in the Morning Post of October 4, 1929: “Members of the City Corporation wanted to know at yesterday’s meeting what a donkey jacket is… Mr Gower explained that the jacket was one with leather shoulders and back.”

A donkey jacket should not be confused with a duffle coat. A duffle coat, with its distinctive toggle fastenings, is traditionally made from duffel – a coarse, thick, heavy, woollen material from the small Belgian town of Duffel.

A donkey jacket is very different from a parka, which is a long, hooded jacket made by eskimo people – “parka” comes from the language spoken on the Aleutian Islands between Russia and Alaska.

Eskimo seamstresses construct a parka out of seal gut, sealskin, and caribou skin.

They finish it with bird skins with feathers on the outside.

Its primary function is to keep the cold out, but in one of its earliest uses in the English language, it appears not to have worked. In 1907, poet Robert Service wrote: Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.

If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze, till sometimes we couldn’t see.

At school in the Eighties, every boy had a snorkel parka. It was created by the US military in the Fifties for aircrew who worked in bitterly cold places. It could be zipped up so far against the cold that there was only a narrow airshaft to see through (schnorkel was a German word coined during the Second World War for airshafts on submarines).

A parka is very different from an anorak which is another eskimo coat, this time from the Kalaallisut dialect of West Greenland. An anoraq is waist length, waterproof and much lighter than a bulky parka – just the sort of thing to keep you and your notebook dry at the end of the railway platform.

A cagoule is a light, mountaineer’s hooded jacket from France, but the macintosh is British. Charles Macintosh, of Glasgow, patented his rubberised material in 1823, and even though his early coats were smelly, stiff and melted in hot weather, they caught on.

And, of course, the donkey jacket is resolutely British and utterly working class – I guess that the leather shoulders are hardwearing protection for men hauling ropes, perhaps along a canalside, and the best explanation for its name is that the men who wore it did all the “donkey work”.

Perfect, then, for a left-wing Labour leader.

Only Mr Foot protested that it wasn’t a donkey jacket. His certainly didn’t have utilitarian patches. He described it as “a perfectly good jacket”; his wife Jill, who bought it, said it was “a very expensive short overcoat”, and the Queen Mother complimented him on it, saying that it was “a smart, sensible coat for a day like this”.

So he wasn’t in a donkey jacket, which means he didn’t make an ass of himself. History is nearly as unkind as the Daily Mail.