Michael Foot (top)and Leila Pasha

London, June 12: Michael Foot had an affair with a “highly sexually charged” Indian woman who worked for BBC radio, it is revealed in a forthcoming biography of the former Labour Party leader.

The woman has been identified as Leila Pasha, who was born in India, grew up in South Africa and moved to London in 1969 to try to make it as a journalist, which she managed with only a modest degree of success.

She now lives quietly and alone in a flat in west London, having caused considerable disharmony in the life of Foot whom she met in 1969 while interviewing him at the offices of the Left-wing Tribune newspaper in London.

Back then, London was enjoying being at the centre of the swinging sixties, women were making full use of the newly discovered contraceptive pill and the lovely, dark Leila appeared to the besotted Foot to be a “sexy, trendy girl expensively dressed in the latest suedes”.

Carl Rollyson, the American author of A Private Life of Michael Foot, told The Telegraph that he was seeking an Indian publisher for his book.

Rollyson, who is professor of journalism at Baruch College, The City University of New York, is a distinguished biographer who has published over 30 books, including one on Jill Craigie, Foot’s wife, a one-time feminist filmmaker who died, aged 88, in 1999.

Foot died at his home in Hampstead, north London, in March this year, aged 96.

Rollyson understandably does not want to give too much away — “at this point saying more would really damage the market for my book”.

However, he said: “Foot cared passionately about India, and I have several passages in my new book dealing with that aspect of his interests. I think Indian readers would find the book compelling, especially some of the remarks he makes about the Gandhi family.”

It is certainly the case that Foot remained one of the foremost champions of India, the freedom movement and post-Independent India. During the Emergency, which troubled him, he sought to put the most positive interpretation on Indira Gandhi’s politics and was relieved when she called an election in 1977 — and gracefully accepted her ouster.

If ever Leila chooses to publish her account of her conversations with Foot, it would be fascinating for historians to learn whether they found the time to talk about India.

It is clear that Rollyson has done thorough research into his subject in the way that Americans do, and has taped admissions by Foot to back up his claims of the Labour leader’s affairs.

Foot had married Jill in 1949 when he was 35 and she was two years older. She had been married before. Everyone was surprised that Foot, who had been insecure about his looks since his undergraduate days at Oxford, had managed to win over such an attractive woman.

To the end he maintained Jill was the love of his life, which she undoubtedly was, but that did not stop him from having affairs with two of his secretaries — one has been named as Elizabeth Thomas, the other hasn’t — and with Leila.

Elizabeth has been happy to admit she was exceedingly fond of Foot but sex with him was not satisfying, at least, for her. In marked contrast, Foot, in common with upper middle class Englishmen through the ages, obviously found making love to “a beautiful black woman” both thrilling and dangerous.

When Rollyson was researching his book, To Be A Woman: The Life Of Jill Craigie, Foot allowed him free access to her study. It was then that Rollyson discovered from diaries how she had felt furious, humiliated and threatened when she suspected her husband was having affairs.

Jill had come across letters of a “sexual nature” written by Leila. For a man who had all his life believed he was not very attractive to women, Leila flattered Foot’s vanity. Jill suspected the worst when her husband started taking “perfumed baths” and care with his normally shabby style of dressing.

Rollyson has provided a taster of the goodies that will be in his book by giving an interview to a British newspaper in which he has provided a fair amount of detail on the relationship between Leila and Foot. They met when he was 56 and she was 24 — though some executives at the BBC, whom Leila had been haranguing for commissions, thought she was a lot older.

“She reminded him of the wife of one of his literary heroes, William Hazlitt,” according to Rollyson. “The type of woman who could destroy men ‘with her wiles, her titillations, her prevarications and her treacheries’.”

A stunned Foot, after pondering the subject for several minutes when first confronted about his adultery, finally came clean with Rollyson and said the affair with Leila “didn’t last all that long but I must say I was absolutely taken by it. We had a good sexual time together. Leila was her first name, ‘L-ee-la’. I’d never known a girl called Leila before, but that was her.”

Foot felt guilty about betraying his wife but not very guilty. Anyway, he declared, rather like Jonathan Swift who had juggled two girlfriends, “a man may be in love with two women at the same time”.

Leila was struggling to make her way at the BBC.

BBC executives “viewed her as a persistent woman who developed an impressive network of contacts but never quite gained acceptance as a writer for radio. Woman’s Hour producer Wyn Knowles said in a memo to colleagues, “Miss Pasha plagued me into seeing her. She is a rather beautiful Indian girl, born and raised in Africa. She has a rather low, sad voice, does quite a bit of freelancing for African service and is anxious to expand her market.”

However, she established a foothold at the BBC, appearing as a panellist on a pop music show and eventually making it on to Woman’s Hour and the Today programme.”

Leila was apparently single though a South African newspaper has suggested there were a couple of children somewhere in her past. She and Foot conducted their tryst at her west London flat. He was also indiscreet enough to take her to Casa Pepe, a popular Spanish restaurant in Hampstead, minutes from his home.

Leila wrote a schoolgirlish letter to Foot: “On Tuesday, when we go to Casa Pepe, if you could have seen your face, how happy you were, my darling. Ricordi quella sera! (a reference to a hit song of the time, meaning ‘remember that night’). You were calling my darling, my Leila I’m so happy with you. Whenever I said something in usual wog! fashion, you put your hands to your face and laughed. When I used the word wog, you — in severe, sober voice — said I’m not allowed to use that word, or you will kiss me in front of everybody, your arm was around my back, you falling about laughing and so happy.”

A distraught Jill wrote to Julie Hamilton, her daughter from her first marriage: “I have a horrible feeling that Michael does not love me enough to give up this girl. My God, how I love him! Too much, far too much.”

Jill read Foot the “it’s me or her” riot act. Foot told Leila the affair was over but found breaking up with her hard to do. For one thing, Leila argued “there was no harm in having an affair, that everyone did it”.

It is alleged she demanded money from Foot, with a hint of blackmail, threatened to commit suicide and even turned up at her lover’s home.

Leila began “bombarding Foot’s nephew, the journalist Paul Foot, with calls to his office at Private Eye, pleading with him to intercede on her behalf” — so it was claimed by Jill.

It is estimated that Foot gave Leila several cheques for her “rent” and in all paid her about £2,000, equivalent to at least £19,500 today.

“I wish to God she would jump in a lake,” Jill wrote to her daughter.

Foot’s marriage did survive. A Labour MP more or less without break from 1945 until 1992, he was the Labour Party leader from 1980 to 1983.

Despite the nature of the end, Foot probably never got over Leila. “I can see it must have been hard for him to give her up if she’s about the only person who can make him potent,” Jill once acknowledged.

And she added: “On my birthday, I heard him whispering to himself with nauseating sentimentality, ‘My child! My child!’ Well, it wasn’t me he was whispering about, that was evident!”