A review of Paul Foot: A Life in Politics

Bill Roberts reviews the new biography Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, portraying the political and varied life of one of Britain’s outstanding journalists and socialist campaigners, and argues that we need more comrades like Paul Foot.

 

I first met Paul Foot on stage, at the 1983 Marxism conference at the University of London’s Student Union. He was delivering his popular talk on “Red Shelley.” With the hall filled beyond capacity, several attendees were offered a stage floor space behind the speaker. We were delighted, but Paul felt he was ignoring some of the audience and had us crowd closer to the lectern. What a thrill to be near the speaker who brought down the house with the conclusion to “The Mask of Anarchy”: “Rise like lions after slumber…/Ye are many—they are few.” Ignoring the thunderous applause, Paul turned and graciously shook hands and wished us better seating for the rest of the conference. We, of course, had seats to wish for, and left the hall looking forward to Paul’s appearance at the final rally. As Margaret Renn makes clear in her biography, Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, we had just met a figure of consequence.

Foot was the author of a dozen books, and twice as many socialist pamphlets. These range from his 1965 examination of Race and Immigration in British Politics to Red Shelley, the poet he embraced after reading a biography by Richard Holmes while recovering from an illness. Paul reviewed that biography in International Socialism, and later, came across an essay by Geoffrey Mathews “that cut through much of the literary criticism” and argued that, to understand Shelly, you had “to deal with the whole Shelley.” Inspired by that charge, Paul wrote his own book-length love letter to the poet-revolutionary.

Paul was born in 1937 in Palestine. His father, Hugh, was an assistant district commissioner in the Colonial Service, a key agency of the British Empire, thus putting Paul on a ruling-class path that took him through esteemed schools, including Oxford. His privileged education helped him discover his talents as a writer and debater, which he would later use to lambaste the class system. It was not a surprise that Paul would embark on a political career. His uncle Michael once led the Labour Party. What was unusual was that he chose to align himself with the underdogs of society and championed a socialist world that would replace the privileged class he was born into.

As the young Paul learned early on, his father’s career meant the family was often on the move—South Africa, Nigeria, Jamaica, and Cyprus, with periodic returns to the home country. Paul was seven when his father was sent to Jamaica as colonial secretary and nine when the family left. Paul often harkened back to his time in Jamaica because it was here, he was introduced to cricket, one of his lifetime passions.

Leaving Jamaica marked Paul’s separation from the family for long periods to attend boarding school, where he was introduced to ruling-class regimen. Although Paul would record in a letter to one of his teachers that he found “more good than evil” at Shrewsbury School, and upon graduation was sad to leave friends, his final assessment of the esteemed public school system was much harsher. In an allegory he penned in his last year there, he found the system “treacherous,” “with the mountain of Authority and its twin peaks, Discipline and Leadership” a climb necessary to achieve “odious power.”

The result for those who succeeded was bitterness and cruelty. “I hate them all,” he concluded. And as Renn learned from the Shrewsbury School’s archives, “He preferred the plain, where things were different and the boys were cheerful, helping each other and being helped.” As Renn notes, “Shrewsbury was a traditional, conservative sort of place, stuck in a late-Victorian time warp.” Here Paul learned the methods used to train the next generation of ruling-class lads. He also learned to despise it, especially the obligatory corporal punishment for even minor rules infractions.

Paul despised the punishment of the ruling class whether it was meted out by the public schools, the police and prisons, or the military. His life as a writer was dedicated to exposing and undoing the effects of that system. Whether it was campaigning tirelessly for someone he found innocent, or taking on a government coverup, Paul earned the respect of countless underdogs and the loathing of those complicit in the misery and injustice of the system.

Although he had a go at acting while at Oxford, his real talent emerged as a debater for the Oxford Union, which he led in his last year. It was also at Oxford that his concern for the working class and a socialist future took hold. To bolster his essays as well as the debates, he began searching out writers such as George Orwell, Toussaint Louverture, and Shelly. Renn describes Foot’s speeches from this era as

something of a performance. They required practice and preparation, and would include carefully crafted jokes and funny voices. A pile of books would have their pages marked in advance for quotation. His notes by contrast were scrappy on pages of A4 torn in half, which he kept slipped inside a relevant book to be recycled for the next occasion. His Shelly notes eventually ran to dozens of pages, with repeated page numbers, no longer decipherable in any coherent form.

Paul earned his accolades as a writer in several contexts. It began early with essays that caught the attention of teachers in his early schooling and again at Oxford, where he wrote essays for student magazines. In his last year at Oxford, he penned a long essay for Isis, a magazine he and close friends produced, that projected his political direction. The target was liberalism that he argued championed individualism. He preferred the collective: “In a society split into classes, separated into elites, canonised by the emotions of contempt, disrespect and, most often plain fear, the concept of individual liberty is little more than a shabby fraud!”

At Oxford he made life-long friends and collaborators, including Richard Ingrams, one of the founders of Private Eye, who wrote a loving memoir, My Friend Footy, after Paul died in 2004. In a heartfelt tribute, Ingrams wrote, “As a journalist he was irreplaceable. No one could rival the quantity of his output or his ability to turn his mind to any subject.”

Paul’s journalistic career grew through several positions on well-known publications, including Private Eye, Daily Mirror, New Statesman and The Guardian. But it was his editorship and articles for Socialist Worker that kept him focused, even when he clashed with comrades over its direction and audience.

While Foot’s literary production is prodigious and compelling, it was his speaking ability that won him special admiration and a following beyond his eventual political home in the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which he joined in 1963 after hearing Tony Cliff’s explanation of what happened to the Russian Revolution. Whether it was coal miners on strike or participants at the yearly Skegness and Marxism gatherings, Paul charmed all. His ability to take the piss out of the ruling class with humor and damning evidence, as well as bring the socialist future into focus, earned him a loyal following. He was often paired with Tony Cliff, the acerbic, sometimes crude, always insightful theorist of the SWP. Cliff often accused Paul of being too soft—and not a Bolshevik. Nevertheless, it was the “soft” Paul who turned Bolshevism into an aspiration rather than a caricature.

Although I was acquainted with Foot’s journalistic prowess, before the Internet it was extremely difficult to follow his output abroad. Fortunately, some of his best writing was published in the collections Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980–1990 and Articles of Resistance.

Now with Renn’s biography we have the context of Foot’s efforts and a new appreciation of his journalism as a weapon against oppression and exploitation.

Whether it was his long campaigns to free those he determined innocent with column after column in the Daily Mirror or standing up to racist politicians like Enoch Powell, Foot did not back off once he engaged, even when legal advisors raised cautions. Renn is particularly good at framing the conflicts of his journalistic campaigns, which take on a cinematic quality.

Paul was not a saint, as Renn is not hesitant to point out. For example, his love affairs and family disruptions took their toll on him and those closest to him. There were also clashes with family members, usually over politics.

While Paul could command a regular column in the Daily Mirror, or join his friends at Private Eye, he did not hesitate to accept the editorship of Socialist Worker when asked to replace long-time editor Roger Protz in 1974. Paul had always been a regular contributor to the newspaper from its beginning, but taking on the editorship would mean a big pay cut and immerse him in a major political fight that found him siding with Cliff against Protz and other long-time journalists on the paper.

The change came in the wake of the Labour Party victory in 1974. While Socialist Worker sales had topped 23,000 per week in the runup to the election of Harold Wilson as prime minister, Cliff and Paul believed it was not reaching the intended audience—average workers. They advocated shorter articles, more pictures, and inclusion of workers’ voices. Protz agreed that the paper needed some changes, but he cautioned that the Cliff-Foot proposal would weaken the paper’s politics. The National Committee backed Cliff and Foot, and turned the paper over to Paul in January 1974.

Foot held the post of editor for a year and a half until he determined he was not an editor, but a journalist. Managing the journalists, the production team, and all that a weekly paper requires had taken its toll. He would continue to write for the paper, which he considered “by far the best work I did,” but overseeing the whole process of weekly paper production did not suit him.

Margaret Renn’s A Life in Politics captures not only the life of a socialist journalist with a reputation for being the tribune of the oppressed for more than thirty years, but gives us the drama of a period, with its highs and lows, its possibilities and failures.

Renn, a writer and journalist, is especially well positioned to write this biography. She worked with Paul Foot from the early 1980s until 1993. She has worked for the BBC producing documentaries, and from 2009 until 2015 was a Visiting Fellow in Investigative Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

In 1979, Foot had been lured to the Daily Mirror by its editor, Mike Molloy. After some back and forth regarding his remit—investigative reporting with no strings—and his salary, which he at first argued was too generous, he would later write that he felt both “delight” and “terror”: “Delight that such an unlikely dream had come true, terror as to how on earth I was to find the stories to fill the page. The answer which now seems obvious but then was unheard of… from the readers of the Daily Mirror.”

Paul left the Daily Mirror after major sackings began following owner Robert Maxwell’s drowning death and falling paper sales. Paul’s last column was devoted to the thirty sacked journalists and other staff of the paper. True to form, he laid into the heartless management team assembled by Maxwell, as well as the Tory-supporting journalists who replaced union journalists. He had already determined it would be his last column for the Daily Mirror. However, this was too much for the editors, even though the legal department had signed off on the column. The new editor, David Banks, refused to publish it. But Paul was not deterred. He found a layout and print worker, Roy Greenslade, to set the page so he could print and distribute it.

Greenslade described Paul standing on the steps of the paper’s building passing out his column to passersby; “[H]e would not go quietly. He would let people know why he could not continue… It was probably the perfect example of Paul’s inner agenda, recognizing where power lay and how to expose it. Exercising press freedom against the press. It was utterly brilliant.”

The column was also printed in the Journalist, the Press Gazette, and Socialist Worker, “where he was at pains to explain why he had continued to work for a monster like Robert Maxwell but could not go on any longer under David Montgomery.” As Foot explained, “When it was clear the union for the moment was crushed, it was time to go. When the editor, who is a ferocious defender of free speech, wouldn’t publish the page and then told the world I was off my rocker, there didn’t seem much point in hanging around.”

Foot now found himself without a job. He wanted to work in earnest on his book The Vote: How it Was Won and How it Was Undermined, but it is difficult to live on book royalties alone. In the meantime, he pursued a financial settlement with the Mirror and picked up the occasional column in other publications, finally landing a regular column with The Guardian. But it wasn’t as if there was ever a down time for Paul. He continued to write for Socialist Worker and Socialist Review, as well as research his books. Private Eye was always open to Paul, too.

Then it happened: The journalist with a big heart had a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1999. His aorta had burst on the operating table. Though the surgeons were able to repair it, there was always the danger of it tearing again, which it did on July 18, 2004, as the family was preparing to leave for Dublin. He died in Stansted airport, with several unfinished projects tucked into his bag.

Margaret Renn has done a superb job of portraying the political and varied life of one of Britain’s outstanding journalists. If his mentor, Tony Cliff, was right that Paul was “soft,” Renn’s efforts in depicting that life prove why we need more comrades like Paul Foot.