Paul Foot (journalist)

Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 – 18 July 2004) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Foot was born in Haifa during the British mandate.

Anthony Chenevix-Trench, later the Headmaster of Eton College, was Foot's Housemaster at Shrewsbury School between 1952 and 1955, a time when Corporal Punishment in all schools was commonplace.

In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chenevix-Trench had given.

Nick Cohen wrote in Foot's obituary in The Observer: "Even by the standards of England's public schools, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, his housemaster at Shrewsbury, was a flagellomaniac. Foot recalled, 'He would offer his culprit an alternative: four strokes with the cane, which hurt; or six with the strap, with trousers down, which didn't. Sensible boys always chose the strap, despite the humiliation, and Trench, quite unable to control his glee, led the way to an upstairs room, which he locked, before hauling down the miscreant's trousers, lying him face down on a couch and lashing out with a belt."

Foot covered the 1962 West Lothian by-election as a political reporter for the Daily Record.

He asked of the Labour candidate, Tam Dalyell: "How on earth is it that the West Lothian Constituency Labour Party with six coal-mines in the constituency can choose somebody from Eton and King's College, Cambridge, as their candidate?"

H. B. Boyne, a political correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, reminded Foot of his own background.

The incident did not stop the two men becoming friends.

Persuaded by what he heard and saw, in 1963 Foot joined the International Socialists, the group in which Cliff had a leading role, and the organisational forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

"Of all the many lessons I learnt in those three years in Glasgow," he wrote later, "the one which most affected my life was a passing remark by Rosa Luxemburg. She predicted that, however strong people's socialist commitment, as soon as they are involved even to the slightest degree in managing the system on behalf of capitalists, they will be lost to the socialist cause."

He was the son of Sir Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and Jamaica and, as Lord Caradon, the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations from 1964 to 1970) and the grandson of Isaac Foot, who had been a Liberal MP.

He was a nephew of Michael Foot, later leader of the Labour Party, with whom the younger Foot was close.

He spent his youth at his uncle's house in Devon, in Italy with his grandmother and with his parents (who lived abroad) in Cyprus and Jamaica.

He was sent to what he described as "a ludicrously snobbish preparatory school (Ludgrove) and an only slightly less absurd public school, Shrewsbury".

Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker, and several other friends with whom he later become involved in Private Eye.

In 1964, he returned to London and began to work for The Sun, as the trade union newspaper, the Daily Herald, had become, in a department called Probe.

The intention was to investigate and publish stories behind the news but the Probe team resigned after six months.

"The man in charge turned out to be a former Daily Express City editor."

Foot left to work, part-time, on the Mandrake column on The Sunday Telegraph.

He had contributed articles to Private Eye since 1964 but decided, in February 1967, to take a cut in salary and join the staff of the magazine on a full-time basis, working with its editor, Richard Ingrams and Peter Cook, by now in possession of a controlling interest in the magazine.

When asked about the decision later, Foot would say he could not resist the prospect of two whole pages with complete freedom to write whatever he liked.

"Writing for Private Eye is the only journalism I have ever been engaged in which is pure enjoyment. It is free publishing of the most exhilarating kind."

Foot first detailed Chenevix-Trench's behaviour for Private Eye in 1969, an experience described by Cohen as one of Foot's happiest days in journalism.

After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at University College at the University of Oxford, where he read jurisprudence, and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the university.

He briefly edited Isis, resulting in the publication being temporarily banned by the university authorities after Foot began to publish articles that found fault with university lectures.

Via his uncle, Paul Foot made the acquaintance of Hugh Cudlipp, the editorial director of Mirror Group Newspapers, who offered him a job with the company and Foot joined the Daily Record in Glasgow.

He was expected "to sort out the Trots" in his journalism, but instead the experience of living in the Scottish city changed his whole outlook.

Foot met workers from shipyards and engineering firms who had joined the Young Socialists.

He read, for the first time, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and the multi-volume biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher.

While living in Glasgow he met Tony Cliff, "an ebullient Palestinian Jew".

Cliff argued that Russia was state capitalist and that Russian workers were cut off from economic and political power as much as, if not more than, those in the West.

Foot's first stint at Private Eye lasted until 1972 when, according to Patrick Marnham, Foot was sacked by Ingrams who had come to the conclusion that Foot's copy was being unduly influenced by his contacts in the International Socialists.

Ingrams has denied this, writing, "It was said at the time that he and I had fallen out over political issues. In fact, we very seldom disagreed about such things, the only tension arising from Paul's belief that whenever there was a strike he had to support the union regardless of any rights or wrongs."

In October 1972, he left to join the Socialist Worker, the weekly newspaper of the International Socialists, "confident that a revolution was coming", as he explained decades later.

He became editor in 1974.

He fought the Birmingham Stechford by-election in 1977 for the SWP (gaining 1 per cent of the vote).

Six years later he returned to Private Eye but was poached in 1979 by the editor of the Daily Mirror, Mike Molloy, who offered him a weekly investigative page of his own with one condition, that he was not to make propaganda for the SWP.

In 1980, Foot began to look into the case of the "Bridgewater Four", who had been convicted the previous year of killing Stourbridge newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater.

Foot got on very well with Cook, only realising after the latter's death in 1995 how much they had in common, "We both were born in the same week, into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the imperial flag. Both fathers shipped their eldest sons back to public school education in England. We both spent our school holidays with popular aunts and uncles in the West Country."