Best Foot forward

A review of Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, Margaret Renn (Verso Books, 2024), £30.00

It always seems that an anniversary with a zero at the end is a good time for a biography. It is therefore appropriate that the publication of the first full-length biography of our much-missed comrade Paul Foot, Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, made its appearance on the 20th anniversary of his death in July 2004.1

In any list of well-known members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Paul would always feature at or near the top. For many years, he was close to being a household name as a multi-award winning investigative journalist and scourge of corrupt politicians, dodgy businessmen, dishonest policemen and self-serving asses of all descriptions.2 He was a formidable champion of the wronged, the underdog, the voiceless and those with nowhere else to turn. Some of his stories and the campaigns he championed have become almost the stuff of legend. Absolutely central to Paul was his membership of the International Socialists (IS) and its successor, the SWP, a membership of tremendous dedication and immense activity that lasted all his adult life.

This biography is written by Margaret Renn, who is one of relatively few people in a position to take on this task. Margaret joined the IS in 1968 and first met Paul that year. In her early years of membership, she operated as Socialist Worker’s business manager. In the mid-1970s, she moved to the editorial office and was there during the period that Paul edited the paper. After Paul moved to the Daily Mirror in 1979, Margaret was a freelance journalist and went to work for Paul, staying for 11 years. Her later career was as a writer and journalist, and, from 2006 to 2008, she worked for the Centre for Investigative Journalism. From 2009 until 2015, Margaret was a visiting fellow in Investigative Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Margaret is the long-time partner of Jim Nichol, who himself held roles in the IS/SWP, including managing their finances and printshop, being National Secretary and editor of Socialist Worker. He subsequently trained as a lawyer, working closely with Paul on several campaigns. Margaret started working on this book in 2014 and the Acknowledgements section of the book lists 135 people who have been interviewed.

Recently, I asked Margaret whether the book’s subtitle, A Life in Politics, meant she located this work within the genre of political biography. Quite rightly, Margaret replied that it depended in part on your definition of politics but, more importantly, everything Paul wrote was political. She was also writing “for a newer generation not so familiar with Paul and his work”. In deference to that, I write this review in the same vein.3 However, for the average reader of International Socialism, I should relate something Margaret said to me some years ago regarding the book, as it will help to structure their expectations about its contents: “I’m not writing specifically for an SWP audience nor an academic one. But hopefully writing something which is readable. No mean task—Paul’s output was vast!”.4

I think managing expectations is important. During the extended “gestation” of this book, I have had more than one member of the SWP telling me something along the lines of: “I fear that the book will rather downplay Paul’s intimate involvement with the party over the decades” or that what we really need is “a collection about Paul reclaiming him for the IS tradition.” Margaret did not set out to write the story of Paul and his 40 plus years in the IS/SWP, and she has not written that story.5 So, what has she written?

Paul once suggested: “Gossip is a dangerous commodity, but no biography worth its salt could survive without it”.6 What we have here is a biography that is worth its salt, but one where gossip is used sparingly, if at all. The book is structured in short, readable chapters and runs in strict chronological order through Paul’s life. The text is very much based on Paul’s own words and writings, the evidence of those who knew him in any given period and the historical record. Supposition and hearsay play no part.

On another occasion, Paul wrote: “Good political biography is rare enough, and even rarer in the labour movement”.7 One thing he had in mind when he wrote these words was a propensity for hero worship to creep into the writing. This book undoubtedly paints Paul in a positive light, but that light is torchlight shining on the factual telling of his life story without recourse to hyperbole.

The young Foot

Paul was born in Palestine in 1937, where his father, Hugh Foot, was an official in the Colonial Service.8 The first two chapters of the book tell of Paul’s early years and schooling. My own family used to talk disapprovingly of “how the other half lived”. Paul’s family background did not represent the other half—it was rather the top 1 percent. After the nannies, the residences, the public schools, the famous relatives, and national service with a commission in the army based in Jamaica, Paul arrived at Oxford University in 1958 to study law. By coincidence, he arrived the same day as his lifelong friend Richard Ingrams. Paul arrived at Oxford with the traditional politics of most of the Foot family—as a liberal.9 His telegrammed instructions from his father were: “Get a First. Be President of the Union”.10 As it transpires, Paul did not get a first, but he did become president of the Oxford Union.

During his time at Oxford, Paul’s literary skills, which had started in a small way during his school days, were honed by his involvement with various student publications, notably Parson’s Pleasure and Mesopotamia. These were forerunners to Private Eye, the magazine which was to play such a large role in Paul’s life. However, it was another part of Paul’s development that is of more interest here: his politics started to move to the left.

How and why did this happen? This was the time of the flourishing of the New Left, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was holding large annual Aldermaston marches and the Young Socialists (YS), the Labour Party youth organisation, was launched in 1960. Margaret reports:

Paul’s first taste of office was as president of the Liberal Club [but] during the term when he was president, he also attended meetings of the Labour Club, and heard some of the arguments for socialism… While at one of the Labour Club meetings, Paul met Stuart Hall, the first editor of New Left Review, which started publication in January 1960. Hall, a Rhodes scholar from Jamaica who was deeply involved in the Oxford left, soon became one of Paul’s heroes; for now, Hall was offering something that explained the world better than liberalism.11

Ingrams, Ian Birchall in his biography of Tony Cliff and Margaret all highlight the important role played by Colwyn Williamson in Paul’s political development:

A concern for the working class was definitely a new sort of politics for Paul in his last months at Oxford. Besides the meetings of the Labour Club and the New Left, Paul had been arguing with a politics don called Colwyn Williamson. Colwyn ran a Marxist study group, to which he invited anyone he thought might be attracted to socialist ideas, and they kept their discussions going through the days and nights of the Aldermaston March at Easter. “On the Sunday night we were sleeping on the floor of a schoolroom, Colwyn, Paul, myself and three or four others”, remembers Ian Birchall, another Oxford student. “We talked until 4am, arguing whether you could detach the issues of nuclear weapons from questions about capitalism. Colwyn was arguing that you couldn’t. It had a huge impact on me, and probably on Paul too.” Colwyn and Paul continued to argue and discuss political ideas for the rest of Paul’s life.12

Ian Birchall put it to me astutely:

Colwyn had an important influence on Paul. It was Glasgow that was the­fundamental turning-point for involving him in revolutionary politics. But I think how he responded to Glasgow had been significantly prepared by Colwyn.13

Glasgow: the making of a revolutionary

When Paul’s Oxford days ended, he did indeed head off to Glasgow to work as a journalist on the Daily Record.

His by-line first appeared on a story about the plight of blind people and the abysmal failure of the Scottish authorities… The story appeared in November 1961. Paul had just celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. His career as a journalist was under way. Articles soon followed on children locked up in remand homes and children beaten in school. He wrote about over-the-top profits at the Post Office and the fate of local shipyard workers, and later the trial of Nelson Mandela, the racist history of South Africa, and the call for a boycott.14

Paul was invited to speak at a meeting of the Govan & Gorbals YS by Gus Macdonald, an apprentice at the shipyards.

The audience was mostly young apprentices and workers from the shipyards and engineering factories. Paul’s chosen topic was the risk of a nuclear war starting accidentally. By his own account, he delivered a very good Oxford Union speech. But he did speak at length, and Gus, chairing the meeting, knew they had a problem: “The pubs shut at 9.30pm and the night shift started at 10pm, so people were getting agitated.” Finally, someone in the audience shouted out: “Wars don’t start by accident, capitalism starts war.” It brought the meeting to an abrupt end, and the entire audience rushed for the door. Paul had been in Glasgow for just three weeks.15

It was Gus who was the first to become aware of the IS, and, in the winter of 1961-2, he invited their two leading members Tony Cliff and Michael Kidron to Glasgow for a weekend school:

The weekend was something of a revelation, not just because Tony Cliff turned out to be a great speaker, but also because of ‘his ability to explain an issue with such clarity and force… The effect of Cliff ’s argument [that Russia was a state capitalist society] on Paul was dramatic.16

Gus was also the first to become a member of the IS, followed by Paul and fellow YS comrades Bob Gillespie and Jimmy McCallum. In time, a number of other talented young apprentices and workers also joined. “There were two other influential Glaswegians Paul got to know during his time there, both called Harry. The first was Harry Selby… The second Harry was Harry McShane”.17 Selby was a long-time Trotskyist, deeply committed to entry into the Labour Party. Harry McShane was nearly 70 when he and Paul first met, with a political pedigree that went back decades. McShane had become a revolutionary in 1908 and agitated against the First World War. He joined the Communist Party in 1922 and left in 1953. When he first met Paul, Harry was a follower of Raya Dunayevskaya, one of a group of three Glasgow members of a Marxist Humanist Group.18 Paul used sometimes to attend their meetings and was favourably impressed with Dunayevskaya’s 1958 book, Marxism and Freedom.

The activity of the IS within the YS was channeled through the newspaper Young Guard, and in November 1962 production of the paper was moved to Glasgow.19 The longer Paul stayed there, the more his involvement in the IS grew. Paul took over the editorship of the IS paper Labour Worker in 1963 and was increasingly in demand as a speaker. He also authored the first of his numerous pamphlets, Unemployment: The Socialist Answer, which was published by Labour Worker in Glasgow in 1963. The chapter of Renn’s book on Paul’s Glasgow days certainly repays close reading.

London calling

A host of young Glasgow members of the IS were moving to London, and soon Paul was treading the same path:

Paul, having served his three-year apprenticeship on a local paper, had another useful conversation with Hugh Cudlipp, the friend of his father who had sent him to Glasgow. This time, he offered Paul a job on a national newspaper in London, at the Daily Herald, which was about to be relaunched as the Sun.20

In the general election of October 1964, the issue of immigration came up in an unpleasant way. The racist campaign by the Conservative candidate in Smethwick, Peter Griffiths, was the epicenter:

Within days of Harold Wilson’s victory, Paul wrote a long letter to Tony Godwin, chief editor at Penguin, with “a very rough sketch” for a book on the politics of immigration… Tony Godwin was enthusiastic, and Paul got the go-ahead. By January 1965, a contract had been signed, and within four months the manuscript was almost finished… When it arrived, Godwin was delighted. It was, he claimed, “the most explosive political book I have published since I have been at Penguin”… Immigration and Race in British Politics was published, after a lengthy libel read, in August 1965.21

Simultaneously with the publication of the book, Paul had his first major article published in International Socialism, titled “Immigration and the British labour movement”.

Paul quit the Sun in early 1965, moving to the Mandrake column on the Sunday Telegraph. This was an unlikely home, but it was just three days a week work, which gave him the time he wanted to write. He left the Sunday Telegraph to work full time for Private Eye in March 1967. At the Eye, “Paul had two whole pages all to himself—that was the attraction”.22

Many of Paul’s stories ran just for one issue but the first of what was to become his trademark, campaigns with multi-issue stories, concerned the pioneering field of heart transplantation and the work of the South African surgeon Dr Christiaan Barnard:

The sensational advance was in the most intractable problem of all: how to get the new heart into the body before the heart was irretrievably damaged… “Professor Barnard and his team have discovered a ‘solution’ to this tricky problem: namely to remove the heart before it has stopped beating”, wrote Paul.23

Paul monitored each of the early transplant operations: “In each case, Paul detailed the sequence of events: the failure to try to save the dying donors, the failure to consult the donor’s relatives, and the desire for success at any cost”.24

In December 1968, all the articles were gathered together in the Private Eye’s first special, a 12-page pamphlet, Hearts and Graft’s—An Examination of the Heart Transplant Craze. A series of other Private Eye specials by Paul were to follow over the years: Rock Bottom—The Gibraltar Killings—Government and Press Cover-Up (1989); Ripping Yarns—Sonia Sutcliffe—The Press and the Law (1991); Not the Scott Report—Thatcher, Major and the Merchants of Death (1994), with Tim Laxton (which won the Orwell Prize for journalism); Lockerbie—The Flight from Justice (2001); Tax Dodge Report—the Artful Dodger—Inland Revenue/Mapeley Deal (2003), with Richard Brookes; P F Eye—An Idiot’s Guide to the Private Finance Initiative (2004). There were plenty of other ongoing stories as well, on Jeffrey Archer, the Ronan Point disaster, John Poulson, and Reginald Maudling, to name but a few. Margaret covers them all.

Alongside all this, Paul was also writing books. The Politics of Harold Wilson (Penguin) was published in 1968 and Margaret describes it as “a sharp attack on Wilson from the left, but also an analysis of the development and decline of socialist theory in the Labour Party since the 1930s”.25 As with Paul’s previous book on immigration and race, this one also had a simultaneously published article in International Socialism. This appeared in the Summer 1968 issue as “Harold Wilson and the Labour left”.

An interesting tidbit is that Margaret tells us that Penguin had been asking for an updated edition of 1965’s Immigration and Race in British Politics when, in 1968, the Tory politician and shadow cabinet member Enoch Powell made his notoriously racist “rivers of blood” speech. Paul changed course and The Rise of Enoch Powell was published in 1969. Paul’s commitment to active anti-racism was total. His son, Matt, informed us at the launch of Renn’s book that Paul always kept the words of a famous 1857 speech by Frederick Douglass above his desk:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.26

Margaret dedicates a whole chapter to Paul’s prodigious campaign over the case of James Hanratty, who was hanged for murder in 1962. His next book, Who Killed Hanratty? (Panther), would be published in 1971. Paul would retain a lifelong interest in the campaign to exonerate Hanratty.

In the heat of the struggle

Margaret’s chapter “One glorious summer” is more required reading. The chapter covers the 1970 General Election, the uptick in industrial struggle—the postal workers’ national strike, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, the 1972 miners’ strike, the jailing and release of the Pentonville Five—and Paul leaving Private Eye to join Socialist Worker:

In 1972, with his reputation as a writer and a journalist riding high and a promising career before him, Paul left Private Eye to work for Socialist Worker. The pay was terrible, the office space even worse than at the Eye, and the hours were long with no alternate week off to write books. Even the circulation was not great. He could have had any job, anywhere in the country. What on earth made him join this small political paper? For Paul, though, when the offer came it was irresistible.27

The chapter ends with a dispute among the IS about the direction of the paper after which Paul was appointed as the new editor. Paul’s editorship was relatively brief:

By June 1975, just 15 months after he had taken the reins, Paul decided he had had enough, and resigned. He wasn’t an editor. He admitted as much himself, even if he loved writing for the paper and would continue to do so.28

It was, however, a period during which Socialist Worker (and Paul) found themselves in court on more than one occasion and Margaret is able to give us some valuable insight into these affairs.

Subsequent chapters take us through the launch of the SWP in January 1977; the Socialist Worker candidates who stood in a string of parliamentary by-elections, including Paul himself in Birmingham Stechford in March 1977; the firefighters’ strike; the Grunwicks dispute; the Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism. Chapter 12 closes with a look at another dispute, concerning the “new” Socialist Worker that had been launched in February 1978 under the editorship of Nichol. Margaret’s account does not fully accord with my own memory of events, those proposing a correction to the course the paper was taking had far stronger arguments than are credited here.29 In any event, the 1978 SWP conference decisions led to Paul leaving the paper and returning to Private Eye.

In 1975, Paul visited Portugal during the revolution, and his prediction as to how the revolution would end if it were not pushed to a conclusion by the workers is embellished by a marvelous extract from a Goethe poem:

You must rise or fall / You must rule and win / Or serve and forfeit / Suffer or triumph / Be anvil or be hammer.30

That neatly leads us into a chapter on a topic we will forever associate with Paul, “Poetry and revolution”. It offers an extended look at Paul’s book on Percy Bysshe Shelley—where the book came from, the events surrounding its publication and its lasting impact. It is a thoroughly enjoyable chapter.

Looking in the Mirror

In 1979, Paul joined the Daily Mirror. Given that his previous regular pay cheques were “the appallingly low wages paid out at Socialist Worker” , it seems that Paul had difficulty coming to terms with his new salary. It had to be explained that he could not turn it down because it was something for which the union had fought. Paul apparently drew a line at the provision of a car and asked for a pass for the underground instead, whereupon the managing editor was rung: “‘Foot wants a Tube pass.’ ‘Tell him to fuck off, we don’t give Tube passes,’ came the reply. ‘Tell him to put it on his expenses’”.31

His column was soon a success:

The company’s own research showed how popular Paul’s column became: read by about 12 percent of Mirror readers—or, as Paul pointed out, about a quarter of a million people each week… The column quickly fell into a routine: page 11, five stories, each no more than 400 words, often much less; one or two stamp-sized photos of the people he was writing about, or occasionally a building; eye-catching headlines, and always a joke—perhaps an irreverent competition, or a quote, often at the expense of a politician, or of himself… Stories for the column came from all directions: people he knew, stories he had worked on for the Eye or Socialist Worker…letters from readers… To round off the year, and Paul’s first three months at the Mirror, he notched up his first front page, about a Tory plan to deal with strikers by cutting benefits and stopping hardship payments to their families.32

Margaret’s role working directly with Paul at the Mirror is invaluable for some fly-on-the-wall insights:

Mike Molloy [Mirror editor] had made it clear from the start that Paul could not use his column as a platform for the Socialist Workers Party, and Paul had agreed… But the agreement about the SWP didn’t really affect what Paul wrote. When he described, in June 1980, how a story had come from “my friends in the Royal Group of the London docks”, he was talking about Eddie Prevost, a member of the SWP.33

Similarly, one of Paul’s important stories during the 1984-5 miners’ strike was assisted by Phil Turner, a reporter on the Rotherham Advertiser and another member of the SWP.

Chapter 16, “The enemy within”, is given over in its entirety to the miners’ strike. Margaret shows Paul’s utter commitment to that struggle, also underlining how Paul’s journalism was grounded in finding out the facts from, as it were, the coalface and using them to bring the struggle to life. A letter that she uncovered in Paul’s private correspondence, written to the staff at Socialist Worker early in the strike, is telling:

Dear Comrades,

I have just read this week’s SW from cover to cover. As far as I can see, apart from a small story on page two, there is not a single living experience reported from a single coalfield. Everything about the strike (except for letters, and they aren’t very descriptive either) is comment, written from the office, or from other industries… Shouldn’t almost all of you be in the coalfields almost all the time?… There is a lot of picketing—not to mention hundreds of stories from the coalfields about the life of the strike.34

Margaret notes: “Matters were resolved. The party took heed”.35

There was also Paul’s tenacity. Where others might write a story and move on, when Paul was convinced that a wrong needed to be righted he stayed the course. As Margaret says of the Carl Bridgewater case and the ultimately successful fight to free the three men wrongly jailed, “it had begun as an investigation, but it became a campaign”.36

Paul’s departure from the Mirror in 1993 in the context of rampant union-busting by the new ownership after the death of Robert Maxwell is rightly famous. Paul’s column attacking his own management’s behaviour was refused publication. Paul had it printed and stood outside the Mirror offices distributing copies. Margaret captures it perfectly by quoting from Roy Greenslade, his former editor:

He’d just been fired. But he turned it into something else. It was probably the perfect example of Paul’s inner agenda, recognising where power lay and how to expose it. Exercising press freedom against the press. It was utterly brilliant.37

Paul’s final book, The Vote, weaves itself in and out of the last few chapters of the biography:

Paul had been thinking about his book on the vote for a large part of his adult life—certainly since 1975, when he mentioned in an interview in Isis that it was one of the books he was contemplating writing. When finished, it became a manifesto of his political ideas, the culmination of a lifetime of political thought, political activity and reading.38

All the way back in 1963, Paul was approached by a Labour Party agent who suggested he put himself forward as a Labour parliamentary candidate. It was a suggestion he politely refused. He was and always remained clear:

Then and since, I took the view that the main job of socialists must be outside parliament, making the case for socialism and for socialist organisation where it matters most, in the rank and file. On the few occasions I have stood for elected office, I did so chiefly for propaganda reasons, and was suitably and comprehensively rebuffed.39

Paul was, from his Glasgow days, strongly influenced by Cliff, the state capitalist analysis of Russia and the belief that socialism must come from below. Margaret describes Cliff as Paul’s “political mentor”. They worked together closely and spoke on the same platform innumerable times (known as “Foot and Mouth” meetings by certain political opponents), but they had always disagreed passionately about the suffragette movement. One only need compare Cliff’s negative assessment in his book Class struggle and Women’s Liberation (Bookmarks, 1995) to Paul’s treatment in The Vote. As Birchall wrote:

[T]he chapter on the suffragettes entitled ‘Women’ in Paul Foot’s The Vote is a sustained posthumous polemic against his old comrade. They had argued fiercely about the question for many years.40

As it turned out, Paul’s chapter on the suffragettes was finished in time for the SWP’s annual Marxism event in 2000, but Cliff had died earlier in the year. The Vote would be published in 2005, after Paul’s own death.

Finally

A revolutionary socialist committed to the building of a party rooted in the working class might justifiably argue, as a comrade did: “one of the weaknesses of the book is inherent in how it was conceived; it is that the omission of the contextualisation of events leads, unintentionally perhaps, to an overemphasis on the role of the individual”.41 However, it would be a mistake to read this book and say, “where is Paul’s speech at this meeting discussed?”, “where is that article mentioned?”, “where are Paul’s views on that party debate analysed?”, “what about his role in that controversy?”. There is room in the future for a party-published book, devoted to Paul’s immense contribution to the SWP, his revolutionary politics, his Marxism and how he conveyed all that. It would also explain how being in the SWP, his commitment to change from below and his understanding of the nature of the state underpinned his journalism.

This book did not set out to achieve that, although even long-standing members of the SWP will learn a lot they did not know before. Instead, this book achieves what it sets out to do. It is a fine book and a fitting tribute to a friend and comrade to not only present and former members of IS/SWP but to literally hundreds of thousands of people who Paul touched through his speaking and his writing. What shines through is not only Paul’s commitment to the great cause he chose to follow in his life, but also the fact that he did it as a fine human being. I remember the first time I met Paul, back in the 1970s. I was a young inexperienced IS member, boarding the train from London to visit my parents in Glasgow. I spotted Paul, sat down and introduced myself. We spent hours together talking—he the famous journalist, I the young nobody, but that meant nothing to Paul. I even asked him to come to Portsmouth to do an IS meeting, and he did, to great effect. Listening to Paul speak at a meeting was an experience to cherish so the hall was packed.

John Rudge joined the International Socialists in Portsmouth in 1974. He is a retired project manager and remains active in Unite. Much of his spare time is spent researching obscure corners of the history of the International Socialist tradition.

Notes

This book is highly readable and also available as an e-book. If you cannot afford £30, ask your local library to order it.