Review: Margaret Renn’s Paul Foot: A Life in Politics
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Curtis Large | University of Cambridge (2021)
‘His supremely intellectual form of argument is to shout “Balls!” at you very, very loud’: a quote by, but not about, the late left-wing British journalist Paul Foot. I first came across it in an archived BBC documentary on YouTube about two years ago, nearly twenty years after Foot’s death in 2004. Soon after, I realised I was just one of many young people who had developed a retrospective interest in his life, impressed by the firebrand’s forthrightness and wit amidst a national political climate increasingly seeming to lack both.
Before the 2024 UK general election, the London Review of Books listed Foot’s posthumous The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined (2005) as one of eleven must reads for electors before they went to the polls. Around the same time, Foot’s son, Tom, made the simple observation that ‘my dad would have cringed at the cult of Paul Foot.’ If there is a cult, Margaret Renn’s biography Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, published last year, is surely the worthiest monument to it yet.
Again, it was not Paul Foot who shouted ‘Balls!’ That was his uncle, Michael, leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1980 to 1983. This illustrates the first pillar of Foot’s life and Renn’s book, that progressive politics was a family affair.
Foot was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1937. His father, Hugh, was a senior diplomat who became British governor of Jamaica and then Cyprus. The Foot clan, renowned for its parliamentarians, reformist lawyers, and bibliophiles, once comprised a central dynasty of the UK’s liberal establishment.
Family life was cultured and itinerant, with Foot eventually being sent to boarding school in England. His socialist politics formed early, and while at Oxford he emphatically rejected his inherited liberalism by aligning himself with the flourishing New Left in 1960, a burgeoning movement spurred by Marxist intellectuals dejected by the authoritarianism of Soviet communism (as most starkly evidenced by its repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956).
Renn’s biography is weakened by its failure to sufficiently interrogate the disconnect between Foot’s privileged background and his revolutionary zeal. The most common criticism of Foot during his lifetime was that he was little more than a ‘posh Trot’, a smoked salmon socialist cloistered from the authentic hardships of the proletariat. This claim will likely remain unassuaged for those inclined to make it.
After university, Foot leveraged a paternal connection to work as a reporter for the Daily Record in industrial Glasgow. There he fell under the influence of Tony Cliff, who likewise offered a Trotskyist alternative for Marxists disillusioned with the Soviet Union – many of whom now viewed it as state capitalist – by forming the International Socialists (IS), known as the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) from 1977. Foot was loyal to Cliff’s revolutionary doctrine throughout his life, although the party has never attracted more than a few thousand members, nor, I expect, retained many parliamentary election deposits.
Following a series of roles at various newspapers, including a stint with the IS’s Socialist Worker from 1972, Foot joined the Daily Mirror in 1979. During his thirteen years there, he very notably championed the cases of many whom he believed were victims of miscarriages of justice, including the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. These were two groups of predominantly Irish men wrongly convicted of separate pub bombings in England in 1974 after being falsely accused of acting on behalf of the Provisional IRA.
Through his vociferous journalism, Foot played a crucial role in building public pressure for the prisoners’ release, which ultimately contributed to their respective exonerations in 1989 and 1991. Writing about these cases in 1986, he demonstrated the kind of anger and courage that, as Renn rightly observes, made him ‘one of the most influential investigative reporters of his generation’:
‘There appears to be a link between the enormity of a crime and the ignominy which attaches to any journalist or investigator who publicly questions the guilt of those convicted for it … Anyone who questions the verdict against an Irish bomber is assumed to be a bomber himself. As a result of this extraordinary logic, the authorities have been able to get away with mistakes, inconsistencies and far worse.’
While Foot’s advocacy in these cases exemplified the style and subject matter that secured his reputation, his investigations extended to countless other issues in domestic – and international – politics. Less successfully, for example, he argued that Britain’s conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 was a politically motivated decision aimed at indicting Gaddafi’s Libya, based on flawed evidence and the neglect of alternative suspects, particularly Iran and the Palestinian PFLP-GC.
Furthermore, although sadly omitted from Renn’s biography, Foot delivered a sobering and impassioned defence of British-Iranian journalist Farzad Bazoft in a televised episode of What The Papers Say on the BBC. This came after Bazoft was arrested by Saddam Hussein’s regime and later executed in March 1990, having been convicted in a kangaroo court of spying for Israel while pursuing a scoop in Iraq.
A considerable section of the British press, covertly spurred by elements of the UK Government, rounded on Bazoft by misreporting his intentions and questioning his character. Foot lamented the prevailing lack of perspective, arguing that the Bazoft affair was disgraced ‘by the journalists who might have been expected to have shelved their petty squabbles and circulation wars in exchange for a little solidarity with a murdered colleague.’
It is a telling and touching example of Foot’s sincerity as an ally of the underdog, an enduring theme in Renn’s admiring portrait of a former colleague and friend. However, for all her just celebration of his achievements as a crusading truth-seeker, the mainspring of his socialist commitment remains, for the most part, obscure.
Foot left the Daily Mirror in 1993 and died eleven years later. The epitaph on his simple grave in Highgate Cemetery quotes The Masque of Anarchy, an 1819 work by his hero, the aristocratic poet Percy Shelley, reading:
‘Rise like lions from slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few’
These words are a fitting emblem of Foot’s political philosophy – one of revolution, yet also of a distant and intangible romance.
Further reading:
Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981).
Paul Foot, Words as Weapons: Selected Writing 1980–1990 (London: Verso Books, 1990).
Paul Foot, Articles of Resistance (London: Bookmarks, 2000).
Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995).
Chris Mullin, Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986).
Curtis Large is an independent researcher working in public affairs. He holds an MPhil in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge and an MA in European Politics from the University of Dundee. His interests include nationalism, European integration, and Marxist thought in Britain during the Cold War.
