He was close to leading left-wing politicians including Harold Wilson, Frank Cousins, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot.
The newspaper reported on declassified intelligence archives stating that he received payments in return for providing information and analysis about the Labour Party, trade unions and Harold Wilson's government during his first term.
[2] He was born in Stockport, Cheshire (now Greater Manchester), and was the only child of Edythe (née Bowman)[3] and Michael Goodman, whose Jewish parents had emigrated to Britain from Poland and Russia.
[4] His father spent long periods unemployed, and the family moved to Camden Town, London, in 1935 in an attempt to change their situation.
[5] Goodman was influenced in his choice of becoming a political journalist by overhearing current affairs being discussed in the local dairy, and a shopkeeper reporting that the newspapers refused to print stories about the Prince of Wales with Wallis Simpson, "despite most of us knowing exactly what is going on".
[9] In January 1947, he married Margit Freudenbergova, who as a child just before the war had been on the final train of the Kindertransport, a means of rescuing Jewish children from Czechoslovakia.
He discovered "astonishing inefficiencies, poor management bordering on the absurd, corrupt trade union practices and a bewildered workforce".
[13] Goodman supported the decision of editor Michael Curtis to oppose the Suez intervention, a stance which split the paper's staff.
[1] In his first editorial he wrote that "the business is now subject to a contagious outbreak of squalid, banal, lazy and cowardly journalism whose only qualification is that it helps to make newspaper publishers (and some journalists) rich.
In its account of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, the later volume is free, according to Dominic Wring, of the kind of "score settling" common to memoirs covering this period.
While conceding that the amount of information available had greatly increased, "what we do not have is the depth of knowledge, and this translates into a lack of understanding about key current issues.