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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[6] 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.

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.

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.

[14] He repeatedly returned to this case, to the occasional consternation of his editor but believed this practice would lead to new witnesses coming forward.

was published in 1986, Stephen Sedley wrote in the London Review of Books that Foot had not managed to "answer his own question" but did succeed in demonstrating "that if a jury had known what is now known about the case, it would not have inculpated" the defendants.

Banks, he claimed, had accused him of being "mad" and a contemporaneous boardroom coup had introduced, according to Foot, a "systematic campaign of union-busting" at the company.

[18] Foot rejoined Private Eye, now with Ian Hislop as the magazine's editor, and began his regular column for The Guardian.

His friend and Private Eye colleague Francis Wheen, in his Guardian review, concluded: "Passionate, energetic and invincibly cheerful: the qualities of his final book are also a monument to the man himself.

[22] Foot was a bibliophile, following in the steps of his grandfather Isaac and uncle Michael, and was also the author of a publication about the radical union leader A. J. Cook.

[27] Foot was a great admirer of West Indian cricket (he used to say that George Headley had taught him to bat) and a faithful follower of Plymouth Argyle Football Club.

The following year, The Guardian and Private Eye jointly set up the Paul Foot Award for investigative or campaigning journalism, with an annual £10,000 prize fund.