Remembering Paul Foot: A Tireless Campaigner for Justice
Paul Foot was one of the most influential investigative reporters of his generation.
Red flags filled the air as a great crowd of mourners brought Golders Green to a standstill on a sunny summer’s day. Paul Foot’s family, and a lifetime of friends, comrades and colleagues, made their way through the streets of North London in a long procession, to be greeted by a steel band as they filed into Golders Green crematorium.
Paul Foot’s death on 18 July 2004, at the age of sixty-six, made the evening news, the next day’s papers, and a joke in Private Eye: ‘RIP Paul Foot 1937–2004. A Great Journalist. Died in time for press day.’
Obituaries appeared in newspapers across the country – the nationals, weekly and monthly journals and magazines, dozens of local newspapers and international papers alike. The BBC website asked for tributes, which poured in. There were special supplements in Socialist Review and Socialist Lawyer, as well as in Private Eye, which would become a book, My Friend Footy, written by Richard Ingrams, Paul’s friend for almost his entire life.
Tam Dalyell MP described Paul as ‘the staunch friend of lost causes’, while Richard Stott, his editor for many years at the Daily Mirror, reflected that Paul ‘had a rare ability to make our trade feel noble’. The Economist described his politics as ‘potty’ but his journalism ‘revelatory’. On the journalists’ Fleetstreet Forum website, one posted: ‘So, farewell then Footie. I’m sure that crooks and swindlers the length and breadth of the country are breathing a sigh of relief.’
Paul’s coffin, a wicker basket draped in a red flag, a Plymouth Argyle scarf and a West Indian cricket rosette, was carried into a venue so small that his family had to issue tickets for those who needed to be inside. Meanwhile, a huge crowd listened to the speeches relayed on loudspeakers in the summer sunshine in the crematorium gardens. ‘For god’s sake, cheer up’, his friend Jim Nichol began. ‘That’s what Paul would have wanted.’ And then, at the request of Paul’s young daughter Kate, I’m a Gnu by Flanders and Swann rang out to a sea of smiles, balanced later by a lively rendition of the socialist ‘Internationale’, sung with great gusto. Many knew the words already, but for safety’s sake they were printed on the funeral card.
His son Matt caught the mood with his reference to another song. On the night before he died, Paul, walking with the help of two sticks, had left home with his son Tom, also on crutches, singing, ‘Anything you can do, I can do better’.
His three sons, John, Matt and Tom, remembered the father who was always losing his keys and spectacles, but never forgot telephone numbers. Who never lost his passion for life. Who was loving and friendly, until his partner Clare beat him at tennis or golf, when he turned into a furious, sulky child. They finished by reciting one verse each from the ending to Shelley’s poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. There was the odd glitch. No one had thought about who was going to press the button, and the coffin snagged before disappearing from sight. Then, as many as could made their way back to Stoke Newington for a curry in the Abney Hall.
Three months later the Hackney Empire was sold out for a celebration of Paul’s life. Clips of old television footage and photos ran between his children’s stories about trips to have his hair cut and his delight in eating meringues and Liquorice Allsorts. The comedians he worked with were there to tell old jokes and new, and Dave Spart, the eponymous lefty of Private Eye fame, made an appearance, as told by Richard Ingrams.
Some of the people he had campaigned for were also present: the sisters of Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, two Palestinians locked up for the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London, which Paul was sure was a miscarriage of justice; Pam Dix, whose brother died in the Lockerbie bombing; Gurpal Virdi, a black policeman drummed out of the force by his racist colleagues; Colin Wallace, who suffered a similar fate from the British army in Northern Ireland. And the widow of Harry Stanley, shot dead in the street by a Hackney policeman.
Of course there was politics, courtesy of Tony Benn and Eamonn McCann, among others. ‘I’ve never known a man’, said McCann, ‘who could laugh so much at the absurdity of the system we live under.’
The evening, however, belonged to Michael Foot. Ailing and infirm, he was helped on to the stage, and in a halting voice delivered a love letter to his devoted nephew. ‘It’s terrible to think of waking up in a world where there’s no Paul Foot. It is a very sad thing indeed’, he began. With his shaking hands and poor eyesight, Paul’s uncle’s sadness at the death of his nephew caught at everyone’s throat. But Michael, politician and journalist, was a typical Foot, and had no time for a great show of sentiment. ‘I owed so much to Paul. We had a few arguments which were still going on right up to the end. And I won’t go into who was winning them.’
His chosen theme was a book, a revolutionary leader, and a poem. The first was The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James’s history of the slave revolt in Haiti, the best book about the history of slavery, Michael explained, and ‘one of the greatest books on socialism ever written’. It was a book that Paul had read and reread, and he coveted Michael’s first edition: ‘He had an eye on my books, you know.’ The leader was Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black Jacobin and leader of the Haitian slaves. And the poem was Wordsworth’s homage to Toussaint, written to his fallen hero, and read by Michael in memory of his fallen nephew:
‘That's what we think about Paul’, Michael interjected.
