David Osland reviews Paul Foot: A Life in Politics, by Margaret Renn, published by Verso.

It used to be widely said that today’s newspapers were tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers. But nobody even wraps fish and chips in newspapers anymore.

Journalism remains – even more so in its internet incarnation – the most ephemeral and fleeting of literary forms. The vast majority of it is instantly disposable by design, rarely lingering in the memory even minutes after readers get to the end of an article. That is, if they make it beyond the first paragraph, of course.

What possible interest, then, can a biography of a practitioner who died two decades ago hold for today? The obvious answer is that Paul Foot, whose life is detailed in a new book by Margaret Renn, was different.

Leftwing writing is famously derided as turgid, often overly inflected with the vocabulary of academia. The claim is not without justification. 

But at its best, it is uniquely capable of indicting the powerful, delivering punchy words on the page with a practised elan that gets the underlying message across to those who would switch off from boilerplate agitprop.

 It’s a difficult combination to bring together. But Foot was the master of that craft, transforming what otherwise might have been mundane socialist polemic into an art form.

It’s impossible to overstate his standing among left-leaning journalists of my generation. Even for those nowhere near his overtly Trotskyist politics, he was the working hack’s rock star, frequently mopping up awards such as Journalist of the Decade.

He secured a vast audience, with a weekly column in the Daily Mirror reaching millions, as well as contributions to Private Eye, the London Review of Books and Socialist Worker. He was also a television regular. As platforms in the era before social media went, that was as good as it got.

The nearest current parallel is Owen Jones. But the comparison only applies up to a point. Jones’ stock in trade is the Guardian opinion piece, and Foot could knock out op eds with similar obvious facility. But he did a lot more than that. 

Throughout his long career from the 1960s onwards, his work specialised in the in-depth investigations that are no longer possible in the current budget-constrained media environment, as anyone who has recently tried telling an editor they needed more than a day to work on a story can testify.

Much of his attention was focused on people he felt were framed up or penalised for things they didn’t do, and/or not convicted for actions of which they were indeed guilty. 

The list of the former is long, ranging from James Hanratty to the Birmingham Six, the Bridgewater Four and the Guildford Four to Colin Wallace and John Stalker. Jeffrey Archer is the outstanding example in the latter category.

 He wasn’t always right. DNA evidence not available at the time throws new light on Hanratty’s probable involvement in the A6 murder. But the point is that he was right most of the time.

Renn recaps all these cases. Those too young to remember them can find out about them in the two collections of Foot’s published journalism, Words as Weapons and Articles of Resistance. As fish and chip wrapping goes, the sheer clarity of the prose is astonishing even now.

Foot was also quick to call out establishment cover-ups, contending that Syria rather than Iraq was behind the Lockerbie bombing and that the truth behind the death of British nurse Helen Smith in Saudi Arabia was not being told.

There were forays into poetry with a book on Shelley, a lengthy and brilliant history of the fight for the right to vote, biographies of Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell, pamphlets in support of industrial struggles, a volume on Why You Should Be a Socialist, and much else. A lot of effort must have gone into making the quality consistently seem effortless.

This has been an admiring review – have you spotted that yet? – and Foot’s Daily Mirror colleague Renn has written an admiring book. Some of the published notices have not been kind.

The most prominent attack line has been the observation that Foot was a mere “posh Trot”. As the old joke goes, Britain is so class-divided that even the revolutionary left is dominated by public schoolboys. While purposely and pointedly sneering, the charge is indubitably true; it also misses the point.

As Renn sets out, he was the son of a former colonial governor of Cyprus and Jamaica, born into a prominent political family and educated at a top private  school. Several immediate relatives had been Liberal or Labour MPs and peers, and his uncle Michael became leader of the Labour Party.

The full title of the book is Paul Foot: A Life in Politics. Without wanting to get into an argument about how to define the word politics, that’s actually the life he rejected.

A conventional political career could readily have been his, had he wanted it. A safe Labour seat, ministerial office and the standard metamorphosis from firebrand to reactionary old knucklehead bogusly purporting nominal adherence to social democracy would have been an effortless trajectory.

Instead, he gave lifelong commitment to the Socialist Workers’ Party, a far left outfit whose political impact has been in inverse proportion to its stridency. And I say that as a former member.

Renn, herself a former SWP stalwart, perhaps goes too easy on the contradictions inevitably involved. Being out of sync with the line of a democratic centralist organisation is never a barrel of fun. 

In her defence, she does not entirely duck Foot’s disagreements with the leadership, even if more might have been said. But strangely enough, not everyone finds details of the inner workings of Trot groups 40 years ago intrinsically fascinating.

Get this book if you remember Paul Foot fondly. If you’re an aspiring writer, get it even if you have never heard of him. Perhaps especially if you have never heard of him. Learn from the best.

David Osland is a long-time leftwing journalist and author. Paul Foot wrote an introduction to his 2002 book Labour Party PLC. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland