When Auberon Waugh joined the Eye in 1970 to contribute a fictitious ‘Diary’ about his daily life, he and Foot formed an un- expected alliance. Ingrams does not make enough of this brilliant conjunction, but he quotes Waugh’s subsequent tribute to Foot:
Sanctity attached to him … We all sought his approval, as if he had been a beautiful girl. But he bore the burden lightly … Obviously there is a screw loose somewhere but we all have our oddities … I myself own up to a slight weakness for orientals.Writing about Foot’s funeral at Golders Green crematorium, Ingrams bemoans the lack of religious content in the service and says that he and others failed to recognise the friend they had known when the congregation burst into the Internationale and raised clenched fists. But the political animal, the one Ingrams failed to recognise, was the real Paul Foot; if you couldn’t share his politics, you couldn’t, finally, share his life.
This was confirmed in 1972 when Ingrams began to suspect that Foot was allowing the comrades to influence his choice of news stories. In response, the editor increased the proportion of politically incorrect jokes about trades unions or Polly Toynbee. A proposal to publish a brutal cover about Bernadette Devlin’s unborn baby was the final straw. Foot threatened to resign and Ingrams, although he denies this in the book, pushed his old friend out. Foot gave up everything he had achieved at Private Eye and left what Ingrams terms ‘the gang’, to become editor of Socialist Worker, the house journal of his movement. His reporting there, and later on the Daily Mirror, and finally back on Private Eye, remained outstanding, though it never recovered its original high-spirited inspiration.
The oddest thing about Ingrams’s determination to view Foot through the wrong end of a telescope is that it suggests he has never realised the extent of his own achievement, because the creative tension that existed for a few years between Foot and Waugh was only made possible by Ingrams. In reducing Foot to the ‘old school friend with a heart of gold who enjoyed a joke’, Ingrams is saying, ‘Nothing much happened. It was “only personal”.’ That is all very understated and British, but as a summary of Foot’s achievement, it won’t do. Private Eye between 1967 and 1972 was more than just a spot of good reporting and titters every fortnight. It was more than ‘a weathervane of middle-class opinion’, to use Foot’s own words about the paper in 1981. Public figures like Wilson, Maudling, T. Dan Smith and Lord Goodman were permanently damaged by the Eye’s well-informed hostility. Looking back now, the short-lived triumvirate of Ingrams, Foot and Waugh represents one of the high points of British journalism in the last 40 years, and perhaps — why be modest? — since John Wilkes.
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