Defeat and betrayal

When Paul Foot died last July, he was more widely and deeply mourned than any other journalist for years past, apart perhaps from his great friend Auberon Waugh. Born in 1937, he was a contemporary of the gang who founded Private Eye (and whose mortality rate has been frightening: few of the original group made it to 70, and many not even to 60). Although he wrote over the years for many papers, he always returned as if by instinct to Private Eye.

He occupied a special place there, the proverbial piano player in the brothel. When anyone complained about the spiteful tittle-tattle or mean-spirited jokes (which is of course what people buy the magazine for), ‘Footnotes’ could be held up in reply. He was a genuine investigative-cum-campaigning reporter, who could master complex documents — he would have hated to be told it, but he would have made a good barrister — and see through official obfuscation.

To say that he had bees in his bonnet would be an understatement: there was a swarm of them, and some of the cases he took up proved worthier than others. We need someone like Foot to expose miscarriages of justice, as he certainly did with the Carl Bridgwater case, although he does not in the end appear to have been right (whatever one thinks about capital punishment) in supposing that James Hanratty was falsely convicted. But in any case it was his personality as much as his work which gave him that unique position. Bron Waugh described how the Eye gang loved and revered Paul, to the point where they were like schoolgirls competing for his affection and esteem. He was indeed an unusually likeable and honourable man, with a capacity for ecumenical friendship which overrode his zealous commitment as a Trotskyist revolutionary socialist.