Articles of Resistance
Paul Foot Bookmarks, 318pp, £14.99
ISBN 1898876649
Paul Foot has rightly earned the respect of his journalist peers, who recognise in him a dogged investigative persistence. Wit is one of his most effective weapons, and the way in which he uses humour at the expense of pompous power fits in easily with the anti-Establishment ethos of one of the homes for his writing, Private Eye. (Foot's far-left politics were a constant source of send-ups for the original Eye coterie of Richard Ingrams, Peter Cook and Willie Rushton.)
Foot is at his polemical best when paying tribute to the particularities of English radicalism. Shelley, Paine, Wollstonecraft, the Levellers and Tom Mann all make an appearance in the opening section of this book, reminding us that Foot could easily have made a career as a popular historian. But the book does not explore the connection between the brilliant manner in which he unearths this tradition and his commitment elsewhere to a largely unchanging Leninist model of party and revolution. Which is a shame: as Tommy Sheridan has shown in Scotland, with his election to the Scottish Parliament, a nationalism of the left can be a potent force, and Foot's work on a hidden English past suggests that a radical Englishness is not such a contradiction in terms as some would suggest.
This book includes many of the original articles that have made Foot such a formidable campaigner. Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell and the like must have rued the day when he set his typewriter on them. No conspiracy theorist, Foot's successes are founded on a belief that, in the end, truth will catch the guilty unawares, as happened in the Carl Bridgewater case.
So what of his commitment to the Socialist Workers Party, and its "revolution not reform" maximalism? Foot generously pays dues to the party that he still treats as the source of his political guidance. Membership has seldom prevented him from working effectively as an investigative campaigner, through columns in the Daily Mirror, Private Eye and, more recently, in the Guardian. It is a pity, though, that he has only rarely appeared on television, where he could have been a star performer, and where his political engagement would have prevented him from becoming merely another Roger Cook, or even a revolutionary Esther Rantzen, Lenin forbid!
What Articles of Resistance does not reveal is whether Foot found the dogma and one-dimensional model of revolution for which the SWP is known quite to his taste, 40 years after being first inspired by the party's appeal. He was a prolific, and often very funny, public speaker at Socialist Worker rallies, until a recent (and near-fatal) illness forced him to call a temporary stop to relentless activism.
The problem with Foot, in the end, is that once you strip away the jokes and the digs at authority, he reveals little or no political strategy. Trust no leaders; the working class can change society; overthrow the powerful - this is all that his guiding principles seem to amount to. Enough to inspire a journalist to free the innocent, perhaps, but hardly a rallying cry to change the world.
Mark Perryman is the editor of The Ingerland Factor: home truths from football (Mainstream, £9.99)
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