Paul Foot: A Life in Politics

A portrait of a brilliant journalist and tireless campaigner for justice

Paul Foot was one of the most influential investigative reporters of his generation. For nearly fifty years, he was the scourge of corrupt politicians and dodgy businessmen, a champion of the underdog.

In this, the first biography of Paul Foot, journalist Margaret Renn traces Foot’s personal, political and professional trajectories, placing his life and works within the long arc of postwar Britain. Drawing on extensive interviews with those close to him, and utilizing her unparalleled knowledge of his prodigious output, the book brings the many different faces of Paul Foot together into a single portrait.

A prolific writer for the Daily Mirror, Private Eye, the Guardian and Socialist Worker, Foot’s investigations broke numerous major stories. He wrote about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, and the issues in some of his campaigns maintained their prominence long after his death in 2004: police corruption in the Stephen Lawrence case; sexual abuse in children’s homes; the Lockerbie bombing. His books ranged from how politicians used race to win votes, through miscarriages of justice, to the politics of poetry and the failure of the vote to deliver power to the people. Paul Foot: A Life in Politics is a brilliant portrait of a committed and active socialist, orator and relentless investigator of wrongdoing.

Margaret Renn is a writer and journalist. She worked alongside Paul Foot on Socialist Worker and then at the Daily Mirror from the early ‘80s until 1993. She has since worked at the BBC and produced radio documentaries for Radio 4 and the World Service, including programs on Lockerbie and on corruption. From 2009 until 2015 she was a Visiting Fellow in Investigative Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.