At the Guardian, there was little restraint on what he could write, albeit with the usual caveats about using his column as a platform for the SWP. All he had to do was produce 800 words, on time, once a fortnight – and he was able to write to that precise length with amazing ease.
He would begin with serious matters of the moment and follow with short pieces, triggered by one event or another, reflecting the rich mosaic of his own life: lunch with Churchill, when Paul was a teenager and his father was governor of Jamaica. ‘We don’t want to become a magpie nation, do we?’ was how Churchill had expressed his anxiety about immigration from Jamaica. ‘Magpie nation?’ Foot senior muttered to himself all the way home, until he exploded: ‘Magpie nation, that’s nothing but bloody racialism.’
There was also a surprising amount of poetry in Paul’s Guardian columns. Shelley, of course – and Byron, berating Robert Southey for being such a wimp as Poet Laureate (Don Juan, Guardian, 17 November 1998). Keats also featured, and the question he posed, which Paul thought should be emblazoned over the Stock Exchange and all similar institutions:
Why were they proud? Again we ask aloud, Why in the name of Glory were they proud? (Isabella, Guardian, 6 November 1995).
Walt Whitman also appeared, with his description of revolutionary Europe in 1848:
God, ’twas delicious!
That brief, tight, glorious grip Upon the throat of kings (Resurgemus, Guardian, 18 December 1995).
Alongside Shakespeare, Voltaire, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde, there was a song Paul remembered from his Glasgow days, sung to the tune of ‘The Red Flag’. It came to him in the run-up to the Labour Party conference in 1994:
The cloth cap and the working class
As images are dated.
But we are Labour’s avant garde
And we are educated.And we are sure if we persist,
To make the New Year’s Honours List.
So just to show we’re quite sincere
We sing the Red Flag once a year
(Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party, Guardian, 15 August 1994).
Leon Rosselson, who wrote the song, points out that Paul had delivered a slightly mangled combination of two verses of the original. They were written in the Hugh Gaitskell days of the early 1960s, and, he says, came back, as if newly minted, in the New Labour years.