paulfoot.org

WRITER

Paul could write. He knew this from an early age. He also spent time as a young boy at his grandfather Isaac’s house, where he was surrounded by books, and willingly earned precious pocket money for learning poems by heart and reading recommended volumes, sometimes weighty ones, like Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His grandfather didn’t write books, but his uncle Michael did. Michael was also, like Isaac, a bibliophile.

Altogether Paul wrote ten books. The first, Immigration and Race in British Politics, was published in 1965 and the last, The Vote, was published posthumously in 2005, the year after he died.

He turned to books when he knew a story needed more space and, more than anything, when he had a good story to tell – what he called a Ripping Good Yarn – often of someone up against authority.

He also owned a lot of books, a state of affairs he defended in a Socialist Worker article published in July 1983. And he always gave books as gifts, usually signed ‘With love from Paul’.

“Gratuitously offensive and occasionally ludicrously biased”

Paul’s first book followed events in Smethwick during the 1964 general election, when Peter Griffiths, the Conservative candidate, played what Paul called the game of immigration poker: if you want to win an election, garnering the racist vote is a good way to go about it. Immigration and Race in British Politics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1965

A David and Goliath story

The story of Ron Smith’s search for the truth about the death of his daughter Helen. Did she die in a fall from an apartment building in Jeddah, Saudia Arabia, as the Foreign Office insisted? Or was she murdered? The Helen Smith Story: Fontana, Glasgow (in Cooperation with Ron Smith) 1983

“It is fantastic. But is it true?”

‘Colin Wallace has a fantastic story to tell’, Paul told his Daily Mirror readers in April 1987, ‘so fantastic that official spokesmen everywhere fall over themselves to deny it.’ This was possibly the most complicated case that Paul had to unravel, as denials and lies flowed freely from the mouths of Government ministers, the security services and other journalists, over a period of years. Who Framed Colin Wallace? Macmillan, London, 1989

“Something will turn up. It always does.”

Carl Bridgewater, a 13-year-old Midlands newspaper boy, was shot dead during a robbery at an isolated farmhouse. Four Birmingham criminals were arrested and found guilty. But just four weeks later, another murder, at the farm next door, blew the case open. In a story that would run for 18 years, Paul Foot argued that the wrong men were convicted Murder at the Farm: Who Killed Carl Bridgewater? Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1986

“Provide ammunition for a counter-attack”

The third of Paul’s books for Penguin tracked the political transition of Enoch Powell from supporter of Empire to Little Englander. In it, Paul argued that Powell’s speeches about the threat of immigration were driven by his own chances of political advancement. The Rise of Enoch Powell, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969

“How could change come about, through reform or revolution?”

Paul didn’t accept the patronising view that Shelley was just a great lyrical poet. He writes of a political radical, a republican, atheist and feminist, whose convictions rose and fell with the popular movements of his time. Red Shelley, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1981

The central problem, he argued, was partition

Published in the great tradition of pamphleteering, Chatto’s Counterblasts series gave some of Britian’s finest thinkers the chance to confront the big issues of the day - music to Paul’s ears. ‘There is a solution to the problem of Northern Ireland,’ he began: Britain should get out. Ireland: Why Britain Must Get Out, Counterblasts No. 2, Chatto & Windus, 1989

“Much more opportunist than principled”

The second of Paul’s books for Penguin was published on the eve of the Labour Party conference in September 1968. It was a sharp attack on Wilson from the left, but also an analysis of the development and decline of socialist theory in the Labour Party since the 1930s. The Politics of Harold Wilson, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968

Why had elected socialists been so pathetic in office?

Paul spent more time thinking about and planning this book than any other. When finished, it became a manifesto of his political ideas, the culmination of a lifetime of political thought, political activity and reading. The Vote: How It was Won and How It was Undermined, Viking, London, 2005