A great ‘campaign’ socialist

Paul Foot, the ‘campaigning’ journalist who died last year and whose funeral attracted a crowd of 2,000 mourners, was a Cornish nonconformist who retrained as a Marxist revolutionary. Had he lived a century ago he would have made a stalwart Liberal member for West Cornwall, savaging the tinmasters. But Foot was condemned by the ideology of the 1960s to political obscurity, and to the enclosed, distrustful world of Marxist orthodoxy.

When he died, after a lifetime of revolutionary struggle, his political epitaph could have been: Cut his teeth on Harold Wilson, Failed to dent Margaret Thatcher, Died under Tony Blair. But that epitaph would be a little unfair because his real achievement lay in journalism, not in revolutionary politics. As his obituaries rightly claimed, he was the finest polemical writer of his day and for a few years in the 1960s and 70s when he worked for Private Eye he was able to use those gifts to devastating effect.