In the last of his sixty-two pieces for the London Review of Books, written just a couple of months before his death in June 2004, the radical journalist Paul Foot offered some generous, if qualified, praise for a book on the contested legacy and grubby compromises of Britain’s 1832 Reform Act. Foot noted with pleasure that its author’s “political instincts are the opposite of reactionary,” that he “ruthlessly exposes the buffoonery” of a particularly egregious cluster of nineteenth-century Tory grandees and robustly lays into the “religious lunacy” and bigotry of the church.

It was disappointing then, to see how little time the book devoted to what Foot saw as the real story: the raucous, uncompromising agitation of the masses, with their riots at Nottingham, Derby, and Bristol, and the crusading journalism that gave voice to their thwarted demands for universal suffrage, like the Poor Man’s Guardian, made infamous by the writing of the Irish Chartist James Bronterre O’Brien. The “noise outside” that terrified the political establishment and set tight constraints on acceptable debate regarding the “suffrage question.”

Noise, agitation, political ferment. Few subjects consumed Foot more over the course of a half-century career as investigative reporter and polemicist with the LRB, Guardian, Daily Mirror, Private Eye, and Socialist Worker. His Guardian obituary put it succinctly: “The most seductive revolutionary socialist of his generation died yesterday. . . . He was 66 going on 21 and had been seriously ill but very busy for several years.” Margaret Renn’s Paul Foot: A Life in Politics is, somewhat remarkably, the first book-length biography of Foot to be published. It is exhaustively detailed and unflaggingly generous toward, as another eulogy put it, “a staunch friend of lost causes” and “revelatory” journalist, as even the Economist grudgingly conceded, despite Foot’s “potty” Trotskyist politics. It likely won’t have to be done again.

Renn, who worked with Foot at the Socialist Worker and Daily Mirror for over a decade, draws heavily on his voluminous archive, a daunting stack of weekly columns and one-off investigations, as well as the accumulated books and pamphlets, essays, and speeches. The bibliography of Foot’s major works runs to three pages, stretching from his study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s politics to scrupulously crafted investigations into everything from the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the New Labour Private Finance Initiative scandal to biographies of Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell.

Alongside these works are the forensic exposés of miscarriages of justice through which Foot made his name. The Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, two groups of predominantly Irish men falsely accused of involvement in pub bombings, and the Bridgewater Farm case of four men accused of murdering a thirteen-year old paperboy were championed by Foot, whose interventions helped to overturn their prison sentences. Foot’s best work, in his assessment, was in the Socialist Worker, though it was the satire and investigative reporting magazine Private Eye that offered him the greatest pleasure. “[It is] the only journalism I have ever been engaged in which is pure enjoyment. It is free publishing of the most exhilarating kind.”

Paul Foot was born in Palestine in 1937. His father, Hugh, was a career diplomat in the British Colonial Service, eventually rising to become governor of both Jamaica and Cyprus. The Foot dynasty — a sprawl of MPs, reforming lawyers, and bibliophiles — were, then as now, well-regarded liberal royalty. Paul was to become particularly close to his uncle Michael, later leader of the Labour Party. Family life was cultured and competitive. Peripatetic too, until the young Paul was sent to boarding school in England. At Shrewsbury, he fell under the tutelage of Anthony Chenevix-Trench, a notorious sadist who was later forced to leave his post as headmaster of Eton due to concerns over his ready recourse to corporal punishment. “Trench explained that I had a ‘choice,’” Foot wrote in the London Review of Books many years later. “The cane with the trousers on; or the strap with trousers off. . . . When the relatively painless strap was nominated, he became extremely cheerful and excited.”

Foot’s political commitments crystallized early. As a student at Oxford, he wrote a long essay for Isis, the student paper, on his rejection of his family’s liberalism. “I passionately believe that where the spirit of collectivism exists, there is hope for the creation of a just and humane society.” On graduation, his father wrangled him a job in the Daily Record in Glasgow, then as now Scotland’s largest tabloid. The posting offered both a practical and political education. It was there that he met Tony Cliff, heavyweight intellectual and senior member of the International Socialists, and later founder of the Socialist Workers Party. “Stuart Hall had suggested to Paul that he should ‘sort out the Trots’ when he got to Glasgow,” Renn writes. “As it turned out, the International Socialists were the very [people] he had been warned about.” His commitment to the cause remained unwavering for the next half century. In a disdainful 1994 piece on his former SWP comrades, Christopher Hitchens described Foot as the party’s “chief ornament . . . in rather the same way that, until its deliquescence, the only distinguished remaining member of the Communist Party was Eric Hobsbawm.”

Renn’s is not a critical biography, nor is it marketed as such. Her tone is admiring, stopping just short of hagiography. Renn has supplemented her research with extensive reporting of her own, including a series of interviews with family, friends, and assorted ex-colleagues. Mary-Kay Wilmers, the longtime former editor of the London Review of Books and an Oxford contemporary of Foot and his first wife Monica, offers her reflections on the particular qualities of her stalwart late contributor — chiefly, the clarity of his anger, combined with an innate narrative ability and clean, “cliché-free” prose. There was one mostly forgivable snag: the fact that they’d invariably have to cut the obligatory musings “about the SWP line.” In her 2004 obituary, Wilmers speculated that Foot included “a standard Socialist Worker harangue in every piece for the sheer joy of watching us take it out.”

Any implied humorlessness would be misleading. Amid the obvious seriousness of much of his subject matter, Foot possessed a well-cultivated sense of the absurd: Could the world, his writing often seems to ask, really be filled with such a spectacular array of villains and crooks? His ire, when directed at enemies, was scathing but also funny. Of Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced Conservative MP turned, inexplicably, popular novelist, Foot wrote that his biographer could not decide whether his subject was an atheist. “The evidence of his book, however, is heavily weighted against God’s existence. Any omnipotent deity with a grain of mercy would surely have preserved us from Jeffrey Archer.”

For all of the swashbuckling campaigning and apparently endless supply of trenchant, wittily composed investigative writing, Foot’s political and journalistic commitments were often unglamorous. Renn offers up some winning details on the ceaseless grind of the weekly print deadline and speculative reporting trips to this or that remote corner of the country, covering a doomed strike or cajoling an uncooperative source into action. When the miners’ strike was finally crushed in March 1985, Foot retreated to Skegness, the perpetually beleaguered seaside town halfway up the Lincolnshire coast, for the SWP’s annual Easter Weekend get together. “The weather is usually cold and wet,” he wrote in his Socialist Worker column. “The countryside is tedious beyond belief and even the beaches are bleak. Am I mad?”

It perhaps isn’t surprising, considering Renn’s own time spent working alongside Foot at the paper, that the Mirror years offer some of the book’s most vivid passages. Paul Foot Reporting was introduced in 1979 by Mike Molly, then a senior editor, later editor-in-chief. The weekly investigative column’s remit was simple. It would, by and large, spotlight the stories that other outlets wouldn’t, or couldn’t, drawn from “the people at the bottom of the pile.” The column was an instant success, which justified the considerable freedom afforded to it.

Many of its concerns — utilities privatization, everyday political and corporate corruption — remain depressingly timeless. It proved a particularly effective forum for exploring potential miscarriages of justice. Renn describes the good-natured teasing from colleagues at Foot’s relentless perusal of the Bridgewater Farm case that was finally overturned after nearly two decades and the death in custody of one of the accused, partly thanks to Foot’s columns. “Oh Christ, you’re not doing this again are you?” was a regular newsroom refrain. “Paul ignored them all. For him, the repetition was crucial.”

It’s difficult not to read Renn’s book in 2024 without a certain strain of regret. Not for the self-consciously macho “golden era” of Fleet Street and certainly not for the comically odious Robert Maxwell, the Mirror’s then proprietor, with his tangle of ornate financial-confidence tricks and baroque personal unpleasantness. During my first read through of Renn’s biography, I was instead struck by a sense of loss, particularly after spending half an hour on the Daily Mirror’s current website, rendered almost useless by pop-up adverts and apparently AI generated listicles. What sort of equivalent investigative series, a truly popular weekly series, could be said to exist in the American or British press today, outside of Private Eye (which Foot had done so much to help establish in the 1960s)? At which mass-market publication would a young Paul Foot be offered the time, space, and freedom to generate and pursue leads drawn from readers’ letters? And who is still publishing, with a livable advance, the sort of crusading single-issue, book-length investigation into a miscarriage of justice with the same quality and depth of reporting as Who Killed Hanratty?, Foot’s investigation into the trial of James Hanratty, one of the last people to be hanged in Britain? It is likely that the specific confluence of talent, privilege, political commitment, and preternatural work ethic that Foot embodied would always be enough, whatever the material and market constraints of a particular era.

But perhaps not. It is telling that it wasn’t the ample lies and misdeeds of Robert Maxwell — after his mysterious death in 1991, it was revealed that he had embezzled hundreds of millions of pounds from the Mirror’s pension fund — that provoked Foot to leave the Daily Mirror in 1993. Instead, his departure came after a bout of redundancies spearheaded by David Montgomery, a particularly sinister ex-Rupert-Murdoch hatchet man who emerges as one of the book’s central villains. “To prove a point,” Renn explains, “[Paul] devoted his entire column to the bullying of his own management. . . . Much to Montgomery’s annoyance, Paul also detailed the eye-watering share options Montgomery had been given by the board.” When his editor refused to publish, Foot distributed copies by hand to staff at the Mirror’s central London offices. He was soon placed on forced “compassionate leave” before offering his resignation: “When the editor, who is a ferocious defender of free speech, wouldn’t publish the page and then told the world I was off my rocker, there didn’t seem much point in hanging around.”

The final decade or so of his life was remarkably prolific. There was never any shortage of worthy causes to champion and egregious iniquities to investigate. Some of his best and most perceptive late writing centered on the New Labour project. Foot had been suspicious of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown alike. Both, Foot wrote in 1998, “had worked together to bring about the emasculation of the Labour Government as a force for change; and that as a result they are both extremely pleased with themselves.” A year later, Foot was taken to Homerton Hospital with a ruptured aorta, where he remained for several excruciating weeks. For the final five years of his life, he walked with two walking sticks, though had no time for anything approaching self-pity. The pieces kept arriving.

After his 2004 death from heart failure, an assortment of establishment-left grandees showed up to his wake. But so did some of the people for whom Foot had campaigned over the decades: the sisters of two Palestinians jailed for the 1994 bombing of the Israeli embassy in London; the widow of a man shot dead by the Metropolitan Police in Hackney; Pam Dix, sister of a man who had died in the Lockerbie bombing; a black police officer bullied out of the force by his racist colleagues. When Foot’s uncle Michael took to the stage, he captured the mood succinctly. “It’s terrible to think of waking up in a world where there’s no Paul Foot. It is a very sad thing indeed.”