Foot balls
Lloyd Evans attends a memorial to Paul Foot and finds the usual suspects getting it all wrong again Isaw the twilight of the idols last Sunday, or something very close. At the Hackney Empire crowds of leftwing activists had come to see Tony Benn, John Pilger, Tariq All and other extremist luminaries commemorate the life of their fallen prince, Paul Foot. Though best known as a successful investigative reporter, Foot was also a member of the Socialist Workers party and a lifelong advocate of revolutionary communism. He came from a long line of political dissenters. The blood in his family flowed deepest red.
The first speaker was his uncle, Michael Foot, who tottered on to the stage helped by two stout Marxists of indeterminate sex. Adoring yelps of 'We love you, Michael!' floated down from the upper circle. Foot is a stupendous wreck of his former self. The essentials are still there, the flying mane, the black-rimmed goggles, the thin, dry and impassioned voice with its gatling gun lurches and inflections, but age has put a brake on his mental processes. As he crouched restlessly on his lonely throne his rhythms of speech erred and blurred as if he wasn't quite sure what he was saying or to whom. He introduced a Wordsworth poem with, 'and these make me think of Paul, these lines make me think of Paul, whenever I read them I think of Paul'. The poem was printed on a clipboard and he held it in front of his face, less than an inch from his eyes. Another pause. We feared some awful embarrassment or, worse, a complete meltdown of his faculties. Then from behind the board came a stern rebuke: 'And if I misread this you can go home and look it up properly.' There were gales of relieved laughter.
He was succeeded by Tony Benn, who has wizened visibly since leaving Parliament. Stooped, thin and pipeless, he came on in a cardigan and Hush Puppies. taking light, cautious steps as if treading on weak ice. He spoke briefly about the twin passions that burned in Paul Foot's heart, 'the flame of anger and the flame of hope', and then he crept quietly away into the wings. The shortest contribution of the night won the heartiest round of applause.
Those who couldn't attend in person sent in videotaped eulogies. Ricky Tomlinson offered his condolences from a lush meadow in Henley which he explained was a film set. Tariq Ali was holed up in what looked like a Hampstead garden flat but which I'm sure was a workers' hostel in Cuba. His wily face appeared on the big screen and he offered a toast to his friend. 'A little-known fact about Paul is that he liked good food and he liked good wine. Only in Britain could this be controversial.'
Then the screen fell dark and a new speaker was announced. I'd never seen John Pilger in the flesh and I was curious to see a tall, elegant, disdainful figure ambling into the spotlight, sleekly coiffured and conspicuously well shod, rather like a dressage horse that has just finished a particularly magnificent routine at the Olympics. And he was spoiling for a fight. He worked himself into a fine old lather deriding those journalists who had treated Foot's Marxism as a quaint and eccentric hobby. 'Paul wasn't a great journalist despite being a Marxist. He was a great journalist because he was a Marxist.' After this he digressed into selfregarding talk about the latest documentaries and his tiffs with William Shawcross. A portion of us began to feel that the eulogist was aggrandising himself at the expense of the eulogee.
Jeremy Hardy made the same mistake. Usually a shrewd and effective comedian, Hardy scarcely bothered to mention Paul Foot and launched into a series of pensionable gags about American foreign policy. 'Conspiracy theorists tell us that Bush was behind 9/11; he bantered. 'How ridiculous. How absurd. That attack was well organised.' An objector in the crowd shouted out, 'When are they bringing on the comedians?' This was booed, but with little enthusiasm. Hardy simply wagged his head and said, just hope you get out of here alive, comrade.' But this didn't work. The heckler heckled again and Hardy leaned into the microphone with a sour rasp: 'Oh shut the fuck up. I may be five foot six and have a cold but I'll pull your pancreas out through your arse hole if I have to.' For some reason this was applauded. Then he went back to his jokes. Other comedians followed, Mark Steel and Rory Bremner, both more urbane and more accommodating than Hardy.
At this point I couldn't help feeling that I was watching a movement in the last phase of its active life. The old guard are so frail that they seem ready to pass into the care of the National Trust while the young Turks (all in their mid-forties) expend their best energies as pub-comedy acts. The most touching contributions came from the victims of injustice whose lives Paul Foot had transformed. Their unrehearsed testimony formed the core of the evening's celebration. In contrast, the pleadings of John Rees seemed opportunistic and pretentious. This skilful rostrum-banger gave us a hectoring sermon on our obligation to 'organise' in memory of Paul Foot. 'To organise' in its special Marxist sense is a verb that comes ready-loaded with a whole catechism of exhortations and prohibitions. It means to preach, to leaflet, to protest, to march, to expend all your energies on the defeat of capitalism. Above all, it means to fight that temptation, common among the Left, to allow one's commitment to weaken and to let revolutionary Marxism become recreational Marxism.
Rees was followed by a star turn from Ulster, Earnonn McCann, a brilliant demagogue who delivered the sort of soliloquy that warms your veins like a triple measure of vodka. He reiterated John Pilger's argument that Marxism was central to Paul Foot's life and not some extraneous ornament. He made this point so urgently that I began to suspect the opposite view might be right. Paul Foot unearthed scores of judicial blunders and helped dozens of mistaken convictions to be reviewed and overturned. But the jailed innocents whom he sprung from prison didn't care whether he was a communist or a Plymouth Argyle supporter or a passionate lover of meringues. He was all these things. What mattered was that he changed their lives. Nor were his investigative successes due to Marxism, but to scepticism and diligence, to forensic cunning and dogged perseverance. Marxism, by contrast, led him to make such fantastical and narrow-minded utterances as 'All history is the history of exploitation.' The lessons of Paul Foot's life are twofold. His work is vital to our democracy and we can only hope that others fill his shoes with as much compassion, energy and humour. The other might be summed up in a Footian generalisation: all revolutionary Marxism is recreational Marxism. To realise that you don't need a speech or a pamphlet. Just eyes.
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