Paul Foot

Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 – 18 July 2004) was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Foot was born in Haifa, Palestine, during the British mandate. He was the son of Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of Cyprus and Jamaica and, as Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations from 1964 to 1970) and the grandson of Isaac Foot, who had been a Liberal MP. He was the nephew of Michael Foot, later leader of the Labour Party, with whom the younger Foot was close. He spent his youth at his uncle's house in Devon, in Italy with his grandmother and with his parents (who lived abroad) in Cyprus and Jamaica.

He was sent to what he described as "a ludicrously snobbish prep school, Ludgrove [near Wokingham in Berkshire], and then to an only slightly less absurd public school, Shrewsbury, in Shropshire." Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Christopher Booker and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.

Anthony Chenevix-Trench, subsequently the Headmaster of Eton College, was Foot's Housemaster at Shrewsbury between 1950 and 1955, a time when corporal punishment in all schools was commonplace. In adult life, Foot exposed the ritual beatings that Chenevix-Trench had given. Nick Cohen wrote in Foot's obituary in The Observer:

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