It is 20 years since British journalism was deprived of the brilliance of Paul Foot and in that time the most brazen corruption seems to have become commonplace at the highest levels of society.
Foot died of a heart attack in 2004, aged 66. How we could do with his tenacity in uncovering concealed truths and his refusal to accept the Establishment’s word on trust. It was his unstinting sleuthing that cleared the names of four men jailed for the murder of 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater. He helped overturn the miscarriage of justice that convicted the Birmingham Six.
But his biggest impact came from his work for the Daily Mirror and Private Eye, where he unpicked the official record and put a spotlight on the powerful.
A figure of hope for many, he listened to victims of injustice who were otherwise unheard.
Yet the corrupt would be wrong to think that today’s media is so enfeebled and distracted that they can escape the kind of exposure that Foot excelled at. His investigative zeal lives on with a generation of contemporary journalists whose work can go under-appreciated in a news environment fractured by paywalls and distorted by social media algorithms.
Among those who have learnt this lesson is the billionaire hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, a friend and donor of Boris Johnson. When Johnson was in Downing Street, Odey was the leading backer of a no-deal Brexit. He denied planning to make millions by short-selling UK companies and the pound, having made a killing from shorting UK banks in 2008.
Today Odey’s privileged status as a beneficiary of the UK’s politics and economy is diminished, thanks to media investigations into his behaviour.
A deeply researched Tortoise Media podcast, led by Paul Caruana Galizia, included allegations from a series of female employees at Odey Asset Management who said Odey had sexually assaulted them.
The Financial Times (FT) took up the investigation and found more of his alleged victims.
The hedge fund began to unravel after the FT published its findings in June last year and brokers and clients walked away.
Contrast the effects of these news outlets with the apparent toothlessness of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which took no action against Odey. “It wasn’t the company in the end, it wasn’t the courts. It wasn’t the police, it wasn’t the regulator, it was a bunch of journalists,” says Galizia, the son of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist who was murdered by a car bomb in 2017.
Odey denies the allegations against him.
Sadly, it is apparent that sexual assault victims of high-profile figures are often disbelieved unless journalists can compile a dossier of similar attacks.
“The huge number of women in our story did help it to hit home but it is depressing that it takes that number of women,” reflected the FT’s Madison Marriage. “I feel enormously frustrated for the women who came first.”
The Sunday Times and The Times spoke to 500 sources on four continents to corroborate claims by four women of rape and sexual abuse against the comedian and activist Russell Brand. He is contesting the allegations.
Both these pieces of journalism reflect the Foot spirit and are among 11 stories on the longlist for this year’s Paul Foot Award, which encourages the determined reporting that he epitomised.
Also nominated is the Northern Scot, a weekly paper in Moray with a circulation of just over 2,000, which embarrassed the Scottish Government by revealing the shelving of plans to upgrade the hazardous single carriageway A96 between Aberdeen and Inverness.
Reporter Lewis McBlane used Freedom of Information requests to obtain Government emails that showed the upgrade had been dropped.
Foot would have admired the efforts of Tristan Kirk, the London Evening Standard courts correspondent, in exposing the “conveyor belt justice” of a fast-track system that allows magistrates to hand out convictions for minor crimes behind closed doors without a hearing.
Kirk has reported that the single justice procedure, introduced in 2015 for crimes including speeding and fare evasion, can deal with cases in less than a minute, without considering mitigating factors.
Foot was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. If he had written in today’s charged social media era, his reporting would have been routinely denounced for assumed political bias. But I say there was an underlying fairness to his journalism that we need to keep alive.