Paul Mackintosh Foot (8 November 1937 in
Palestine – 18 July 2004 at
Stansted Airport) was a
British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was the grandson of
Isaac Foot, who had been a Liberal MP, and the son of
Hugh Foot (who was the last Governor of
Cyprus and, as Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the
United Nations from 1964 to 1970). He was the nephew of
Michael Foot, former leader of the
Labour Party, and was educated at
Shrewsbury School, an independent school in
Shrewsbury,
Shropshire, and at
University College, Oxford.
Foot spent much of his youth at Trematon Castle, his father's home in Cornwall.[1] He was sent "to a ludicrously snobbish prep school, Ludgrove, and then to an only slightly less absurd public school, Shrewsbury." [2] Contemporaries at Shrewsbury included Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and several other friends who would later become involved in Private Eye.
Exposing him in Private Eye was one of Foot's happiest days in journalism. He received hundreds of congratulatory letters from the child abuser's old pupils, many of whom were then prominent in British life.
After his national service in Jamaica, Foot was reunited with Ingrams at Oxford , where he read Law, and wrote for Isis, one of the student publications at the University.
