Without doubt Paul Foot is one of the outstanding reporters of his generation, and not just because of his remarkable and truly majestic work as an “investigative journalist” (mind you, I have always been sceptical about that word “investigative”, since it seems to me that all good reporters are “investigative”). But still more because of his fearless honesty, intellectual courage, exceptional persistence and integrity in pursuit of social justice and the fight for decency in our society. Paul is a great journalist in the tradition of his uncle and the remarkable Foot family. You have only to flick through the pages of this collection of his writings over the last dozen years to realise that. Praise be to Bookmarks Publications for bringing them to us within one cover. It is a rich resource of material for all radicals, and might even jolly along some who would not normally regard themselves as radical lefties. I leave you to guess the names I have in mind...

This book is a splendid collection of pieces Paul Foot has written for a whole range of newspapers and journals from Socialist Worker and Socialist Review to the Evening Standard, Guardian, Observer, Daily Mirror, Private Eye and London Review of Books.

But let me declare a personal interest: Paul has been a working colleague and friend of mine for a long time. We were together many years ago on the old Daily Herald and Odham’s Sun, and latterly on the Daily Mirror which he joined in 1979, five years before Robert Maxwell acquired the paper. It was a brilliant appointment by the then editor, Mike Molloy whose 10 years editing the paper was one of the best post-war epochs of the old Daily Mirror. The tragedy was – is – that it was all scattered to the winds in 1984 when Bob Maxwell was effectively handed the Mirror Group on a tarnished plate by its then owners, Reed International.

If there are flaws, or perhaps I should say gaps, in Paul Foot’s references to his time on the Mirror it is in this era. He admits in his introduction that “Maxwell demeaned everyone who worked for him, myself included, but I was able by sheltering behind the editor to protect myself from his more monstrous excesses...”. Well, yes, but only up to a point Lord Copper. His column was protected by Mike Molloy and later by Richard Stott, both of whom fought Maxwell with guile and stealth to protect a number of journalists from the lunacy of Cap’n Bob and the erosion of the paper’s once unique reputation. Paul himself was rightly deeply protective of his column and perhaps there were occasions when, in the closing stages of Maxwell’s mania, he drew back from ridiculing the maniac on the ninth floor at Holborn Circus. In the end Paul did provoke a showdown with a column the editor refused to print – but that was after David Montgomery had taken charge of the Mirror and when David Banks had become editor.

I raise this point not in criticism of Paul. Not at all. But it is important to get this record straight, and I feel entitled to do so since I was the first to fight off the attempt by Maxwell to interfere with my own column in the Daily Mirror. Paul refers to this, albeit only marginally, in this book. It happened half way through the miners’ strike in 1984, a few weeks after Maxwell had taken over the paper. He removed important sections of my column late at night, without consulting me, or the editor, Mike Molloy. He did not, as Paul suggests, “re-write” the copy so much as delete sections with which he didn’t agree. The next day I threatened to resign unless I had assurances from Maxwell that it would never happen again. In the company of Mike Molloy he gave that guarantee – and extended the assurances to John Pilger and Paul Foot. Of course it was meaningless. Maxwell could be depended on not to keep a promise. We all knew that. Paul is quite correct – working for Bob Maxwell demeaned all of us and I am as guilty as anyone for continuing to work under his gruesome shadow for 18 months. Colleagues like Terry Lancaster and Tony Miles bravely left the paper in the early stages of Maxwell mania. Maybe the rest of us should have followed their example. Perhaps the Mirror story today would have been different had we done so.